White House Allocates $1.7 Billion to Combat COVID-19 Variants

The Biden administration announced Friday that it is dedicating $1.7 billion in funding from the COVID-19 relief package to ramp up U.S. capabilities for genomic sequencing, an effort to improve the ability of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the nation’s health departments to detect potentially deadly mutations.

According to the White House, $1 billion will go toward expanding genomic sequencing at both the federal and state level. Specifically, the funds will allow the CDC and state health departments to conduct, expand and improve efforts to sequence genomes and identify mutations in the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

“Much of this [sequencing] work is done through CDC partnerships with the laboratory community and through state laboratories, and the funding will support the collection of COVID specimens, the sequencing of COVID viruses and the sharing of the resultant data,” the White House said.

An additional $400 million of the funds will be used for “innovation initiatives,” including the establishment of six Centers of Excellence in Genomic Epidemiology. The centers of excellence will serve as partnerships between academic institutions and state health departments for research into genomic epidemiology, the study of how genetic factors affect health and disease in families and the population, and how such factors interact with the environment.

The final $300 million will build and support the National Bioinformatics Infrastructure, a unified system that will be used to share and analyze sequence data in a way that protects information while still allowing for more informed decision-making. The funding will also support training to increase sequencing in clinical settings.

The administration allocated almost $200 million to increase genomic sequencing capacity at the CDC earlier this year and said the funding helped raise sequencing from 8,000 to 29,000 samples per week.

Great concern has been raised that the SARS-CoV-2 virus could mutate significantly and bypass vaccine protections, and experts are predicting that booster shots and possibly annual doses will likely be required to protect against new viral strains in the future. Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla made such a prediction last week, while former FDA Commissioner David Kessler, who testified before the House’s coronavirus subcommittee, said booster shots should be expected for planning purposes (DID, April 16). — James Miessler