The Biden administration released an updated “National COVID-19 Preparedness Plan” that emphasizes improving surveillance of new variants, boosting production of antiviral treatments, and preventing further economic and school shutdowns.
The updated plan comes amid a waning omicron wave that the administration maintains is ushering in a new phase of endemic COVID-19.
BIDEN PROMISES TAILORED VACCINES ‘WITHIN 100 DAYS’ OF NEW VARIANTS
“The path forward in the fight against COVID-19 is clear: we must maintain and continually enhance the tools we have to protect against and treat COVID-19. The Administration looks forward to working with Congress to ensure that we have the resources to do just that,” the White House said on Wednesday. “Because we have these tools, we can begin to get back to our more normal routines safely and the use of public health mitigation measures like masking can be less frequent.”
The updated preparedness plan is a four-pronged approach to improving the country’s ability to confront future surges of the virus. The goals include protecting against and treating COVID-19, preparing and monitoring for new variants, preventing economic and educational shutdowns, and continuing to promote vaccines across the world.
The extensive plan also includes petitioning Congress for more funding in order to fulfill those goals. For instance, the Biden administration will ask members of Congress to secure funding to increase manufacturing capacity to produce an additional 1 billion vaccine doses per year reliably and develop a pan-COVID-19 vaccine; add supplies including at-home tests, antiviral pills, and masks for the general population to the national stockpile; and reinstate tax credits to help small- and mid-sized businesses provide paid sick and family leave to deal with coronavirus-related absences.
“I want to emphasize that execution of the President’s plan requires additional funding. [The Department of Health and Human Services] has laid out some immediate funding needs for Congress. We’ll need additional funding for medium and longer-term priorities, and we’ll be working with Congress in the weeks ahead,” said White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Jeff Zients.
A sticking point for the administration has been scarce supplies of tests, monoclonal antibody treatments, and antiviral medications. Biden announced Tuesday night that his administration would launch a “test to treat” initiative, which aims to give people who test positive for COVID-19 in a pharmacy setting access to antiviral pills on the spot at no cost. The administration also promised to have variant-specific vaccines prepared in the event that a new strain arises for distribution “within 100 days instead of many more months or years.”
President Joe Biden ran on the pledge to eliminate COVID-19, but he has pivoted his pandemic messaging in recent months to reflect an increasing acceptance of the coronavirus as part of the new normal. The rate of new cases has fallen 58% over the past two weeks, to an average of roughly 59,000 new cases announced daily over the past week. Nevertheless, the pandemic is inching toward a grim milestone — 1 million deaths attributed to the virus. Currently, the death tally sits at about 951,000.
Biden has pivoted his pandemic messaging in recent months to reflect an increasing acceptance of the coronavirus as part of the new normal. Biden said during his State of the Union address on Tuesday, “Thanks to the progress we have made in the past year, COVID-19 no longer need control our lives.”
Part of accepting COVID-19 as part of the new normal included loosening federal masking regulations last week. The federal government’s decision to announce that the majority of people no longer needed to mask up succeeded a series of blue-state governors pulling back their mask mandates for public places and schools. This put Democratic-run states more closely in line with Republican-led states, which spurned such mandates before and during the omicron surge.
Republicans have capitalized on the Democrats’ recent amenability to rolling back pandemic-era rules, such as mandatory masking in schools. GOP lawmakers at the federal level have also blamed the Biden administration for other policies that have had detrimental effects on children’s development, such as school closures that shifted many students back to virtual learning amid the rise of the omicron variant last year.
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The White House insisted, however, that Biden would not “accept just ‘living with COVID’ any more than we accept ‘living with’ cancer, Alzheimer’s, or AIDS. We will continue our work to stop the spread of the virus, blunt its impact on those who get infected, and deploy new treatments to dramatically reduce the occurrence of severe COVID-19 disease and deaths.”
