President Biden announced that he had secured an additional 100 million doses of Johnson & Johnson’s Covid-19 single-shot vaccine, to be delivered by the end of this year.
In Texas, the mask mandate ended and businesses reopened. Maryland lifted some Covid restrictions, to cheers, criticism and confusion.
Alaska opened vaccine eligibility to all residents or workers 16 and older.
Get the latest updates here, as well as maps and vaccines in development.
Cash to fight the pandemic
The House of Representatives approved the nearly $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief plan this afternoon — a landmark moment for President Biden. The plan, which passed without any Republican votes, will send direct payments of up to $1,400 to many Americans, expand a child tax credit and extend a $300 weekly unemployment supplement. Mr. Biden is expected to sign the bill into law on Friday.
While the stimulus checks will be a boon to many struggling families, the package is also geared toward strengthening efforts to bring an end to the pandemic. To better understand how, I spoke to my colleague Abby Goodnough, a national heath care correspondent.
Abby told me that one big piece of the new package is money.
It provides $14 billion for vaccine distribution and another $48 billion for testing and contact tracing. There’s also close to $8 billion for state and local public health departments to help them beef up their public health work force and infrastructure.
“Long before the pandemic, state and especially local health departments were way underfunded,” Abby said. “We saw the effects of that over the past year. Local health departments are going to have so much work to continue doing, moving forward, to prevent flare-ups of the virus and keep this kind of thing from happening again.”
Community health centers, which Abby said act as primary care clinics for low-income Americans or for those who don’t have health insurance, will get nearly $8 billion. Around $200 million will go to nursing homes, and while Abby said that was not a lot of money, it will be used to keep infection out of these facilities, which were savaged by the virus.
The plan also includes a number of mostly temporary, but important changes to certain health insurance programs that are vital to addressing the pandemic.
It requires Medicaid to cover vaccines and Covid treatments for free.
It will pay the full premiums for Cobra coverage, the insurance program offered to people who lose their job, through Sept. 30.
People who receive subsidies for Affordable Care Act coverage will get more money, and people with higher incomes will now qualify for those subsidies. Regardless of their income, people with Obamacare will also not have to pay more than 8.5 percent of their income toward health insurance.
It will allow women who have given birth to stay on Medicaid, the government health insurance program for the poor, for a full year after delivery, instead of two months.
The plan also attempts to get more states to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. For states that do, the federal government will pay a larger percentage of their other Medicaid costs.
Despite the infusion of cash, the country still faces huge challenges to building up its public health system, while also trying to deal with the pandemic and its aftereffects, Abby said.
“I think it’s going to take a lot more time and money over a number of years to get the kind of infrastructure in place that can respond rapidly to the kind of crisis we’ve been in over the past year,” she said. “But this is a good start.”
The New York Times