During a CNN interview on Tuesday, Dr. Ashish Jha, Dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, slammed Democrat President Joe Biden’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, saying he “dropped the ball.”
“And so you saw President Biden yesterday acknowledging pretty bluntly they need to do better when it comes to testing, because we are seeing this nationwide shortage of those rapid at home tests. It’s very difficult to just walk into a store and get one,” CNN’s Kaitlan Collins said. “And what we’re hearing from officials like Dr. Fauci is that they believe they’re going to have this solved by mid-January, in a few weeks. But how critical is the window that we’re missing right now for testing?”
“I think it is incredibly critical,” Jha responded. “And I cannot believe this is where we are almost two years into the pandemic. Everybody saw it coming. We knew we needed more tests. I think the administration had dropped the ball on this. They focused a lot on vaccines, which is terrific. Vaccines are a really, really important part of this, but did not pay enough attention to testing. And I think it has been really costly in this holiday season.”
Dr. @ashishkjha applauded the CDC's shortened isolation recommendation but says there is a distinction for the vaccinated and unvaccinated.
"When [vaccinated people] have a breakthrough infection, they shed for much shorter period of time. So this is really reasonable for" them pic.twitter.com/73PCH0tNTp
— CNN This Morning (@CNNThisMorning) December 28, 2021
Jha’s comments come as the United States is set to face its biggest wave of COVID-19 yet as the new Omicron variant continues to spread.
According to researchers at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington’s School of Medicine (IHME), the United States could see 140 million new infections from January 1 to March 1, 2022.
“We are expecting an enormous surge in infections … so, an enormous spread of omicron,” IHME director Dr. Chris Murray told USA Today. “Total infections in the U.S. we forecast are going from about 40% of the U.S. having been infected so far, to having in the next 2 to 3 months, 60% of the U.S. getting infected with omicron.”
