Funding battle shapes up over COVID-19 package
Biden team, Dems adding pressure on returning lawmakers
Congress is returning from a spring recess this week and will soon resume a tense battle over the stalled $10 billion pandemic aid package that senators failed to pass earlier this month, despite increasing pressure from the White House to approve emergency aid for new vaccines, therapeutics and research.
Millions of vaccine doses that the United States has already purchased and could send abroad could expire because of the impasse, warned Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del.
Coons, who has been one of the negotiators of the package in the Senate, framed global aid as a “critical” national security matter on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday, saying that expanding international access to vaccines was “the best way to protect the American people from the next variant.”
Public health experts have repeatedly stressed that vaccine inequity allows new and potentially more dangerous variants to emerge. Only 16% of populations in low-income countries have received at least one dose of a vaccine, according to data compiled by the Our World in Data project at the University of Oxford, compared with 80% in high- and upper-middle-income countries.
Still, $5 billion in funding for global vaccination aid was stripped from U.S. lawmakers’ latest proposal on the package in an effort to appease Republicans’ spending concerns.
Republicans had demanded that new aid be financed in part by repurposing previously approved but unspent COVID-19 relief.
Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., the majority leader, has said he was planning for future negotiations on another package that could include the global vaccination aid.
The Agency for International Development has warned that without more congressional funds, it would likely have to curtail a new program that aimed to vaccinate people in poorly inoculated countries.
Schumer said President Joe Biden supported the $10 billion deal — as do several other Democrats — given the pressing need to approve domestic aid. Without it, the White House has said, the United States could run out of COVID-19 treatments and coronavirus tests starting in May, just as the national rolling average of new cases has begun to trend upward. As of Sunday night, an average of more than 37,000 new cases were being identified each day in the United States, an increase of 39% from two weeks ago, according to a New York Times database.
It remains unclear when a vote on the stalled aid package might take place. Dr. Ashish Jha, the new White House COVID-19 response coordinator, on Sunday urged lawmakers to return to the matter right away.
“Let me be very clear on why we need the money,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.” “We’re going to have a new generation of vaccines — my hope is, in the fall. There are a lot of really promising treatments coming down the pipe. None of those things are going to be available for the American people if Congress does not step up and fund these efforts.”
As part of the effort to build momentum around vaccine donations, the White House on Monday announced that it would co-host the second global
COVID-19 summit next month.
The meeting, set to be held virtually May 12, will carry over themes from the first meeting, held in September, the White House said, including the logistical work of getting shots into arms; reaching high-risk groups with virus tests and treatments; building out more local and regional vaccine manufacturing capacity; and increasing the number of public health workers.
Vaccine supply in the lowest-income countries has grown, but health officials
say that doses can arrive on an irregular schedule, making it difficult to organize vaccination campaigns, particularly when health systems lack the storage, transportation and staff needed for them.
Global health experts are worried that the U.S. commitment to addressing the pandemic is waning as Biden’s attention has been consumed by other matters, notably the war in Ukraine.
Peter Maybarduk, director for access to medicines at advocacy group Public Citizen, called the summit
“late and necessary,” and criticized the Biden White House for not fighting harder to get money from Congress for the global effort. He said the effort must go beyond vaccination, to expand access to testing and therapeutics in low- and middle-income nations.
“If you are going to solve a global pandemic, you need the wealthiest governments to really commit to it,” Maybarduk said. “And if you don’t have a highly prioritized U.S. leadership, the world is going to stumble through it.”