The U.S. needs an Operation Warp Speed for rapid COVID testing

Accessible at-home rapid testing is a strategic tool that if deployed last year would have reduced COVID-19 transmission to a point of potentially eliminating the virus as a public health threat. A plan to ramp up such testing gained momentum at the start of the Biden Administration and it continued to make headlines in the spring. With no no national strategy, however, states and schools received the funding, but they were left to figure out procurement and protocols alone. Nevertheless, as the administration made vaccines its major focus, it seemed to treat testing as more of a penalty for the unvaccinated, rather than using it as an extra layer of protection and providing peace-of-mind for all. There was never a comprehensive federal plan to assure that supply met growing market demand for a convenient and accurate tool that would signal if people were infectious and enable them to take vital precautions to break chains of household and community transmission…

One example of the need to take a holistic approach to rapid testing is the unintended disruptive impact of the Biden mandate that workers at large companies get vaccinated or face weekly testing. This may apply to as many as 100 million workers and stands to displace huge unfunded mandated testing costs to the private sector or to the employees themselves. It will also wreak havoc on the national supply chain, limiting test availability for schools and other national priorities as well. The Biden plan allocates $2 billion for 280 million tests. This is a bad deal for American taxpayers. We are over-paying for tests that could be produced for as little as $1 and not getting nearly enough supply on the market to meet the demand.