Brooks: Biden COVID Testing Response 'Too Little, Too Late'

On Friday’s “PBS NewsHour,” New York Times columnist David Brooks said the White House’s response on coronavirus testing has been “too little, too late” and they “missed a couple of months where we could have been, in theory, ramping up testing.”

Brooks said, “It is too little, too late. There was an interesting report in Vanity Fair magazine that, in October, a group of scientists came to the White House with a 10-page plan to get 730 million tests to Americans, families, hopefully by the holiday season, by right now and the White House didn’t pursue that. And, according to the article and other articles on the phenomenon, a lot of scientists think they were too vaccine-heavy, they just wanted to focus on vaccines. They thought vaccines were the best way to do it and they neglected a lot of the other tools we need. And, in one theory, they decided, if we let people have a lot of tests, they’ll try to test their way through the crisis without relying on the vaccines. I’d love to see any social science evidence that supports people really are — were thinking that way. But I do think it’s fair to say that it’s just hard to think as big as this problem is. And, at times, the administration has thought this big, but according to a lot of experts, at times, they’ve been thinking too small and too slow. And so we sort of missed a couple of months where we could have been, in theory, ramping up testing.”

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