Congress is returning from a spring break this week and will soon resume a tense battle over the stalled $10 billion pandemic relief package that senators approved earlier this month despite mounting pressure from the White House to provide emergency aid for new vaccines , Therapeutics and approve, have not approved research.
Millions of vaccine doses that the US has already bought and could send abroad could be wasted because of the impasse, Sen. Chris Coons warned on Sunday.
Mr. Coons, a Delaware Democrat who was one of the Senate package negotiators, called global aid a “critical” national security issue on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday and said international access to vaccines is being expanded “the best way to protect the American people from the next variant”.
Public health experts have repeatedly emphasized that vaccine inequality allows for the emergence of new and potentially more dangerous variants. Just 16 percent of the population 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 percent in high- and middle-income countries.
Still, $5 billion in funding for global immunization assistance has been removed from the US Legislature’s recent proposal on the package to allay Republican spending concerns.
Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Majority Leader, said he plans future negotiations on another package that could include global immunization assistance.
Mr. Schumer said President Biden supports the $10 billion deal — as do several other Democrats — amid the urgent need to approve domestic aid. Without them, the White House says, the United States could run out of Covid-19 treatments and coronavirus testing starting in May, just as the national moving average of new cases has started trending upwards. An average of more than 37,000 new cases were identified each day in the United States as of Sunday, a 39 percent increase from two weeks ago, according to a New York Times database.
It remains unclear when a vote on the stalled aid package could take place. dr Ashish K. Jha, the new White House Covid-19 response coordinator, on Sunday urged lawmakers to address the matter immediately.
“Let me be very clear why we need the money,” he said on Fox News Sunday. “We will have a new generation of vaccines – I hope in the autumn. There are a lot of really promising treatments coming down the tube. None of these things will be available to the American people unless Congress stands up and funds this effort.”