President Joe Biden will direct officials to double the government’s purchase of Pfizer‘s antiviral COVID-19 pill from 10 million to 20 million in a speech on Tuesday.
‘These pills will be delivered in the coming months and have been shown to dramatically decrease hospitalization and death from COVID-19,’ the White House said in a tweet ahead of Biden’s remarks.
The Food and Drug Administration granted Pfizer emergency authorization for its Paxlovid-nirmatrelvir tablets and ritonavir tablets last month. The pill is the first oral antiviral treatment for COVID-19 and is said to be effective against the Omicron variant.
The announcement will come as the United States recorded a million cases of COVID on Monday.
That morning, the US reported 55,114,057 confirmed cases. By midnight, the tally had risen to 56,190,946 – an increase of well over a million in under 24 hours.
But hospitalization rates and the death rate remains low compared to past waves.
President Joe Biden will address the Omicron crisis on Tuesday and will direct officials to double the government’s puchase of Pfizer’s antiviral COVID-19 pill from 10 million to 20 million in his remarks
Pfizer said that its Covid pill, called Paxlovid (pictured), is also effective against Omicron
The Biden administration has already paid $5.295 billion for the first 10 million courses of Paxlovid
In November, the administration announced it would puchase 10 million treatment courses of the Paxlovid oral antiviral drug – as long as it got FDA approval. It paid $5.295 billion for the first 10 million courses.
Paxlovid is an antiviral medicine with a combination of active ingredients, PF-07321332 and ritonavir, that works by inhibiting a protease required for virus replication.
This prevents Covid from multiplying, keeping virus levels low and helping the body to overcome the viral infection.
The two active substances of Paxlovid come as separate tablets that are packaged together and taken together, twice a day by mouth for five days.
Biden’s remarks come as nearly 1 in 100 Americans have tested positive for COVID in the last week.
Testing for COVID was up during the holiday season as Americans sought reassurance they were safe to celebrate with loved ones but the spike also indicates the country is facing another wave of the virus, likely due to the highly transmissible Omicron variant.
Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris will meet with members of his COVID-19 response team – which includes coordinate Jeff Zients, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky – at the White House complex.
The briefing will focus on the Omicron variant and the administration’s response to it, according to a White House official.
The president will discuss ‘the importance of continuing to use the tools we know protect the American people – vaccines, boosters, and masking’ in his remarks, the official said.
Biden also is expected to address his pledge to deliver 500 million at-home testing kits to Americans.
His administration has yet to offer comprehensive details on how the delivery system will work.
President Biden is expected to address his pledge to deliver 500 million at-home testing kits to Americans
Additionally, his remarks come amid a report the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will update its guidance on the recommended isolation period imminently.
The CDC has been under pressure from medical experts to include a testing component in its new, shortened five-day isolation period.
CNN reported that updated guidance is coming amid deep frustration inside the Biden administration that no testing component was included when the agency shorted the isolation period for those who test positive for COVID from 10 days to five.
Biden was asked about the issue on Monday and told reporters: ‘I’ll be talking to you about that later.’
The United States recorded a million new cases of COVID-19 on Monday, shattering the global record it previously set, and making the U.S. by far the hardest-hit nation of the pandemic.
There have now been 827,753 deaths in the U.S. from COVID-19. There were 826,065 deaths during the same time frame analysis performed by DailyMail.com, meaning fatalities increased by 1,688 over the same timespan that infections surged by one million.
Monday’s number is almost double the previous record of about 590,000 set just four days ago in the U.S., which itself was a doubling from the prior week.
Outside the U.S., the highest number of cases recorded in a single day was in India, when more than 414,000 people were diagnosed on May 7, 2021.
Biden’s speech comes as the administration rushes to fill its promise to deliver 500 million at-home COVID testing kits to Americans.
The contract for those kits is supposed to be signed late this week, Zients told reporters during a briefing last week when long lines of Americans formed to get tested around the holiday season.
The administration has said there will be a website for Americans to sign up for the kids but it has yet to answer questions on how it will determine how many kits each household gets, how long it will take households to get the kits and how those kits will be delivered.
Zients simply said the White House is ‘actively working to finalize’ the distribution mechanism.
‘Companies are already submitting information, and we expect the contract to be completed late next week,’ Zients said at the COVID press briefing last week.
‘That means that the first deliveries for manufacturers will start January. We’ll set up a free and easy system, including a new website to get these tests out to Americans. We’re actively working to finalize that distribution mechanism, which includes a website where people will be able to order tests for free. And we’ll share more details in the weeks ahead — days and weeks ahead,’ he added.
COVID response coordinator Jeff Zients is seen with President Joe Biden at last week’s virtual meeting with governors on the Omicron crisis
Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Chief Medical Advisor to the President, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky also make up Biden’s COVID team
President Biden and his staff have pushed back against criticism of the lack of testings kits available during the holiday rush. With demand high and shelves emptying out of stock, some retailers have placed limits on how many at-home testing kits can be purchased at a time. CVS has a limit of six test kits per purchase both in stores and online while Walgreens limits it to four kits.
The administration bragged last Wednesday it has brought two more at-home tests on the market.
‘The Biden-Harris Administration has brought two new over-the-counter, at-home COVID-19 tests to the U.S. market. The tests, one manufactured by SD Biosensor and distributed by Roche and the other manufactured by Siemens, have received emergency use authorization (EUA) by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA),’ the Department of Health and Human Services noted in a release.
‘Combined, it is estimated the companies can produce tens of millions of tests per month for use in the U.S.,’ the agency noted.
Again, it remains unclear when these tests will be in the hands of Americans.
The White House has emphasized officials are working on the problem over the holidays and pushed out the numbers behind their work.
‘There are now 20,000 free testing sites across the U.S., four times as many at-home tests available to Americans than were available this summer, and free at-home tests are already being made available at key community sites, such as community health centers and rural clinics,’ HHS said.
Meanwhile, White House press secretary Jen Psaki downplayed questions about the unsigned contracts to deliver the promised testing kits, calling it a ‘part of the process.’
‘We have no concern about the contract being finalized. We’re just working to finalize the contracts. We just announced this two days ago. But there’s no — we don’t see any issue or any halt to getting that done and to finalizing that. That’s a natural part of the process,’ she said at her press briefing on Thursday.
She also argued that the president has boosted testing capacity and pointed out it wasn’t until October that five versions of at-home tests were available.
‘The president knew that we needed to increase testing capacity. That’s why he used the Defense Production Act to expand the supply of at-home tests. Without that, we wouldn’t have the supply in the market,’ she said.
But when drilled on details – how long it would take to get a test after one was ordered, how would they be delivered – Psaki had no answers.
‘Again, really good questions. And we, of course, want people to be able to rapidly receive the tests and people have certainty to know they can get a test, they can feel safe, go into their workplace, seeing their family members, sending their kids to school. That’s our objective. The details of how it will be distributed and the mechanisms will all be coming soon,’ she said.