White House has 'no concern' over contract for 500 million COVID-19 tests

White House press secretary Jen Psaki gave one of the last briefings of 2021 on Thursday, where she was asked about the status of the 500 million COVID-19 tests the Biden administration has promised to deliver in January.

Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy asked, "About the testing and the contingencies, why is it that you guys are proposing 500 million tests next month if you haven’t even signed a contract to buy the tests?"

"Well, we have no concern about the contract being finalized," replied Psaki. "We're just working to finalize the contract. We just announced this two days ago. But there's no … we don't see any issue or halt to getting that done and to finalizing that. That's a natural part of the process."

"What I can tell you Peter about the process up to date, because I know there's been a lot of questions about this, is that when we saw a surge in demand in Delta, we took additional actions to expand the over-the-counter test market," she continued.

"You may not remember this but if you look back to the period pre-Delta, a lot of actually a lot of these testing companies there was so little demand they were laying people off around the country and around the world because there was not demand," Psaki added.

"What the president also did was to use the Defense Production Act to invest $3 billion to ensure we were upping the market, so the market would have the capacity to produce more tests. And also as you know, the FDA approved eight tests, otherwise we wouldnt have the capacity to do what we’re doing for January," she said.

Also at the briefing, Psaki said that the White House was grateful to former President Donald Trump for getting the booster shot for COVID-19 and said that they are both effective and safe. "This is not a partisan issue," said Psaki.

Asked if the White House would consider a partnership with Trump to convince vaccine-hesitant Americans to take the jab, Psaki said that the White House doesn't know it requires a partnership and that it believes the former president being out there and "stating what is factually accurate about the efficacy of the vaccines, of getting boosted, which he recently did, is a good thing."

"And it's a good thing to have a range of voices out there – Democrats, Republicans, independents, celebrities, non-celebrities, whomever people will be listening to out in the country. We continue to believe that the most effective voices are local voices, local people  -- that's who everybody listens to. People in their community. Your neighbor, your friend, your cousin, your pediatrician. Certainly we would applaud and we have the former president's comments."