President Joe Biden on Monday signed a bill that terminates the coronavirus national emergency, which was initially enacted by former President Donald Trump in March 2020, according to a White House announcement.
Biden had extended the emergencies since Jan 2021.
“On Monday, April 10, 2023, the President signed into law: H.J.Res. 7, which terminates the national emergency related to the COVID-19 pandemic,” the announcement reads.
While the Biden administration had not planned to pull back the national emergency declaration until May 11, House Republicans proposed bills to end it earlier.
The bill was introduced by Arizona Representative Paul Gosar (R) and received a passing 229-197 vote in the House in February.
In the Senate, the bill passed 68-23.
The national emergency declaration gave the federal government additional powers to respond to the pandemic, including the ability to waive certain regulations and redirect funding to pandemic-related efforts.
Despite Biden ending the national emergency, his administration is launching a $5 billion-plus program to accelerate the development of new coronavirus vaccines and treatments, The Washington Post (WaPo) reports.
Biden’s “Project Next Gen” will follow President Donald Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed,” which sped up the usually-lengthy vaccine development process to produce the COVID vaccine.
Project Next Gen will “take a similar approach to partnering with private-sector companies to expedite development of vaccines and therapies,” according to WaPo. “Scientists, public heath experts and politicians have called for the initiative, warning that existing therapies have steadily lost their effectiveness and that new ones are needed.”
The fresh multi-billion-dollar push for new COVID vaccines comes despite research published in February in The Lancet confirming that natural immunity acquired from a previous coronavirus infection can provide better protection against severe illness and death than vaccines, which pose their health risks.
The study authors said their analysis of the available data “suggests that the level of protection afforded by previous infection is at least as high, if not higher than that provided by two-dose vaccination using high-quality mRNA vaccines (Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech).”
