Joe Biden is planning to spend $5 billion on a new program designed to further the development of the “next generation” of COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics.
White House officials this week in an interview with the Washington Post revealed that Biden’s new project, dubbed “Project NextGen,” will serve as a successor program to former President Donald Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed” launched in March of 2020.
Like Warp Speed, Biden’s Project NextGen will receive funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, and will be ran by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
According to Reuters, the HHS “will coordinate across various government agencies and private-sector actors, covering “all phases of development from lab research and clinical trials to delivery.””
“Scientists, public heath [sic] experts and politicians have called for the initiative, warning that existing therapies have steadily lost their effectiveness and that new ones are needed,” the Washington Post reported.
The project plans to develop a nasal COVID vaccine designed to prevent infection, which the current jabs fail to do. Additionally, the Biden administration wants to create “broader” vaccines that last longer and cover more variants.
Funding will also be used to develop more variant resistant monoclonal antibodies, the Biden administration claims.
Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist who worked with the Biden administration to develop the new program, told USA Today that he believes the current COVID jabs are “really good, but they’re not that great.”
“There is a substantial amount of work (to be done) to take these good vaccines and hopefully achieve better vaccines,” he added.
After declaring in September of last year that the “pandemic is over,” Biden in April signed a bipartisan Congressional resolution officially ending the COVID-19 emergency in the United States.
In an interview with 60 Minutes, Joe Biden says "the pandemic is over." pic.twitter.com/JEEKdvQvXX
— Marie Oakes (@TheMarieOakes) September 19, 2022
“The pandemic is over,” Biden said on 60 Minutes. “We still have a problem with covid. We’re still doing a lot of work on it… but the pandemic is over. If you notice, no-one is wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape. And so I think it’s changing, and I think this is a perfect example of it.”
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