The committee lays retired 30 recommendations for protecting the state during aboriginal pandemics, ranging from replenishing the Strategic National Stockpile to passing authorities to amended probe and attraction of agelong Covid to enacting cosmopolitan paid sick and household permission for U.S. workers.
Yet the study comes arsenic Congress is poised to repetition immoderate of the precise mistakes the committee highlights. Partisan warring appears apt to doom the Biden administration’s petition for $10 cardinal to combat the Covid-19 pandemic — backing the medication says is indispensable to support vaccines, tests and therapeutics escaped for the nationalist and proceed processing amended treatments for the virus.
A bipartisan pandemic preparedness measure that would bolster nationalist wellness staff, information infrastructure and agelong Covid probe is in information of being near out of a year-end package.
“The coronavirus situation volition not beryllium the past nationalist wellness exigency oregon economical situation that we confront,” warned committee Chair Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), who described the study arsenic “as a guidepost for aboriginal legislators arsenic good arsenic for the American people.”
What it says: In summation to summarizing the committee’s erstwhile 37 reports — which impeach the Trump medication of manipulating wellness data, Emergent BioSolution’s vaccine manufacturing problems and landlords’ eviction practices, among different topics — the last study includes caller accusation from the last investigations committee Democrats launched this autumn into spreaders of coronavirus misinformation, and Covid deaths successful for-profit nursing location chains.
The study examines however doctors and conspiracy theorists affiliated with the tract SpeakWithAnMD.com profited from promoting misinformation astir the pandemic and prescribing off-label drugs similar hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.
From April 2021 to September 2021, they found, “more than 480,000 prospective patients registered for accounts connected SpeakWithAnMD.com’s telemedicine level seeking consultations.” From July 2021 to September 2021 prospective patients look to person paid much than $6.7 cardinal for consultations, according to the report.
Approximately 72,000 radical paid $90 for archetypal telephone consultations, and galore had followup consultations that outgo $60, the study said. One probe recovered that immoderate individuals were charged for consultations that ne'er occurred.
The committee’s proposal to combat this benignant of cognition successful the aboriginal is vague: “Explore opportunities to bounds the dispersed of harmful misinformation.”
What’s next: The committee is scheduled to clasp its last proceeding of the twelvemonth connected Wednesday, wherever members volition statement and ballot connected the report’s recommendations.
The proceeding volition besides diagnostic grounds from: Rick Bright, erstwhile lawman adjunct caput for preparedness and effect astatine HHS; Kizzmekia Corbett, adjunct prof of immunology and infectious diseases astatine Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and erstwhile vaccine researcher astatine the NIH; Rebecca Dixon, enforcement manager of the National Employment Law Project; and Ngozi Ezike, CEO of Sinai Chicago and erstwhile manager of the Illinois Department of Public Health.