Biden Unveils ‘Wartime’ Covid Response Plan

By Yuval Rosenberg

Biden Unveils ‘Wartime’ Covid Response Plan

In his first full day in office, President Joe Biden
rolled out a comprehensive plan to address the Covid-19 pandemic,
releasing a
200-page document outlining his strategy while
signing executive actions to jumpstart the federal response to the
coronavirus.

Pledging a “full-scale wartime effort,” Biden signed 10
executive orders Thursday that touched on a range of Covid-related
issues, including vaccine production, mask wearing and worker
protections. “We didn’t get into this mess overnight, and it will
take months to turn this around,” Biden said. “Despite the best
intentions we’re going to face setbacks. To a nation waiting for
action, let me be clear on this point: Help is on the
way.”

The document detailing Biden’s strategy calls for a
coordinated national response to the pandemic based on science. “We
can and will beat COVID-19,” it says. “America deserves a response
to the COVID-19 pandemic that is driven by science, data, and
public health – not politics. Through the release of the National
Strategy for the COVID-19 Response and Pandemic Preparedness, the
United States is initiating a coordinated pandemic response that
not only improves the effectiveness of our fight against COVID-19,
but also helps restore trust, accountability and a sense of common
purpose in our response to the pandemic.”

The executive orders and actions Biden signed on Thursday
address the following issues:

Vaccines: Increase the supply of
vaccines to reach the goal of administering 100 million vaccines —
enough for 50 million people — in Biden’s first 100
days.

Testing: Create a National Pandemic
Testing Board to improve testing capacity throughout the
country.

Treatments: Boost the development of
therapeutics to fight the disease for those who get
sick.

Supply chain: The federal government
is ordered to “secure supplies necessary for responding to the
pandemic” and examine whether further use of the Defense Production
Act is warranted.

Supply costs: The Federal Emergency
Management Agency will reimburse states for the cost of protective
equipment and National Guard deployments.

Schools: The Departments of Education
and Health and Human Services are directed to provide guidance for
safe re-openings and operations.

Worker protections: The Occupational
Safety and Health Administration will release guidance on Covid-19,
consider new standards and enforce safety requirements.

Travel: Facial coverings are required
in airports and on some trains, planes, ships and buses.
International travelers to the U.S. must provide proof of negative
Covid-19 tests.

Fairness: Establish a Covid-19 Health
Equity Task Force to ensure an equitable pandemic
response.

Global leadership: Biden ordered the
federal government to restore America's leadership on health
issues.

Larry Levitt of the Kaiser Family Foundation said that
Biden’s plan contained few surprises. “Reading President Biden’s
COVID plans, I’m struck by how predictable they are, following from
things he's been saying for weeks,” Levitt wrote. “Biden will do
plenty of controversial things, but predictability allows people
and organizations to plan, not a small thing with multiple
crises.”

The plan’s rollout comes amid accusations that the Biden
administration received “no coronavirus vaccine distribution plan
to speak of from the Trump administration,” as CNN
reported Thursday. “There is nothing for us to
rework. We are going to have to build everything from scratch,” a
source said.

Biden’s Covid response coordinator, Jeff Zients, laid the
current state of the pandemic response squarely at the feet of the
Trump administration. “For almost a year now, Americans could not
look to the federal government for any strategy, let alone a
comprehensive approach, to respond to Covid, and we’ve seen the
tragic costs of that failure,” he told reporters.

However effective the new approach may prove to be, one
thing is clear: It will require lots of funding from Congress to
get off the ground, with much of the $1.9 trillion Biden has
requested going toward the effort. “On the asymptomatic screening
side, we’re woefully undercapacity, so we need the money in order
to really ramp up testing, which is so important to reopening
schools and businesses,” Zients
told The New York Times. “We need the testing. We
need the money from Congress to fund the national strategy that the
president will lay out.”

Quote of the Day

“The idea that you can get up here and talk about what you
know, what the evidence, what the science is and that’s it, let the
science speak, it is somewhat of a liberating feeling.”

– Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of
Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Chief Medical Advisor to
President Biden, at a White House press briefing on
Thursday.

Number of the Day

About 1.3 million people filed for
unemployment benefits last week, the Labor Department said
Thursday, including 900,000 in state systems and 424,000 in the
federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program. “Last week was
the 44th straight week total initial claims were greater than the
worst week of the Great Recession,” Heidi Shierholz of the Economic
Policy Institute wrote. AnnElizabeth Konkel, an economist at jobs
site Indeed,
told The Wall Street Journal that “Covid hasn’t
let up, and it’s still creating massive amounts of economic
havoc.”

