President Biden seems fairly certain his administration didn’t reject a 10-page proposal prepared by experts from Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the COVID Collaborative calling for the production of more than 700 million at-home COVID tests a month to keep up with the holiday surge.

But they did reject it.

“Why did your administration reject a holiday testing surge in October?” The New York Post asked the president on the White House lawn. “Does the buck stop with you there?”

“We didn’t reject it,” replied the commander-in-chief, holding an umbrella against drizzle before boarding Marine One en route to his beach home in Delaware.

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According to the New York Post, the expert plan wanted “Every American Household to Receive Free Rapid Tests for the Holidays/New Year.”

“Three days after the meeting, White House officials reportedly told the experts that the administration would not adopt the plan,” the Post continues. “One official who participated in the Oct. 22 meeting confirmed the decision to Vanity Fair, saying, ‘We did not have capacity to manufacture over-the-counter tests at that scale.’”

Biden has been very vocal about his administration’s shortcomings in response to the omicron surge, saying he wished he’d reacted sooner.

“We went from no over-the-counter tests in January to 46 million in October, 100 million in November and almost 200 million in December. That’s not enough. It’s clearly not enough. If I — we’d known, we would have gone harder, quicker if we could have,” Biden said during a virtual meeting with state governors.

Biden announced a plan on December 21st to distribute 500 million at-home rapid tests to American households, but the rollout won’t begin until early January.

“I wish I had thought about ordering a half a billion [tests] two months ago, before COVID hit here,” Biden told ABC’s David Muir.