Three people with knowledge of the matter explained to Politico that the decision, which has not been made final, would guarantee that federal measures defend some form of health coverage, access to vaccines, and treatments.
"COVID is not over," one senior Biden official declared. "The pandemic is not over. It doesn't make sense to lift this [declaration] given what we're seeing on the ground in terms of cases."
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If the suggested extension goes through, the Department of Health and Human Services will proceed the declaration past the November midterms and probably into 2023.
Yet an HHS spokesperson refused to remark on the matter. Nonetheless, others close to the administration warned the situation might change ahead of the Aug. 15 deadline for deciding whether to extend the measure.
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The Biden administration has increasingly declared that COVID vaccines and boosters enable Americans to live with the virus in relative safety. Yet this assertion arrives at a time when caseloads are topping 100,000 a day.
"It will end whenever the emergency ends," one senior administration official announced.
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Yet with vaccines and treatments already widely distributed, no expectation remains that the administration can stop COVID; this arrives when different health officials, over the last several months, have discussed a phasing-out from the emergency declaration and what it should look like.
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The federal government has continuously renewed the declaration since the first Covid cases hit the U.S. in January 2020. And while HHS has promised to give states 60 days’ notice before letting it expire, the administration has declined to set out specific criteria for phasing out its emergency authorities.
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The debate around proceeding the declaration, however, has grown more contentious. With vaccines and treatments widely distributed and no remaining expectation the administration can eradicate Covid, health officials over the last several months have increasingly discussed when that phase-out should take place, and what it should look like.
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In the most recent round of deliberations, some officials have floated enabling the declaration to expire in October, contingent on the administration successfully rolling out its next round of vaccines and averting a fall surge in cases, two people familiar with the matter announced. An end of the emergency declaration this year could further provide a pre-election demonstration that the nation has, indeed, entered a new phase of the pandemic fight.
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Yet such a move would probably spark fierce pushback from the health industry and invite denouncement from public health groups on the front lines of efforts to combat the virus and vaccinate more Americans.
Some health officials also feared that formally ending the public health emergency would dampen any remaining sense of urgency in Congress to allocate further money toward the Covid response.
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