Is the Covid border policy on its last legs?

By Krista Mahr and Daniel Payne

Presented by SOAR Campaign

PROGRAMMING NOTE: We’ll be off next week for the holidays but back to our normal schedule on Tuesday, Jan. 3.

A controversial public health order used to keep migrants and asylum seekers out of the U.S. could end this week. | Dario Lopez-Mills/AP Photo

DIVISIVE COVID-19 BORDER POLICY COULD END THIS WEEK ... OR NOT — The imminent expiration of a controversial Trump-era border policy Wednesday after several protracted legal battles has prompted fresh concerns over a surge of arrivals at the southern border and a new wave of criticism of President Joe Biden’s immigration policies from both sides of the aisle, POLITICO’s Olivia Olander reports.

How we got here: Title 42 is a section of the 1944 Public Health Service Act that allows the CDC to restrict immigration during public health emergencies. The Trump administration enacted the policy — against top CDC officials’ wishes — early in the pandemic to expedite the return of migrants who arrived at the Mexican border during the pandemic.

The policy has come under fire from public health experts, who say it’s pulled public health into politics, as well as by immigration advocates, who say it runs afoul of international humanitarian law, which forbids sending asylum seekers back to places where they may be in danger.

The Justice Department pushed for the end of Title 42 and has made efforts to speed up processing for asylum seekers as Biden administration officials have scrambled to figure out how to replace the policy. But, earlier this month, the administration appealed a judge’s ruling challenging the expulsion policy’s legality, putting them in a position of defending a strategy they’d long publicly criticized.

On Friday, a group of Republican-led states lost their bid in a federal appeals court to delay the end of the policy. The group could take the matter to the Supreme Court.

What critics say: Lawmakers from several states, and both sides of the aisle, have lashed out at the Biden administration’s handling of the situation in recent days.

Texas lawmakers urged the administration to provide more support at the border, which could face a large influx of migrants that could overwhelm border patrol officials if the order ends.

“They’ve gotta have something in place,” Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Democrat who represents a border area in Texas, said Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation” of the Biden administration’s immigration plans for the Title 42 policy’s end. “With all due respect, I’ve looked at that plan. … It hasn’t worked.”

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), for his part, urged Biden to use all possible executive power to extend the Covid-19 border policy and suggested that Congress could also mandate that the order be extended by law and put a bill on the president’s desk.

WELCOME TO MONDAY PULSE — Don’t buy oysters from southeast Galveston Bay right now, but do read the first sentence of this Forbes story. Got an even better pun? Send us your best, along with news and tips, to kmahr@politico.com and dpayne@politico.com.

TODAY ON OUR PULSE CHECK PODCAST, Lauren Gardner talks with Megan Wilson about why lobbyists are bracing for what comes next when Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) takes the reins of the Senate HELP Committee next month.

A message from SOAR Campaign:

Robert Vanbrocklin is a Marine Corps Veteran who survived a heart attack because an air ambulance was there when he needed it. A new VA proposal could cut access to this lifesaving access, putting millions of Veterans’ lives in grave danger. Learn more.

Past atrocities like Tuskegee, in which the federal government allowed Black men to go untreated for syphilis for decades for research purposes, have fueled distrust of the U.S. health care system. | National Archives via AP

WHY MANY BLACK AMERICANS STILL DON’T TRUST HEALTH CARE IN AMERICA — Countless incidents across the decades of abusive and exploitative practices directed at, or performed on, Black Americans in the name of science have fueled broad distrust in the Black community toward medical professionals, write Joanne Kenen and physician Elaine Batchlor in POLITICO Magazine.

But blaming grim incidents of the past lets the current health care system off the hook. Black patients and their families regularly encounter discrimination while seeking care today, the authors write, perpetuating distrust of the U.S. health care system, which in turn perpetuates health disparities and broader suffering.

A discouragingly long list of statistics demonstrates the toll of this dynamic. Black people have higher rates of uninsurance and less access to care. They’re less likely to have a regular primary care provider, and when they do, they are less likely to be referred to a specialist. Their doctors write about them more critically or skeptically in their medical records. Their pain is undertreated, whether for a child with a broken bone or someone at the end of life. They have higher maternal mortality rates, preterm birth and infant mortality, and higher rates of asthma, diabetes and advanced cancer.

FEWER PARENTS SUPPORT SCHOOL VAX REQUIREMENTS — The number of parents who say children should be required to get a measles vaccination is decreasing, according to a new KFF survey.

The Covid-19 Vaccine Monitor survey found 71 percent of adults say healthy kids should be required to get the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, down from 82 percent in a 2019 Pew Research Center poll. Nearly 30 percent of respondents said parents should have the choice of whether to vaccinate their kids, whatever the public health risk, up from 19 percent in 2019.

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JHA SAYS IT’S SAFE TO GATHER, DESPITE RISING CASES — Ashish Jha, White House Covid-19 response coordinator, said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” that Americans should still gather to celebrate the holidays, despite a rise in respiratory illness and low rates of uptake for the latest Covid vaccine, POLITICO’s Olivia Olander reports.

He said those measures include testing, treating and taking the updated booster and didn’t list masking as part of the current strategy against the virus.

Daily Covid cases, hospitalizations and deaths are up across the country, with average deaths up 63 percent over the previous two weeks with an average of 403 a day. Hospitalizations are highest among older Americans.

Meanwhile, the new boosters are working to prevent severe disease, according to CDC research released on Friday. It shows the bivalent booster reduces hospitalization risk of people who received at least two previous monovalent vaccines. The reduction was greatest in adults 65 and older.

The study also found that the longer the time between the monovalent dose and the booster doses, the more effective the boosters were, likely a result of the monovalent vaccine’s waning efficacy over time.

POLITICO AT CES 2023 : We are bringing a special edition of our Digital Future Daily newsletter to Las Vegas to cover CES 2023. The newsletter will take you inside the largest and most influential technology event on the planet, featuring every major and emerging industry in the technology ecosystem gathered in one place. The newsletter runs from Jan. 5-7 and will focus on the public policy related aspects of the event. Sign up today to receive exclusive coverage of CES 2023.

NIH SPENDS BIG ON NEW HARM-REDUCTION RESEARCH — The National Institutes of Health has launched a research network to test the efficacy of harm-reduction services and tools for deadly drug overdoses.

The project will award up to $36 million over five years to nine research projects and a coordinating center. It’s the largest pool of funding that NIH has directed at studying a variety of harm-reduction strategies, which includes increasing access to tools like naloxone, the drug used to reverse opioid overdoses, and developing smartphone-based programs to help people in rural areas connect with harm-reduction services.

A message from SOAR Campaign:

If the VA moves forward with cutting its reimbursement rate, air medical bases will be forced to shut their doors leaving 4.7 million rural Veterans without access to this emergency service. SOAR is urging the VA to stop this rule from moving forward. Our Veterans are counting on us to preserve access to these lifesaving flights. Learn more.

The Washington Post reports on how the current shortage of pediatric beds in hospitals has been decades in the making.

The Los Angeles Times reports how cannabis companies and investors have been underwriting UCLA research on pot’s health benefits.

The Wall Street Journal explores how online mental health care isn’t working for everyone.

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