Creating a WWII-scale pandemic testing board, canceling the Keystone XL pipeline, rejoining the Potemkin Paris Accords, etc — Presidentish Joe Biden had a busy first few days in office.
The Pandemic Testing Board was supposed to be a big deal, so big that here we are, more than a year later, and Pro Publica had to remind me that the Pandemic Testing Board was supposed to be a thing at all.
The PTB was to be modeled on FDR’s World War II War Production Board that successfully managed all the resources needed to produce the weapons of war on a scale never before seen in human history.
The WPD was “how we produced tanks, planes, uniforms, and supplies in record time,” according to Biden. “And it’s how we can produce and distribute tens of millions of tests.”
Still, Biden did sign an executive order creating the PTB, putting the “full force of the federal government” behind creating those tens of millions of test kits.
Hey, that reminds me — remember when the super-duper-contagious omicron variant hit us last fall, and we didn’t even have a small fraction of the testing kits we needed?
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Sure would have been nice if we’d have had some kind of “Pandemic Testing Board” or something to see to it that we had plenty of testing kits on hand, given the 100% chance of new variants springing up.
Snark aside — at least for the moment — whatever became of Biden’s PTB?
Pro Publica looked into just that question and found … squat, basically:
As far as we can find, the group has put out no press releases, held no hearings and made no announcements. Biden’s executive order states that the head of the board would be, or be chosen by, the White House’s head of COVID-19 response. That’s Jeffrey Zients, but when we contacted him, he didn’t respond.
When we asked White House officials about the Pandemic Testing Board — who was on it and what actions it had taken — they declined to answer our questions and pointed us to the Department of Health and Human Services.
That agency did respond to our inquiries about the board, but its answers offered few details about the board’s work. It did not say who is on the panel or what decisions it has made.
So there might have been some people on this panel whose identities we aren’t allowed to know, and whose decisions and actions (if any) remain a mystery.
We certainly weren’t suffering from a surplus of COVID testing kits when we needed them most:
In October, White House officials reportedly disregarded a proposal from testing experts to send rapid tests directly to Americans in anticipation of a COVID-19 spike during the holidays. Press secretary Jen Psaki also infamously dismissed the idea in a December briefing.
Later that month, the Biden administration announced it would send tests directly to Americans. But the tests are arriving just as the omicron wave is receding.
Exactly as I predicted back in December, by the way: Those Free COVID Test Kits Won’t Arrive Until Omicron Is Over.
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I’m not exactly tooting my own horn here. Predicting a Biden Fail wasn’t exactly a tough call. All I had to do was look at three things: The expected peak of omicron, the expected delays in getting kits produced, and Joe Biden.
So what went wrong, aside from Joe Biden somehow getting made president?
The Biden Administration went all-in on vaccines and semiofficially dismissed the need for more testing kits. As Bloomberg reported last month:
Suppliers have also been caught off guard by uncertain demand beginning the delta wave last summer followed by the sheer speed of omicron’s onslaught. Some either scaled back or stopped production of Covid tests altogether as the virus waned and public health guidance suggested vaccinated people no longer needed to take tests. Leading test-maker Abbott Laboratories shuttered one of its factories.
No one in the Administration bothered telling us his promised Pandemic Testing Board would become little more than a fable, and that’s why they got caught with their pants down (again) last fall.
A real Pandemic Testing Board might have prevented such a mess.
What a shame we got such big promises and such lousy results … from the usual Team Biden know-it-alls who never let reality get it the way of their pet theories.
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