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Published on Jan 24, 2021 Updated 4 Days ago
Inside Biden’s 198 page Covid-19 playbook: 5 highlights

On his first full day as America’s 46th president, Joe Biden dropped a 198 page playbook headlined “National Strategy for the Covid-19 Response and Pandemic Preparedness”.  Everything inside its pages reveal the scope and scale of Biden’s - and America’s - greatest challenge: the pandemic’s end.

The first wave of milestones is fashioned around the number 100. Topping that list is a 100 day goal to get 100 million shots in arms. That seems straightforward enough for a country that has sealed deals with Pfizer and Moderna and now awaiting a third vaccine from Johnson & Johnson. But no, it’s not. Over the last 365 days, America’s political leadership has blown every opportunity to crush the infection curve and now Biden is trying to un-Trump the country’s public health response via executive orders. He has a desperate plea, one we’ve heard before from him but never from his predecessor: “For god’s sake, wear a mask if not for yourself for your loved ones for your country." This plea comes one year later than it should have. During the squandered time, 24 million people got infected with Covid and over 410,000 died. America has just 4% of the world’s population, but 25% of the world’s COVID-19 cases and 20% of all COVID-19 deaths. Over 77,000 Americans lost their lives to COVID-19 in December 2020 alone.

Forty eight hours in, Biden has 98 days to go. At a pace of 1 million doses a day - and let’s set aside vaccine hesitancy for a moment -  the virus won’t be contained until sometime in 2022. Dr. Anthony Fauci breaks it down to a single data point: “If we can get 70 to 85 percent of the country vaccinated by the end of...middle of the summer months, we could approach a degree of normality by Fall,” he told reporters in his first briefing from the Biden White House lectern. Achieving widespread or “herd immunity” would require vaccinating as many as 280 million people but vaccinations don’t figure as the top item in Biden’s 198 page strategy document. Rebuilding trust does. There’s stuff in here that never needed to be said if Trump hadn’t inserted hydroxychloroquine, bleach and ultraviolet light as quack cures. We bring you 5 highlights from Biden’s Day One agenda which was all Covid-19 and little else.

Framework

The 10 Covid-19 related executive orders Biden signed on 21 January speak to three focus areas: increasing vaccinations and testing, laying the groundwork for reopening schools and businesses, and ramping up the use of masks — including a requirement that Americans mask up for travel, and addressing health care inequities in minority communities who bear a greater burden of disease. Almost every one of the 10 EOs speaks to both present and future vulnerabilities. Biden is already calling for congressional support to establish a national center to prevent, detect and respond to future biological crises.

Masks, testing

Trump said masks are optional, Biden’s mask order for travel extends to airports, on-board planes, ships, intercity buses, trains and other forms of public transportation. US bound travelers must show a negative Covid-19 test before leaving and must quarantine upon arrival. Biden has already mandated masks on federal property which means those who want to argue about it can’t claim it’s optional. Biden’s new national testing strategy will expand testing supplies, increase laboratory capacity, and the federal government will work with schools to implement screening programs to help them reopen. Clarity of messaging about the use of tests and insurance coverage is now an official Biden policy, after 12 months of chaos.

Biden’s new national testing strategy will expand testing supplies, increase laboratory capacity, and the federal government will work with schools to implement screening programs to help them reopen

