WASHINGTON — Two years into the coronavirus pandemic, Americans who have had a hard time getting their hands on masks and at-home tests are suddenly being showered with offers of freebies — courtesy of taxpayers and the Biden administration, which had come under sharp criticism for not acting sooner.
The White House announced Wednesday that 400 million N95 nonsurgical masks will be free of cost at community health centers across the United States. The White House said that to “ensure broad access for all Americans,” there would be a limit of three masks per person.
The announcement came just one day after the administration launched covidtests.gov, its new website that allows Americans to order at-home coronavirus testing at no charge.
The White House is intensifying its efforts to combat Omicron, a fast-moving coronavirus that first appeared in November. It has caused a spike of deaths, hospitalizations, and cases across the country. Some public health experts disagreed and said that the efforts were welcome but too late.
“It will not be as impactful as it would have been had we done it at the beginning of the Omicron surge or the beginning of the Delta surge,” said Julia Raifman, a health law and public policy expert at the Boston University School of Public Health.
The White House called the distribution of masks the “largest deployment of personal protective equipment in U.S. history.” Wednesday’s announcement came days after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its mask guidance to acknowledge that cloth masks do not offer as much protection as surgical masks or respirators.
The N95 masks will come from the Strategic National Stockpile, the nation’s emergency reserve of medical supplies. The stockpile was severely depleted during the pandemic. This left health care workers without masks or other personal protective gear that is essential for fighting the coronavirus. Even as late December 2020, the United States was still suffering from alarming shortages personal protective gear.
The distribution of masks from a stockpile to the general public is a departure from past practice. They were previously reserved for health care workers.
According to the C.D.C.’s new description of masks, well-fitting respirators, including N95s, offer the highest level of protection. When used correctly, their name refers to their ability filter out 95 percent all airborne particles.
This month, in a series of opinion articles in the Journal of the American Medical Association, six former advisers to President Biden’s transition team called for a new pandemic strategy that would include making N95 masks free and easily available to all Americans, and vastly increasing the number of free coronavirus tests.
However, Mr. Biden was faced with challenges, especially on the testing front. His administration had promised to improve testing capacity, but they had not fulfilled that promise by the time Omicron was available. His administration purchased 500 million rapid test kits to distribute free to the public. This was just before Christmas.
“They talked a lot about substantially ramping up testing and it didn’t happen,” said Dr. Ashish K. Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, adding, “I think that was a real failure of the administration, to not have more tests available by the time we got into the holidays.”
Mr. Biden announced last week that his administration would purchase 500 million more tests to increase the number of available. This brings the total to one-billion. Jeffrey D. Zients, the president’s coronavirus response coordinator, also told reporters last week that the administration was “actively exploring” ways to make high-quality masks available.
Dr. Jha said that distributing free high-quality masks may only “help on the margins,” because just a small minority of Americans are interested in wearing them. He agreed with Dr. Rochelle Wilensky, C.D.C. Director, who stated that the best mask is one people will wear.
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In a statement, the White House stated Wednesday that N95 masks would be shipped to pharmacies and other health centers by the end this week. The masks will then be available for purchase starting next week. According to the statement, the program will be fully operational by February 1.
A March 2021 investigation by The New York Times revealed that the Strategic National Stockpile had been heavily geared toward protecting against bioterror threats for many years. Nearly half of its budget was spent on the Anthrax vaccine over the past decade. At the same time, China made half the world’s masks before the coronavirus emerged there, and the country was hoarding them.
The Biden administration promised to correct the stockpile’s deficiencies. At a Senate hearing last week, Dawn O’Connell, the assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the Department of Health and Human Services, said the stockpile now had 737 million N95 masks, all from domestic manufacturers.
Lisa O’Connor, the former chief nursing officer at Boston Medical Center, said she was concerned that distributing stockpile assets to the public would put health care workers at risk.
“This precious resource should be in the hands of health care providers only, which has been the practice and guidance for 20 years,” said Ms. O’Connor, who is now a health care consultant at FTI Consulting.
But Ms. O’Connell told senators last week that the government was soliciting proposals from companies that have the ability to produce 141 million N95 masks per month in a crisis and that would be able to manufacture them at a much lower rate when demand is lower.
The idea is for the stockpile to “keep this capacity that we currently have going,” she said, “even when demand diminishes.”
Source: NY Times
