Man in charge of coronavirus testing in US explains why there are still shortagesExBulletin

Mary Louise Kelly of NPR speaks with Admiral Brett Giroir, Assistant Secretary of Health at the Department of Health and Human Services, about coronavirus testing and vaccine distribution.

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

They’re back – cars lined up as far as the eye can see, people lined up for hours, reports of shortages of key supplies like swabs and pipettes, reports of long waits for results. I’m talking about the headlines of the horror stories about coronavirus testing – headlines we hoped we had put behind us in the spring and summer. And to be sure, a lot more tests are available now than at the start of the pandemic. But the testing infrastructure in this country still seems to fall short of what’s needed. We’ll talk about that now with the man in charge of testing in the United States, Admiral Brett Giroir.

Welcome, Adm. Giroir.

BRETT GIROIR: Thank you for inviting me.

KELLY: Why is demand still exceeding eight months after the start of this pandemic?

GIROIR: The demand does not exceed the supply. In fact, we perform over 1.5 million tests per day.

KELLY: I’ll underline those lines I just described.

GIROIR: OK. So when you have people who believe they need to be tested – millions of people so they can go on vacation, on vacation – the system doesn’t support that. We are fully able to support screening of those who are symptomatic of whatever contact they have, of testing asymptomatic people across the country in an unprecedented way. We have it all. But the lines you mainly see now are the result of individuals who mistakenly (ph) believe that taking a test today or tomorrow will make them safe while on vacation. And that is simply not true.

KELLY: You think it’s a Thanksgiving bottleneck.

GIROIR: Oh, I think that’s really a Thanksgiving bottleneck. We have almost twice as many tests as we will probably be doing this month as we did last month. We will have more than 70 million point-of-care tests this month, well over double the number of tests performed last month. We have already distributed 63 million Binax cards to individuals.

So take a look. We are not in a situation and we are not soon going to be in a situation where everyone who wants a test every day will be able to get it. But we have large and solid supplies. We test all nursing home staff twice a week in hot counties; in cold counties, once a week. We test 250,000 students in Wisconsin, which is booming in Utah. We have enough tests to do what we need to do on the testing side.

What I want the American people to really understand, however, as you’ve heard today – that we are in a dangerous and critical part of the epidemic. The number of cases exceeded 1.1 million this past week. Our hospital admissions increased by almost one hundred percent last month. This problem will not be solved by people who get tested and do not need to be. This will be resolved by wearing a mask. It will be solved by limiting exposure to crowded indoor spaces, physical distance, hand hygiene and, unfortunately, closing some establishments or limiting the population of indoor establishments like restaurants and bars.

KELLY: And you’re preaching a message that’s been absolutely emphasized, supported, and public health officials would 100% agree with – wear a mask. Social distance. Do all of these things. But I’ve been questioning those same public health officials for months, months, and months now. They argue that, you know, to put this pandemic behind us, to keep the country and the economy safe to reopen, you have to do tens of millions of tests every day. What is preventing us from doing this?

GIROIR: It’s a physical impossibility. We dont do…

KELLY: Why?

GIROIR: Why – is that – kind of an existential question, isn’t it? You know, why can’t people fly? Why can’t these things happen? I mean, we’ve invested every dollar we can into increasing the testing infrastructure. Remember, we only had a few thousand tests we could do per week. Now we are making over 10 million a week. We have point-of-care testing, but we don’t have the physical capacity to perform tens of millions of tests.

The closest is Binax, right? It is the closest. It’s $ 5 per test. It’s very easy to administer. We’re going from $ 30 million to $ 35 to $ 50 million a month, but that’s a month. There is not a worldwide supply of certain types of materials that go into this. We are doubling, tripling the withdrawals that are made. It is not a lack of will, money or infrastructure. But we are moving from a starting point to where we are now, which is an unprecedented increase. I wish we had hundreds of millions of tests per month. There was no lack of investment, effort, science and coordination. It’s just that we are not there yet as a country.

KELLY: So you’re saying it’s not a lack of willpower. It is not a shortage of money. There are physical barriers to this.

GIROIR: There are physical barriers to manufacturing that cannot be resolved overnight. Many of them could be fixed over the weeks. We went from a few million withdrawals per month to a hundred million per month. We had no point-of-service testing – none …

KELLY: Yeah.

GIROIR: … Until I have some. And then this quick point-of-service test is here in the quantities of 35 or 40 million. But I mean, look. There is – but it is possible that in the future there will be home testing for everyone and everyone can test every day. There will be …

KELLY: I wanted to ask you about it because it’s news this week. The FDA just approved the first test that people can use on their own at home and get results right away, but it’s $ 50 a pop, and the supply is really limited.

GIROIR: It’s very limited.

KELLY: Do you have any idea when this will be more widely available and more affordable?

GIROIR: This particular technology is unlikely to be widely available, nor more affordable because it comes in a form that will not be affordable. It is expensive to make it. So the type of tests we’re talking about is like the Binax test, the $ 5 card-based test that we bought 150 million from. He’s the top of the class. There will be others that look like it and come from other companies where there is an independent supply chain like across Europe. So we expect that. But we are not a few months away from being able to have hundreds of millions of them a month. Therefore…

KELLY: And I guess – forgive me for interrupting you.

GIROIR: No, go ahead. Please.

KELLY: We only have a minute or two left. And I just want to get to this – the basic question that I can’t leave my mind. It is a country that sent people to the moon decades ago. It is a country that, in the same eight months, two pharmaceutical companies have developed a vaccine that they say is 95% effective. Why can’t we come up with tests in the supplies that would allow anyone who wants a test to take a test?

GIROIR: So we’ve been investing in making these vaccines for about 20 years to get us to when you have an eight-month start …

KELLY: That’s right.

GIROIR: … And can help something. There was not a single swab in the stock. There was no production line. There was no industrial base. There was not a single diagnosis in the stock, no production line, no industrial base. So it’s really a standing start. It’s the equivalent …

KELLY: I’m sorry to interrupt you.

GIROIR: Yeah, go ahead.

KELLY: I know you’re going fast and we wish you good luck.

GIROIR: Thank you.

KELLY: Adm Giroir, thanks.

GIROIR: OK, OK. Bye Bye.

KELLY: It’s Brett Giroir, the testing czar for the White House Coronavirus Task Force.

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