The Biden administration, facing calls from public health experts to distribute high-quality masks to the American public, will announce on Wednesday that it will make available 141 million N95 non-surgical masks, free of charge, at community health centers and retail pharmacies across the United States.
The move, which officials call the “largest deployment of personal protective equipment in US history.” , comes just days after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) updated its guidance on face coverings to acknowledge that cloth face coverings do not offer as much protection as surgical masks or respirators
The masks N95, so called because they can filter the 95 percent of all airborne particles when used correctly, were in short supply at the beginning of the pa pandemic.
According to the CDC’s new description of masks, well-fitting respirators, including N95, offer the highest level of protection.
Wednesday was also the formal launch day of covidtests.gov, the administration’s new website that allows Americans to request free home coronavirus tests.
The site it was quietly launched on Tuesday.
The administration has come under intense criticism for not acting sooner to distribute tests and masks to the public, especially as the Omicron variant leads to a large spike in cases.
Some public health experts have suggested that the federal government should send N95 masks to every home.
Jeff Zients, President Biden’s coronavirus response coordinator, told reporters last week that the administration was “actively exploring” ways to make high-quality masks available.
The White House said in a statement on Wednesday that the government would begin shipping N95 masks to pharmacies and health centers by the end of this week, and that the masks were expected to be available at end of next week.
The program would be in full swing in early February, according to the release.
The masks will come from the National Reserve Strategic, the nation’s emergency stockpile, which was severely depleted at the start of the pandemic, leaving health care workers without masks and other essential personal protective equipment to combat the new virus.
An investigation by The New York Times published in March found that, for years, the reserves were largely used to protect against bioterrorist attacks ; for most of the last decade, almost half of its budget was spent on the anthrax vaccine.
China made half of the world’s masks before the coronavirus emerged there, and the country was stockpiling them, leaving hospitals in the United States and the rest of the world scrambling for supplies.
Still December 2020, the United States was still facing an alarming shortage of personal protective equipment.
The administration Biden promised to correct those shortcomings.
At a Senate hearing last week, Dawn O’Connell, deputy secretary for preparedness and response at the Department of Health and Human Services, said the reserve now had 737 millions of masks N95, all from domestic manufacturers.
The government is also requesting proposals from companies that have the capacity to increase production to 141 million N95 masks per month in a crisis, and that could keep manufacturing at a much lower rate when demand be less, so the nation never gets caught up in a public health emergency again, O’Connell said.
The idea, he said, is that the reserve “maintain this capacity that we currently have even when demand decreases”.
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