The pandemic relief bill contains funds for research and international public health programs

What’s in the huge pandemic relief bill for science? $1.9 trillion measure expected to become law by Friday Science | AAAS

A massive $1.9 trillion pandemic relief bill now on its way to President Joe Biden’s desk will deliver cash to a wide array of groups—including the scientific community.

The U.S. House of Representatives today approved final passage of the bill, which Biden is expected to sign on Friday, on a 220–211 party-line vote.

The bill is designed primarily to address the economic damage caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and accelerate the distribution of vaccines and treatments that have proved effective against the pandemic coronavirus.

In addition to direct cash payments to millions of U.S. residents, the bill includes nearly $60 billion for vaccine and treatment development, manufacturing, distribution, and tracking, as well as COVID-19 testing and contact tracing.

It also includes $11 billion that will go to international groups and foreign governments addressing the pandemic and other public health threats, including $3.5 billion to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and $250 million to the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the primary U.S. aid program to address HIV/AIDS.

The Democratic-controlled Congress rejected pleas by higher education lobbyists for tens of billions of dollars for federal research agencies to help universities recoup the losses to their research programs. But legislators did include some provisions to bolster pandemic-related research activities, including:

• $1.75 billion for efforts to sequence and track variants of the pandemic coronavirus. Researchers fear some of these variants could make some vaccines and treatments less effective. The funding comes on top of $200 million that Congress approved in late 2020 for variant sequencing.
• $600 million for the National Science Foundation. The agency, which has a current budget of $8.2 billion, was given a relatively free hand in choosing how to allocate the additional research funds, including providing greater support for training the next generation of scientists and engineers. ...