Psaki’s Latest Covid Rx Is Deja Vu All Over Again

BUCK: We’re awaiting the White House speech. And right now there’s a briefing underway. Let’s see what Psaki is staying about the long lines at covid testing centers because a lot of people are saying, “I thought you were supposed to be prepared for this.”

PSAKI: It includes quadrupling, not even including the president’s speech today, our testing capacity over the course of the last couple of months. It includes the 50 million tests that we made available to rural community health centers and community health centers, all components that I talked about exactly on that day in the briefing. If anything, it was a lesson to me to always include the context and make sure you use every opportunity of questions you all ask to do exactly that.

But today what the president is announcing — and this is, again, to Jeff’s question and to yours as well, to be clear, we’re not sending a test to every single home in the country. We are providing an opportunity, another opportunity or ability for people to, an important one, go on a website and request a test if their preference is to get that test to their home. Not everybody will do that, but we want people who want to do that, who want to get tested, who want to request tests that way to have that ability to do.

REPORTER: And obviously this, you know, new push for — for testing is a big component of this strategy —

BUCK: Okay, can I just jump in here. Testing is not going to stop this thing. It’s not going to bring the curve down. It’s not going to even dramatically impact the trajectory of the pandemic right now — unless you think that everything we’ve seen before doesn’t count and somehow this is entirely different. This is deja vu all over again, to borrow from Yogi Berra. This is utter madness.

What else are they gonna say? We screwed up? We were wrong? We fired doctors and nurses and first responders ’cause they wouldn’t get a shot that doesn’t actually stop the spread; now we want you to get more shots and more shots and more tests? Pretty much.