Six key medical advisors to President Biden have essentially endorsed what we have been advocating for months — the need for massive testing.
“it feels like we are always fighting yesterday’s crisis and not necessarily thinking what needs to be done today to prepare us for what comes next,” Dr. Luciana Borio, a former acting chief scientist at the Food and Drug Administration, said in an interview with The New York Times.
Three of the scientists noted that in July Biden proclaimed “we’ve gained the upper hand against the virus,” which plainly was not true. The U.S. must avoid becoming stuck in “a perpetual state of emergency,” three of them write in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Every person in the U.S. should have access to low-cost testing, they say, adding that the Biden Administration’s highly touted purchase of 500 million test kits isn’t nearly enough. They also called for development of new vaccines and forms of delivery with N95 masks sbeing free and readily available to all Americans.
In interviews, the authors said they had made their views know to administration officials but felt as if they were being ignored. They were especially critical of Biden’s “single-minded focus on vaccines” and the fact that there isn’t a federal system linking testing to treatments, so that people who test positive can instantly get prescriptions for antiviral medicines.
The six served as advisors to Biden during his campaign, but the advisory group was dissolved once he took office.