By Courtney Rosen
USA. The U. S. government agreed to spend at least $6 billion last year to send millions of covid-19 tests home, but Biden’s management will divide the value based on the test, where they were sent, or the main points that appear if they reached Americans most in need.
White House staff, the U. S. Postal Service, and the White House staff, and the U. S. Postal Service, and the U. S. Postal Service, and the U. TThe U. S. and other agencies have rejected several requests from Bloomberg’s government for data on the program for nearly a year.
State and local fitness officials also don’t know who won Biden’s verification kits. The lack of data has made it difficult which communities have been reviewed and where they deserve to distribute theirs, state or local officials in 3 states said.
The United States has delivered 737 million home tests by mail since January 2022, said Zachary Dembner, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services. It generally weighs on socioeconomic status, demographics, and access to housing and transportation. Neither he nor the staff of the other agencies involved disclosed the knowledge or formula of this assessment.
Biden’s administration this week announced plans to end the coronavirus public health emergency that has helped pay for the national reaction to the pandemic for the past three years. transparency and accountability in relation to this reaction.
“Millions of dollars are being spent on systems [where] we have very little data,” said Joanna Derman of the Government Oversight Project, a nonpartisan organization that investigates government waste. “It’s not just the size, it’s the speed at which the cash comes out. This requires greater control.
Loose check kits were just one component of management’s wider diversity of options. Biden’s March 2021 stimulus bill (Public Law 117-2) earmarked a $47. 8 bill for Covid-19 screening, adding cash for states, pharmacies, and gyms to check residents. .
When the country experienced a surge in infections from the omicron variant that same year, the president pledged to send one billion tests to homes.
“We want more evidence,” Biden told reporters at the White House. “And at that point, we’re not where we should be. “
Months later, his most sensible Covid-19 adviser insisted that equitable distribution of testing is essential.
“We’ve given equity a lot of insight in this case. . . ,” Dr. Ashish Jha told reporters in June. “We distribute tests to food banks. We distribute tests to federally licensed fitness centers. We have a total series of effortsArray. . . to ensure that tests pass through a variety of other channels so that others who cannot access them in other contexts can access the tests.
Management set up an online page and phone line where you can only sign up for check kits in the mail. While the benefits covered immediate checks for many Americans, as many as 28 million have no health insurance.
The postal service then set up dozens of distribution centers across the country to handle millions of pallets of tests, Pritha Mehra, the postal service’s chief data officer, said during a filing last summer. Thousands of temporary employees agreed to stay after the holidays. to pack, label and ship the kits to the country.
The military has allocated $4. 5 billion for at least 10 companies, according to contract summaries through June 2022 reviewed by the Bloomberg government. Another $1. 6 billion has been allocated to distribute the check kit through early February 2022, according to figures management reported to Congress.
Military and health officials said they had documents for the agreements, and the White House declined to provide copies of most of its contracts with check providers.
The Department of Health and Human Services has issued two contracts, those of medical source corporations Medea Inc. and Atlantic Trading LLC, but with newsrooms. In any case, the charge on each check is hidden and classified as an industry secret. Companies that send checks to the U. S. U. S. officials have asked Biden officials not to disclose the price, Pentagon spokeswoman Jessica Maxwell said.
Military officers refuse to accept percentage prices, infrequently because their agreements with corporations prohibit it. Accountability Office, the congressional firm that audits expenditures.
Medea and Atlantic Trading responded to Bloomberg’s requests for additional details from the government.
The UK has implemented an option for citizens to request loose tests. Officials also declined to say how much they spent on the tests because it is “commercially sensitive material,” said James Wood, a spokesman for Britain’s Health Safety Agency.
As COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations continue to decline, Americans typically skip testing those days, along with other pandemic precautions. According to an Axios-Ipsos poll conducted in early December, only one-third of Americans contract the virus significantly. o Moderate risk.
Management tracked where it took position for at least some of the time. Biden’s team counted recipients through zip codes in the spring of 2022, said Tom Inglesthrough, Biden’s former COVID-19 coordinator and fitness researcher at Johns Hopkins University.
Early effects showed it reached poorer neighborhoods and set up giant teams of black or Latino residents, Inglesby said. He left management last summer.
Knowing where and how many immediate tests were sent is especially helpful in protecting Americans living outdoors in metropolitan areas, said Kendra Babitz, Utah’s coronavirus testing coordinator.
Rural citizens have to travel long distances to succeed at a verification site. Knowing which spaces were or were not released from home verification by the Biden administration would make it easier to make a decision on where to set state-managed verification options. She said. The state’s governor had asked most citizens in January 2022 to bypass control in an effort to maintain supplies.
“We had no concept or transparency about this program and where the tests would go,” Babitz said.
In California, this knowledge was especially vital because the state had limited testing materials for last winter’s omicron surge, said Erica Pan, a California state epidemiologist.
The state bought millions of its own antigen tests in federal cash after the government ran out of materials from Washington, he said. City officials asked him for help figuring out where federal tests were mailed to. Pan couldn’t answer that.
Lydia Isaac, a fitness researcher at the National Urban League, said her team helped spread the word about mail-in tests to underserved teams in dozens of states, though she didn’t verify whether they had won.
Congress has not directed government auditors to read whether Biden’s management received fair value for mail-order testing or whether the tests reached all Americans equally. A senior congressman is calling for an audit, but no one has done so.
That indicates Congress is rarely “particularly concerned” about the mail-order testing initiative, said Linda Miller, a former deputy director of government auditors who reviews pandemic spending. U. S. officials suggested in November 2020 for recordkeeping.
The postal service’s own auditor released a report in September on its role in the Covid check mail-order effort. His recommendations included that the agency monitor how it tracks prices and revenue and improve its software in the event of an emergency.
The same report wrote the amount spent by the company to distribute the tests and errors made by the carrier when delivering them.
A spokesman for the auditor declined to explain why.
Disclaimer: The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health is through Michael Bloomberg. Michael Bloomberg is the majority owner of Bloomberg Government’s parent company.
To touch the reporter in this story: Courtney Rozen in Washington in crozen@bgov. com
To touch the editors of this story: Bernie Kohn in bkohn@bloomberglaw. com and John P. Martin in jmartin1@bloombergindustry. com and Gary Harki in gharki@bloombergindustry. com
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