Health officials from Alabama to Washington say Congress is blocking billions of new funds Shaken Attempts to move to a stable, long-term approach to Covid-19.
“They will cut their legs in the future under Covid’s firm response,” Arkansas Health Secretary Jose Romero told POLITICO. “It’s going to respond.”
New plans, from Oregon’s “Resilience to Support Equality” To North Carolina’s “Moving forward together, “Draw how the state health departments intend to move from crisis response to disease management while maintaining opportunities to strengthen public health operations when new waves of the virus come. The policies announced by state health officials over the past few weeks vary in specificity but focus on the idea that public health interventions should be predictable even when there is no virus.
But The congressional hearing about that was precisely where the firing came from. Implement their new strategies even as they face the Omicron sub-variant BA.2, which has seen a dramatic growth in the number of cases in Europe in recent weeks and is now The dominant variant of Covid In the United States Although cases have continued to decline nationally over the past two weeks, in some states, especially in the Northeast, they have begun to increase.
“We are well positioned, but not that we have somehow failed to act and reach a consensus to continue to provide some funding for this,” said Marcus Pleshia, chief medical officer at the State and Territorial Association. Health officials.
The Biden administration has asked Congress for $ 22.5 billion to continue fighting the pandemic shortly. Are senators Instead of closing About $ 10 billion in aid packages? This sentence can be passed through the upper chamber In the coming days but will still need approval from the ward.
Lawmakers have been in a deadlock for weeks as Republicans demand a record of how previous pandemic aid was spent – insisting that any new dollars be repaid by reducing other programs – and Democrats favor more cash.
The proposal, approved by party leaders but failed in the House earlier this month, offered a $ 7 billion return from 30 federal recovery dollars to help pay for a new round of about $ 15 billion in pandemic aid.
States were adamant that they needed congressional-approved healthcare assistance last spring – states can use it to rebuild their economies, invest in healthcare infrastructure, and support required workers – and additional Covid-specific dollars.
Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, chairman and co-chair of the National Association of Governors, respectively. They asked The White House and Congress to supply states with “the resources they need to continue to respond to COVID-19, as well as to meet current federal government obligations, including state and local fiscal recovery funds.”
In Washington, D.C., Governor Jay Insli’s office contacted the White House to stress that the state legislature had already appropriated federal recovery funds and that there would be a “significant direct impact if this promised funding were not received,” Insley’s spokesman. Said James Smith. The state of Washington lost nearly $ 400 million in funding with its initial $ 15 billion Covid-19 deal.
“We want to have confidence that when federal federations offer to fund, we can budget and know that they will deliver,” Smith said.
Congress deadlock Left Some states have hastily drawn up emergency plans to help the uninsured. In Utah, health officials are arguing over the treatment and vaccination of Covid for uninsured people through Medicaid, as they are already doing for testing, as allowed by Congress during the pandemic. But it is a short-term solution that could hinder the state if a public health emergency ends this summer.
Georgian officials continue to offer Covid tests, vaccinations, and boosters to any Health Department resident and contract partner for free. In Arkansas, healthcare officials collect funding to support in-house testing of uninsured individuals.
But health officials in the red and blue states say they will only be able to quickly step up testing efforts, provide treatment and Offer booster vaccines to their residents if tests, medicines, and vaccines are available.
“If Congress does not approve additional funding, then we will have a catastrophe,” said Scott Harris, an Alabama health officer. “You would think that at some point, someone could do a cost-analysis here and say, pay for people to get tested and vaccinated or get antivirals for Covid. It would be cost-saving to ignore this problem and allow more explosions.”
North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, St. Louis Letter A delegation from the state congress said this week that states would still face each other in competition for scarce resources as they did in the early days of the pandemic if the federal government did not continue to procure them.
North Carolina monoclonal antibody treatment spending fell by more than 30 percent this week due to a lack of federal funding to pay for them. The state exceeded the dollars allocated for testing in the background due to Delta. And Omicron waves.
“If they do not have the funding to continue procuring and, most importantly, to develop more treatments and therapeutic options, moving it to the states and launching it in the private market will create incredible chaos. Said Code Kinsley, North Carolina’s health minister.
While Covid vaccines and therapies may be ordered directly from healthcare providers in the future, this transition will take time, said Dean Siddlinger, an Oregon health officer and state epidemiologist. And state health officials say it is impossible to do so as long as the world continues to compete for limited supplies of vaccines and treatments.
“Building a separate system where providers or states individually go to distributors or manufacturers to buy them does not happen overnight,” Siddlinger said. “You create uncertainty or a realistic prospect of reduced funding and resources. You need to invent new systems that hinder our ability to do some planning and be prepared to respond more conveniently.
Public health experts are cautiously optimistic that increasing Omicron this winter will slow down some BA.2 impacts in the United States. Still, state health officials fear that a small BA.2 wave that passes relatively quickly could be perceived as Evidence that they can successfully withstand weather conditions. Covid’s new options without the extra federal dollars – rather than proof that public health interventions work and deserve ongoing support.
