Bring back FREE PCR tests and increase the number of free at-home COVID tests!


TO: Biden Administration, the Department of Health and Human Services, and Congress

We’re in the middle of another COVID surge—and we know that testing is crucial to keeping our friends and family healthy once we’ve been exposed. But, as it stands, tests are costly and can be hard to get. The Biden Administration created a program to send free antigen tests to Americans who make the request, but the current cap is 4 tests per household per month. That’s not nearly enough. We need our government to give Americans the resources and tools necessary to effectively test and mitigate the spread of COVID.

Sign the petition calling on our elected officials to bring back free PCR testing and increase the number of free at-home antigen tests available to each household.

Why is this important?

The Federal Health Emergency for COVID expired in May 2023, stripping everyday people from the resources and support they needed to manage community care and health. Now private insurance companies are no longer required to cover the costs of testing, pushing the most reliable form of testing for early detection, Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) tests, out of reach for many. And while households can still request access to four free at-home antigen tests per month, that number is simply insufficient given the uptick in cases.

Over the past three years, we were able to use tools like testing, among other interventions, to reduce the spread of COVID-19 and help save lives. And it worked. We were able to drastically reduce infections and deaths. But with new variants emerging, cases are on the rise and hospitalizations are spiking.

We can’t repeat past mistakes and allow COVID to once again spiral out of control. Add your name to call on our government to keep testing FREE and make it even more accessible by increasing the number of antigen tests each household can request.

1964 Mississippi … a repost


 

OnCivil Rights Workers.jpg June 2,1964  3 men were abducted and murdered, on June 20,2016 the case was closed and in 2018 Killien died in custody … The grim story of folks wanting to register fellow Americans in a campaign for Civil Rights is below:

Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney had only just begun working on the Freedom Summer campaign to register black Mississippians to vote when they suddenly disappeared.

Schwerner and Goodman were two Jewish men from New York—they had been there less than a week—and Chaney was a local black activist. They had just finished investigating the bombing of a nearby church when they were taken into custody under false pretenses, and never again seen by their fellow volunteers. The disappearance of these three men sparked national outrage, and the FBI converged on Mississippi to investigate.

They discovered that on June 21, 1964, immediately upon being released from custody, the young activists had been brutally beaten and murdered by a Ku Klux Klan lynch mob. The FBI’s investigation led to the first successful federal prosecution of a civil rights case in Mississippi.

 The anniversary of the day we lost these brave defenders of civil rights.

Please Register People to Vote for Joe Biden

The circumstances under which we fight may have changed, but our values remain constant. All Americans, regardless of income or the color of their skin, must be able to freely exercise their constitutional right to vote.

The work of civil rights activists to protect this right did not stop when Freedom Summer ended, or even with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. As long as there are legislators fighting to keep our most vulnerable populations away from the polls, our work and our struggle continues.

Join your voice with your fellow champions of civil and human rights. Take just one minute to do these things:

Pledge to exercise your hard-won right to vote in November.

 

In solidarity,

Lorraine C. Miller
Interim President and CEO
NAACP