Schrier Continues Push for Increased Availability of COVID-19 Vaccine and Rapid Testing

Congresswoman Kim Schrier, M.D. (WA-08) participated in an Oversight and Investigations hearing Wednesday that addressed increasing the availability of COVID-19 vaccines. In the course of Rep Schrier’s questioning, Dr. Anthony Fauci agreed that all three authorized vaccines are safe, extremely effective at preventing death and hospitalization, and that every American would do well to take whichever vaccine they can. Dr. Fauci and CDC Director Rochelle Walensky also agreed that more rapid testing is needed to crush the coronavirus.

“I want to make sure our return to normalcy is sustained and that we don’t have to fully close down our economy and our schools again,” said Rep. Schrier. “If COVID is going to be with us for a while, vaccination is critical but I also believe we need a much greater ability to test asymptomatic people, test them early, catch them early, and prevent outbreaks that could land us right back in the same situation. Dr. Fauci, do you agree it would be useful to add some degree of routine home testing in addition to vaccinations to our public health toolbox?”

Dr. Fauci said that not only did he agree with Rep. Schrier about increasing the availability of rapid tests, he has been saying we needed to “flood the system” with inexpensive rapid tests for months. Dr. Fauci and Dr. Walensky told Rep. Schrier that more guidance to facilitate increased inexpensive at-home rapid tests was coming “imminently.”

For months Rep. Schrier has been pushing federal officials to increase inexpensive, rapid at-home tests that would allow us to safely reopen schools and the economy. Last month she sent held a call with top FDA officials to talk about the approval process for rapid tests. Last month Rep. Schrier also announced a rapid testing pilot program partnership between Seattle Children’s Hospital and Washington school districts and Reps. Schrier, Bill Foster (IL-11), and Suzan DelBene (WA-01) sent a letter pushing the FDA to do head-to-head testing of rapid antigen tests to determine the most effective tests to then manufacture at-scale. Reps. Schrier, Foster, and DelBene also sent a letter to President Joe Biden in January asking him to use the Defense Production Act to increase the manufacturing of parts for rapid tests. Later that week, President Biden announced that he would be doing that as part of his COVID-19 Executive Orders.

Tuesday, the FDA announced they were developing steps to streamline an approval path for COVID-19 screening tools. This is something Rep. Schrier has been advocating for since last September, when she and her colleagues brought this to the FDA’s attention. This is a big, overdue step in the right direction that signals a larger strategy that paves the way to making frequent at home tests a reality.

The above is a press release from Congresswoman Kim Schrier.  The Auburn Examiner has not independently verified its contents and encourages our readers to personally verify any information they find may be overly biased or questionable. The publication of this press release does not indicate an endorsement of its content.