COVID testing to take back seat as Biden administration rations funds

The decision to allocate what little funding remains to prioritize purchasing the next generation of vaccines and treatments could create disease surveillance blind spots, and scaled-down manufacturing of tests means the United States could be forced to play a game of catch-up in a number of months, administration officials said Thursday.

“For us to lose this capacity again and then be forced to ramp up by hook or by crook in the coming months with a potential variant coming, it’s just not a good place for the country to be,” said HHS Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response Dawn O’Connell. “It puts us back to where we were, despite all the effort and all the hard work we’ve invested in this testing manufacturing capacity.”

The Biden administration intends to ration existing funds dedicated to the pandemic response to prioritize purchasing treatments and the next generation of vaccines. The administration will allocate $5 billion to purchasing vaccine doses, while an additional $5 billion will be spent on Pfizer’s blockbuster treatment Paxlovid and monoclonal antibody therapies.

The reshuffling of funds, which the administration argues must be replenished by Congress, will mean diverting resources for building up the domestic testing capacity, as well as the stockpiles of PPE and ventilators.

“The domestic manufacturing of testing issue is really very unfortunate, because the U.S. government put in a lot of effort and resources into building up that domestic manufacturing, and what we’re seeing is, day-by-day, week-by-week, that beginning to go away,” said White House COVID-19 response czar Ashish Jha.

Domestic test manufacturing ground to a halt in the spring of 2021, when vaccines were first made available and demand for tests, particularly home administered tests, plummeted. Manufacturers let workers go and sold off equipment. The U.S. was then woefully unprepared for the subsequent surges, caused first by the delta variant and followed by the omicron variant. Rebuilding domestic manufacturing capacity was an arduous process that, if it has to be repeated, could cost the country millions and set virus surveillance efforts back months.

Administration officials hammered home their pleas for Congress to appropriate more money to deal with the pandemic. Without it, the U.S. risks falling behind the virus in the fall, when cases and hospitalizations are expected to rise. Cutting domestic manufacturing also means that the U.S. will have to rely on foreign test manufacturers such as China.

“If we get more resources down the road, we will be able to reverse some of [the manufacturing stoppage]. It will be more expensive. It will be difficult,” Jha said. “That is not the situation we need to be in, and it is absolutely essential that we continue to have a domestic manufacturing capacity that can produce tests for the American people, both during times when infection numbers are low, but particularly so when infection numbers are high.”

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The administration maintained its request for $22.5 billion in additional funding from Congress. Persistent gridlock and apprehension on the part of Republicans to spend even more money on the pandemic and risk further economic fallout have consistently stood in the way of the White House getting the money it says is necessary to forestall another severe surge of COVID-19.

“It’s far more expensive to have to go back and rehire and buy new equipment, and we ended up funding and supporting a lot of that effort,” Jha said. “So from a just pure fiscal prudence point of view, maintaining this capacity, making sure we can tap into it when there is a surge and we need more testing, is really a smart thing to do, obviously, from a public health point of view … But even financially, it’s much smarter.”