The NPR Politics Podcast - The White House Says It Is Prepared To Respond Quickly To New COVID Variants

Episode Date: March 3, 2022

Biden is asking Congress to make new treatment options free and immediately available to patients who test positive. The administration says wastewater monitoring will help localities respond nimbly to outbreaks and that widespread vaccine adoption will help to reduce the lethality of future waves. The new plan comes as at a time when most states are easing masking and gathering restrictions and preparing to embrace a return to normal,This episode: White House correspondent Scott Detrow, White House correspondent Tamara Keith, and health correspondent Allison Aubrey.Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography. Kauffman.org. Hi, this is BJ. And this is Jack. And we just started reading The Hobbit by J.R. I love it. I love it. Very targeted. This timestamp is just like catnip for Scott Detrow. I love it. I love it. Very targeted. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the White House. And I'm Tamara Keith. I also cover the White House.

And we've got Allison Aubrey back with us again, our health correspondent. Hey, Allison. Hey, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me. And I think we all know what we're talking about. Since you are on the show, we are talking about COVID because the White House unveiled a new roadmap for the pandemic. It's a reflection of a couple things, the enormous drop in cases post-Omicron and also of the changing politics of COVID, where many Democrats suddenly feel very defensive about aggressive COVID policies. So this new plan hopes life goes

back to normal, but it still provides resources to test and treat sickness. Allison, before we get into the plans details with Tam, I will just say it, you made an excellent point at the end of our prep meeting for this podcast. And I would like you just to repeat it here when it comes to how you think about this moment, about the United States and COVID and what's going through our brains and just how to make sense of things. Sure. I mean, I think we were talking about how there's sort of this split screen, you know, depending on there's sort of two realities, depending on which sort of bubble you're in about this moment and where we are and is it behind us

and what to make of it. And I would say, you know, we really are in this new moment. The statistics on the CDC's COVID dashboard just bear that out, paint that picture really well. I mean, cases way down, hospitalizations way down. When Dr. Walensky announced that the masking requirements would be easing last week, some people said, wait, wait, why now? You know, last week it was where the N95, is this all politics? No. I mean, she made it very clear why she was doing this. She pointed out we're at a point in the pandemic where many people get infected. They're either asymptomatic or they're only mildly ill because so many of us are vaccinated or have natural immunity.

So I think for months now we've been hearing the administration, the president himself, say we're in a new time. Things are getting much better. We have so many more tools to manage this. And now it's finally feeling true or true-ish. And if you don't believe Allison, Dr. Fauci also said it. He put it in a similar context. It's just a different phase of the pandemic. We are clearly going in the right direction. And with all the interventions we have, I believe that we are prepared for the possibility that we will get another variant with regard to vaccines, boosters, testing, good masks and antivirals. OK, so let's let's shift and look at this new this new plan

from the White House. I try to give myself like a rate, a ration of one use of the word optics a year of the Union address. Nobody's wearing, a few people are wearing masks, but to a large crowded space, a very different approach for him, really signaling the White House is thinking about this differently. Given everything we said, given that moment, what is in this plan? And we should say the vast majority of those people were tested before going into that room, unlike most Americans. But yeah, this plan, it includes continuing to get people vaccinated, whether that is small children who don't get qualified, but hopefully eventually there will be a vaccine for our kids. It includes making sure people get the boosters and continuing to look at the efficacy of the current vaccines and developing new ones if necessary, preparing for new variants, preventing businesses and schools from shutting down.

That's really important for the White House. They are saying give up those sweatpants and fill up those downtown offices again. And also they continue to want to help to vaccinate the rest of the world. And that they've pledged 1.2 billion vaccine doses. They are not quite halfway there yet. So there's a lot more work to do on that front. And we're going to talk in the second half of the podcast about the fact that many Americans have been doing that for months and months and months already. And there's a real split screen in the United States in terms of how people think about this or if they even think about it at all. Again, we'll talk about that in a little moment.

Allison, let's talk about this test-to-treat system. What does that mean? Sure. The test-to-treat system addresses what has been a key disconnect up until now. Look, we've had a lot of breakthroughs here. I mean, there's a breakthrough in testing capacity and testing technology. It's now possible to do these instant tests pretty easily. We've had breakthroughs with antivirals. So we do have medicines that work

to keep people out of the hospital if they're given right away. The problem is we haven't had really a system that connects testing to treating. You test positive, what do you do? Who do you call? Doctors haven't had these antivirals until very recently. So basically what the White House announced yesterday was this whole kind of one-stop system. And the idea is that there will be pharmacies and long-term care facilities and spots in community health clinics where somebody could show up. They could get tested if they're positive and they're at high risk and they're a good candidate.

They walk away with a prescription or they actually walk away with the antiviral medication all in sort of one stop. Allison, from like November on, from when Omicron first came on the scene on, there was an interesting moment of more pushback from a lot of scientists, a lot of doctors about Biden administration policies than there had been the previous year, you know? And I am wondering, given that, how public health professionals are reacting to this latest change in approach, in messaging, and in policy.

