Here’s what’s in Biden’s executive orders targeting Covid-19

WASHINGTON – President Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Thursday revealed a list of new executive orders and presidential guidelines intended to speed up production of Covid-19 supplies, increase testing capacity and require the wearing of a mask during travel interstate – part of a sprawling 200-page national pandemic strategy, he announced at a White House event.

Taken together, the orders signal Mr. Biden’s top priorities in crafting a more centralized federal response to the spread of the coronavirus. Some of them reflect actions taken during the Trump administration, while most seek to change course.

Here’s what the commands aim to do.

Accelerate the pace of manufacturing and testing.

Order asks agency leaders to check for shortages in areas such as personal protective equipment and vaccine supplies, and identify places where the administration could invoke the Defense Production Act to increase manufacturing . The White House said it could use Korean War-era law, which the Trump administration used in its vaccine development program, to ramp up production of a type of syringe that pharmacists can use. to extract an additional dose from the vaccine vials.

Biden’s team said it had identified 12 “immediate supply shortages” critical to the pandemic response, including N95 surgical masks and isolation gowns, as well as swabs, reagents and pipettes used in the tests.

“On the asymptomatic screening side, we are woefully insufficient, so we need the money to really speed up the tests, which is so important for the reopening of schools and businesses,” said Jeffrey D. Zients, the new Covid -19 from the White House. coordinator of the response.

Another ordinance establishes a pandemic testing committee, an idea taken from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s war production council, to speed up testing. The new administration promises to expand the nation’s supply of rapid tests, double testing supplies and increase lab space for testing and monitoring coronavirus hotspots.

“This effort will ensure that we get testing where it’s needed and where it’s needed most, helping schools and businesses reopen safely and protecting the most vulnerable, like those living in institutions.” long-term care, ”Biden said in his Thursday Remarks.

Require the wearing of a mask during interstate travel.

Mr Biden has vowed to use his powers as president to influence mask wearing anywhere he is legally permitted to do so, including on federal property and in travel that crosses state borders. An order issued Thursday requires the wearing of masks at airports and on many planes, buses and intercity trains.

The same order also requires international travelers to prove that they have recently had a negative Covid-19 test before traveling to the United States and to comply with quarantine guidelines issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention a once they have landed.

Train better data collection systems.

An order calls on the Secretary of Health and Human Services and the White House’s Covid-19 response coordinator to reassess the federal government’s Covid-19 data collection systems and publish a report on their findings. He also calls on the heads of “all executive departments and agencies” to collect and share data relating to coronaviruses.

The Trump administration struggled last year to settle on a centralized system, pitting competing agendas between the Department of Health and Human Services and the CDC against each other. Alex M. Azar II, the former secretary of health and human services, ordered hospitals to send daily reports of virus cases to a private provider who forwarded them to a central database in Washington, instead of the CDC, which previously housed the data. The ruling, which remains in effect, angered scientists at the CDC.

Set up a working group on health equity.

Another order creates a Covid-19 “health equity task force”, which will recommend how to allocate more funding to parts of the population particularly affected by the virus, analyzing needs by race, ethnicity, geography and disability, among other factors. Mr Biden said on Thursday the task force would deal with reluctance to take the vaccines.

The panel, hosted at the Department of Health and Human Services, is part of a larger effort by the Biden administration to draw more attention to persistent racial and ethnic disparities in access to health care, as minorities were hospitalized and died from Covid-19 at significantly higher rates. Mr. Biden appointed Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, associate professor of internal medicine, public health and management at Yale, to lead the task force.

Publish advice for schools and workers.

Mr Biden issued an order intended to protect workers’ health during the pandemic, asking the occupational safety and health administration to issue new guidelines for employers. The order also calls on the agency to step up enforcement of existing rules to help stop the spread of Covid-19 in the workplace.

The president also called on the departments of Education and Health and Human Services to release new guidance on how to reopen schools safely – a major source of controversy over the summer when officials in the White House and the Department of Health lobbied the CDC to minimize the risk of sending students. return.

Find more treatments for Covid-19 and future pandemics.

Biden administration calls on Secretary of Health and Human Services and Director of National Institutes of Health to draft plan to support study of new drugs for Covid-19 and future public health crises through large trials randomized. Treatments should be those that “can be easily manufactured, distributed and administered, both nationally and internationally,” according to the decree.

The focus on randomized trials follows two emergency approvals – for convalescent plasma and hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug – that hit the Food and Drug Administration last year. Federal health officials, including scientists at the FDA, remain unhappy with the agency’s decisions, under pressure from the Trump administration, to erase treatments without strong evidence from randomized trials.