The Senate health committee voted overwhelmingly to pass legislation to improve the country’s preparedness for future public health crises on the heels of the Democrats’ failure to include additional funding in the government spending bill.
The Senate health committee voted 20 to 2 on Tuesday to advance the Prepare for and Respond to Existing Viruses, Emerging New Threats, and Pandemics Act — known as the PREVENT Pandemics Act for short. GOP Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Mike Braun of Indiana were the sole “no” votes.
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The bill would bolster public health infrastructure and attract more workers, modernize biosurveillance systems to detect infectious disease outbreaks better, and establish ARPA-H, a high-risk, high-reward disease research agency modeled after the Defense Department’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The bill also dictates that the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, currently led by Dr. Rochelle Walensky, must be confirmed by the Senate.
“We’re putting into place real, meaningful reforms that take important steps to improve the culture of CDC, which desperately needs changing,” said ranking member Sen. Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican. “The modernization of public health data and surveillance capabilities will be key in providing early warning signs of the next threat we face.”
Among its many aims, the bill would establish a Congress-appointed task force modeled after the 9/11 Commission to assess the country’s response to the pandemic early on and investigate the origins of COVID-19. Some Republicans in Congress have called repeatedly for an extensive investigation into the theory that the virus leaked out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where scientists studied pathogens similar to the one that caused the global pandemic. This bill would not, however, create a stand-alone task force to delve further into the lab leak theory despite numerous calls from Republicans such as Paul and House Minority Whip Steve Scalise to launch a thorough investigation.
The committee passed a bevy of amendments to the bill, such as one from Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders that would expand the healthcare workforce by offering student debt forgiveness to nurses and nursing educators. Some GOP-authored amendments, meanwhile, did not fare so well. Paul, for instance, had introduced an amendment that would remove Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, from his position as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The agency would then be split into three distinct institutes dealing with infectious diseases, autoimmune diseases, and allergic diseases. Directors would be Senate-confirmable and subject to five-year terms. The measure failed by a vote of five to 17, with Republicans divided.
The committee’s bipartisan agreement to advance the bill comes on the heels of the Democrats’ failure to get an additional $15 billion in funding to bolster the national supply of COVID-19 treatments, tests, and vaccines. The White House had initially requested $30 billion, which shrunk to about $22 billion when faced with blowback from Republicans, who argue that the Biden administration has not provided Congress with a full accounting of pandemic spending.
“On this side of the aisle, we agree that more funding is needed, but also is more information,” Burr said. “There’s no reason that this committee shouldn’t understand how many vaccines do we currently have an inventory, how many therapeutics do we have an inventory, how many home tests do we have an inventory? These are reasonable things for the committee to know.”
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The PREVENT Pandemics Act does not include major new funding to prepare for another pandemic. The White House is scrambling to get Congress on board with funding efforts to fight the current pandemic. Administration officials told reporters Tuesday that the nation’s supplies of tests and therapeutics are running dry, and vaccines could become scarce if additional booster shots are deemed necessary by federal health officials. Funding for research and development of variant-specific vaccines and more treatments is also dwindling, senior administration officials told reporters.
Democrats have introduced a stand-alone bill that would appropriate $15.6 billion to deal with the pandemic and future variants as they arise. Unlike the funding allocation that was excluded from the $1.5 trillion government spending bill, this infusion of cash would not be partially offset by reclaimed funds allocated to states that have yet to be dispensed. This was a sticking point for many Democrats, who argued that states would still need the money from the federal government that they had yet to spend.
