Current Events > Congress cutting $30 billion in funding to address future pandemics

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Antifar
08/02/21 5:11:21 PM
#1:


https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/08/congress-slashing-plan-end-pandemics/619640/
President Joe Biden campaigned as Americas pandemic fighter. So it will be strange, to say the least, if his infrastructure bill fails to significantly increase the countrys pandemic-preparedness budget.

But it could happen. Biden proposed $30 billion to address the issue, which advocates say could permanently mitigate the risks of future outbreaks. The investment would replenish medical stockpiles, proactively develop vaccines for major types of viruses, and ensure that the United States has a permanent production base of face masks and respirators. In effect, it would amount to an Apollo Programlike push to guarantee that a global pandemic could never shut down the country again.

Yet those funds have been slashed in the current negotiations over the $3.5 trillion reconciliation package as part of a push to slim it down, according to a source familiar with the situation. (I agreed not to name this person because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the negotiations.) While the exact amount is still in flux, it is significantly less than requested.

In the past week, public-health advocates and nonprofits have mobilized against the reduction, which Tom Frieden, a former CDC director who now runs the nonprofit Resolve to Save Lives, first revealed earlier this month. But as the White House and Democrats in Congress discuss the packages details, they may be locking in an outdated approach to tackling pandemics, quietly and out of public view.

Public health has been chronically underfunded. But prevention is always better than treatment, and the fact that, after an event as significant as COVID, we have to fight for this $30 billion defies belief, Gabriel Bankman-Fried, the executive director of the nonprofit Guarding Against Pandemics, told me. (The White House and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer did not respond to requests for comment.)

Looming over this funding fight is a broader question: What reforms, if any, will the federal government make to its public-health agencies after their significant failures over the past 16 months? After 2,977 people were murdered on September 11, 2001, Congress started a war and revised the countrys approach to policing, surveillance, and national security within six weeks; it opened a new federal agency and commissioned a bipartisan fact-finding panel within 14 months. Although the wisdom of some of those decisions is debatable, COVID-19 has now killed more than 600,000 Americans. The federal governments failures have been, in some ways, just as stark as 20 years ago: The CDC, for instance, did not know how many people were sick throughout the early months of the pandemic. Yet Congress has demonstrated little haste so far in determining what went wrong and how the countrys public-health institutions can prevent it from happening again.

That was supposedly about to change. In recent weeks, leaders in Congress and the White House had seemingly coalesced around a two-step approach: First, increase funding to pandemic prevention in the current infrastructure package. Then, perhaps as soon as this fall, conduct a more in-depth investigation that could end with the reorganization of major agencies. Senators Patty Murray of Washington and Richard Burr of North Carolina, the highest-ranking Democrat and Republican on the Senate health committee, have discussed beginning such an effort later this year.
The two steps are separate but not entirely disconnected. Murray and Burrs ability to remedy the failures of the CDC or FDA will be limited, public-health advocates and lobbyists say, if pandemic preparedness receives tens of billions of dollars less than proposed. Senator Murray believes we need to make as strong of an investment as we can at this critical moment in our nations pandemic response, a spokesperson told me in an email.

The $30 billion is meant to enable a far more aggressive stance toward pandemic prevention than has previously existed in the United States. A large share of the funding would go to developing, testing, and approving vaccines and treatments for the viral pathogens with the most pandemic potential, according to a document circulated by Guarding Against Pandemics.

Scientists, for instance, have long sought to develop a vaccine that addresses all known types of betacoronavirusesthat is, not only SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, but also SARS and MERS. With the $30 billion, the government could develop not only that universal vaccine, but one for all 25known viral families that infect humans, such as filoviruses, a family of viruses that includes the pathogen that causes Ebola.

This would mark a big change in how the country addresses infectious disease, Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security, told me. For years, Congress has apportioned money only to fight specific diseases. If a new pathogen arose or became a public-health threatas the Zika virus did last decadethen public-health agencies often had to wait for Congress to provide more money before they could attack it in earnest.

Having a vaccine ready to go for every class of pathogen would help America meet the goalendorsed by Biden and the other Group of Seven leaders last monthof distributing a vaccine for any pathogen that could potentially cause a pandemic within 100 days of its emergence.

Most of the remaining funds would go to similar problems, subjects related to the technical and engineering challenges of countering a virus. The goal is to keep an outbreak from ever again spiraling into a pandemic, Bankman-Fried said. The funding would also allow for R&D into cheap, fast, and more widely available tests for potential pathogens. As I have previously reported, Americas inability to test for the coronavirus during the first months of the outbreak all but ensured that it would swell out of control.

Appropriately enough for the Apollo comparison, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA, would take home the largest share of the total, about $14 billion, according to the Guarding Against Pandemics document. BARDA is the federal agency in charge of applying basic medical research to treatments and in-the-field technologymedicines answer to DARPA, the famous defense R&D agency whose projects spawned GPS, weather satellites, the internet, and personal computing.

The National Institutes of Health, which conducts medical research, would receive $9 billion, the document said.. Finally, the CDC would receive $6.5 billion of the proposed $30 billion, and the FDA would get $500 million.

But that injection of funds is now in question as negotiators have been trying to shrink the reconciliation package from its original size of $3.5 trillion to satisfy Democratic moderates in their caucus. Last week, Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona said that she didnt support the package at its current size.



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Doe
08/02/21 5:12:08 PM
#2:


Why do democrats campaign so hard to win seats when they refuse to pass legislation that's not rubberstamped by the Republicans?

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Were_Wyrm
08/02/21 5:13:01 PM
#3:


I am shocked that nothing is fundamentally changing.

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Turtlemayor333
08/02/21 5:17:49 PM
#4:


Surely there won't be a massive deadly pandemic.

*checks notes*

Surely there won't be ANOTHER massive deadly pandemic.

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NinjaWarrior455
08/02/21 5:25:07 PM
#5:


Everything about this current infrastructure bills disappoints me. Not sure why Dems are pretending that the current bipartisan bill will be supported by enough Republicans when it reaches the floor.

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ultimate reaver
08/02/21 5:27:01 PM
#6:


NinjaWarrior455 posted...
Everything about this current infrastructure bills disappoints me. Not sure why Dems are pretending that the current bipartisan bill will be supported by enough Republicans when it reaches the floor.

because they dont care and want to look like theyre doing something

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RchHomieQuanChi
08/02/21 5:27:54 PM
#7:


Neither party really cares about us

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uwnim
08/02/21 5:34:29 PM
#8:


Politicians love being stupid. Probably because they get rewarded for stupidity but not for doing shit that is useful.

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BlockAddition
08/02/21 5:35:04 PM
#9:


Turtlemayor333 posted...
Surely there won't be a massive deadly pandemic.

*checks notes*

Surely there won't be ANOTHER massive deadly pandemic.
They come around every 100 years or so

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Funkydog
08/02/21 5:35:09 PM
#10:


Why is basically every single politician across the world such a pathetic gutter shit worm?

You could probably count the decent ones on your hand, the world over.

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Doe
08/02/21 5:36:33 PM
#11:


Funkydog posted...
Why is basically every single politician across the world such a pathetic gutter shit worm?

You could probably count the decent ones on your hand, the world over.
Honest people either don't have the cunning to get far, or notice what a racket it all is and pursue other avenues

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