U.S. Begins Investing $3 Billion into COVID-19 Testing

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently invested more than half a billion dollars in increasing domestic COVID-19 test-related supplies.

These HHS investments are an integral part of the U.S. Administration's strategy to expand COVID-19 testing and make tests more widely available for Americans and protect public health.

As of October 25, 2021, over 607 million RT-PCR diagnostic tests had been performed to confirm SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus infections since the COVID-19 pandemic began in late 2019.

In recent weeks, HHS, in partnership with the Department of Defense, has awarded over $562 million to a dozen U.S. companies to support manufacturing supplies like pipette tips, protective packaging, swabs, and reagents used to detect the evolving coronavirus in samples.

A list of companies receiving the HHS investments is available on this webpage.

In September 2021, the Administration confirmed it would invest a total of $3 billion in rapid testing to quadruple the supply of at-home tests by December 2021 and increase the number of no-cost testing sites, including up to 30,000 pharmacies.

Recently, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced it is investing $70 million of that amount to help bring additional high-quality, at-home tests onto the U.S. market.

The NIH's Independent Test Assessment Program will establish an accelerated pathway to support U.S. FDA evaluation of tests with potential for large-scale manufacturing. This new program is an extension of the NIH Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics initiative.

The latest SARS-CoV-2 virus testing news is available on this Coronavirus Today webpage.