Biden Calls for More Virus Testing, Public Health Jobs Corps

(Bloomberg) -- Joe Biden called on the Trump Administration to vastly expand the country’s testing capabilities for the coronavirus, including launching a new public health jobs corps of 100,000 people to assist with the testing and contact tracing, as he laid out his vision for safely reopening the economy in a new memo on Monday.

In a lengthy plan written by Biden and his public health committee, the presumptive Democratic nominee criticized the president’s inaction on testing and detailed how the country should expand its capabilities in order to catch a spike in infections before it spreads.

“We are still seeing a massive shortfall and extensive disparities between states in testing -- that’s unacceptable,” Biden and his committee wrote in the memo. “And those failures are in no small part due to the federal government mishandling and delaying the pandemic response. We are now several months into this crisis, and this administration refuses to own up to the original sin of its failed response –- the failure to test.”

The former vice president’s proposals include creating a pandemic testing board, modeled after Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s War Production Board, to scale up production of diagnostic and antibody tests. He also suggests forming a jobs corps for public health, drawing from volunteers from AmeriCorps, the Peace Corps and others who have been laid off due to the crisis. He suggested those workers could implement large scale testing programs and contact tracing. After the pandemic, the corps would then be deployed to other public health problems including the opioid epidemic.

“Testing is the springboard we need to help get our economy safely up and running again,” the memo says. “Trump could make this happen. He hasn’t. Instead, he’s pushed sole responsibility to governors, while telling them to fly blind without the critical data we derive from testing.”

In the United States, now the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, the virus has killed more than 53,000 people and infected nearly a million. The U.S. has conducted 5 million COVID-19 tests, which, per capita, is fewer than Italy, Canada and Germany.

Biden also called for greater collaboration with colleges and universities to harness their research and testing capabilities, in addition to working with other countries and investing in “Apollo-like moonshots” to find a vaccine and therapeutics.

“We should set the goal of identifying safe, effective therapeutics within 100 days by building on long-standing, proven clinical trial networks -- which helped save millions of lives in the fight against AIDS -- with a new enduring Emerging Infectious Disease Clinical Trial Network and equipping it with every resource at our disposal,” Biden and his committee write. “Instead of having different studies competing with each other for resources and patients, this new clinical trial network would bring scientific talent together behind the most promising drugs.”

Biden also underscores the need for clear guidance from governmental agencies such as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration on what conditions need to be met for private sector industries to reopen. Biden criticized the Trump administration for not giving enough attention to enforcement of standards and called for specific guidance on how workplaces should respond to the spread of the virus.

“It is urgent we get these pieces in place and functioning smoothly at full capacity before flu season arrives in the fall, when experts say we could experience a second wave of COVID-19 cases,” Biden’s committee wrote.

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