Days after President Biden publicly promised to provide 500 million free at-home rapid COVID-19 tests, his administration has still not signed any contracts — leading experts to deride it as nothing but a “hope.”
The president has already been accused of being caught on the hop when he announced the vague plans for a testing spree only on Tuesday, two years into the pandemic.
Now the New York Times has revealed that contracts have yet to be signed, and are unlikely to be until next week the earliest — with the eventual rollout of his promise potentially taking months after that.
“That’s not a plan — it’s a hope,” Jennifer Nuzzo, who helps track testing trends with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told the paper.
“If those tests came in January and February, that could have an impact,” Nuzzo said of the alarming escalation of infections from Omicron.
“But if they are spread out over 10 to 12 months, I’m not sure what kind of impact it is going to have,” the epidemiologist warned.