growing pressure to deliver with many people having to wait for hours to get tested during the holiday rush. now after promising to distribute tests the president wishes he had done it two months ago. rich edson starts our coverage live at the white house this morning. good morning, rich. good morning, julie. the white house is trying to get those tests out some 500 million of them where americans will ideally be able to go online early next month, order them, get them delivered to their homes. they still have to get the contracts signed and get all those tests out. this was the omicron variant arriving just in time for the holidays. americans have waited hours in line for covid tests, face shortages of at-home kits. president biden said last week his administration should have implemented a more aggressive testing strategy two months ago. the federal government needed to insure enough tests so anyone getting together for the holidays could have tested
order one to be sent by the government. that may mean ohm one to two tests per person. the white house is still building this plane as they fly it. they don t yet have the contracts where to get those tests. they don t have the website built where people will order them. they can t exactly tell us when those tests are going to be available to people, although they say hopefully sometimes in january. i think it s fair to say at this point that the white house put a lot of their eggs into the basket of the vaccines. remember last year when we were tall talking about herd immunity, if we could focus on getting as many vaccines into arms, it would sort of ameliorate the need of having this testing be part of everyday life. now with delta, now with omicron, we have these new variants that changes the game. so this testing strategy is one
vaccinated. they need to focus on getting vaccinated and boosted. the highest risk population and then from there we need to make sure that we have treatments available if and when they do get sick. carley: conversation almost exclusively on testing yesterday. is there such a thing as overtesting a population even asymptomatic people? carley, test something very important. that gives us an idea of what is going on and where the cases are. i can say though he is talking about they didn t expect the surge. they didn t expect to need some tests. i don t actually believe that to be true. we had testing shortages back in september during the delta wave. unfortunately they have put all of their investments into the veenkses and unfortunately they did not really reinvest into the testing strategy going on under operation warp speed. testing is crucial, especially when we are trying to get back to normal life. people need have access. and they need it to be affordable so we can move on a
you ve been calling for more testing and more at-home testing for a year. what does a half billion rapid at-home tests being sent out mean if they re delivered sometime in january? to me it represents forward momentum and forward motion from the administration to start taking testing as a public health tool in this pandemic seriously. i think 500 million tests spread out over a few months is not going to make a major dent, but if it s just spread out over everyone in the u.s. my hope is the tests will be used strategically, something we haven t done yet in this pandemic, is really create a testing strategy. if we dorks then we can make a relatively small number of tests, just over one per person in the u.s., go a much further way if we use them in very specific approaches or with very
that have killed millions of people worldwide. what they ve done is taken a protein and 24 different surfaces of that protein are similar to different aspects of the coronavirus so you are getting a lot of different levels of immunity not just to the spike protein. that vaccine is reportedly in phase one clinical trials. dana, back to you. dana: thank you, jonathan. have a good afternoon. senate majority leader chuck schumer tells colleagues he expects to vote on a revised version of bidens social spending plan early next year. president biden appears to be on a different pace as members of his own administration when it comes to the omicron vair yanlt. former white house chief of staff and former rnc chair reince priebus with reaction next. they ve put all their investments into the vaccinations and unfortunately they did not reinvest into the testing strategy that was going