POLL: PANDEMIC RELIEF BILL, DELTA VARIANT BREAK THROUGH THE NOISE — In yet another year of constant coronavirus news, three major events caught voters’ attention the most: Biden’s March signing of the $1.9 trillion relief package; the summer news of the Delta variant; and the February milestone of more than 500,000 deaths in America, according to the latest Morning Consult/POLITICO poll. Yet news seemed to resonate less with respondents over the year: About 34 percent of voters said they’d seen, read or heard “a lot” about pandemic news from January to March, which dropped to 26 percent from April to June. Overall, only 28 percent of voters said they heard “a lot” about Covid-19 on average. And it mostly didn’t sway vaccine opinions. While getting more Americans vaccinated (and boosted) is a top priority for the Biden administration, no one news event in 2021 seemed to move the needle substantially — even the summer Delta surge and FDA’s approval of the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine. Instead, Morning Consult reports that “vaccine willingness slowly ticked up this spring and summer before grinding to a halt in August.” Stories resonated along party lines. Most Democrats said they heard a lot about Biden’s announcement that all adults would be eligible for vaccination by April 19 while only 26 percent of Republicans said the same. Republicans did, however, say they’d heard plenty about other topics, like former President Donald Trump encouraging vaccination in March or then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo downplaying Covid-19 deaths in nursing homes. The poll was conducted among 2,000 Americans between Jan. 15 and Dec. 6, 2021, with a 2 percent margin of error. It’s the latest in an annual series on news consumption that stuck with voters. SENATE TWEAKS SOCIAL SPENDING BILL — The Senate Finance and HELP Committees released their pieces of Democrats’ $1.7 trillion social spending package over the weekend, and the updated bill text includes a few important changes from the version the House passed in November, Alice reports. Among the changes: Hospitals’ cuts reversed. The Finance Committee’s version scraps a planned cut to hospitals’ disproportionate share hospital allotments, or DSH, in states that haven’t expanded Medicaid. House Democrats had argued that the reductions — key to their efforts to control the price tag of the health care portions of the bill — were justified because a different piece of the legislation enrolling people in the Medicaid gap in free Obamacare plans would save those hospitals so much that it would more than make up for the cuts. Hospitals lobbied heavily against the cuts anyway and got allies on their side, such as Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.). Generic drugmaker perks. Some saw lobbying pay off in the updated bill, which has new carveouts exempting some generic medicines from the inflation rebates under Medicare Part D. The bill text also includes some pieces that could change in the coming weeks — either due to the parliamentarian’s ruling or opposition from the party’s conservative wing. For instance, both paid family and medical leave and the addition of Medicare hearing benefits remain in the bill, though Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) has said he doesn’t support their inclusion. MODERNA PLEDGES MORE DOSES TO THE WORLD — The vaccine maker will allocate another 150 million doses to COVAX next year, under a new deal that was brokered in part by the Biden administration. The agreement, first reported last month by POLITICO, would deliver the additional doses to COVAX between April and September. That comes on top of the 500 million doses that Moderna previously pledged to supply to the vaccine equity effort. The deal ends months of difficult negotiations. The U.S. had to intervene in the talks after Moderna sought to charge higher prices, and at one point went as far as publicly pressuring the company to devote more of its supply to low-income countries. But Moderna’s total commitment is still far short of what is needed to inoculate the world, especially now that Omicron’s emergence means everyone will likely need booster shots. The company has also only delivered a fraction of the number of doses pledged; under the new deal, Moderna will send 50 million doses to COVAX by the end of the year, up from the 34 million it originally planned to deliver. | 
