The White House announced Wednesday that it is making 400 million N95 masks available for free, part of a string of actions aimed at fighting the surging omicron variant.<\/p>\n
The masks will be available for pickup at \u201ctens of thousands of local pharmacies\u201d as well as thousands of community health centers, the White House said. The masks will begin shipping later this week\u00a0and will start to become available late next week, before being \u201cfully up and running\u201d in early February.<\/p>\n
Making high-quality masks more available has been one of\u00a0the\u00a0areas where\u00a0President Biden\u00a0has been\u00a0under pressure\u00a0to step up the response to the virus.<\/p>\n
Sen.\u00a0Bernie Sanders\u00a0(I-Vt.) and more than 50 Democratic lawmakers introduced a bill last week, for example,\u00a0to send\u00a0three\u00a0N95 masks to every person in the U.S.<\/p>\n
Caveat:<\/strong>\u00a0Similar to\u00a0action on testing, experts say the Biden administration should have acted months ago to make high quality masks more available, but the new steps are still\u00a0progress.<\/p>\n The masks are being deployed from the Strategic National Stockpile, which currently has more than 750 million N95 masks, triple the number in January 2021, the White House said.<\/p>\n Why they\u2019re needed<\/strong>: Experts have been stepping up calls for people to use higher quality masks like N95s, which offer much better protection than simple cloth masks,\u00a0especially in the face of the\u00a0highly transmissible\u00a0omicron variant.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 400 million N95 masks to be...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43899","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health","category-u-s-a"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43899","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=43899"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43899\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43900,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43899\/revisions\/43900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=43899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=43899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=43899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}