Source: Mary Ellen McIntire, ROLL CALL, 4/16/21


The Biden administration will direct $1.7 billion to sequence the emerging variants of the virus that causes COVID-19, the White House announced Friday. New variants of the coronavirus make up about half of the current COVID-19 cases in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “The emergence of variants underscores the critical need for rapid and ongoing genomic surveillance,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky told reporters in a press briefing.

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