Key GOP senator warns that U.S. needs millions of coronavirus tests by August

4 minutes

Sen. Lamar Alexander. | Mario Tama/Getty Images

The United States will need to produce hundreds of millions of coronavirus tests in order to give parents and students the confidence they need to return to school in the fall, Sen. Lamar Alexander said in an interview on Friday.
As chairman for the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, the Republican lawmaker said he is spending his days and nights at home in Tennessee “trying to encourage a Manhattan Project for testing” so that every American later this year will have access to a test.
The effort is critical to allowing some semblance of normalcy this fall by letting kids go back to school in time for the fall semester. And that’s going to be a difficult task, Alexander said, unless the government, Congress and the private sector do everything they can to increase test production in the next month.

“My fear is that we’ll get to August and the government says we can all go back to school or back to college,” Alexander said by telephone. “And a lot of people won’t want to do it unless they can be assured that they don't have the disease, but just as important, that the classmate next to them doesn’t have the disease.”
The scale of the effort is essentially unheard of, but is key for the country to move beyond social distancing that will plague the economy until the government and companies boost their testing or find a vaccine. Alexander said Congress and the administration had stumbled by putting up roadblocks and regulations that made developing new tests and treatments more difficult.
“The big test for the administration right now is: Can you scale up the production of hundreds of millions of tests, several new treatments and hundreds of millions of doses of an effective vaccine as quickly as possible?” Alexander said.

The timeline is tight, warned Alexander, who said Congress’s role right now will be to lean on the Food and Drug Administration to speed up approvals of new, 15-minute tests as well as on the private sector to develop them. Congress delivered money in recent aid packages to help facilitate widespread testing, but now the solution might be to get out of the way, the retiring Republican chairman said.

“We’ve appropriated the dollars, the issue is the government’s not usually really good at fast production of anything,” Alexander said. “We need to create an environment where somebody outside the government can make the scientific discoveries and turn them into tens of millions and eventually hundreds of millions of tests.”
If that could happen, Alexander envisioned tests being available to everyone headed back to school by August, treatments by the fall and a vaccine being ready for at least frontline health care workers as soon as wintertime. He said the country has been caught flatfooted on testing “but that’s not the president’s fault.”
“The major reason we don't have enough tests is because Congress and the Food and Drug Administration have restricted development of tests by everyone except the Centers for Disease Control,” Alexander said. “Let’s just say that’s everybody’s fault.”

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