Not Sure Why the White House Is Mocking the Idea of Widely Available COVID-19 Testing

In May 2020, we caught up with the COVID-19 testing czar for the state of California, Bob Kocher, to discuss why so-called "surveillance testing" would be key to reopening parts of the American economy while limiting spread and loss of life. If everyone were to take a rapid antigen test every couple of days, regardless of whether they have symptoms or believe they've been exposed to the virus, we could catch cases earlier and isolate people, cutting down on how many others they would in turn expose. This would involve manufacturing a huge number of tests and getting them out to people, but it would otherwise be pretty painless. Obviously, this went nowhere. The proprietor of the federal government at the time was against testing on the basis that it "creates more cases," the kind of cause-and-effect analysis you'd expect from a nine-year-old or, more accurately, someone who digests everything in terms of how it will play out in a cable-news chyron with their name in it. Strategic thinking? Patience? No, thank you.

In November 2020, shortly after it was confirmed that Joe Biden and the Science Brigade would take over management of the federal government—well, after a lively transition period—we circled back with Kocher in the belief we might have reached a new dawn in the pandemic response. By then, Kocher had rounded out his advocacy for widespread testing into a strategy and philosophy. "Testing's really the vaccination for the economy," he said. It allows the gears to grind back into motion without grinding up so many citizens in the process. He described the situation in other places: "In Asia, there are—varying from free to $5—self-done, rapid, 10-minute, lateral-flow antigen tests that are in baskets by the doorway of schools, churches, business, office buildings. You take them, you spit on them, you wait 10 minutes, you show people the thing and then you go inside." He wanted to know whether the Biden-Harris administration was willing to invoke the Defense Production Act to generate the kind of volume of tests necessary for Americans to get tested at least twice a week.

The answer, it seems, has been "no." By the transition period, the data coming in on the vaccines was very good, and the Biden team chose to focus almost all their resources on the vaccination drive. But we now know, and probably should always have known, that the virus is never going away and we will continue to find it useful to know where it is in our population. (In fact, Kocher said as much back in November: "The vaccine's probably not gonna be a permanent solution to making you immune. You probably will have to get a booster shot, and so COVID is going to be in our community.") Over this same period, many European countries have made rapid at-home tests widely available, and often free. In the United States, the situation has improved from a miserable starting point. The most widely available test kit is the BinaxNOW, produced by Abbot Laboratories. (Others: Flowflex, QuickVue, and Ellume.) But the Binax kit, which contains two tests, is $24 at Walgreen's. It's $14 at Walmart. And it's not always on shelves.

It's hard not to see this as a policy failure from the Biden administration. Yes, the vaccination drive deserved a full-court press, but we've got to be able to walk and chew gum. The Biden folks started looking at this in September—a couple of months ago—with initiatives to distribute tests and make sure manufacturers have adequate supplies to make them, but the results have been paltry. Should Germany really be eating our lunch on this? And yet here was an answer from White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki to a question on this point on Monday:

As Matt Karolian points out, the United Kingdom is sending rapid tests to households. Not sure why this is an idea worthy of mockery, or why cost is suddenly the concern when the Feds have (mostly justifiably) shelled out trillions in coronavirus-response funds in the last year. Maybe shave a chunk off the latest ghastly Pentagon spending proposal and put it towards making rapid tests widely available in this, the richest country in the history of the world. Hell, put it in the bill and call it a national-security measure! Instead, the administration seems to be turning towards a cockamamie public-private partnership scheme (The Democrats!) in which you can petition your insurance company to reimburse you for at-home tests. Surely, that will be a painless process. Press "1" to remain on hold.

In fairness to Biden and his allies, while Germany and other countries outperforming us on this have right-wingers, they don't make 'em like we do. It's kind of like the climate crisis, on which the Republican Party has been an extremist outlier—even among conservative parties worldwide—and seems to prefer drowning its constituents in swamps of delusion. Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina garnered praise in polite precincts last week for challenging the deranged anti-Muslim hate speech from her colleagues in the House Republican caucus, and fair enough. But the day before, she could be found responding to Dr. Anthony Fauci's statement that we need more testing and surveillance with conspiratorial nonsense: "This government 'surveillance' has nothing to do with your safety and everything to do with his power." We're talking about disease surveillance here—identifying spread in the population, doing genetic sequencing to catch new variants. Fauci, out-of-touch as he can be at times, is not going to be peering in through your bedroom window. But this kind of stuff is what is required to gain power and relevance in one of our two major political parties. That does make a cohesive pandemic response difficult. The trials and tribulation of a country that has, in large part, lost its mind.

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