Federal Government Spent BILLIONS On COVID Testing And Has Nothing To Show For It

The average number of COVID-19 tests per day is close to record highs as Americans wait for hours in long lines around the country to get tested following the holidays.

The American Rescue Plan, ushered through Congress by the Biden administration last March, allocated $47.8 billion “to carry out activities to detect, diagnose, trace, and monitor SARS–CoV–2 and COVID–19 infections.”

Roughly 80% of those funds were gone by mid-December, according to U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra.

“Are we going to have more than $10 billion worth of needs and costs? (With) COVID, especially regarding testing, there’s a strong chance we will, depending on, again, where Omicron takes us,” Becerra told reporters on Dec. 14.

Since Dec. 14, the 7-day average for new daily cases has risen nearly three-fold, surging from 119,356 to 316,277 new infections last Wednesday.

America is nearing a record number of new tests per day in December as the 7-day average for new tests hit 1,769,532 on Dec. 23.

Prior to the American Rescue Plan, Congress allocated $25 billion in April 2020 as part of the Paycheck Protection Program to “research, develop, validate, manufacture, purchase, administer, and expand capacity for COVID–19 tests.”

The $73 billion allocated through these massive economic stimulus plans has been partly distributed to states, which can then use the money to distribute tests for local residents.

Connecticut announced a plan last week to use federal funds to purchase three million at-home tests made by iHealth Labs. Likewise, Massachusetts announced a plan in mid-December to purchase 2.1 million at-home tests and distribute them to areas of the state with the highest percentage of people below the poverty level.

President Biden announced a plan last month to increase rapid antigen testing by making 500 million at-home tests available to anyone who wants them but admitted that more work needed to be done.

“It’s not enough. It’s clearly not enough. If we’d have known, we’d have gone harder, quicker if we could have,” he told governors last week.

Prior to that, the Biden administration announced a $650 million investment in November to “strengthen manufacturing capacity for quick, high-quality diagnostic testing.”

The National Institutes of Health also established the Independent Test Assessment Program in October to “accelerate regulatory review and availability of high-quality, accurate, and reliable over-the-counter COVID-19 tests.”

The first at-home rapid test wasn’t approved by the FDA until about six months into the pandemic in November 2020. The FDA has since given emergency use authorization to about a dozen antigen over-the-counter at-home tests and three molecular at-home tests.