President Biden thread

I thought the last president established the American mantra of no testing/no cases, he laid the groundwork for testing in this country.  Why are people upset about testing now? It must be a focus for the partisan political rhetoric of their media. It is interesting how social conservatives pick and choose which thing to be outraged over.  

At any rate, 

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“The administration has been focused on expanding testing since the very beginning,” Dr. Tom Inglesby, who in January will become senior adviser for testing on the White House COVID-19 response team, told Vanity Fair. “It has always been a major pillar of the approach.” When Biden took office, there were no rapid, at-home COVID tests on the market; there are now 13. And the monthly supply has almost quadrupled since late Summer. The administration has invested more than $23 billion on expanding testing, surging manufacturing capacity, and improving genomic sequencing, according to Mara Aspinall, cofounder of the biomedical diagnostics program at Arizona State University.

Do you remember how upset conservatives were about testing last year? Vanity Fair does. 

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/07/how-jared-kushners-secret-testing-plan-went-poof-into-thin-air

37 minutes ago, Beerman said:

The fact of the matter is we've been in short supply for awhile,  and the Biden administration turned down a plan to produce hundreds of millions per month.  And, it's not just conservatives and their media that are upset about it.

It's funny how Biden keeps being compared to his predecessor.  I guess Trump set the bar higher than what his haters were letting on. LOL 

From the article:

Quote

An administration official who attended the meeting told Vanity Fair that, while everyone present shared the same goal of expanding rapid testing as soon as possible, the plan could not be implemented at that time: “We did not have capacity to manufacture over-the-counter tests at that scale.” The problem, in essence, was twofold: The FDA had authorized only a handful of different home tests, and those it had authorized could not increase manufacturing fast enough.

If only testing had been a priority as we were waiting for vaccines. 

11 minutes ago, Beerman said:

Great point about the FDA.  They are facing criticism from testing experts, not just conservatives,  that they have approved only a handful of at home tests.

 Europeans have over a hundred available to them.

What is the administration doing about the regulatory process involved in getting these tests to the market?

What did the previous administration do relative to tests that the current administration could build upon? Testing didn't just become an important piece of pandemic mitigation strategy on January 21, 2021. What did you think about the state of American testing capacity as a new administration assumed responsibility nearly a year ago? As I recall, Trump's team was busily removing FDA rules for review of tests before they could be sold to the public.  Apparently, the director of HHS agreed with  you that it doesn't matter if the tests were accurate, only that people could purchase them. A cottage industry of covid tests cropped up that were completely useless for covid testing but certainly made some grifters some serious profit after no premarket FDA review was required.  

Is that the kind of thing you would like Biden to do to get tests to the public?

7 minutes ago, toomuchbaloney said:

What did the previous administration do relative to tests that the current administration could build upon? Testing didn't just become an important piece of pandemic mitigation strategy on January 21, 2021. What did you think about the state of American testing capacity as a new administration assumed responsibility nearly a year ago? As I recall, Trump's team was busily removing FDA rules for review of tests before they could be sold to the public.  Apparently, the director of HHS agreed with  you that it doesn't matter if the tests were accurate, only that people could purchase them. A cottage industry of covid tests cropped up that were completely useless for covid testing but certainly made some grifters some serious profit after no premarket FDA review was required.  

Is that the kind of thing you would like Biden to do to get tests to the public?

Early in the pandemic the government made the clear decision that they were not interested in primary prevention.  Testing would look back for the administration.  Even a year later, DeSantis towed the Trump line and  decided to spend the money on espensive monoclonal antibodies (which has since lost favor) rather than on testing.  There wasn't enough demand for tests to incentivize companies to manufacture them.  The Republican brain-washed anti-vaxxers have created a viral-friendly environment and all of a sudden, even THEY want tests available, too stupid to realize that they contributed to the problem of mostly occasional and expensive alternatives being available.  A friend in NYC tried yesterday to get tested before she viisited her mother, stood in a long line to get tested and then was told that she wouldn't get a result until 5 or 7 days.  This is what she paid for?  The administration chose the medical industrial complex over the public health system which had been allowed to wither over the years, despite multiple warnings of an impending pandemic.   Now we are reaping what the 2016 election sowed.  They had 4 entire years to screw things up and you expect the predecessor to have the situation all wrapped up in a year?

1 hour ago, Beerman said:

The Biden administration only reversed that a few weeks ago.  I guess it wasn't such a obvious bad policy, or it was and the delay in reversing it is simply another sign of incompetence. 

Either way, Biden has been president almost as long as Trump was with the pandemic.  Of course, Biden has vaccines, therapeutics, testing, etc.  It's ridiculous and one should be embarrassed to keep deflecting back to Trump.

It's mostly ridiculous and embarrassing that we're confronted so regularly with hyperbolic partisan criticism of the current administration by members who completed ignored(s) the incompetence and corruption of the previous president, the fellow who disadvantaged us from the start of the pandemic. 

Trump's deregulated charlatans then profited at the expense of We the People. Testing was one of those corrupt governance failures that the current president inherited.  

When one completely ignores corrupt incompetence it's difficult to comprehend that it takes time to discover and correct the effects of the incompetence.  There was an alarming amount of destructive activity during the last administration.  

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/01/upshot/trump-effect-government-agencies.html

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-government-donald-trump-left-behind