During a Fox News interview on Thursday, Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said that his administration is going to distribute 1 million at-home COVID-19 tests to the most vulnerable people in his state as President Biden has failed to follow through on his promise to send at-home tests to Americans.
“You know, the Biden administration promised they were going to send all these at-home tests. They said all you had to do was go online and get it. And nothing has happened in a month and a half with doing that,” DeSantis said. “And so, we looked at it in Florida and say, you know, the point of matter is not every single person needs to be going out always getting tested. You have healthy people. That’s not a good strategy. But what is a good strategy is to have these at-home tests available for our vulnerable population.”
“And so, we’ve secured a million at-home tests and we’re going to be distributing them to nursing homes and long-term care facilities throughout the state of Florida, and then to the broader senior communities throughout our population. Because we view testing as something that should lead to, then, a clinical result,” DeSantis continued. “And so, we’ve embraced early treatments in Florida. So if you have somebody that’s elderly that may be vulnerable to COVID they can get a quick test in-home and don’t got to wait in line. And then if they’re positive they have the ability, potentially, to get treatments. Now, we would like to have more treatments, but the federal government is being very scarce with those, and so we’re fighting for more so that Floridians get what they need.”
Last month, Biden announced his administration would be delivering 500 million at-home COVID-19 tests to Americans in an effort to combat the highly contagious Omicron variant.
Since Biden’s promise, the tests still have not been sent and Biden has ignored questions from reporters asking for updates on when they will be sent. Meanwhile, there has been record high COVID-19 cases – with the number of new daily cases breaking 1 million this week.
