I will live blog the VRBPAC meeting tomorrow. According to the NYT, the USG is "redesigning annual Covid booster shots to target newer variants of Omicron."

A reformulated shot will most likely roll out by early September. And $10 billion per year is not enough for pandemic preparedness.

From the NY Times on May 10, 2023

For now, vaccines will continue to be free because the government has a stockpile of them. When they move to the commercial market later this year, they will remain free for most people with insurance. For the uninsured, the Biden administration plans to spend more than $1 billion on a new program to offer free shots, though questions remain about how the initiative will work.

It is unclear when Paxlovid, the leading antiviral medication for Covid-19, will move to the commercial market. For now, it will also remain free because of the government’s stockpile, though patients may have to pick up part of the cost once the supply is depleted.

and it seems the US public health leaders have been given their talking points and we have simply not been spending enough on public health, they say, using military analogies.

But while the military builds warships and fighter jets in peacetime, public health has long been caught in what experts call a cycle of panic and neglect.

The Covid Crisis Group, a panel of experts led by Philip D. Zelikow, a University of Virginia historian who ran the commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks, says Congress and policymakers must view infectious disease threats through a national security lens. The group spent two years investigating the pandemic response and recently published its findings in a book, “Lessons From the Covid War.”

Top federal health officials said the military readiness analogy was apt…

Instead, Biden administration officials say they are scrounging for money for pandemic preparedness…

Yet in fact the government was spending over $10 Billion a year for pandemic preparedness before the pandemic, according to the Heath Security group at Johns Hopkins. This graph was notably missing from the NY Times article which would have allowed citizens to judge for themselves whether the government was scrounging for funds…

According to Kizzmekia Corbett, in the May 11, 2023 issue of TIME magazine, we really need tons more money to prepare. Kizzmekia was the black NIAID scientist who was credited with a major discovery that made the COVID shots possible.

"I’d like to see us invest in each of the 23 viral families that infect humans. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) should lay out checkpoints: key scientific milestones we need to hit for each viral family, so we’re ready to move rapidly in case a pathogen emerges and begins to spread. The investment would be significant, to be sure. But the total cost would be far smaller than COVID-19’s estimated $16 trillion drag on America’s economy and the enormous toll of lives lost."

To encourage innovation, the Biden administration intends to spend $5 billion on a new initiative, called Project Next Gen, to develop a new generation of Covid-19 vaccines and treatments. Officials have said little about how that money will be spent. The Biden administration could not persuade Congress to pay for the program, said Dawn O’Connell, the top emergency preparedness official at the Department of Health and Human Services.

“We requested and requested and requested supplemental funds to be able to do Next Gen,” she said. When the money was not forthcoming from Congress, federal health officials decided to use unspent coronavirus response funds.

Guess they didn’t have to scrounge after all.