By India Edwards HealthDay Reporter
WEDNESDAY, Feb. 19, 2025 (HealthDay News) — The Trump administration changed course on Tuesday, deciding to keep the government’s free COVID test program running, just minutes before the website, COVIDtests.gov, was set to shut down.
Earlier that day, The Washington Post reported that officials were preparing to end the program and possibly destroy tens of millions of unused tests worth more than a half-billion dollars.
But 12 minutes before the shutdown, Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), announced the site would remain active.
“With COVID-19 infections decreasing after a winter peak, we are in the process of regular discussions on closing this round of the COVID-19 test ordering program. At this point, the program is still open, and we will share additional updates as needed,” he said in a statement.
Internal documents showed that HHS officials had been debating two options: Disposing of more than 160 million COVID tests, or continuing to ship them to U.S. households. The stockpile is maintained by the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR).
Only a small fraction of the tests had expired, and tens of thousands were still being ordered daily, Dawn O’Connell, an ASPR chief under the Biden administration, told The Post.
“It’s expensive to stockpile these tests,” she said. “Destruction costs a significant amount of money, but hanging on to them costs a significant amount of money.”
The reversal followed concerns from public health experts about losing a valuable tool during flu season and future COVID surges.
In his first days back in office, President Donald Trump rescinded many of former President Joe Biden’s COVID-related executive orders, including one aimed at expanding national testing strategy.
“The virus is not posing a major public health threat now,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, who led the White House COVID response from March 2022 to April 2023 under Biden.
Jha, now the dean of Brown University School of Public Health, told The Post that trashing the tests “feels like an act of self-destruction here. It’s going to be expensive. And it takes away a tool that the administration would want to use in the scenario that we get a highly immune-evasive variant.”
While COVID cases have decreased after the winter peak, experts warn that free testing remains critical to control infection.
“Destroying an asset that was paid for by the American people, that doesn’t make any sense,” said Dr. Tom Inglesby, who was White House national coordinator for COVID testing from the end of 2021 to April 2022. He’s now the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School of Public Health.
In the event of a resurgence, “we need to be able to figure out who is sick, who is not sick, who needs medicine, who is, in fact, contagious, who may be someone who’s vulnerable,” Inglesby told The Post. “These diagnostics really help you make really good decisions, help families make good decisions about how to stay healthy.”
ASPR has distributed more than 2 billion free tests since January 2020, including 900 million sent directly to households through COVIDtests.gov, in partnership with the U.S. Postal Service.
The program has been paused and restarted many times, including seven shutdowns since its launch.
Most recently, it was paused in March 2024 and reopened in September right before the winter respiratory illness season.
More information
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has more on at-home over-the-counter COVID tests.
SOURCE: The Washington Post, media report, Feb. 18, 2025
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