CDC Rescinds Around $11 Billion in Funding for COVID Response

The CDC is pulling back $11.4 billion in funds “allocated in response to the [COVID-19] pandemic to state and community health departments, nongovernment organizations, and international recipients.” NBC News has the story.

HHS Director of Communications Andrew Nixon said in a statement that “HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago.” This comes despite the fact that over 1.2 million people in the U.S. have died from COVID, with hundreds of people continuing to die every week and “long COVID symptoms [continuing] to cause debilitating medical problems in some cases.”

The funds in question were “largely being used for COVID testing, vaccination, community health workers, and initiatives to address COVID health disparities among high-risk and underserved populations, including racial and ethnic minority populations and rural communities, as well as global COVID projects.”

CIDRAP reported on a statement given by the Minnesota Department of Health commissioner. The state health department had $226 million in COVID-related grants terminated; the commissioner called the cuts “sudden and unexpected,” cautioning that it will “take time to figure out all of the impacts of this action,” labeling it a “tremendous loss.” Additionally, officials in Illinois were told that $125 million in promised funding was being rescinded. The funds were supposed to go toward responding to COVID and “other infectious diseases, including measles and H5N1 avian flu.”

Plus, COVID-19-related research grants made by NIAID are “in the process of being terminated.” A program from the NIH that promised to “spend $577 million on efforts to develop new drugs to treat COVID-19 is also terminated” in this round of cuts. The HHS’s Office of Long COVID Research and Practice will also be shuttered, despite HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s promise to “continue efforts to better understand and mitigate the impact of long COVID” in his confirmation hearing.