At last week’s State of the Union address, President Joe Biden declared the importance of buying American. “We are going to buy American — buy American products to support American jobs,” Biden said in his speech. Yet, looking at the Biden COVID tests I (finally) received in the mail last week, this is not true. Despite Biden’s oath to buy American, my Biden COVID tests were made … in China.
On Feb. 8, I ordered four COVID tests from the government-designated website. The tests came from iHealth Labs, a subsidiary of China’s Andon Health Co. The Department of Defense appeared to hide this connection to China in its announcement on Jan. 13. Furthermore, it seems that while Biden was boasting to the public about “buying American,” he stiffed the American taxpayer, instead opting for “made in China.”
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var _bp = _bp||[]; _bp.push({ "div": "Brid_46855597", "obj": {"id":"27789","width":"16","height":"9","video":"969764"} }); ","_id":"0000017f-72a4-d151-a7ff-f3e500ab0000","_type":"2f5a8339-a89a-3738-9cd2-3ddf0c8da574"}”>Video EmbedRecords show that the United States signed a $1.28 billion contract with China’s Andon Health Co. for nearly 350 million at-home COVID tests. That’s $1.28 billion that did not go to American companies but instead to our most dangerous long-term geopolitical rival; it was money that went to the country responsible for the COVID-19 outbreak and not the American companies that suffered because of it.
“Well, I would say our objective continues to be to increase U.S. manufacturing capacity of tests,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in a press briefing on Feb. 2. “We also needed to meet a need that we had in this country for more tests and a shortage of tests and the understandable demand from people across this country to get tests and make them free and accessible, which required us purchasing some of those tests from China in order to meet that demand.”
“But that doesn’t change our commitment to increasing our U.S. manufacturing to ensure that we will be able to meet that demand with products made here in the United States over the course of time,” Psaki said. Except that it absolutely does change the commitment.
Although the Biden administration threw bones to two American companies to supply some COVID tests, Roche Diagnostics Corp. and Abbott Rapid Dx North America, it was China’s that received the most money. Four times as much as the next company, in fact.
Unfortunately, Biden also took so long to get the tests that nobody cares about testing anymore. As of Feb. 27, nearly 250 million free COVID tests were unclaimed. The total population of the United States is slightly over 332 million. Based on these numbers, it would seem the Biden administration does not fully understand what “demand” actually means.
