COVID CONFUSION IN THE WORKPLACE — The Department of Labor has yet to say how far businesses can go to incentivize the shots without tripping anti-discrimination laws, and whether certain perks amount to coercing employees into getting vaccinated or disclosing their vaccination status, POLITICO’s Rebecca Rainey reports. That ambiguity has undermined Biden’s call for employers to offer paid time off for workers to recover from the shot, and heightened the scrutiny on the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the agency responsible for issuing workplace guidelines. OSHA is finalizing long-delayed safety rules that would last through November — and are expected to include mask requirements, among others. Yet the specifics are critical, and could determine whether businesses follow through with reopening or decide it’s not worth the hassle. Particularly fraught is whether the OSHA rules allow for some relaxation of mask mandates or distancing requirements if enough employees are vaccinated, incentivizing businesses to suss out how much of their workforce is vaccinated while also not violating privacy laws. HOW BIDEN’s PATENT PLAY IS REVERBERATING ABROAD — The White House’s surprise support for waiving coronavirus vaccine patents prompted some eye-rolls overseas, where it’s thrust the European Union into a tight diplomatic spot. U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai’s announcement has also exposed the bloc’s own failures in aiding the global vaccination effort, POLITICO Europe’s Jakob Hanke Vela reports. In response, European leaders sought to downplay the U.S.’s action and shift the focus to Europe’s ongoing effort to ship doses to needy countries around the world. Junior Europe Minister Clément Beaune, for example, dismissed the U.S.’s openness to patent waivers as a “very political move,” while noting the Biden administration has yet to send any significant amount of doses abroad. The White House has shared roughly 4 million shots with Mexico and Canada; it's committed to sending another 60 million abroad by July 4, but has yet to say where those will go. And while European Commission President Usula von der Leyen allowed that the EU has not done nearly enough on the world stage, she also called for the U.S. to ramp up its vaccine exports. But the chilliest response so far has come from Germany. The country’s government blasted the Biden administration for a position that it warned could undermine pharmaceutical innovation, arguing that “the limiting factor in vaccine manufacturing is production capacity and high quality standards, not patents.” CMS BOOSTS PAY FOR COVID TREATMENTS — CMS on Thursday set Medicare's national average payment rate for monoclonal antibody treatments at $450 for most health care settings, up from $310. The agency will pay even more when the treatment is done in a patient’s home, or in other “lodging” such as hotels, homeless shelters or aboard cruise ships — a move that could encourage greater use of antibody therapies to combat the virus. There are currently few Covid therapies on the market, but those that are — such as Gilead’s remdesivir — can be complicated to administer, which has so far limited their use outside of hospitals. | 
