The Biden administration announced today that 500,000 Covid 19 test kits have been ordered and will be available starting in January.
OK, so you're off by an order of magnitude there, and you appear to have misread quite a bit:
- The Biden Administration ordered 500-million (not 500-thousand) additional home test kits for COVID-19 (different from existing, LAB test kits).
- These are, apparently, not NEW TECH, just the Federal Gov't stepping in to cover the purchase costs. (As-if the Gov't had the money to spend - but that's a Democrat for you! Spend SPEND SPEND!)
Other sites report that ~191-million of these same home-test-kits were sold in the last week of November (2021) already...
They are not talking about treatment drugs. I think they over purchased vaccines and will wait until there supply runs out before they move on to other things.
Sigh - you don't just see the glass half-empty... you consider the hole at the top of the glass to be a serious design flaw prone to spillage!
The FDA has approved many hospital-based treatments for COVID-19, and permitted a WIDE ARRAY of experimental options.
The FDA also recently approved (via EUA) Pfizer’s Paxlovid - an oral (vs IV) treatment for early COVID-19. Merck's Molnupiravir is expected to receive the same EUA soon, which is a similar ORAL treatment. These drugs are still only by prescription, and are both for use in early COVID-19 disease - within 5 days of the onset of symptoms.
Let's be clear here though: the Federal Gov't in the US is STILL PAYING for all COVID-19 hospitalizations! Insured and uninsured are getting the same level of care for COVID-19 here!
I have heard that there are better vaccines in the pipeline but they are not using WARP SPEED to get those done. Keep producing a vaccine that still has not been approved by the FDA that require boosters every six month.
"Project Warp Speed" was a Federal Gov't spending initiative, started in the Trump Administration, where the US Gov't paid - up-front - for massive amounts of research into COVID-19 vaccines, in exchange for pre-arranged purchasing agreements. They spent about $12-billion under the name Warp Speed, and while the program still exists, it's not under the name anymore. (Politics!)
Research continues for better vaccines, and if/when they become available, the FDA will look into their approvals... but remember: the "goalpost" for a "solid vaccine" was, in mid-2020, to be 50% effctive at preventing death.
18 months later, that seems like a rather low bar - hindsight being 20/20! The truth is, we've never HAD a vaccine that was 95%+ effective at preventing serious illness, much less death, before! The current vaccines are an order of magnitude better than we expected to get out of Warp Speed!
True, their effectiveness against Delta dropped to about 80-85%, and against Omicron it's down to a 70-75% effectiveness - but when measured against the original 50% "goal," they're still doing QUITE WELL!
That said, the research didn't just uncover a single "magic pill" - it created a new kind of vaccine: created using mRNA techniques, originally pioneered for use in a potential HIV vaccine, that is easily (and quickly) "re-tooled" to focus on other viruses with other markers.
Pfizer & BioNTech both say they can create new vaccines for other COVID-19 strains when it becomes necessary... not in years or months, but in weeks!
Oh, and by the way: the Pfizer vaccine is fully approved by the FDA - with the Moderna & J&J vaccines both still authorized, and with full approval in the works (the only difference is a paperwork one - you can get any of them still, and if there were any DANGERS at this point, they would pull the EUA and just lean on the others.
YES - the pharma companies are out to make a buck, but they're in the business of healing people, not killing them! Just how much did you pay (in the US) for your last COVID-19 vaccine? (Answer: nothing - your insurance is required to cover it 100%, regardless of coverages or co-pays, and if you're uninsured, the Federal Gov't is footing the bill.
To be clear: if you want to say that Big Pharma is money hungry, and over-charging for many life-saving drugs? (ESP Insulin for diabetics!) I'm with you! ALL-IN!
But when you want to make up lies & mislead people to support your argument, that's just not helpful...