about what kind of test is rigorous enough to offer the public.įrance and Germany, for their part, will be ending universal free rapid testing this fall, in an attempt to encourage vaccination. The Biden administration wants to continue to defer to the F.D.A. But the tests are not likely to become anywhere near as available as they are in much of Western Europe. The administration awarded contracts on Monday that will lead to the delivery of 120 million at-home tests, starting next month. ![]() ![]() White House officials told me that they expect rapid tests to become more widely available and less expensive soon. The tests would not be free but would likely be substantially cheaper than they are now. If that happened, the companies selling many tests in Europe, like Abbott and Roche, would quickly flood the U.S. Several experts have called on Biden to issue an executive order reclassifying rapid tests as a public health tool rather than a medical device. To survive that process, the rapid tests must demonstrate that they are nearly as sensitive as P.C.R. still uses the same cumbersome process for approving Covid tests that it uses for high-tech medical devices. Eric Topol of Scripps Research wrote in Stat News.įor the most part, the F.D.A. The F.D.A.’s process for approving rapid tests is “onerous” and “inappropriate,” Daniel Oran and Dr. I tried to buy rapid tests this weekend and couldn’t find any. But drugstores, Amazon and other sellers have now largely run out of them. has loosened its rules somewhat over the past year, allowing the sale of some antigen tests (which often cost about $12 each). Even as President Biden has followed a Covid policy much better aligned with scientific evidence than Donald Trump’s, Biden has not broken through some of the bureaucratic rigidity that has hampered the U.S. Other experts are also criticizing the Biden administration for its failure to expand rapid testing. ![]() has failed on testing.” Frequency over sensitivity “Imagine what ubiquitous cheap testing could do in the U.S.,” Friedhoff wrote.
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