NPR

Biden Administration To Spend $1.7 Billion To Track Spread Of Coronavirus Variants

With a more contagious variant now dominant in the U.S., the country's genomic surveillance capacity is getting a major boost.
Lab Assistant Tammy Brown dons PPE in a lab where she works on preparing positive COVID tests for sequencing to discern variants that are rapidly spreading throughout the U.S. at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland.

The Biden administration will send $1.7 billion to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and local and state governments and other research efforts, starting early next month to find and track coronavirus variants lurking in the U.S. Already, the more contagious UK variant B.1.1.7 is now the dominant strain in this country, fueling surges in Michigan and the Northeast.

"Our goal is to get that money out as fast as possible to help states in all the many ways that they need to be able to expand their own sequencing capacity," said Carole Johnson, the White

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