The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced it will convene a virtual meeting of the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) on Wednesday, April 6 to discuss considerations for future COVID-19 vaccine booster doses and the process for selecting specific strains of the SARS-CoV-2 virus for COVID-19 vaccines to address current and…
Read More »This week, Moderna announced it plans over the coming weeks to submit an emergency use authorization (EUA) request to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for a two-dose COVID-19 mRNA vaccine for children six months to six years old. The vaccine for children is a quarter of the dose of Moderna’s adult COVID-19 vaccine…
Read More »The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) recently announced that additional disaster funding is available to all states, tribal nations, and territories with presidential major disaster and emergency declarations issued in 2020 and 2021. President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. signed into law the 2022 Consolidated Appropriations Act (H.R. 2471) last week, granting a minimum 90 percent…
Read More »On Monday, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recognized the one-year anniversary of the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) Health Center COVID-19 Vaccine Program which has provided COVID-19 vaccines directly to thousands of HRSA-supported health center sites nationwide. To date, health centers have administered more than 20 million vaccines in underserved…
Read More »The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), through the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), this week announced more than $413 million in Provider Relief Fund (PRF) payments to more than 3,600 providers throughout the country. The latest round of funding is the fourth round, totaling nearly $12 billion that has been distributed…
Read More »The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) this week released, on the 12th anniversary of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), a new report highlighting the successes of the ACA and key health coverage gains made under the initiative. The “State of the ACA” report, published by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services…
Read More »This week, U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra and U.S. Education Department (ED) Secretary Miguel Cardona launched a joint-department effort to expand school-based health services in an effort to ensure children have the health services and supports necessary to build resilience and thrive. Under the joint effort, HHS and ED will provide…
Read More »This week, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration took a series of actions as part of its work to ensure any electronic nicotine delivery system (ENDS) products available on the market have demonstrated that marketing of the products is appropriate for the protection of public health. The FDA authorized several tobacco-flavored ENDS products from Logic…
Read More »Preliminary data published this week from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) explore the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on tuberculosis (TB) in the United States. Reported TB disease diagnoses decreased 20 percent in 2020 and remained 13 percent lower in 2021 than TB disease diagnoses made prior to the COVID-19 pandemic….
Read More »This week, the White House sent a letter to Congress reiterating the need for additional emergency COVID-19 response funds and outlining consequences of a lack of funding. According to the White House, if funds are not appropriated by Congress soon, the U.S. will be unequipped to handle a future pandemic surge. Specifically, if immediate funding…
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