WASHINGTON – This week, U.S. Senator Roy Blunt (Mo.), the top Republican on the SenateAppropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies, spoke on the Senate floor to discuss the current shortage of COVID-19 tests and the Biden administration’s failure to utilize billions in congressionally-approvedfunding to ensure tests are available to every American.
This week, Blunt and U.S. Senator Richard Burr (N.C.) sent a letter urgingU.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra to detail the administration’s strategy for solving the nation’s severe shortage of COVID-19 tests as coronavirus cases driven by the omicron variant continue to skyrocket.
CLICK HERE to Watch Blunt’s Remarks
Following Are Blunt’s Remarks:
“Madam President, on Monday, the United States set a new pandemic record with more than 1 million new cases in 24 hours. I’m sure you and I and everyone who’sthinking about this would have hoped we’d be in a very different place right now than we are. But, pretty significant–two years into the pandemics to set that kind of record.
“What’s most concerning about this is–many people who are concerned with catching the virus or who think they may already have it can’t get access to tests.I just heard earlier today on a call that the administration was providing information that they have asked for requests for information about who could provide a test and then maybe request for proposals about who might be able to provide tests.
“But, we’re way down the road to be asking about who can provide tests. Congress has provided more than $80 billion for COVID testing. …
“We’ve lost track, I think, of how much money a billion dollars or a trillion dollars or $80 billion is. But the administration has had $80 billion. Over halfof it, $47 billion, they got in March in the American Rescue Plan. This is supposed to cover everything from research and development of new rapid tests to manufacturing and purchase of these tests to funding for state and local governments to distribute thesetests.
“And here we are nine months later, and we are concerned that we don’t have tests because we don’t have enough tests. For the last month, Americans have facedlong lines at testing centers. They’ve gone to places where they thought they could purchase a rapid test to find empty shelves.
“The question I really have is the same that many Americans have, which is ‘what went wrong? Why are we facing such a shortage of tests now? How could we possiblyhave had $80 billion available for a minimum of nine months, and now we’re back in a testing problem?’
“I think the answer surely is not a lack of funding, but I think more fundamentally a lack of strategy, a lack of priority, and a failure to anticipate theongoing testing needs by the administration.
“When this administration came into office, their COVID-19 policy could have been called, ‘vaccines first’. And while I’ve been vaccinated, and while I’veurged all Americans to get a vaccine, unless your doctor tells you not to, it’s always been clear to me that the vaccine was only one part of the process.
“Now, what we know now is that that person that gets COVID that have had a vaccine is not going to be incredibly affected by it in all likelihood. But, it shouldn’t have been a shock that many people who got a vaccine would also get COVID and would also want to know if theyhad COVID.
“Yet, for a full year, the administration has focused almost exclusively on one thing, and testing and treatments have not had the attention they should havehad or now that they must have. That failure’s come at a steep cost. Today, Americans can’t find over-the-counter tests, and the nation lacks a comprehensive, reliable testing infrastructure.
“Early in the pandemic, former Senator Lamar Alexander and I were on the phone nearly every day with officials from the Department of Health and Human Servicesto get a better understanding of how to fight the virus. He was the chairman of the [authorizing] committee. I was the chairman of the [appropriating] committee. We thought we had come up with a plan that, if carried out, would work just right.
“In fact, the result of those conversations was a two-fold testing response. First, we started a program at the National Institutes of Health called RADx,which we kind of based roughly on the TV program the Shark Tank, where people brought ideas in about how they could produce a test in ways that those tests were not being produced and over a billion dollars was invested directly with a dozen different companiesthat are producing today almost all of the tests that are available in stores. But, obviously, being sure that they were producing them at the volume that they needed to be produced was something we should have been paying attention to.
“We wanted to bring more tests to the market. We wanted to do it as quickly as possible and provide the necessary government intervention to do so. So, inthe first six months of the RADx program, at the end of that six months, they were delivering 2 million tests a day, and 100% of all of the tests that were available for at-home testing.
“Secondly, Senator Alexander and I thought that testing should be widespread and easily available, easy to take, as we pushed to reopen schools and keep themopen. We want to do the things that have a test that is frequent, that’s inexpensive, and makes sense.
“We went on. We appropriated more than $30 billion for testing activities in the first five bipartisan bills to deal with COVID. Later, in the American Rescue Plan, an additional $47.8 billion for testing activities was made available. …
“And, frankly, we sent a letter to the Secretary of HHS this week, Senator Burr and I did, asking exactly where did this money gets spent on, and I’m afraidwe’re going to find out that not nearly all of it got spent on testing.
“The lack of funding has not been a problem, and I think we need to know what happened to the money and what we need to do to make the kind of investment nowthat we thought that $80 billion would surely have made.
“When people asked last month about the difficulties in getting tests and why the administration wasn’t making tests free and available, the White House presssecretary said, she just dismissed the idea as out-of-hand. Then, less than three weeks later, they did an about-face and announced they’d distribute rapid tests to any American who wants one. Now, that’s a bold idea. It’s one that Europeans have been usingthroughout the pandemic.
“But let’s look at what the administration actually did. They’ll spend $3 billion per 500 million rapid tests. That’d be about one-and-a-half tests per person.They’re also saying right now that really to have faith in the rapid tests, you probably need to take two of them. So, the one-and-a-half per person doesn’t do quite what it needed to do.
“The approach to the answer to our testing shortage is not to send 500 million tests to the American people. These tests haven’t been purchased yet. They haven’tbeen produced yet. They haven’t been distributed yet. And, what do we do in the next weeks as we wait for even that to be done? Finally, the administration says that the at-home tests are less sensitive to the omicron variant than they need to be. I hope that’snot the case.
“It’s time the administration began to recognize that vaccines are a powerful weapon, that we need to continue to focus on them, but we also need to have abroader strategy.
“That strategy has to include people finding out whether they have COVID-19 or not. This is a wakeup call. I hope we wake up.”