Biden Coronavirus Task Force Updates
President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris say they will move the US Covid-19 pandemic response in a dramatically different direction. By the time Biden takes office January 20, the influential University of Washington Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation model projects there will be more than 372,000 Covid-19 deaths — that’s 135,000 more than the current total.
Biden’s transition team announced members of his coronavirus advisory board, which will be led by former Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, former US Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. David Kessler and Yale University’s Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith.
Here are five ways Biden says the US coronavirus response will change with his task force:
Increased testing and contact tracing
Number one on Biden’s list of promises is more testing and contact tracing. Testing has ramped up dramatically since the earliest days of the pandemic, but scientists say the nation needs tens of millions of tests per day to keep the country open safely, and even 10 months into the pandemic, there still aren’t enough.
Without testing, scientists can’t get a clear picture of where the virus is taking off. With as many as 40% of Covid-19 cases estimated to be asymptomatic, a quick test result is key to stopping the spread of the disease. And research has found about 75% of infected contacts need to be quarantined to stop the spread.
Biden promises all Americans will have access to regular, reliable, and free testing.
His task force will double drive-through testing sites, invest in new technology, and create a U.S. Public Health Jobs Corps that would mobilize at least 100,000 culturally competent contact tracers.
Additional investment in vaccines and treatments
States filed their vaccine distribution plans with the CDC weeks ago. But they have received no funds from Congress to start building the infrastructure they will need to distribute those vaccines to tens of millions of people.
Biden promises to invest $25 billion more to make and distribute vaccines to everyone in the US for free. They say politics will play no role in whether a vaccine is approved, and the new administration will make clinical data for any approved vaccine publicly available.
The Biden campaign also promised therapies and drugs would be affordable.
Mandatory masks and more PPE
Biden has said he’d work with local governors and mayors to mandate masks in public. An October modeling study showed that if 95% of Americans wore masks, more than 100,000 lives could be saved from Covid-19.
The Biden team also says it will take on problems with personal protective equipment for health care workers. While the Trump administration has claimed to use the Defense Production Act to step up production of PPE, a nonpartisan analysis in September found it has rarely done so.
Biden said he would use that power to make sure the national supply stocks are fully replenished. He also promised to help create American-sourced products so the US would not be dependent on other countries.
In addition to encouraging Congress to pass an emergency package to help schools pay for pandemic supplies, the Biden administration would create a restart package to help small businesses pay for protective equipment and plexiglass.
A push for ‘clear, consistent, evidence-based guidance’
The Biden administration also says it would encourage the CDC to take a more active role in providing specific guidance to communities about when they need to shut down.
The Biden team says it would create a Nationwide Pandemic Dashboard so people could gauge for themselves, in real time, how much disease is in their ZIP code. That level of data has been hard to find.
Biden would also create a Covid-19 Racial and Ethnic Disparities Task Force that would become a permanent Infectious Disease Racial Disparities Task Force after the pandemic that would address problems with disparities in the public health system. Black, Hispanic and American Indian communities have had significantly higher rates of infection and hospitalization.
Rejoining WHO and searching for future threats
The Trump administration formally began the process of withdrawing from the World Health Organization in July. Biden says he would re-establish the US relationship with WHO.
The Biden administration also says it plans to expand the CDC’s ranks oversees, so that its disease detectives can spot future threats. The Trump administration had cut some of those jobs, including in the China office.
During the Trump administration, PREDICT, the pathogen-tracking program that looks for future disease threats such as the coronavirus, ended. Biden said he’d re-launch it. Biden also said he would restore the White House National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense, which the Trump administration had folded into another organization in 2018.