President Joe Biden has approved a $230 million deal with an Australian company for COVID-19 home test kits that take 15 minutes and are 95% accurate, reports The Wall Street Journal.
The deal covers 8.5 million over-the-counter tests that received FDA approval in December. The $30 test is expected to go down in price as mass production ramps up, White House COVID senior advisor Andy Slavitt said Monday.
“Obviously, the cumulative costs will come down only when we can get to that mass production and scale. There’s a chicken and egg problem that we have taken a step to solve today by creating mass production so that we will have tens of millions of these tests out there,” said during a press conference.
"Thanks to this contract, they'll be able to scale their production to manufacture more than 19 million test kits per month by the end of this year,” he added.
A person will use a nasal swab to run the test and then insert it into the analyzer. Test results are administered to the person’s phone via Bluetooth. An app needs to be downloaded in order for the result to be accessed.
Solange Reyner ✉
Solange Reyner is a writer and editor for Newsmax. She has more than 15 years in the journalism industry reporting and covering news, sports and politics.
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