Within hours of the first confirmed infection from the new omicron variant in the United States, the Biden administration on Thursday announced an array of measures to protect Americans, including campaigns to increase vaccinations and booster shots, additional testing requirements for travelers arriving in the country and plans to make rapid at-home coronavirus testing free for more people.
FAQ: What to know about the omicron variant of the coronavirus ArrowRight
While some of the measures are new — notably a plan to launch “family mobile vaccination clinics,” where all eligible members of a family can simultaneously get first shots or boosters — others build on existing tactics, such as President Biden’s plan to urge businesses to institute mandatory vaccination-or-testing requirements for their workers.
Biden’s package of coronavirus strategies comes as the nation grapples with mounting infections and deaths driven by the delta variant and braces for the emergence of the still-mysterious omicron. Scientists caution that it will take days, if not weeks, to understand if the new variant can evade current vaccines and cause more severe symptoms in infected people.
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White House officials said the measures would allow schools and businesses to stay open while keeping Americans safe from a mutation-laden variant that is not yet fully understood. “We are pulling out all the stops to get people the maximum amount of protection as we head into winter months,” a senior administration official told reporters on a conference call Wednesday night.
Biden is set to formally unveil the plan at the National Institutes of Health later on Thursday, a speech that is part of a broader effort to reassure Americans his administration can control the virus, regardless of how perilous any new variant turns out to be. Biden — who said Monday that omicron is a “cause for concern, not a cause for panic” — has staked much of his presidency on returning the country to normalcy after nearly two years of battling the pandemic.
Ahead of Biden’s speech, public health experts said new measures to ward off the coronavirus were overdue, lamenting the slow pace of vaccinations, the rise of misinformation that has fueled vaccine hesitancy and other factors they said had left the nation vulnerable to a potential winter surge of infections. For instance, 58 percent of Americans were considered “fully vaccinated” against the coronavirus as of Nov. 1 — a figure that climbed to only 59.4 percent as of Dec. 1, according to The Washington Post’s vaccination tracker.
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“We’re going the wrong way” on vaccination status, said Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, saying the nation should aim to inoculate at least 80 percent of its population to ensure sufficient protection against another spike in cases. But “we’re at 59 [percent] and fading,” Topol said, asserting that many vaccinated Americans’ immune protection had likely waned because they had yet to get booster shots.
Topol and others also lamented that the nation’s testing capability remains insufficient, with many Americans so far unable to obtain rapid tests they could take before going to work or family gatherings, especially during regional outbreaks.
“So much of the next phase of covid depends on easy, rapid access to testing, whether it’s omicron or quick access to oral treatments” or compliance with employer vaccine mandates, said Nirav D. Shah, president of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials and director of Maine’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
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Many of Biden’s measures center on encouraging more Americans to get vaccines or booster shots, which the administration has stressed provide the best protection against all known coronavirus variants.
The federal health department will launch new ads and events, focused on seniors, to encourage all adult Americans to get booster shots as soon as they are eligible. The government also will partner with AARP, the advocacy group for older Americans, to convene booster-focused town halls, offer rides to vaccination sites and pursue other strategies to boost uptake.
Meanwhile, the federal health department will send a notice to the approximately 63 million people covered by the Medicare program, offering instructions and encouragement on how to get boosters.
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Medicaid, the safety net health insurance program, also will reimburse participating health-care providers for “COVID-19 counseling visits,” where health workers answer families’ questions about vaccines and stress the importance of getting children immunized.
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While the vaccines’ ability to protect against infections from the omicron variant is not yet guaranteed, researchers have stressed that they remain the best tool to ward off the worst outcomes. “About the only thing I am sure of in this is that I would rather confront omicron vaccinated and boosted,” William Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, wrote in an email. “So boosters should be a major deal.”
Another major plank of Biden’s plan: allowing Americans covered by private health insurance to be reimbursed for purchasing rapid, at-home coronavirus test kits. Officials said the plan, which calls for the Departments of Health and Human Services, Labor and Treasury to issue federal guidance by Jan. 15, would not apply retroactively to already purchased rapid tests.
