reporter: one year after taking office, president biden facing a stubborn problem he vowed to solve. long lines and empty shelves exposing a testing system failing once again to match demand. biden s own rhetoric. anyone who wants a test should be able to get one, period. reporter: biden came into office with a plan to expand testing. pouring billions of dollars to boost manufacturing and ramp up testing in schools and underserved communities. his top priority was vaccines, which kept most people out of the hospital and even slashed the chances of getting and spreading the virus. and then came omicron. the vaccines were really doing their job to decrease the number of cases. so there wasn t demand. but then because of the variants, we ve had this increase in cases and, therefore, increase in demand. reporter: biden has acknowledged coming up short on testing but resists calling it a failure. i don t think it s a failure. i think you could argue that we should have known a y
about the dangers of omicron weeks ago, the president doesn t seem to be taking any responsibly for the current covid search. president biden: because covid is spreading so rapidly if you notice, it just happened almost overnight. what s your message to americans that are trying to get tested now and are not able to get tested and i are wondering what took so long to ramp up testing? president biden: come on, what took so long? what happened was the omicron virus spread more rapidly than anyone thought. kayleigh: interesting. lauren, she s asking about testing. i mentioned to you that the administration, unlike the trump administration, did not order attesting to the magnitude of 500 million as they should have early on. they didn t tell the private sector we will buy down your risk because we are going to need testing so i bit, keep producing, and abbott didn t keep producing.
promise that defined him and his presidency. he said he was going to end the pandemic. he attacked donald trump during the campaign and he said that donald trump s testing was a travesty. and now he blames the lack of testing as a reason for the omicron virus variant and he said no one could have known that this was the case except as you mentioned jason, his advisor, dr. fauci, has been talking about these variants and the fact that there would be variance for months. and just three days ago, fauci and the head of the nhh side note, they did in fact predict that omicron was going to make it to the united states and become a big problem.ct look, when you base your entire existence and your presidency on a promise to the american people, even if the promise was something that he should not have made, he made that promise
variant. so i do think we ll get another variant after this. it will be more infectious. that s why we need to put these things in place. we need the testing up to speed, we need the public private partnerships, the operation warp speed approach to anti-virals and we need to continue to live our lives and get these important aspects of life functioning. can t afford kids to be out of school and closing down our economy. we need to move forward. one of the real secrets to doing that is adequate testing. martha: thanks, sir. great to see you. we spent $82.6 billion taxpayer dollars and you were told that that money was going to make sure that there would be testing across the board. now people are having a heck of a time trying to get their hands on a test. something is wrong there and people need to ask the hhs, ask the government what is going on with that money and where are those tests that they were
ordered up those 500 million tests that will be available for free to americans who order them off a website. they have invoked the defense production act to try to ramp up testing. they created pop-up testing sites, all those things have been inadequate for the current moment, but the administration hopes once we get past the holidays that the governors are going to find in their states that those tests are more readily available than they are now. that s something that we need to try to cope with this omicron surge. yeah. no question about it. john harwood at the white house where the president is about to depart for rehoboth, delaware. as we mentioned, cases are at the highest point in nearly a year, almost 200,000 new reports daily. that s up 47% in a week. the rate of positive pcr tests nationwide now a whopping 12.5%. now omicron is cancelling college bowl games along with pro sports and forcing airlines to pull thousands of flight do you to staffing short afscme. cruise sh