Reps. LaHood, Panetta lead coalition urging strengthened U.S. supply chains

U.S. Reps. Darin LaHood (IL) and Jimmy Panetta (CA) led 18 colleagues in sending a letter to President Joe Biden, encouraging him to improve supply chains, national preparedness, and vaccine delivery efficiency.

They hope this will help the nation recover economically from the COVID-19 pandemic. The correspondence focused its attention on distributing vaccines, supply chain limitations for personal protective equipment and medical devices, as well as helping other nations with a lack of health care infrastructure.

“While these issues may be particularly pronounced in poorer countries, time has shown that any failure to address disease in one part of the world will eventually be felt internationally,” the legislators wrote. “These are global problems that political leaders around the world must work together to address so that we can move past the pandemic and grow the global economy.”

While the United States saw some success throughout the pandemic, including the developmental gains of Operation Warp Speed, increased domestic vaccinations between December 2020 and June 2021, and the nearly 11 billion doses of vaccine produced last year, the legislators added that a major global need remains. This, they argued, requires the White House to turn to strategies that will maintain testing, therapeutics, PPE, ventilators, healthcare worker training, and more – all things that would help the domestic and global economy.

The representatives also urged the president to continue supporting U.S. innovation, identify and address barriers interfering with vaccine production and distribution, use COVID-19 resources efficiently and collaborate with Congress to achieve all of this.

“We believe support in these areas will save lives globally, protect the United States from any future variants, and help the world to move forward from the COVID 19 pandemic,” the legislators wrote. “An investment to maintain vaccination efforts in lower-income countries now will eliminate the need to spend trillions later in responding to successive waves of COVID variants. We are ready to engage with your administration further to support U.S. leadership in ending the COVID-19 pandemic.”