President Biden’s pandemic response team announced plans on Friday to use the Defense Production Act to help Pfizer manufacture more of its COVID vaccine, produce 61 million rapid at-home COVID tests over the next six months, and address shortages of personal protective equipment for health care workers.
The Defense Production Act gives the president emergency powers to compel private companies to prioritize supply lines and manufacturing for the benefit of national defense, in this case against coronavirus. Biden signed an executive order directing federal agencies to use the 1950 law shortly after his inauguration.
The announcement is the new administration’s latest departure from COVID policy under President Donald Trump, who was criticized by Biden and the media for taking a hands-off approach to deploying the Defense Production Act and largely ignoring the pandemic during his final months in office.
Tim Manning, a former Federal Emergency Management Agency administrator serving as Biden’s pandemic supplies coordinator, told reporters on Friday that limited supplies of ingredients and equipment are currently straining a push to speed up production of the Pfizer vaccine. The federal government is expanding “priority ratings” under the Defense Production Act, giving the company “first access” to components for filling pumps and tangential flow filtration skid units needed to scale up vaccine manufacturing.
“It’s actions like these that will allow Pfizer to ramp up production and hit their targets of delivering hundreds of millions of doses over the coming months,” Manning said.
The Biden administration is also working to increased production of rapid COVID tests that can be taken at home without a prescription. On Friday, Manning announced that the Defense Production Act will be used to contract with six companies to produce at-home tests, but he did not release the names of the companies due to ongoing contract negotiations. Manning said the government will help the companies build new production plants and supply lines in the United States, reducing “vulnerabilities” in the supply chain.
Under most insurance plans, at-home tests are only free of charge for people experiencing symptoms or exposed to COVID-19 and can cost $129 or more out of pocket.
“The country is well behind where we need to be in testing, particularly the rapid at-home test that will allow us all to get back to normal activities like work and school,” Manning said, adding that 60 million at-home tests would be available by the end of the summer.
Manning said the U.S. is nearly 100 percent reliant on overseas manufacturers to export personal protection equipment, notably surgical gloves, which is “unacceptable.” The government will use the Defense Production Act to invest in private companies building plants and factories for producing raw materials and manufacturing surgical gloves. By the end of the year, Manning expects the U.S. to be producing one billion gloves per month.
“We’re already working to increase the availability of N95 masks to frontline workers but another critical area of concern we hear over and over is surgical gloves,” Manning said. “Right now, we just don’t have enough gloves.”
Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control, said the U.S. is coming off a “case bump” from the holidays and has seen a 61 decrease in new COVID-19 cases since infection rates peaked on January 8. Over the past week, rates of COVID-related deaths and hospitalizations fell 11.9 percent and 15 percent respectively, according to the Washington Post.
“The data moving is in right direction, we will know in the next week if it is really going down,” Walensky said on Friday.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.