Faced with calls from public health experts to distribute high-quality masks to the American public, the Biden administration said Wednesday it was making 400 million non-surgical N95 masks available for free at public health centers and pharmacies in the United States. .
The move, which officials have called the “largest deployment of personal protective equipment in U.S. history,” comes just days after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated their mask guidelines to recognize that cloth masks don’t offer as much protection as surgical masks or respirators.
N95 respirators, so named because when used properly they can filter out 95 percent of all airborne particles, were in short supply early in the pandemic. According to the CDC’s new description of masks, well-fitting respirators, including N95s, provide the highest level of protection.
Wednesday was also the formal launch day for covidtests.gov, the administration’s new website that allows Americans to order coronavirus tests at home for free. The site was quietly rolled out on Tuesday.
The administration has come under heavy criticism for not taking action earlier to distribute both tests and masks to the public, especially since the Omicron variant causes a massive spike in cases. Some public health experts have suggested that the federal government should send N95 masks to every household.
President Biden defended his pandemic response at a news conference Wednesday. He said he wished he had moved “a month earlier” to ramp up testing capacity, but said that was not a sign of incompetence given everything else his government had done to fight the virus.
“Am I satisfied with the way we have dealt with Covid and everything that comes with it?” he said. “Yes, I am satisfied. I think we did remarkably well.”
Jeff Ziens, President Biden’s coronavirus response coordinator, told reporters last week that the government was “actively exploring” ways to make high-quality masks available.
The White House said in a statement Wednesday that the government would begin shipping N95 masks to pharmacies and health centers by the end of this week, with the masks expected to be available by the end of next week. The program would be in full swing by early February, the statement said.
The masks will come from the Strategic National Stockpil, the country’s emergency reserve, which was severely depleted at the start of the pandemic, leaving health workers without masks and other personal protective equipment essential to fighting the new virus.
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A study published in March by DailyExpertNews found that the stock had been heavily focused on protecting against bioterror attacks for years; for most of the past decade, nearly half the budget was spent on the anthrax vaccine.
China made half of the world’s masks before the coronavirus showed up there, and the country was hoarding them, leaving U.S. hospitals — and the rest of the world — scrambling for supplies. As late as December 2020, the United States faced an alarming shortage of personal protective equipment.
The Biden administration promised to correct those shortcomings. During 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 contains 737 million N95 masks, all from domestic manufacturers.
The government is also asking for proposals from companies that have the ability to ramp up production to 141 million N95 masks per month in a crisis, and that would be able to maintain production at a much slower pace if the demand is lower so that the country never falls short again in a public health emergency, Ms O’Connell said.
The idea, she said, is that the inventory will “maintain current capacity even as demand declines.”