The USNS Comfort arrived in New York Harbor on March 30, 2020, to help with an overwhelming COVID-19 outbreak. New legislation in Congress seeks to codify what was learned during the pandemic to improve preparations. U.S. Navy photo.
WASHINGTON — The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee recently marked up the PREVENT Pandemics Act—a bipartisan piece of legislation combining ideas from over 37 different bills and dozens of legislators. The goal of the legislation is to strengthen the United States’ public health system by learning from what worked during the nation’s COVID-19 response and what did not.
One of the main components of the bill is to strengthen the medical supply chain so that the shortages that hospitals faced, both in the government and private sector, early in the pandemic would not be repeated.
“During this pandemic, access to medical products such as lifesaving drugs, ventilators, testing components and protective equipment like N95 masks has been a constant challenge,” committee Chair Patty Murray (D-WA) explained last month at the bill’s mark-up. “[The PREVENT Act] strengthens the medical supply chain; supports domestic manufacturing; improves management of the Strategic National Stockpile; provides more transparency to identify potential shortfalls; and strengthens FDA’s enforcement of counterfeit medical devices like fake N95 masks.”
The bill also focuses on how to prevent burnout among healthcare workers during future medical emergencies. The act includes loan repayment programs for public health workers; community health worker grants for underserved communities; grants to improve trauma care; and increased educational opportunities for people seeking careers in a number of physical and occupational therapy fields.
The bill also would allow HHS to hire up to 500 employees per year to address public health emergencies, bypassing the normal hiring process in areas where the agency was experiencing a shortage.
Inspired by the speed at which the COVID-19 vaccines were developed, the bill establishes the Advanced Research Projects Authority for Health (ARPA-H), which was proposed by President Joe Biden last year. ARPA-H would be a component of NIH tasked with building high-risk, high-reward capabilities to drive medical breakthroughs.
“I was pleased to work with [Murray] to authorize ARPA-H so that we established a framework by which to advance breakthrough technologies that will revolutionize biomedical science,” declared Ranking Republican Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC). “By partnering with innovators across sectors and fostering an environment where innovation is the norm, I hope that this will result in the discovery of platform technology to treat and cure many diseases.”
The legislation also recognizes that previous breakthroughs, including the COVID-19 vaccines, have been less available to communities of color, people with disabilities and rural communities. The bill includes provisions to: develop best practices in demographic data collection; modernize clinical trials; ensure tribes have direct access to federal medical supplies and equipment; and generally identify gaps in the pandemic response that resulted in these communities being underserved.
Finally, the bill calls for the creation of an independent task force modeled after the 9/11 Commission to conduct a comprehensive investigation into the nation’s response to the pandemic and issue recommendations.
In his opening statement during the mark-up hearing, Burr urged the other senators on the committee not to clutter up the bill with amendments, consequently slowing the process and harming its changes of being passed. “I would like to ask my colleagues to resist the temptation to add legislation that is not related to preparedness policies in this bill. This legislation should stay focused on the important task at hand,” he said.
He also took the opportunity to chastise the current and previous administrations for failing to provide critical information to the committee in a timely manner.
“We agree on this side of the aisle that more funding is needed, but also more information,” Burr said. “I’ve tried for months to get this administration, not unlike the last administration, to provide details to oversight committees. There’s no reason this committee shouldn’t understand how many vaccines do we currently have in inventory. How many therapeutics do we have in inventory? How many home tests do we have in inventory? These are reasonable things for a committee to know. In order to make decisions about spending, we need a baseline. [When COVID came] none of us knew what was in the National Stockpile. None of us knew who was in charge. These are all things that we’ve got time to sort out now.”
