The fight to prevent the next pandemic is underway on Capitol Hill even as the coronavirus continues to ravage the nation, with the Biden administration joining a quiet but consequential battle to secure tens of billions of dollars in funding aimed at readying vaccines, tests, treatments and surveillance for future global health threats.
While the amount of funding in play pales next to the overall scale of the planned $3.5 trillion economic package that Democrats hope to push through Congress, advocates are arguing that the stakes are high. Without at least $30 billion of federal investment, they say, the nation could be left vulnerable to a devastating repeat of the covid crisis, or worse.
But a budget blueprint adopted by Congress in August envisions delivering only a fraction of that total -- less than $10 billion -- which some are warning would squander an important opportunity while Washington and the world are focused on the threat posed by pandemics.
The White House in recent days has circulated a memo to key congressional leaders arguing for the pending bill to provide at least $15 billion in pandemic prevention funding, dollars that might have to be diverted from other administration priorities. Even that amount, the memo says, would only provide a "jump-start" to an estimated $65 billion effort needed in the coming decade to prepare vaccines, therapies and tests that can be quickly scaled to blunt emerging disease threats.
Among those pushing for even more is Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader, whose office was targeted in a 2001 anthrax terrorist attack and later joined the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense, which created a road map for federal pandemic prevention investments.
In an interview, Daschle said he was "fearful" that lawmakers would soon move past the covid-19 crisis without taking the necessary steps to prepare for the next global threat.
"Right after the anthrax attack, everyone's attention was focused on, how do we better prepare ourselves? And we made a commitment then that we somehow have now forgotten," he said. "We know for certain there will be another pandemic. And shame on us if we haven't been better prepared for the next one after learning such hard lessons in this one."
The White House memo, dated Aug. 26, lays out an ambitious program of research, development and industrial preparation that would enable the approval of effective vaccines against any virus within 100 days and enough production of that vaccine to inoculate the world within 200 days. The program also aims to create new drugs that could be effective against any virus family, develop new tests that can be easily adapted to particular viruses and new monitoring networks to catch pathogens before they spread widely.
In justifying the $65 billion cost, the memo notes that future pandemics could be far worse, far more frequent and cost the U.S. economy even more than the estimated $16 trillion impact from covid-19. "Modest investments in pandemic preparedness should not be viewed as a cost, but instead as providing a large return on investment," the document says, noting that $10 billion in annualized spending is a fraction of the federal government's spending on traditional national security items.
The battle is expected to reach a climax in the coming days ahead of a Sept. 13 meeting of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which will decide how much pandemic preparedness funding to include in its $486 billion spending allotment. While even the pandemic funding would be only a small portion of that, the panel is also responsible for funding major health care and climate programs that are expected to account for the vast bulk of its spending.
With the amendment process expected to be tightly controlled by House and Senate leaders, it could be difficult to force significant changes after that committee finalizes its portion of the bill.
A spokeswoman for the committee did not respond to requests for comment Thursday. A White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions, confirmed the memo's veracity and said the administration is "working to lay out the urgent resources and other needs to ensure that we are protected against upcoming threats."
The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee is also engaged in the discussions, congressional aides said, and its chairwoman, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., has long supported additional spending on pandemic preparedness. Asked about the issue in July, Murray said she was looking for the highest number possible but added "we have a lot on our plate."
Since then she has made several statements in support of robust preparedness funding, and her spokeswoman, Helen Hare, said Thursday that Murray "is working closely with the House and White House to align around the strongest possible investment in the Build Back Better budget." Other senators, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., have also pressed for significantly more funding.
The Biden administration had its eye on $30 billion for pandemic preparedness funding in initial policy proposals released earlier this year. But under outlines embedded in the budget blueprint that congressional Democrats assembled and adopted in August, only about $5 billion was ultimately set aside.
The reduction was a consequence of divisions inside the Democratic ranks on how expansive the catchall economic bill ought to be. Because it is being written to take advantage of special budgetary procedures that can allow Democrats to avoid a Republican filibuster, many of the fiscal parameters have to be sketched out in advance.
While many Democrats favored $6 trillion in spending or more, Senate centrists pushed that top-line figure down to $3.5 trillion, and some Democrats are insisting it needs to be reduced further still. Rather than cut entire programs from the bill, Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and fellow leaders opted instead to maintain the vast majority of programs proposed by Biden but reduce them by delaying their implementation or sunsetting their funding.
"There are a lot of competing interests, all of them are important, and we're just going to have to do our best to prioritize," Sanders said in late July, as his committee assembled the budget blueprint. "Obviously, it goes without saying, we want to be a hell of a lot better prepared for future pandemics than we were for this one."
Gabriel Bankman-Fried, executive director of Guarding Against Pandemics, a nonprofit that has pushed for significant new funding, said it would be a mistake to treat the pandemic preparedness funding as just another minor line item in the sprawling bill that can be bargained down and returned to later.
Spending to prevent a future pandemic is the single most popular provision of the Democrat's vast bill, he said, citing his own group's polling, and he added that the White House memo makes clear that the increased spending is justified.
And, like Daschle, Bankman-Fried said that simply passing a small down payment and leaving future Congresses to fill in the gaps would be a recipe for disappointment or worse.
"Every time there's been a new outbreak -- Zika, H1N1, SARS, MERS -- there's been a flurry of investment targeted at just that outbreak, and then that investment fades. We fail to make the systemic changes we need to be better prepared, and we fail to think broadly about preparing for threats other than the one we just experienced," he said. "You have a small political window to make that happen before everyone kind of moves on."