Federal health officials said on Tuesday that they withdraw $ 11.4 billion in COVID-19-related funds for national and local public health departments and other health organizations throughout the country.
“The COVID-19 Pandemie is over and HHS will not waste billions of taxpayers who respond to a non-existent pandemic that Americans went on years ago,” said the US Department of Health and Human Services in a statement.
The statement said The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Expect to restore the money that starts 30 days after termination reports, which be started on Monday.
Civil servants said the money was largely used for COVID-19 tests, vaccination and global projects, as well as health workers in the community that respond to COVID and a program established in 2021 to tackle COVID health in risky and disadvantaged patients, including those in minority populations. The move was Reported for the first time by NBC News.
Lori Freeman, CEO of the National Association of County & City Health officials, said that much of the financing would end soon. “It ends in the next six months,” she said. “There is no reason – why would you withdraw it now? It is just cruel and unusual behavior.”
In a related step, more than two dozen COVID-related research grants financed by the National Institutes of Health have been canceled. Earlier this month, the Trump administration closed ordering covidtest.govThe site where Americans could have delivered Covid-19 tests to their mailboxes without costs.
Although the Covid Federal Public Health Emergency has ended, the virus still kills Americans: 458 people a week died on average of Covid in the past four weeks, According to CDC data.
HHS would not provide many details about how the federal government expects to get the money back from what the ‘affected recipients’ call. But HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon said in an e -mail: “The $ 11.4 billion is not yet in the funds.”
Freeman said her understanding is that the health departments of the state already had the COVID money.
“The financing was authorized by the congress, was appropriated by the congress and it was actually out of the door in the hands of the beneficiaries,” she says, who decide how to distribute the room.
Part of the COVID money is used to tackle other public health problems, Freeman added. Waste water monitoring that started during Covid, for example, also became important for detecting other diseases.
“It was used in important ways to follow the flu and patterns of new diseases and emerging diseases – and even more recently with The outbreaks of the measles“Freeman said.
Under the first Trump administration and the BIDEN administration, billions of dollars were allocated for COVID response through legislation, including a Covid Relief Bill and the American Rescue Plan Act.
At the moment it is unclear how health departments will be influenced by the withdrawal of funds. But some started looking at what it could mean for them. In the state of Washington, for example, health officials were informed that more than $ 125 million in COVID-related financing was immediately terminated. They judge “the impact” of the actions, they said.
In Los Angeles County, health officials said that they could lose more than $ 80 million in core financing for vaccinations and other services. “Much of this financing supports disease murder, public health labels, outbreak investigations, infection control activities in health care facilities and data parcel,” wrote a departmental officer in an e -mail.
– Laura Unggar
Associated Press reporters Mike Stobbe in New York, Jonel Aleccia in Temecula, California, Carla K. Johnson in Seattle and Amanda Seitz in Washington, DC contributed to this story.