Lawmakers accused top Biden administration health officials of neglecting virus testing and mangling key messaging around the pandemic.
Top federal health officials on Tuesday defended the Biden administration’s efforts to protect Americans from the highly contagious Omicron variant, facing withering accusations from senators about the scarcity of coronavirus tests and confusing guidance on how soon people who test positive for the virus can return to normal life. In a nearly four-hour hearing, lawmakers charged that the administration remained woefully unable to meet the demand for at-home tests, noting that the White House would fulfill its pledge to send 500 million of them to American households for free only after the current surge had peaked. The health officials testified before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions during one of the most trying weeks yet in the administration’s struggle with the pandemic. Infection rates are skyrocketing nationwide, and hospitals set a single-day record on Sunday for the number of patients with the virus, surpassing last winter’s peak. While Democratic senators offered only gentle criticism, Republicans were unsparing, claiming that President Biden and his pandemic response team had mangled public health strategy and messaging. “Most Americans can’t make heads or tails of anything coming out of this administration,” Senator Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama, said. “I’m getting texts as we speak, sitting here, asking, ‘Where do I get the test?’ We spent billions on this.” The officials who testified said they had mounted an all-out effort to test, treat and vaccinate Americans in the middle of a shape-shifting pandemic that had suddenly reached a new inflection point with the Omicron variant. “It’s hard to process what’s actually happening right now, which is, most people are going to get Covid,” said Dr. Janet Woodcock, the acting commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, offering one of the federal government’s most pointed acknowledgments of Omicron’s 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 happens,” she added. Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, Mr. Biden’s chief medical adviser, said the virus had “fooled everybody all the time, from the time it first came in, to Delta, to now Omicron,” adding, “We’re doing the best we possibly can.” The hearing came as the highly contagious Omicron variant, coupled with the Delta variant, has strained hospital systems and caused businesses to struggle to stay open because of staff shortages. An average of more than 735,000 infections are being reported in the United States each day, according to a New York Times database. On average over the last seven days, more than 135,000 people were hospitalized with the virus, an 83 percent increase from two weeks ago.
