CONGRESS TO CLEAR $15 BILLION IN COVID SPENDING — Congress plans to give $15.6 billion to the Biden administration’s fight against Covid-19 in its spending bill, a significant drop from the more than $30 million the White House requested last month, Alice reports. “We cannot let it be said that America, after the third or fourth variant hits our shores, is unprepared, does not have adequate testing, therapeutics, vaccines,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a floor speech Tuesday, urging lawmakers to approve the funding. Lawmakers said the new amount includes $10.6 billion for domestic spending on testing, therapeutics and vaccinations, and $5 billion for global pandemic efforts. Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) told reporters earlier this week that the $15.6 billion is only enough to keep Covid operations funded for the short term, and the administration is likely going to have to come back and ask for more. “They’ve never pretended that they thought this money would last for very long,” Blunt said. That money may get increasingly difficult to get, as Republicans have opposed more spending on a pandemic they have recently voted to declare a thing of the past. OMNIBUS INCLUDES DECADES-OLD BAN ON ABORTION FUNDING DESPITE DEMS’ PLEDGE TO END IT — Congress’ spending bill will include an extension of the longstanding ban on federal funding for abortion despite Democratic promises to repeal it, Alice reports. Blunt, the Senate’s top Republican appropriator for health care funding, told reporters what lawmakers have privately acknowledged for weeks — that to get 60 votes in the Senate, Democrats were forced to concede on the issue. “All the language that has been in the Labor-HHS bill for the last 10 years — that will all be in there,” he said, referring to the Hyde and Helms amendments that prevent Medicaid and other federal health insurance plans from covering abortions. A handful of more conservative Democrats, including Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Tim Kaine (D-Va.), also oppose lifting the funding ban. House Democrats, who passed a budget last year that dropped the ban for the first time since it was enacted in the 1970s, have vowed to keep trying. “It makes me angry,” Rep. Andy Levin (D-Mich.) told reporters. “But I have no great illusions that it will be eliminated in this omnibus bill.” LAWMAKERS AIM TO CLOSE SYNTHETIC NICOTINE LOOPHOLE — Lawmakers slipped legislation into the omnibus funding bill that would grant the FDA the ability to regulate lab-made nicotine, Katherine reports. Currently, the agency’s Center for Tobacco Products has authority only over products with tobacco-derived nicotine — which is how the agency came to regulate e-cigarettes in 2016. WHO ISSUES FIRST-EVER RECOMMENDATIONS ON TELEMEDICINE ABORTIONS — On Tuesday, the World Health Organization released updated guidelines for abortion care that included, for the first time ever, recommendations for abortion pills prescribed via telemedicine, Alice reports. WHO officials said they were motivated to update their guidance based on new data about the safety and effectiveness of abortion pills and the desire to reduce what they say are 25 million unsafe abortions that occur worldwide each year. They particularly noted that telemedicine abortions have played an important role in keeping patients safe during the Covid-19 pandemic when it was riskier to go to a clinic in person. The international body’s recommendations come as several U.S. states controlled by Republicans work to ban the use of telemedicine to obtain abortion pills. Though their new release doesn’t address it directly, WHO’s announcement criticizes governments attempting to block access to abortion, writing that “restrictions are more likely to drive women and girls towards unsafe procedures.”
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