[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 3 (Wednesday, January 5, 2022)]
[Senate]
[Pages S33-S34]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                              Coronavirus

  Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, on Monday, the United States set a new 
pandemic record with more than 1 million new cases in 24 hours. I am 
sure you and I and everyone who is thinking about this would have hoped 
we would be in a very different place right now than we are, but it is 
pretty significant, 2 years into the pandemic, to set that kind of 
record.
  What is most concerning about this is many people who are concerned 
with catching the virus or who think they may already have it can't get 
access to tests. I just heard earlier today on a call where the 
administration was providing information that they have asked for a 
request for information about who could provide a test and then made a 
request for proposals about who might be able to provide tests.
  But we are way down the road to be asking about who can provide 
tests. Congress has provided more than $80 billion for COVID testing. 
If you look at the size of the defense budget, this is a pretty big 
percentage of the defense budget.
  We have lost track, I think, of how much money $1 billion or $1 
trillion or $80 billion is, but the administration has had $80 billion. 
Over half of it, $47 billion, they got in March in the American Rescue 
Plan. This is supposed to cover everything from research and 
development of new rapid tests to manufacturing and purchase of these 
tests, to funding for State and local governments to distribute these 
tests. Here we are 9 months later, and we are concerned that we don't 
have tests because we don't have enough tests.
  For the last month, Americans have faced long lines at testing 
centers. They have gone to places where they thought they could 
purchase a rapid test to find empty shelves.
  The question I really have is the same that many Americans have, 
which is what went wrong? Why are we facing such a shortage of tests 
now? How could we possibly have had $80 billion available for a minimum 
of 9 months and now we are back in a testing problem?
  I think the answer surely is not a lack of funding but, I think, more 
fundamentally, a lack of strategy, a lack of priority, and a failure to 
anticipate the ongoing testing needs by the administration.
  When this administration came into office, their COVID-19 policy 
could have been called ``Vaccines First.'' And while I have been 
vaccinated and while I have urged all Americans to get a vaccine unless 
your doctor tells you not to, it has always been clear to me that the 
vaccine was only one part of the process.
  In fact, if you remember, from the very first, the vaccines were at a 
level that indicated that roughly 1 out of 10 people that had a vaccine 
would also get COVID. What we know now is that person who gets COVID 
that had a vaccine is not going to be incredibly affected by it, in all 
likelihood, but it shouldn't have been a shock that many people who got 
a vaccine would also get COVID and would also want to know if they had 
COVID.
  Yet, for a full year, the administration has focused almost 
exclusively on one thing and testing and treatments have not had the 
attention they should have had or now that they must have. That failure 
has come at a steep cost. Today, Americans can't find over-the-counter 
tests, and the Nation lacks a comprehensive reliable testing 
infrastructure.
  Early in the pandemic, former Senator Lamar Alexander and I were on 
the phone nearly every day with officials from the Department of Health 
and Human Services to get a better understanding of how to fight the 
virus. He was the chairman of the appropriating committee. I was the 
chairman of the authorizing committee. We thought we had come up with a 
plan that, if carried out, would work just right. In fact, the result 
of those conversations was a twofold testing response.
  First, we started a program at the National Institutes of Health we 
called RADx, which we kind of based, roughly, on the TV program ``Shark 
Tank,'' where people brought ideas in about how they could produce a 
test in ways those tests were not being produced. Over $1 billion was 
invested directly with a dozen different companies that are producing 
today almost all of the tests that are available in stores.
  But, obviously, being sure that they were producing them at the 
volume that they needed to be produced was something we should have 
been paying attention to. We wanted to bring more tests to the market. 
We wanted to do it as quickly as possible and provide the necessary 
government intervention to do so.
  In the first 6 months of the RADx Program, at the end of that 6 
months, they were delivering 2 million tests a day and 100 percent of 
all of the tests that were available for at-home testing.
  Secondly, Senator Alexander and I thought that testing should be 
widespread and easily available, easy to take. As we pushed to reopen 
schools and keep them open, we want to do the things that have a test 
that is frequent, that is inexpensive, and makes sense. We went on and 
appropriated more than $30 billion for testing activities in the first 
five bipartisan bills to deal with COVID.
  Later, in the American Rescue Plan, an additional $47.8 billion for 
testing activities was made available. Now, remember this is 
legislation that was partisan in nature. No Republican voted for it. It 
had easier transfer authority from category to category than any 
appropriations bill in the last 10 years, and, frankly, we sent a 
letter to the Secretary of HHS this week--Senator Burr and I did--
asking exactly what did this money get spent on. I am afraid we are 
going to find out not nearly all of it got spent on testing.
  The lack of funding has not been a problem, and I think we need to 
know what happened to the money and what we need to do to make the kind 
of investment now that we thought that $80 billion would surely have 
made.
  When people asked last month about the difficulties in getting tests 
and why the administration wasn't making tests free and available, the 
White House Press Secretary said--she just dismissed the idea out of 
hand. Then, less than 3 weeks later, they did an

[[Page S34]]

about-face and announced they would distribute rapid tests to any 
American who wants one. That is a bold idea, one Europeans have been 
using throughout the pandemic.
  Let's look at what the administration actually did. They will spend 
$3 billion for 500 million rapid tests. That would be about 1\1/2\ 
tests per person. They are also saying right now that really to have 
faith in the rapid tests, you probably need to take two of them, so the 
1\1/2\ per person doesn't do quite what it needed to do.
  The approach to the answer to our testing shortage is not to spend to 
send 500 million tests to the American people. These tests haven't been 
purchased yet. They haven't been produced yet. They haven't been 
distributed yet. And what do we do in the next weeks as we wait for 
even that to be done?
  Finally, the administration says that the at-home tests are ``less 
sensitive'' to the omicron variant than they need to be. I hope that is 
not the case.
  It is time the administration began to recognize that vaccines are a 
powerful weapon, that we need to continue to focus on them, but we also 
need to have a broader strategy. That strategy has to include people 
finding out whether they have COVID-19 or not. This is a wake-up call. 
I hope we wake up.