Biden Fails the Christmas Test

A t a press conference yesterday about the huge surge of the Omicron variant of Covid-19, President Joe Biden once again stuttered and looked weak, tried to excoriate the purveyors of misinformation and shame the unvaccinated — and he also tried to empathize and reassure. “I know you’re tired, and I know you’re frustrated. We all want this to be over. But we’re still in it,” Biden said. “We also have more tools than we had before. We’re ready.”

Except we’re not ready and don’t have the tools. And it’s his fault.

More than ten months in, the Biden administration has been unwilling to break the monopoly public-health officials are trying to build over the case numbers and the general course of the pandemic. What America — the Northeast in particular — needed this week was an abundance of cheap, easy-to-use at-home Covid tests. The few that were on the shelves are long gone.

Almost every testing site has all its appointments booked. Every pharmacy that lists at-home Covid tests is reporting that they’re sold out. The few pharmacies that do list them as in-stock turn out to have outdated information.

And this was all so predictable, and was predicted. In year two of Covid-19, public-health officials and the public themselves have learned about Covid’s seasonality. Because the Northeast never quite got a Delta wave, it was obvious that region was going to get a major winter wave, no matter what. The Northeast was more vaccinated than the South, but not that much more.

It was also easy to see that this year more people — because they are vaccinated, or have already recovered from a previous Covid infection — would be traveling for the holidays to reunite with parents, cousins, nephews, and nieces, and godsons, and even pets. It was predictable that people would be trying to make up for lost time over the last two years. And so, to meet the requirements of airlines, testing sites would be quickly booked up. With a predictable surge, the last available appointments would be taken. Biden himself at his press conference said that he “knew that was coming.”

But in the next labored breath, he said that nobody would have predicted Omicron, which could well be much more transmissible than Delta. Biden promised a shipment of 500 million at-home tests starting in January.

This is too little and too late. Cities such as New York and Washington, D.C., are setting case records now, this week. By the time these tests come online, the wave will be over, and the pandemic will be closer to ending. But another lost Christmas will be gone forever.

Biden had already promised in a September 9 address that he was going to make at-home test availability a major priority, even using the Defense Production Act to increase our capacity. All that has happened is that the Food and Drug Administration has approved a handful more tests. But very few have gone into full-scale production. The White House has been pressed on this topic. On December 6, White House press secretary Jen Psaki was asked what the administration was doing and shot back sarcastically, “Should we just send one to every American?”

It would be better than nothing. And many governments have done exactly that, or more than that. Or at least, they’ve allowed the private sector to meet the demand.

America has been an outlier in preventing cheap at-home tests from coming to market. By the fall of 2021, the FDA had approved only six at-home antigen tests. The most common at-home tests in America cost roughly $30 for a two-pack. European countries have approved dozens of tests, many of them made by American companies, that are sold for one or two euros and are plentiful at every rest stop, gas station, and pharmacy.

There are also serious ethical questions about how the FDA handled approving at-home tests. The first two companies that had their tests approved were Abbott, which produces the Binax test, and Quidel. The common thread of these two companies is that they both previously employed Dr. Tim Stenzel, who is the director of the office at FDA that authorizes diagnostic tests. No one has proven wrongdoing, but it looks terrible.

The American testing situation is now so stupid that people are actually scouring message boards and auction sites to buy European-approved tests from Americans who recently returned from overseas.

The desire for more tests isn’t even synonymous with support for other intrusions and non-pharmaceutical interventions. Speaking personally, I think we should have abandoned all restrictions months ago, but while those restrictions are still in place, I may prefer not to infect people who may be trying to travel days after seeing me. Or to avoid infecting the one or two persons in my life who are immunocompromised, or the very rare person who can’t, for whatever reason, be vaccinated themselves, or who has simply refused it. This desire to be considerate in this way was always going to well up around the holidays.

This was a known problem. The Biden administration had as much time in office as European governments needed to approve these tests and see their production soar. The White House had a head start, and failed miserably anyway. Now many Americans are going to cancel Christmas plans again in 2020 because they or their family members wanted or needed just this one extra layer of reassurance during the Omicron spike. Chances are they’ll remember it next November, too.