Vaccines

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Friday that of nearly 40 million doses distributed to states, only 19 million have been administered. Biden has directed the Federal Emergency Management Agency to set up vaccination centers, aiming to have 100 up and running in a month in locations like stadiums, convention centers and pharmacies. He's ordering the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to begin a program to make vaccines available through local pharmacies starting next month. This is a plan that carries over from the Trump administration. Tied to this is the need for more staff which is trained to get shots in arms. Tucked inside one of the 10 executive orders is an urgent call to increase the US healthcare workforce capacity, as nurses are hitting peak exhaustion. The Trump policy to hold back large amounts of vaccines will stop. States have been told they will get clear projections on vaccine availability to help them plan rollouts. Troubles are plenty, already. At the current pace, Alabama officials think it would take two years to vaccinate all the adults among its 5 million population. From Louisiana to New York and Florida, states are asking for more vaccines. There just isn’t enough vaccine to go around. Moderna and Pfizer, the two companies which have emergency use approval for their two shot vaccines have each promised to give the United States 100 million vaccine doses by the end of March which will be enough for 100 million people. Both companies are manufacturing at full capacity and releasing a total of less than 18 million doses each week. In some places, vaccines are getting spoiled because of random events like freezers being left unplugged.

There just isn’t enough vaccine to go around. Moderna and Pfizer, the two companies which have emergency use approval for their two shot vaccines have each promised to give the United States 100 million vaccine doses by the end of March which will be enough for 100 million people. Both companies are manufacturing at full capacity and releasing a total of less than 18 million doses each week. In some places, vaccines are getting spoiled because of random events like freezers being left unplugged

Schools

Biden’s call for school re-opening isn’t the Trumpian, all-caps shouting into a void. Biden’s moonshot is to have most K-8 schools reopen in his first 100 days, and he's ordering the departments of Education and Health and Human Services to provide clear, science-led guidance for reopening them safely. States would also be able to tap into federal emergency funds to help get the job done. Biden is calling on Congress to provide at least $130 billion in additional aid to schools, $35 billion for colleges and universities, $25 billion to stabilize child care centers at risk of closing and $15 billion in child care aid for struggling families. We caught this, in the cracks between Biden’s public statements and the text of the executive order: The EO does not speak of the 100-day plan to reopen schools. It stops just short. “Accordingly, it is the policy of my Administration to provide support to help create the conditions for safe, in-person learning as quickly as possible.” The president's pandemic plan also instructs HHS to collect data on school reopenings and Covid-19's spread to produce more research into the risk of sending kids back to school. Like a former CDC director said, “plan better than no plan.” It’s a start.

Biden is calling on Congress to provide at least $130 billion in additional aid to schools, $35 billion for colleges and universities, $25 billion to stabilize child care centers at risk of closing and $15 billion in child care aid for struggling families

Data 

The Trump administration didn’t just gut its Covid-19 response, it ensured that reliable data became incredibly hard to get. For a brief period just before the elections, the flow of data to CDC, the country’s premier public health fighting force, was effectively halted. The Biden administration has put data at the center of measuring policy success and so, an executive order on data collection figures among the list of 10. The order instructs the CDC to create a dashboard detailing county-level COVID-19 cases so people can better assess the level of transmission in their own communities. This stood out to us in the text because of its whole of government approach: “The Secretary of Defense, the Attorney General, the Secretary of Commerce, the Secretary of Labor, the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Secretary of Education, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the Director of National Intelligence, the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), and the Director of the National Science Foundation shall each promptly designate a senior official to serve as their agency’s lead to work on COVID-19- and pandemic-related data issues.  This official, in consultation with the COVID-19 Response Coordinator, shall take steps to make data relevant to high-consequence public health threats, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, publicly available and accessible.”

For a brief period just before the elections, the flow of data to CDC, the country’s premier public health fighting force, was effectively halted. The Biden administration has put data at the center of measuring policy success and so, an executive order on data collection  figures among the list of 10

 Taken together, Biden’s initial burst of executive actions on Covid-19 served notice of a clean break from Trump style grandstanding. Now, the federal government is taking full responsibility for Covid-19 response and telling states that technical and financial help is on the way. “We’ll move heaven and earth to get more people vaccinated for free,” Biden has promised. He will have to. The mess is for real.

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Nikhila Natarajan

Nikhila Natarajan

Nikhila Natarajan is Senior Programme Manager for Media and Digital Content with ORF America. Her work focuses on the future of jobs current research in ...

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