If you recall back in September, when President Biden announced his vaccine mandate on private businesses with more than 100 employees, there were more details tucked into that speech as well. One of those points, concerning the availability of Covid-19 rapid testing, was to use the Defense Production Act to ramp up test production and provide rapid testing access to everyone across the country. The stated goal at that time, from the President’s mouth, was to make it easier for people to test more often at home to prevent more community spread of Covid-19.
Fast-forward to this week, when the President announced a new initiative to, umm, expand access to rapid at-home testing, and it’s becoming clear that the promise back in September was never meant to be taken seriously.
Take this story, dated on Sept. 21, from the Associated Press, which summarized the President’s plan months ago:
President Joe Biden is betting on millions more rapid, at-home tests to help curb the latest deadly wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is overloading hospitals and threatening to shutter classrooms around the country.
…
But in his speech this month announcing sweeping new vaccine mandates, Biden highlighted rapid tests, saying the government would purchase 280 million of them, as he also called on all schools to set up regular testing programs. Biden said the federal government will use the Defense Production Act to ensure manufacturers have the raw materials they need to make tests.
If those plans sound familiar, it’s because they were part of Biden’s original strategy for dealing with COVID-19 released in January.
That was three months ago when Biden pledged to ramp up at-home rapid test production and make them more widely available. Come to find out now, not only did that never happen, it still yet hasn’t happened since Biden’s address earlier this week on Tuesday when he pledged the same thing.
Now, in fact, in a disturbing interview with ABC News on Thursday of this week, Biden says he wishes he had thought about doing this plan months ago to expand at-home rapid testing. Wait, what?
Biden repeatedly confused "test kits" & "pills" today when discussing shortages.
Biden: "500 million pills, I mean excuse me, 500 million test kits…I wish I had thought about ordering a half a billion pills two months ago"(again, he means test kits)pic.twitter.com/zFIr0cidFi
— Tommy Pigott (@TommyPigott) December 23, 2021
But, Biden did think of this plan back in September? Didn’t he? Yes, yes he did.
The goal was to do the exact same thing he announced doing on Tuesday, to expand production capabilities and make rapid tests freely available all over the country and even send them by mail to anyone who wants them.
This statement, from the administration that pledged to “shut down the virus”, is quite telling. They’ve never had a plan, they don’t follow through on their plans, and their Covid handling has been more bungled than their handling of the economy.
Biden has been pledging since before he took office in January to expand testing, and it clearly never happened. Then he pledged it in September, and clearly, it never happened.
Now he pledged it this week once again to counter the winter surge of omicron, yet White House press secretary Jen Psaki says they still haven’t signed the contracts to get started:
The Biden administration on Tuesday announced their plans to order 500 million at-home test kits. Officials expect people to be able to get their hands on the free tests as early as January. Contracts to purchase the tests haven’t been finalized, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Thursday.
“We just announced this two days ago,” she told reporters during a briefing.
Other than the expectation that the tests will be available next month, details are scant from the White House on this initiative, including about how Americans will get their hands on these free at-home tests.
Biden has had months to make these preparations. Even longer than that, in fact, since he pledged to ramp up rapid test production all the way back in January. He never did it, and never made it happen. All the eggs, so to speak, continue to sit in the vaccination basket, so this administration never planned to fight Covid any other way, and it’s now biting them.
With Biden now saying he “wishes he thought of this months ago,” and the clear statements from his speech, months ago, that he literally had the same idea, what to make of this?
Biden is derelict in the government’s fight against Covid-19. This is a failing presidency of dysfunction on something that should be attainable within months if they followed through back in September, or even earlier. They didn’t.
