President-elect Joe Biden on Thursday unveiled a sweeping plan to combat the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, extending testing enormously to support school reopenings, create more healthcare jobs and invest billions in a nationwide Covid-19 vaccine campaign.
The plan, which Biden is expected to discuss in detail Thursday night from his transition headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, would invest $ 20 billion in a national vaccination program in partnership with states, towns, tribes and territories. The pace of vaccinations is moving much slower than US officials hoped, and states blame lack of funding and inconsistent communication from the federal government for the slow rollout.
“Current vaccination efforts are not enough to quickly and fairly vaccinate the vast majority of the US population,” Biden’s administration wrote in a 19-page document explaining the plan. “We need to make sure those on the ground have what they need to get vaccinations into people’s arms.”
Here’s a quick look at what Biden’s proposal would do as well:
- Invests $ 50 billion to expand testing
- Fund 100,000 new public health jobs
- Identify and target emerging Covid strains and invest in new treatments
- Protect vulnerable groups, health workers and increase the supply of gloves, masks and other supplies
- Rejoin international efforts to stop Covid
- Give $ 170 billion to reopen schools and universities
Biden would also scale up testing to support the safe reopening of schools and protect at-risk groups such as the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions. His administration said testing is a “crucial” strategy to control the spread of the virus, but additional tests are still not widely available, and the US is still not using the tests effectively.
The president-elect’s plan invests $ 50 billion in testing, provides cash for rapid tests, investments to expand laboratory capacity, and help states implement mainstream testing protocols.
In particular, the plan includes investments in new treatments for Covid-19. Earlier in the day, a member of Biden’s Covid-19 advisory board, Dr. Celine Gounder, that public health officials have paid too much attention to treatments such as monoclonal antibodies and Gilead Sciences’ antiviral drug remdesivir. Monoclonal antibodies, in particular, have received a lukewarm response from health care providers, often unused, according to US officials.
“We need to think about other therapies,” Gounder told a webcast at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, adding “monoclonal antibodies may not be the answer here.”
The plan also calls for a fund to be created to support 100,000 new health care jobs and to use the National Guard to increase the supply of bottles and gloves and masks to health workers already on the front lines.
Biden’s administration plans to invest $ 30 billion in the Disaster Relief Fund to ensure adequate protective equipment. It will also provide 100% federal compensation for essential emergency supplies to states, local governments and tribes, including the deployment of the National Guard, according to an outline of the plan. Biden plans to request an additional $ 10 billion to produce pandemic supplies.
Biden would “restore US leadership worldwide” and support international efforts in health and humanitarian aid. It’s unclear whether that means the US will rejoin the World Health Organization after President Donald Trump withdrew the nation from the international agency last year. However, Biden has said in the past that he plans to return the US to the WHO.
The president-elect’s new plan comes as the coronavirus continues to spread rapidly across the US and the number of deaths is on the rise. The country now records at least 245,300 new Covid-19 cases and at least 3,360 virus-related deaths every day, based on a seven-day average calculated by CNBC using data from Johns Hopkins University. The US reported a record 4,327 fatalities from the coronavirus on Tuesday, the second time in just a week that the daily death toll has exceeded 4,000.
Trump’s response to the pandemic has been criticized, including his way of distributing Pfizers and Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccines.
At 9 a.m. ET Thursday, there were more than 30.6 million doses of vaccine across the US, but just over 11.1 million injections were administered, according to data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The number is a long way from the federal government’s goal of vaccinating 20 million Americans by the end of 2020 and 50 million Americans by the end of this month.
The Trump administration on Tuesday passed Biden’s plan to release most of the doses it had withheld for the second round of injections of the two-dose vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna.
In an effort to speed up the pace of vaccinations, the Trump administration also changed the way it allocates vaccine doses to states, and the CDC expanded the vaccine’s suitability to anyone 65 and older, as well as those with comorbid conditions, such as diabetes and heart. disease.