Free COVID tests are back. But there are more accurate tests for sale.
CBSN
Manufacturers of the most accurate home COVID-19 tests on the market say they were left out again from the Biden administration's latest round of free orders through COVIDTests.gov, which for a seventh time will rely on less sensitive "antigen" tests, which are generally the cheaper options available on drugstore shelves.
Federal health officials have justified the millions they have spent on device manufacturers for the latest waves as critical to subsidizing U.S. factories capable of producing tests ahead of another potential pandemic, during a time when demand has evaporated.
Taxpayer dollars have flowed largely towards manufacturers of inexpensive rapid antigen tests like Access Bio in New Jersey and iHealth in California, instead of more accurate "molecular" alternatives that the Food and Drug Administration has also greenlighted.
For nearly two decades, there's been an effort to change the way the U.S. has always elected its presidents by creating a workaround to the Electoral College, the indirect popular election process that's been used in every American presidential election in history. A collection of states is now a little closer than it was four years ago to choosing a president by popular vote, after Maine signed legislation in April to join the effort.
President Biden's administration is planning to soon issue a regulation to cement the sweeping asylum restrictions it enacted at the southern border over the summer, two U.S. officials told CBS News, describing changes that would make it far less likely for the strict rules to be lifted in the near future.
Toward the end of June 2018, condemned inmates at Holman Correctional Facility in southern Alabama received slips of paper that gave them the choice to decide how they would prefer to die. There were two options: lethal injection, the default method, which Alabama had been accused of botching in the prison's execution chamber; and nitrogen hypoxia, an experimental alternative that the state, facing political pressure to carry out death sentences despite a tally of mistakes, had recently authorized.