Many Americans have reported difficulty getting testing appointments or buying at-home tests<\/p>\n<\/h3>\n
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WEDNESDAY, Oct. 6, 2021 (HealthDay News) — The Biden administration said Wednesday that it plans to purchase $1 billion worth of rapid, at-home COVID-19 tests and take other actions to quadruple the number of tests available to Americans by December.<\/p>\n
By the end of the year, the number of at-home tests should increase to 200 million a month, according to the White House, which will also expand the number of pharmacies in the federal government’s free testing program to 20,000, an administration official told The Washington Post<\/em>.<\/p>\n In recent months, many Americans have reported difficulty getting testing appointments or buying at-home tests, according to The Post<\/em>.<\/p>\n “These tests are cheap to make — and there’s a lot of demand for it out there,” Ashish Jha, M.D., dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, told The Post<\/em>. “The reason the market hasn’t worked is because the [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] has made it very difficult for these tests to get out into the marketplace.”<\/p>\n One testing advocate said approvals of rapid tests are not coming fast enough. “This slow trickle of [emergency authorizations] is all but promising to get us a large supply of rapid tests just in time for them to no longer be as effective against delta,” Michael Mina, a Harvard University epidemiologist who has advocated for at-home testing, told The Post<\/em>. “There are amazing tests produced in the billions that simply don’t exist here in the U.S.”<\/p>\n FDA officials have said they are concerned that the rapid tests are less accurate than the slower polymerase chain reaction tests that need to be evaluated in a laboratory and can take days to produce results.<\/p>\n