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Public health experts have spent months clamoring for more access to rapid coronavirus testing, warning that the lack of real-time data on infections has had disastrous consequences for containing the virus’ spread.
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“Free and highly available rapid tests would be a game-changer,” said Charity Dean, a former California health official and the CEO of the Public Health Company. “If we had rapid tests at every door for every school, every movie theater, any person can go and get them — just like they can in many other countries — it would enable people to have personal responsibility and know when they’re infectious.”
Shah, the director of Maine’s CDC, stressed the continued difficulty of obtaining rapid at-home tests from manufacturers, as well as paying for them.
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Providing insurance reimbursement for individual consumers is a positive step, he said, but state health departments buy tests in bulk for schools, nursing homes, prisons and other places experiencing local outbreaks. During a call with state health officers Tuesday night, officials spoke of the lack of funding and “a recurring theme was the challenges at the state level with obtaining rapid tests,” Shah said in an interview.
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In Maine, officials have ordered tens of thousands of Abbott’s BinaxNOW rapid at-home antigen tests for delivery until the end of the year, but Abbott has not delivered in a timely fashion, Shah said. While there are other authorized rapid tests on the market, state officials need to send the same test to institutions because “that’s what they know how to use,” Shah said.
Schools, in particular, are the biggest user of the rapid tests in Maine, he said. Schools that do pooled testing — combining samples from several people and testing them for the coronavirus all at once — need to figure out “which one or two or five of the kids has covid,” Shah said. “The best way is rapid testing. But a rapid test is not rapid if it takes two or three days to get one.”
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White House officials said that greater availability of rapid tests was coming, citing recent actions to invest $3 billion in producing them. “We are doing a ton to ramp up all tests, but specifically, a big focus on ramping up these at-home tests,” a senior administration official said.
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Meanwhile, Biden will announce that inbound international travelers must be tested for the coronavirus within one day of global departure, regardless of nationality or vaccination status, beginning early next week. The move, which federal officials had weighed earlier this week, comes after the White House imposed travel restrictions on eight nations in southern Africa after officials there warned about the emergence of the omicron variant.
Celine Gounder, an epidemiologist and infectious-diseases specialist who advised Biden’s transition team on the covid-19 response, said she was unhappy the White House had prioritized restrictions and testing international travelers while overlooking domestic flights.
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“When you think about Texas, it’s the size of France — and it operates as its own country in many respects,” Gounder said, calling for a renewed focus on how state policies contribute to the virus’s growth. “If you’re really trying to prevent spread of dangerous variants, you should be providing similar standards across the board.”
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Meanwhile, Biden will extend requirements that travelers wear masks on airplanes, public transportation and trains, as well as in transportation hubs such as airports and bus stations. The measures, which were set to expire in January, will run through at least March 18, and the minimum fine for noncompliance will be doubled to $500. But the administration’s plan does not include new masking or vaccination mandates — a move that White House officials characterized as unnecessary, and which public health experts said would be difficult to implement.
“I feel like they’ve kind of maxed out what they can do with mandates, from a political perspective,” Gounder said.
Experts also said that renewed shutdowns in the wake of omicron were unnecessary.
“The reason why we had to do broad shutdowns and broad stay-at-home orders in March 2020 was because we were flying blind” and lacked information on the virus or how to fight it, Dean added. “Today … we can use the tools at our disposal to execute containment and mitigation with surgical precision.”
Biden’s plan arrives as U.S. covid-19 deaths this year have surpassed the 2020 toll, and with White House officials in constant communication with their counterparts overseas and vaccine manufacturers about the potential impact of the omicron variant.
Biden and his aides have long said his political fortunes are tied to the their pandemic response, and after a difficult summer highlighted by climbing covid cases, a chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan and supply chain disruptions, White House officials were optimistic about shifting the focus to the president’s economic agenda as the ravages of the delta variant subsided. But the emergence of a new and potentially more dangerous variant has complicated the president’s messaging efforts.
“I expect this not to be the new normal,” Biden said Monday when asked if the country should get used to the idea of new variants and occasional rounds of travel restrictions.