WASHINGTON — Federal health officials on Tuesday defended the Biden administration’s efforts to protect Americans from the highly contagious Omicron variant, facing scathing accusations from senators about the scarcity of coronavirus tests and confusing guidelines about how quickly people who test positive for the virus can return to normal life.
During a nearly four-hour hearing, lawmakers accused the government of being woefully unable to meet the demand for at-home tests, noting that the White House would keep its promise to send 500 million of those to American households for free, until after it had reached its current peak.
The health officials testified before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions during one of the most difficult weeks yet in the government’s battle with the pandemic. The number of infections is rising across the country and hospitals set a one-day record on Sunday for the number of patients with the virus, surpassing last winter’s peak.
While Democratic senators expressed only mild criticism, Republicans were relentless, claiming that President Biden and his pandemic response team had garbled public health strategy and reporting.
“Most Americans have no idea what’s coming out of this administration,” Alabama Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville said. “I get texts as we sit here and ask, ‘Where do I get the test?’ We spent billions on it.”
The officials who testified said the government had made every effort to test, treat and vaccinate Americans amid a shape-shifting pandemic that had suddenly reached a new inflection point with the Omicron variant.
“It’s hard to process what’s really happening right now, which is most people will get Covid,” said Dr. Janet Woodcock, the acting commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, gave one of the most outspoken acknowledgments of Omicron by the federal government. impact since the variant arrived in the United States.
“What we need to do is make sure the hospitals can still function, transportation, you know, other essential services are not disrupted while this is happening,” she added.
dr. Anthony S. Fauci, Mr. Biden’s chief medical adviser, said the virus had “fooled everyone the whole time, from when it first got in, to Delta, to now Omicron,” adding added: “We do the best we can.”
The hearing came as the Omicron variant, combined with the Delta variant, put pressure on hospital systems and left businesses struggling to stay open due to staff shortages. According to a DailyExpertNews database, an average of more than 735,000 infections are reported each day in the United States.
On average, more than 135,000 people have been hospitalized with the virus in the past seven days, an increase of 83 percent from two weeks ago. The hospitalization totals include people who occasionally test positive for the virus after being admitted for conditions unrelated to Covid-19, but there is no nationwide data showing how many people fall into that category.
Model scenarios cited in an internal government document dated Jan. 5 and obtained by DailyExpertNews suggest there will be more than a million confirmed infections per day by the end of the month.
That number is widely seen as a huge undercount due to the scarcity of testing and the widespread failure of people to report positive results from home testing to the government. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, an independent health research center at the University of Washington, last week estimated that the number of daily infections had already risen to six million, predicting that more than half of Americans would become infected over time. hit with the Omicron variant. next six weeks. Public health experts have said many cases will be mild or asymptomatic.
Senior officials in the Biden administration said in interviews on Monday that infections and hospitalizations were expected to peak across the country in late January and then plummet. But dr. Fauci warned Tuesday that peaks and troughs would not look the same in the United States.
The hearing took a detour early on with a violent back and forth between Dr. Fauci and Senator Rand Paul, Republican from Kentucky. The senator accused Dr. Fauci of working to undermine scientists with opposing views about the virus, something Dr. Fauci strongly denied.
In a raised voice, Dr. Fauci that personal attacks by Republicans had endangered his safety and that of his family. He held up a copy of a fundraising webpage for Mr. Paul with an image of “Fire Dr. Fauci,” and said the senator was after him to score points with conservatives.
After nearly a year of concerted efforts to tame the pandemic, Biden faces a depleted audience and another burst of alarming headlines. Asked by reporters on Tuesday if he was concerned about the country’s fight against the virus, the president said he was “worried about the pandemic just because it isn’t slowing down very much worldwide”. He added that federal officials were working to help states and hospitals.
Last week, a group of former pandemic advisers to Mr Biden published a series of articles calling on the government to refocus its response to Covid in a way that would recognize the “new normal” of living with the virus indefinitely.
Federal officials on Tuesday also hinted at that. dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told lawmakers it was more important for Americans to use rapid tests to guide their behavior than to report every positive result to government agencies.
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“One of the really important goals of these rapid tests, even if we don’t count them, is to enable the public to do the right thing through this pandemic” and not infect others, she said.
One idea proposed by the former Biden advisers was the distribution of free N95 masks, which could protect against the Omicron variant better than cloth or surgical masks. The CDC would update its mask guidelines to better reflect how some masks offer different levels of protection, an agency official said Tuesday.
During the hearing, Dawn O’Connell, the deputy secretary for preparedness and response at the Department of Health and Human Services, said there were 737 million N95 masks in the government’s strategic national stockpile, and additional contracts for such masks likely to be completed in February. The government is asking potential contractors to make 141 million of the masks each month at “peak capacity,” she said.
Time and again, senators from both sides have returned to the government’s efforts to meet the demand for tests, and its sometimes conflicting recommendations about when to use them.
Senator Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat and the committee chair, praised the government’s work to provide vaccines and treatments to Americans, but said health workers were still far too thinly spread and schools “worried that they were going back to should close”. if they can’t get the support for testing they need.”
North Carolina Senator Richard M. Burr, the panel’s top Republican, criticized the government’s promise to deliver 500 million rapid tests to Americans’ homes, saying Mr Biden had promised to do so without the tests in to have hands.
“Try to get the government not to make these announcements until we get the product,” Mr. Burr told Ms. O’Connell.
Ms O’Connell said that when federal health officials saw Omicron rampage through South Africa and Europe, “we immediately contacted our manufacturers to understand any supply constraints they had and to evaluate their peak capacity” for producing tests.
“We have also been talking to them daily to make sure they get what they need from their suppliers,” she said, adding that the Defense Production Act has been used in recent weeks to free up supplies and production capacity.
She said the government had invested $3 billion in the fall to support the production of rapid tests, leading to an increase in availability, but she acknowledged that “that is not enough”.
Ms O’Connell said that while some of the 500 million tests the government had purchased would be sent to Americans by the end of January, it would take two months to distribute the rest. By then, as one senator pointed out, the Omicron peak will likely have long since peaked.
Only 50 million of the 500 million tests promised have been purchased so far, Ms O’Connell said, although more agreements will be announced in the coming days. Separately, seven million tests have been sent to community clinics and food banks, of the 50 million the government has pledged to send, she said.