The Biden administration passed on an October proposal that sought to avert this year’s holiday COVID testing crunch by manufacturing more than 700 million tests each month, according to a new report.
Vanity Fair reported that a group of COVID-19 testing experts from Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the Rockefeller Foundation, the COVID Collaborative and several other organizations pitched a 10-page plan to White House officials on Oct. 22.
It reportedly called for the production of roughly 732 million tests per month as part of what the document described as a “Testing Surge To Prevent [a] Holiday COVID surge.” The plan also included a provision for “Every American Household to Receive Free Rapid Tests for the Holidays/New Year.”
To reach the lofty goal, according to Vanity Fair, the experts proposed coordinating a rollout with Amazon, pharmacies, state health departments and local community centers. They also encouraged the administration to implement a similar campaign to the National Institutes of Health’s “Say Yes! Covid Test” initiative to reduce the spread ahead of the holiday season.
However, three days after the meeting, White House officials informed the experts that the administration would not be moving forward with the plan, with one official telling the magazine: “We did not have capacity to manufacture over-the-counter tests at that scale.”
Instead, the White House would announce a plan focusing on pushing rapid at-home tests through the Food and Drug Administration’s regulatory approval process. So far, the FDA has approved 11 COVID-19 tests for over-the-counter distribution.