President Joe Biden announced a new “test to treat” plan to give people who test positive for COVID-19 in a pharmacy setting access to antiviral pills on the spot at no cost.
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“I’ve ordered more pills than anyone in the world has,” Biden said during his State of the Union address Tuesday. “Pfizer is working overtime to get us a million pills this month and more than double that next month.”
A White House official said the administration is launching “one-stop shops” allowing for testing and the distribution of antiviral pills, including hundreds at pharmacy clinics in stores such as CVS, Walgreens, and Kroger.
The two available antiviral pills are Paxlovid from Pfizer and Molnupiravir from Merck. They were authorized by the Food and Drug Administration late last year for people at high risk of developing severe infection due to COVID-19. Paxlovid was authorized for people 12 and older, while Merck’s treatment can only be prescribed to adults. The Pfizer pill has been found to reduce the odds of hospitalization by 90%, Biden noted in his speech. But the pills have been scarce since their approval.
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The administration was criticized earlier this year for not having procured millions of courses of treatments ahead of authorization, as the Trump administration did for COVID-19 vaccines in development. Unlike vaccines, which the Trump and Biden administrations ordered in bulk well before authorization from the FDA in late 2020, the federal government did not strike such deals with antiviral manufacturers. This put manufacturers behind the mark once the FDA granted those authorizations.
