White House grapples with equitable rollout of federal COVID-19 home testing program
President Joe Biden’s health team is weighing options on how best to distribute the rapid coronavirus tests it promised to ship to Americans free of charge so that individuals who have limited access to the internet can benefit equally from the program.
Biden’s administration is looking at ways it can supplement an announced website, where users will be able to request the at-home tests, to help ensure that Americans living in rural areas and communities of color have equitable access to the testing program.
“A website’s going to be important for the distribution of those 500 million test kits. It’s not the exclusive mechanism that we’re using,” said Cameron Webb, senior policy adviser for equity to the White House COVID-19 Response Team.
Those conversations are ongoing, but Webb said the response team will lean on community and faith-based organizations that have helped with the administration’s vaccine and booster shot messaging to assist with the effort to get tests to individuals who live in communities that have been hardest hit by COVID-19.
The details of who gets the tests and how many kits each household can receive are still being worked out, the White House says. It has not launched the website associated with the initiative and says it will not do so until the federal government has the first tranche of tests it is purchasing in its possession.
White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Jeff Zients said Wednesday that deliveries to the administration of tests from companies that are receiving contracts will begin in January.
“Americans will start receiving free tests in the coming weeks. We will set up a free and easy system, including a new website, to get these tests out to Americans,” Zients said at a media briefing. “And we’ll continue to do more and more to increase access to testing.”
Hard-to-reach communities a priority
At the White House on Wednesday press secretary Jen Psaki said the administration is working to ensure it is reaching communities that do not have broadband internet access and individuals who are unable to order tests online.
Psaki said during the White House press briefing the administration will open more federal health testing centers and expand mobile testing options and that an additional 50 million tests are being sent to rural health centers and community health centers.
She said that distribution of those tests, which are separate from the 500 million the White House will make available on its website, began in December.
“A lot of those are targeted to lower-income communities, communities that may not have access to broadband,” Psaki said. “So we will continue to build out all of those options because obviously equity is a key priority to the president as we work to address COVID.”
Amid a surge of cases brought on by holiday travel and the highly transmissible omicron variant, federal health officials are working to make COVID-19 tests and therapies, including oral antiviral pills and monoclonal antibodies, more accessible to rural Americans, individuals in lower-income areas and communities with lower vaccination rates that have been experiencing the greatest number of hospitalizations and deaths from the virus.
Antiviral pills take months to produce, and like monoclonal antibodies, they are in short supply.
Biden announced Tuesday that he was doubling an initial order of Pfizer’s oral antiviral treatment for a total of 20 million courses. The federal government has also purchased 3 million treatment courses of a COVID-19 treatment pill produced by Merck. The president said in remarks before a briefing from his COVID-19 team that his administration began shipping those pills in late December and plans to send out another batch this week.
The latest Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tracking data show 828,417 recorded cases of COVID-19 in the United States. Florida, Puerto Rico, New Jersey, New York City and Washington, D.C., in particular, have been hotbeds of virus activity recently.
Infections have also climbed significantly in the Black community, according to CDC data from the past month. While other racial demographic groups also experienced a surge in cases in late December, case rates were substantially higher among African Americans.
Webb said that because of the administration’s earlier push for vaccinations, the initial data indicate that the omicron outbreak is not solely impacting communities of color.
Pediatric vaccinations in those communities and booster rates among seniors in hard-hit areas have increased recently, he said, and the administration continues to prioritize minority communities in its messaging efforts.
“The gaps that emerge are often because of the systemic and structural dynamics that exist in society. And so our work is always to overcome those structural dynamics. And I think that we saw that we’ve been able to narrow those gaps considerably in just a matter of weeks, whereas in the past it took months,” Webb said.
Equity still a focus, White House says
Health officials are vowing to press on with the administration’s health equity work following the dissolution of the task force that Biden charged with coordinating an equitable pandemic response and recovery in one of his first executive orders.
The executive order establishing the COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force called for the task force to be terminated within 30 days after submitting its report and recommendations, unless its mandate was extended by the president. In early November, the task force delivered its final report and a set of 55 recommendations for advancing health equity to the White House.
Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, a professor at the Yale School of Medicine and chair of the task force, said in an interview that the task force was “one part of a multi-pronged approach to health equity in administration, when it comes to COVID-19 and equitable access to all the resources.”
“The task force work was to get it done quickly, and to respect the urgency of the moment, and to submit those recommendations over to the White House, which the task force did,” she said.
Webb similarly argued that the task force’s charge was to make the recommendations to the president that the COVID-19 Response Team has incorporated into its equity work and is currently working to implement.
“I think oftentimes people, because of language or whatever, may think that the task force was the engine behind all the policy work and all the execution of the administration. And that’s not true,” he said. “All task forces have a task, and theirs was to make and submit recommendations. And that’s precisely what they did by by early November.”
This story was originally published January 5, 2022 at 12:48 PM.
