WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) joined Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), along with U.S. Representatives Ami Bera, MD (D-CA) and Scott Peters (D-CA), in introducing bicameral legislation to dramatically scale up efforts to track coronavirus variants.
The Tracking COVID-19 Variants Act would provide $2 billion for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to support a robust, national sequence-based surveillance program that is vital to protecting public health and combatting the next phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, while preparing for emerging threats.
“There’s no mistaking that we have not been doing enough at the federal level to protect people against COVID, and the emergence of variants has only increased the urgency to act,” said Brown. “This legislation will give CDC access to the resources needed to track variants and protect Americans. Without a national response, we will continue to fall behind.”
The U.S. is currently conducting sequence-based surveillance of approximately 0.3 percent of coronavirus cases, lagging far behind other nations. It is critical that the U.S. scale up its efforts to survey at least 15 percent of cases to better grasp new and emerging variants, understand their origins, and develop mitigation strategies. The virus has changed, and will continue to change as more Americans are vaccinated. President Biden’s American Rescue Plan includes a focus on identifying and addressing emerging strains of COVID-19, and funding to dramatically increase our country’s sequencing, surveillance, and outbreak analytics capacity at the levels demanded by the crisis.
The Tracking COVID-19 Variants Act would provide $2 billion in funding for the CDC to:
- Support CDC’s Advanced Molecular Detection (AMD) Initiative, which is currently working to support the integration of genomics and genomic epidemiology, including national sequence-based surveillance conducted as part of the public-private partnership SPHERES (Sequencing for Public Health Emergency Response, Epidemiology, and Surveillance).
- Require CDC to immediately issue national guidance supporting scientific collaboration around viral sequencing as a key strategy to our nation’s COVID-19 response, including guidance related to the sharing of specimens obtained from patients, and the appropriate use of viral sequence data derived from these specimens.
- Provide technical assistance and guidance and award grants or cooperative agreements to State, local, Tribal, or territorial public health departments to increase their capacity to conduct genetic sequencing of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. This funding may also be used to carry out activities to enhance the informatics capabilities of the current public health workforce and expand the numbers of qualified public health informaticians available.
The legislation also expands the existing data linkage program at the National Center for Health Statistics to allow for the temporary linkage of data across multiple sources, including genomic data, clinical data, and epidemiological data for the purposes of public health research.
The Tracking COVID-19 Variants Act is cosponsored in the Senate by Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Ed Markey (D-MA) and Gary Peters (D-MI).
More information on the legislation is available here.