Millions more will be invested to try to reach out to vulnerable communities and convince vaccine hesitant residents to get the covid shot. Other news from the Biden administration is on vaping, people with disabilities and the NIH-Moderna vaccine patent dispute.
The Hill: Biden Admin Investing Additional $785M In COVID-19 Funding For Hardest Hit Communities
The Biden administration will invest $785 million to help stop the spread of the coronavirus in some of the nation’s most vulnerable populations by building confidence in vaccines and helping to establish a more diverse public health workforce, officials announced Wednesday. The influx of money will be focused on communities of color, rural areas, people with disabilities and low income populations. (Weixel, 11/10)
Politico: Scoop: HHS’ Next Effort To Boost Covid-19 Testing
The Biden administration will spend $650 million to bolster domestic manufacturing of Covid-19 tests, ahead of an expected rise in demand driven by school testing programs, the administration’s own workplace vaccine-or-test mandate and increased holiday travel. The money will go toward making professional molecular point-of-care tests that providers can use to quickly confirm the results of more widely available — but less accurate — over-the-counter antigen tests, POLITICO’s David Lim reports. The point-of-care molecular tests generally perform similarly to lab-based PCR tests, according to a senior administration official. (Cancryn and Owermohle, 11/10)
In other administration news —
The Wall Street Journal: Biden’s Vaping Tax Sparks Concerns People Will Go Back To Cigarettes
Some public-health experts say that adopting an e-cigarette tax without raising the tax on cigarettes would push people back to cigarettes because it would eliminate the price differential that makes vaping a more attractive option financially. The House bill considers a 5% Juul refill pod to be equivalent to a pack of cigarettes, though users’ consumption patterns vary and the body absorbs nicotine from smoke and e-cigarette aerosol at different rates. A two-pack of the Juul refill pods sells for $9.99 on Juul’s website. The average pack of cigarettes in the U.S. costs $7.01 as of November 2020, including local, state and federal excise taxes, according to the economic consulting firm Orzechowski and Walker. (Maloney and Rubin, 11/10)
The Wall Street Journal: Justice Department Sues Uber Over Charging Wait-Time Fees For Disabled People
The Justice Department said Wednesday that it was suing Uber Technologies Inc. for charging wait-time fees to passengers with physical disabilities. The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges that the company violated the Americans with Disabilities Act for charging fees to passengers who, because of disability, need more time to enter a car. (Rana, 11/10)
The Washington Post: Data Broker Shared Billions Of Phone Location Records With D.C. Government As Part Of Covid-Tracking Effort
A data broker shared billions of “highly sensitive” phone-location records with the D.C. government last year that revealed how people moved about the city, public records show. The sharing of the raw phone location data was pitched as uniquely valuable for tracking the covid pandemic, the records show. But the provision of the records for six months to the D.C. government’s Department of Health also shows the potential for abuse of such data, which is generally collected without consumers’ knowledge and then resold to both public and private buyers. (Harwell, 11/10)
The NIH-Moderna patent legal battle continues —
The New York Times: The N.I.H. Says It Isn’t Giving Up In Its Patent Fight With Moderna
The National Institutes of Health is prepared to aggressively defend its assertion that its scientists helped invent a crucial component of the Moderna coronavirus vaccine — including taking legal action if government lawyers deem it necessary, the agency’s director said on Wednesday. Moderna’s vaccine, which appears to provide the world’s best defense against Covid-19, grew out of four years of collaboration with research scientists at the N.I.H.’s Vaccine Research Center. The New York Times reported on Tuesday that the company has blocked three N.I.H. researchers from being named on a key patent application. (Gay Stolberg and Robbins, 11/10)
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