Biden reportedly rejected plan for massive testing surge before the holidays and raises more questions

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In a rare move, Vanity Fair magazine, a decidedly left-wing outlet, published an extensive report Thursday attacking the Biden administration for its just-announced plan to dole out free COVID test kits to the American people.

At issue, according to the magazine, is that this very idea was proposed to them months earlier yet ignored for what some suspect were political reasons.

“On October 22, a group of COVID-19 testing experts joined a Zoom call with officials from the Biden administration and presented a strategy for overhauling America’s approach to testing,” Vanity Fair reported.

The “experts” presented the administration with a 10-page plan that called for putting “rapid at-home COVID-19 testing into the hands of average citizens, allowing them to screen themselves in real time and thereby help reduce transmission.”

“The plan called for an estimated 732 million tests per month, a number that would require a major ramp-up of manufacturing capacity. It also recommended, right on the first page, a nationwide ‘Testing Surge to Prevent Holiday COVID Surge,'” according to Vanity Fair.

As in the COVID surge that’s currently happening.

But the Biden administration reportedly punted. And then to make matters worse, President Joe Biden tried to pretend otherwise during his highly publicized interview this week with ABC News.

“I’ve ordered half a billion … 500 million test kits that are going to be available to be sent to every home in America if anybody wants them,”  he said, adding that he wished “I had thought about ordering” them months earlier.

Listen, but keep in mind that on two occasions, he — in his usual fashion — accidentally refers to the COVID testing kits as “pills”:

(Video: ABC News)

This is clearly false.

As noted by Vanity Fair, the “experts” presented this idea to him months ago, but the idea was rejected.

“Their big, bold idea for free home tests for all Americans to avoid a holiday surge, they were told, was dead. … [T]he administration instead announced an initiative to move rapid home tests more swiftly through the FDA’s regulatory approval process,” according to the magazine.

The problem is that the FDA has been primed by this administration to “vet[] devices for exquisite sensitivity, rather than public-health utility.”

Vanity Fair notes that the rapid tests recommended by the “experts” are “less sensitive than polymerase chain reaction (PCR) laboratory tests, which can detect the virus’s genetic material at any stage of infection.”

However, they do “provide a quick snapshot in time for those seeking assurance that they are safe to travel or won’t accidentally infect vulnerable relatives.”

The approval, mass distribution and rollout of these tests could have therefore made life significantly easier for Americans come the holidays.

But according to Vanity Fair, the administration cared more about incessantly lecturing the American people about the need to get vaccinated than they did about promoting alternative mitigation options such as testing.

“It’s undeniable that [the administration] took a vaccine-only approach. [They] didn’t support the notion of testing as a proper mitigation tool,” Dr. Michael Mina, one of the attendees at the October meeting, told the magazine.

“We put all our eggs in the vaccine basket and it’s not enough,” Dr. Jay Wohlgemuth, described by Vanity Fair as a “critic,” added.

Why, though, did the administration focus exclusively on vaccinations? Some suspect it was for the political benefit of being able to more easily demean and disparage the unvaccinated, whom they have claimed are mostly “white” and “Republican.”

And, indeed, one of the “experts” who attended the October meeting speculated that the administration felt like deprioritizing vaccines would make it easier for the unvaccinated to essentially game the system.

“It was clear they felt that people who didn’t want to get vaccinated might like no-strings-attached rapid testing,” the unnamed “expert” said.

The administration also apparently thought the idea of doling out free COVID tests was ludicrous.

“Should we just send one to every American? Then what happens if you — if every American has one test? How much does that cost, and then what happens after that?” White House press secretary Jen Psaki dismissively said during a press briefing earlier this month.

Listen:

It’s not clear why “cost” would be a concern to an administration that’s been seeking to spend trillions upon trillions of dollars on fundamentally changing the country.

The White House has, of course, pushed back on the criticism and claimed — in contradiction of the president’s admission to ABC News — that it’s “always” been focused on testing.

“The administration has been focused on expanding testing since the very beginning. It has always been a major pillar of the approach,” incoming White House COVID response team senior advisor Dr. Tom Inglesby said to Vanity Fair.

He also claimed that the administration hasn’t been prioritizing vaccinations over testing.

“In our analysis, they are not competing with each other. They are not zero sum,” he said.

And lastly, he defended the administration’s burdensome regulations on COVID tests.

“There is a strong scientific consensus in the administration that there should not be a second, lower public health standard for some tests. Not only would this be confusing, but members of the public will use these tests to make very serious decisions for themselves and their families and so they need to meet the same standard,” he said.

The “experts” clearly disagree on all points and are not even remotely impressed with the administration’s just-announced, “too little, too late” efforts, as Dr. Eric Topol, the director and founder of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in La Jolla, California, reportedly put it.

In a Substack post, he reportedly called the administration’s plan “totally inadequate” and wrote that Americans “need several billion of these [tests], and have needed them for over a year to help prevent spread, as validated and relied upon in many countries throughout the world.”

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