Anthony Stephen Fauci, Carole Johnson, Andrew M. Slavitt, Marcella Nunez-Smith, and Rochelle Paula Walensky

“ We’ve recently discussed investments in at-home and point-of-care testing, which can contribute significantly to our ability to safely get back to normal life.
Today, we’re releasing details about how our testing strategy can be advanced in three additional critical ways.
First — first is how we can reduce the disparities in health outcomes by investing more testing resources in underserved communities. We will also discuss how we will get critical therapies to underserved communities.
Second, our investments we are making in testing to increase screening and surveillance. ”

“ And today, the Department of Health and Human Services announced plans to distribute $10 billion to support COVID-19 testing in schools across our country. With this funding for testing, every state in America will have access to millions of dollars to set up screening testing programs to add a layer of protection for schools, teachers, and students. This funding can be used to test teachers and staff, students and others with symptoms of COVID, those who may have been exposed, and to establish sustained regular screening testing programs across the school system. ”

“ Reliable and widely available testing is a crucial part of our efforts to stop the spread of COVID-19. But several factors can make testing strategy decisions complex, including the different kinds of tests available, the changing dynamics of the pandemic in communities, and the increasing proliferation of new variants that are more transmissible. ”

“ Somewhere in order of a third of vaccination — of vaccines are going to retail pharmacies; something in the order of half are going to the healthcare systems — the healthcare providers, hospitals, et cetera; then a large piece, after that, going — most of the rest to big community vaccination centers; and then an increasing share to community health centers, mobile vans, et cetera.Now, the reason that that can’t be precise is some of their — there’s some overlap in that states are each distributing their vaccinations into a variety of those channels. ”

“ There is really no biological reason at all to indicate or even predict that you would even see any modification of the genetic profile when you’re dealing with an mRNA, which has no way of integrating into the genome of a cell. ”

“ We hope that the President’s commitment to testing, with a nearly $50 billion investment in the American Rescue Plan, is a strong signal to all about our commitment to testing and the importance of continuing to ramp up and expand testing.Every — we are using those resources to not only expand testing but to address critical supply issues as we announced earlier last month that we were going to invest critical resources in raw materials and other issues that have presented shortage issues in the past. ”

“ Today’s updated guidance is intended to help public health officials, medical providers, school and justice system administrators, and others make decisions about setting up testing programs in their communities. ”

“ It’s not even 60 days into the administration, and I would just summarize that your government is acting with urgency — acting even as people are being asked to maintain wearing masks.The government is moving as quickly as possible, acting with speed of moving checks into the American — to the American public — near 100 million already; speed of vaccinations — near 100 million since January 20th; the speed of testing dollars moving out into the field, as Carole Johnson said today, with over $10 billion getting out the door quickly ”

“ Walensky add anything that she would like — but these will be awards to state health departments for the purposes of helping to — help schools stand up testing programs. Many schools have — some schools have testing programs, and so the intent is not to disrupt the relationships that they have. Others need help in connecting to programs. And the federal government is continuing to work to build up the Federal Supply Schedule, to ensure that people have easy access to affordable testing. ”

“ We’re trying to do bridging studies to show comparable immunogenicity at the same time of looking at safety.We will know answers to that for high school-level individuals by the time we get to the fall. ”

“ And when you do an age de-escalation in younger children — we just started a study with Moderna, literally this past week, in which we’re going to do age de-escalation from 12 to 9, 9 years to 6 years, 6 years to 2 years, and 6 months to 2 years. ”