Biden administration allocates $306m in its final days for bird flu response
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‘Critical’ funding comes as H5N1 outbreak intensifies and will go toward developing a response to the virus. The Biden administration, in its waning days, is allocating $306m to respond to public health threats from bird flu, a move applauded by public health experts as the H5N1 outbreak continues to expand among people and animals in the US.
As the outbreak intensifies, the US should continue investing in pandemic response like wastewater monitoring, vaccine manufacturing and distribution, rapid test development and other pressing needs to curtail the outbreak, experts say. But it’s not clear whether the incoming Trump administration will continue such work.
About $183m of the new funding will go toward pandemic preparedness writ large, especially treatment, at the regional, state and local level, while $103m will be spent monitoring people who have been exposed to the bird flu virus. Another $8m will go to test manufacturing and distribution, and $11m is set aside for research on how to combat H5N1.
“These investments are critical to continuing our disease surveillance, laboratory testing and monitoring efforts alongside our partners at USDA,” Xavier Becerra, secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), said in a statement.
The new funding will be distributed within weeks and because the money has already been appropriated, it cannot legally be reversed if the incoming Trump administration lays out diverging priorities. While the Biden administration has spent about $1.8bn responding to bird flu so far, the majority of those funds have gone to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) to address the outbreak among animals.