The Next Steps for Biden’s Stimulus Plan

The new administration and new Congress in Washington are
quickly running into the same old debates about Covid relief.

President Joe Biden has called for a $1.9 trillion pandemic aid
package, but Republicans have already dismissed the idea of
delivering everything on Biden’s wish list. Democrats, meanwhile,
face some internal differences about the best strategy for passing
another relief package and on how far they should press their
narrow majorities in the House and Senate.

Biden’s plan a ‘non-starter’ for Republicans: “GOP
lawmakers on Tuesday dismissed the argument by Janet Yellen, who’s
awaiting Senate confirmation as Treasury secretary, that
historically low interest rates mean major deficit spending isn’t a
problem right now,” Bloomberg News
noted.

Even Republican moderates like Sens. Mitt Romney (UT) and Lisa
Murkowski (AK), both of whom played a key role in enacting last
month’s relief package, have questioned the need for another
massive spending bill so soon on the heels of that $900 billion
effort.

“I suspect the whole package is a non-starter,” Sen. Roy Blunt
(R-MO)
told reporters Thursday. “But it’s got plenty of
starters in it, and a lot of them are things that we proposed in
terms of more assistance to the states. I think we’re ready to look
at what it takes to move forward as effectively and quickly as we
can on vaccine distribution, on securing what we need for the
future.”

Republicans object to Biden’s proposal to raise the federal
minimum wage to $15 an hour and some have rejected providing the
amount of aid Biden would like for state and local governments,
among other criticisms of the president’s plan.

Democrats divided on the best path forward: Democrats
remain eager to pass another relief bill, and House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi (D-CA) said Thursday that House committees will begin work
on Biden’s plan next week even as the full House won’t return to
session until the following week. “House Democrats have rearranged
their schedule over the next two weeks, scrapping votes next week
to allow the relevant committees to consider the various provisions
of their emerging COVID-19 relief package,” The Hill
said. “Pelosi suggested that package could hit the
House floor as early as the week of Feb. 1.”

But Democrats are split on just what approach they should take,
given that passage of a large aid bill in the 50-50 Senate would be
more difficult. As PunchBowl News reported:

“There are elements in the White House and
figures in the House Democratic Caucus pushing to pass a bill next
week to plus up vaccine money and send targeted, $1,400 direct
checks to Americans. This would be an immediate victory for the
Biden administration and a Democratic Congress that’s just coming
to power.
“But there are some in the Senate and
others in the House who have voiced concern over this strategy.
They don’t want to pass the popular stuff alone, they want to hold
out for a larger deal that includes direct checks, vaccine money
and a lot more.”

Timing is one consideration, since any larger relief package
that includes Democratic priorities beyond direct payments and
vaccine funding likely wouldn’t happen for weeks. But some
Democrats reportedly worry that passing a narrower package now
might mean that nothing else gets done later, with Republicans
potentially willing to let emergency unemployment benefits lapse as
scheduled in mid-March.

Using a tool called
reconciliation would allow Democrats to push a
package through Congress on their own, and avoid the threat of a
filibuster by Senate Republicans, but that approach would be
discordant with Biden’s call for unity and bipartisanship and it
would also require limiting the size and scope of the package in
order to comply with budget rules. The minimum wage hike, for
example, couldn’t be included. Even then, Democrats would have to
make sure that all 50 Democratic senators support the plan.

“We’re at that point where we can do whatever leadership says
they want to do,” House Budget Committee Chair John Yarmuth (D-KY)
told reporters, according to
Politico. “We’re prepared to use reconciliation
for the relief package and we’re saving it for the relief package
because that’s our number one priority, but we hope we don’t have
to use it.”

Reaching out to moderates: Against that backdrop, Biden’s
top economic adviser, Brian Deese, reportedly plans to meet with a
bipartisan group of 16 centrist senators in the next week or so to
push for the president’s proposals.

The senators expected to take part in that meeting include
Republicans Shelly Moore Capito (WV), Bill Cassidy
(LA), Susan Collins (ME), Jerry Moran (KS), Murkowski, Rob Portman
(OH), Romney and Todd Young (IN). The Democrats are Dick Durbin
(IL), Maggie Hassan (NH), John Hickenlooper (CO), Mark Kelly (AZ),
Joe Manchin (WV), Jeanne Shaheen (NH), Mark Warner (VA). Sen Angus
King of Maine, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, is
also anticipated to be in the meeting.

Some progressive Democrats are already warning that the
administration shouldn’t only focus on centrists, further
highlighting the challenges Biden could face as he tries to reach
bipartisan agreement on a relief deal.

Tweet of the Day

From
Winnie Wong, a former senior adviser to the Bernie
Sanders 2020 presidential campaign:

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