Biden Administration Issues Fact Sheet on New Plan to Increase Access to and Public Awareness of COVID-⁠19 Treatments

Last week, the Biden administration announced a new plan to increase accessibility to COVID-19 treatments, with a focus on ensuring health care providers and patients know about the safety, efficacy, and availability of these treatments. The administration’s announcement reiterated the need for Congress to pass additional funding in order to continue the administration’s efforts to secure and disseminate more and better treatments.

The administration’s actions will focus on the following actions:

• Increasing the number of places oral antivirals are available in the coming weeks. The administration is now allowing all pharmacy partners in the federal antiviral pharmacy program to order directly from the federal government, with the goal of increasing the availability of oral antivirals from about 20,000 locations across the country to up to 40,000 sites over the coming weeks.
• Expanding federally supported Test-to-Treat sites. The administration, with support and coordination from the Department of Health and Human Services and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, will expand from the current 2,200 Test-to-Treat sites in pharmacies and other clinical settings to open additional sites.
• Providing medical providers with additional guidance and tools to understand and prescribe treatments. These efforts include providing medical providers with toolkits and resources and a Health Alert Network health advisory issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to public health officials to provide additional information about the efficacy and availability of these treatments.
• Ramping up public awareness and education efforts on COVID-19 treatments.