WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - The President's Budget for Fiscal Year 2023 includes a $88.2 billion request for funding various U.S. Departments and agencies to prepare for future biological threats in support of objectives within U.S. national and global biodefense and pandemic preparedness strategies and plans.
The budget request proposes mandatory funding, available over five years, to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Department of State, the Office of
the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Food
and Drug Administration (FDA), and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
The Budget includes $40 billion for the HHS ASPR to invest in advanced development and manufacturing of countermeasures for high priority threats and viral families,
including vaccines, therapeutics, diagnostics, and personal protective equipment (PPE). This funding will also support manufacturing capacity to surge countermeasure
production in response to future biological threats, INCLUDING from COVID variants.
The Budget provides $28 billion for the CDC to strengthen the public health infrastructure and early warning capabilities.
The Budget provides $12.1 billion to NIH for research and development of vaccines, diagnostics, and therapeutics against high priority biological threats, including safe and secure laboratory capacity and clinical trial infrastructure.
$1.8 billion has been earmarked to enable the CDC and NIH to expand efforts to strengthen biosafety and biosecurity practices domestically and globally.
The Budget includes $6.5 billion in mandatory funding for the Department of State and USAID to make transformative investments in pandemic and biological threat preparedness globally, which complements ongoing U.S. investments to also strengthen health systems.
In the Budget, President Joe Biden announced new pandemic subsidies for large businesses.
The United States is the worst-affected country in the world by the pandemic, causing almost a million deaths and billions of dollars in economic losses.
With 42967 new cases of coronavirus infection recorded from across the country on Monday, the national total increased to 79,997,022, according to the latest data from Johns Hopkins University.
With 985 deaths reporting on the same day, total U.S. Covid casualties reached 977,944.
There is a 40 percent fall in Covid deaths and 11 percent decrease in cases in the last fortnight.
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