(John Ransom, Headline USA) Free COVID testing by the federal government has run out of money, so will no longer be offered, one month after President Biden finally fulfilled a promise that he made last year to provide more free testing kits for Americans.
In early October Biden had promised to triple the number of free test kits available by early November, according to Politico.
The White House promised to spend $1 billion to make testing kits available, after Republicans charged that the administration had been caught flat-footed with the Delta variant of the virus.
It is February 10. Where are my free COVID tests from the federal government? pic.twitter.com/WhDxXhSe7S
— Amanda Aguilar ABC30 (@AAguilarTV) February 11, 2022
“They really believed that they were going to declare victory over COVID and move on,” Jerome Adams, the country’s surgeon general during the Trump administration, told Politico.
“And so they took their eye off the testing ball for most of this year because they thought that vaccines were going to save the day,” he said. “I think that was very much a real issue with our lack of ability to provide testing.”
But even as late as December, the Biden administration still hadn’t solved the testing dilemma as a new variant, omicron, threatened to shatter COVID cases records.
“I am sitting here, December 2021 — and why am I sitting here trying to figure out when I’m getting tests?” Dr. Kavita Patel, who practices at a federally funded clinic in Washington DC told NPR.
And in February, as test kits were still not available, Biden invoked the Defense Production Act in order to speed up the production of test kits, even as the number of cases of COVID fell significantly.
“Viruses will not evolve and mutate if you do not give them an open playing field to replicate and replicate in essentially an unbridled fashion,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci at the time of the announcement, Politico reported.
And yet just a month later, the White House has announced that it’s out of money to provide more free testing.
“Providers will no longer be able to submit claims for providing these services to uninsured individuals, forcing providers to either absorb the cost or turn away people who are uninsured, increasing the disparity in access to critically needed health care and putting additional burdens on safety net providers,” the White House said in a statement last week according to Fox News.
Which is certainly good news, because COVID cases are at their lowest level since last summer, just in time for the government to run out of free test kits that they never were able to provide in the first place– an almost perfect federal government program.
