Biden’s plan to flood America with a billion COVID-19 tests expected to put even more pressure on collapsing supply chain

02/08/2022 / By Arsenio Toledo

The federal government has promised to provide every single household in America with up to four rapid antigen Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) tests, with taxpayers shouldering the cost. Regular Americans are also the most vulnerable as the country’s hobbled supply chains struggle with the added pressure that manufacturing and transporting a billion COVID-19 tests bring.

To do this, President Joe Biden and his administration have promised to make available up to one billion of these tests for distribution for a whopping cost of $53 billion, of which around $29 billion remains unspent. (Related: Biden regime’s “free at-home COVID test kits” are coming from China, proving again first family’s ties to Beijing run deep.)

Households that want to acquire their free COVID-19 tests can get it sent directly to their homes through the mail, or they can avail of the tests from local pharmacies or at one of the over 20,000 free COVID-19 testing sites across the country.

The Biden administration is even forcing private insurers and group health plans to cover the costs for up to 32 rapid antigen tests each month for a family of four.

This means that if every single one of the 200 million or so Americans currently on private insurance plans asked for the maximum number of tests they are allowed to get for free each month, that would account for 6.4 billion tests per month.

Interestingly, government insurance programs like Medicare and Medicaid were given no such order and are exempt from being forced to pay for rapid coronavirus tests.

Influx of COVID-19 tests will have negative impact on American supply chains

One of the big problems Biden first encountered is that there just weren’t enough rapid antigen COVID-19 tests to go around and he and his administration had to figure out, at the expense of American taxpayers, how to provide every household in the country with coronavirus tests.

As of Wednesday, February 2, around 60 million American households have so far ordered COVID-19 tests. If every single household that ordered tests had four people, that would amount to a test for 240 million Americans. The Biden administration has made it clear in previous statements that it does not have enough tests to provide for 240 million people, let alone the entire population of the United States.

But it has begun ordering millions of tests from private-sector manufacturers. Just recently, the Department of Defense and the Department of Health and Human Services signed a contract with iHealth Lab in Mountain View, California. According to the agreement, iHealth will provide the federal government with over 104 million over-the-counter COVID-19 test kits.

This massive influx of COVID-19 tests is expected to wreak havoc on American supply chains, which are already on the verge of collapse.

“If the government plans to mail out one billion tests, what does that do to the supply at your local Walgreens? Already, the tests are in short supply,” commented Doug Badger, a senior fellow at the healthcare nonprofit research organization the Galen Institute and the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation. “I don’t think this parallel distribution chain is going to be the best way to do it.”

Many experts have also pointed out that, even if the economic problems this mass testing would cause were taken out of the equation, widespread testing still makes no sense.

Dr. Jeffrey Singer of the libertarian think tank the Cato Institute pointed out that testing broad swaths of the general public are just begging for trouble.

“It makes no sense to test everyone, symptomatic or otherwise, high-risk or otherwise, considering the large percentage of the population at this point has a fair amount of [natural] immunity,” he said.

Assuming that the rapid antigen tests are effective at accurately spotting COVID-19, Singer pointed out that focused testing would be a more effective way of deploying rapid tests. Otherwise, the false positives the mass testing will inevitably bring about will wind up “unnecessarily shuttering much of society.”

“Test the symptomatic and test those who work with vulnerable people, such as nursing home workers, hospital workers and caregivers,” said Singer. “We need focused testing along with focused protection if we ever hope to live in a world with endemic COVID.”