I think there's this enormous relief that there's now a recognition, there's a plan in place, because it's clear that the virus is not being eradicated, that there, we will be dealing with it for a very long time. And if you go back seven months, and you criticize the, you know, Biden administration for where they were sort of saying, oh, we're going to be liberated from the virus in July. Well, you know, that didn't, the president wasn't the only one saying that there was a lot of hope that the vaccines were going to give us that moment last summer, it didn't come, we had Delta, we had Omicron. So I think that there is relief that the recognition that a long term investment is needed is now sort of put into this 96-page document. I think it's a hard

moment because we all should be excited that we're at this new moment, that we are returning to normal routines at the same time. And this is something Dr. Zeke Emanuel mentioned to me on the phone yesterday. We have to be pretty careful. We can't let our guard down. The worst thing that could happen now is complacency, inaction, and sort of premature triumphalism. We're done. That would be bad because this virus has surprised us many, many times. So last July, declaring independence, that was a mistake. And what Zeke Emanuel is saying to Allison, what all kinds of epidemiologist types that we talked to are saying is, yeah, now going forward, we have to keep wondering, will there be another dinosaur around the corner or is the movie really over? They don't actually talk about dinosaurs. But you think the movie is over. You feel the relief.

And then another variant comes or a velociraptor is hiding in the refrigerator or whatever. So right now, we're in this moment where it feels like it could be over. And maybe the movie is over. And we'll all ride off into the sunset, but we don't know. You know, I think that one thing that is a big focus of this 96-page plan is scaling up the surveillance systems that really didn't even exist two years ago. I mean, just look at the wastewater surveillance. It turns out that analyzing our sewage does give this pretty good, quick snapshot of the amount of virus in the area. It can also detect specific variants. They can start to look for a new variant of concern. So when testing isn't being done as much, this wastewater surveillance becomes really important because it's this, you know, form of passive surveillance. It's a good way

to keep tabs on the virus and sort of give a heads up of whether there's another outbreak around the corner. And you don't have to shove anything up a toddler's nose. That's right. All right, let's take a quick break. When we come back, we'll talk more about this. And we'll talk more about the political split screen that the administration is trying to set policy for. We are back.

And let's just reality check this a little bit. I think maybe with the exception of climate change, the like radically different political and even like reality bubbles that we all live in is like the defining story of this moment. And that has played out with COVID more than anything else, right? Like do you mask or do you not mask? It depends where you live. And I think, you know, I think,

I think that's a really fair thing to say just to just put some data on it. A poll out from Axios and Ipsos recently had just one in three Americans saying they are still wearing a mask at all times. So like these policies of it's time to take your mask off. Many Americans are thinking, cool, I stopped doing that months ago. And that's, you know, that's really tricky to set policy for when that is the case. You know, in part, what the CDC mask guidance did, what the president taking off his mask did was catch up to the vast majority of Americans. The policy is now more in line with

the way people have been living. But I don't think that catching up is going to really fix the sort of political division that has developed over masks or vaccine mandates or any of those things. Though I will say I've seen a fair number of conservative voices praising this test to treat program because testing and treatment are actually not nearly as controversial as vaccines and masks. Right. And Biden talked in the State of the Union about trying to have a moment of reset where

this isn't split as a purely partisan issue, which feels for many reasons like wishful thinking. But maybe like you said, there are straightforward things that have not become culture war issues that do help. And maybe this can be one of them. I did want to note one more thing when it comes to this. And, you know, we've talked a lot about this policy on the test because Mara Liason was kind of indirectly possible for that happening. And that was the big policy of mailing out rapid tests to people who signed up for them. Everyone on our team was signed up like it was concert tickets, refreshing the page, getting our information in as soon as that program went up, as soon as that

website went up. And yet, half of these tests were never claimed because that just wasn't the case elsewhere. So, Tam, we had the news that if you ordered tests, you can order more. They lifted the limit because they're trying to get rid of them. That doesn't mean this policy is a failure, though, does it? I mean, what does that mean? I would not say that they're trying to get rid of them as much as they realize that a limit of four tests per household, when many households have more than four people in household, when many households have more than four people in them, and if you have COVID spreading through your house, you might need more than four tests. I mean, it's adjusting to demand. But there's a bigger thing here,

which is that last summer, the testing manufacturers had no business. Nobody was buying rapid tests last summer. And so production slowed or halted. And then here comes Omicron, and there aren't enough tests around. So essentially, what the administration is doing here, and they're asking Congress for more money to continue doing it, is keeping an industry afloat. They have seen a public good in having home testing, and the testing companies need to know that there will be customers, even if that customer is the federal government. It just goes back to the point that, look, we are not eradicating the virus.

We are just simply planning for a time when we know it could come back. And this time, we've learned our lesson. We want to be prepared. And I do think that, you know, there is this political reality because everything is so politicized and because masks and vaccines became kind of fault lines in the broader culture war. I think we have to pull back from that just a little bit and recognize that the policies that are being put in place now, the easing of all of the COVID restrictions, the lifting of the mask mandates, we really are at a time when the science is justifying them.

And even though people have very different views, I mean, across the country, it's hard to appease everybody. But I would say right now that our policies are really in line with where the science has taken us. Allison, you're not saying this is all nuanced and complicated and ever-changing and needed to be thought about thoughtfully, are you? Oh, yeah. No, not that at all. I mean, that's exactly what I'm trying to say.

There's no place for that on a politics podcast. Right. All right. Let's end it there today. Allison Aubrey, thank you, as always, for coming to help make sense of all of this. Oh, it was great to be here. Thanks for having me. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the White House.

I'm Tamara Keith. I also cover the White House. We'll be back tomorrow with our weekly roundup. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. NPR Politics Podcast