Biden administration lays out $1.7B plan to fight COVID-19 variants as part of American Rescue Plan

In response to the $1.7 billion investment tacked onto the American Rescue Plan to address COVID-19 variants, the Biden administration last week released a plan to rapidly invest those funds into genomic sequencing, innovation partnerships, and a new health data infrastructure.

From the total, $1 billion will be used to expand genomic sequencing as means of helping the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), states, and other jurisdictions to improve identification and monitoring capacity and conduct sequence genome activities to identify mutations. Another $400 million will boost innovation partnerships between state health departments and academic institutions, as well as fund six Centers of Excellence in Genomic Epidemiology. The final $300 million will go to building and supporting a National Bioinformatics Infrastructure to provide a data system capable of preventing the spread of viruses.

These funds will also be broken down state by state. The first allocation of $4 million will begin in May to Wisconsin. One of its senators, U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), pushed to include the larger investment within the American Rescue Plan.

“We haven’t beaten COVID-19, and variants are a real threat to the progress we have made in this fight. I worked to include this investment in the American Rescue Plan because I understand it’s an essential component in our effort to beat COVID-19 and get past this pandemic,” Baldwin said. “Our state has been a national leader on tracking the spread of COVID-19 and variants for over a year, and the federal investment we are receiving is going to be put to good use on our Made in Wisconsin science, research, and innovation that is working to protect public health.”

Nowadays, the original strain of COVID-19 that took the world by storm just last year makes up only about half of all cases in America, according to the White House. Other strains, some resistant to current vaccination efforts, have cropped up over the last few months, adding to fears the COVID-19 could be here to stay, in varying forms over the coming years. However, the administration hopes that funding like this will help federal, state, and local health leaders to sequence the virus and implement effective prevention measures to stop the spread.