Biden issuing pandemic plan that aims to expand access to testing and vaccines, reopen schools [View all]
Source: Washington Post
President Biden plans Thursday to issue a new national strategy to respond to the coronavirus pandemic and to take executive actions intended to make tests and vaccines more abundant, schools and travel safer, and states better able to afford their role in the path back to normal life.
On his second day in office, aides said, Biden will sign an additional 10 executive orders, plus presidential memorandums, dealing with many aspects of the public health crisis the new president has defined as his top priority. They include the creation of a Pandemic Testing Board that can spur a “surge” in the capacity for coronavirus tests. Other orders will foster research into new treatments for covid-19, the disease caused by the virus; strengthen the collection and analysis of data to shape the government’s response to the crisis; and direct the federal occupational safety agency to release and enforce guidelines to protect workers from getting infected.
Other aspects of the plan are intended to steer more money to states, which have complained they need more funding to carry out the work placed on them for testing, vaccinating residents and other functions. The plan says the White House will try to persuade Congress to cover the entire cost for states to vaccinate low-income residents on Medicaid, while directing health officials to explore whether the program’s payment rates for vaccinations should be higher.
The 21-page plan is far from a federal takeover of the nation’s efforts to cope with the worst health calamity in a century. Yet it represents a pronounced shift away from the Trump administration’s deference to each state to design its own plan for coronavirus testing and carry out other elements of its response. The replacement plan synthesizes many of the goals and strategies for fighting the coronavirus that Biden has mapped out in the weeks and days leading to his inauguration, including in a $1.9 trillion request to Congress for these efforts and to hasten the nation’s economic recovery. Many represent promises whose success or failure will be born in the their details and execution.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/biden-coronavirus-executive-actions/2021/01/21/9a4ab954-5b56-11eb-8bcf-3877871c819d_story.html
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