Almost two decades ago, Congress passed the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act (PAHPA) to safeguard our nation and prepare for all-natural disasters and biological, chemical and radiological threats. Considering that then, the provisions enacted in that legislation and subsequent reauthorizations have established important to shoring up our public well being infrastructure and safeguarding our national well being safety.
With PAHPA up for reauthorization once more this year, we applaud the bipartisan leadership of the Senate Overall health, Education, Labor and Pensions and Residence Power & Commerce Committees for starting the important perform of making sure that our nation’s preparedness applications are appropriately funded, sustained and enhanced.
The origins of PAHPA lie in our country’s response to the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, and the anthrax attacks that followed shortly thereafter. We intimately seasoned these attacks, as 1 of the sitting members targeted with anthrax via the mail (Daschle) and the Senate’s public spokesman on anthrax and bioterrorism charged with easing public fears (Frist).
With each other, we worked to construct the legislative framework to respond to this new threat. In 2002, Congress passed the Public Overall health Safety and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act, establishing the Workplace of Public Overall health Emergency Preparedness, which was accountable for coordinating efforts to prepare for bioterrorism and other public well being threats. Nowadays, these efforts are run by the Division of Overall health and Human Service’s Administration for Strategic Readiness and Response.
4 years later, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Congress passed PAHPA to bolster our emergency preparedness and response capabilities by authorizing lots of of the federal government’s biodefense and pandemic preparedness applications, like the agency now identified as the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response, the National Overall health Safety Strategy and the Biomedical Sophisticated Analysis and Improvement Authority. With bipartisan reauthorizations in 2013 and 2019, PAHPA established new applications to boost our nation’s emergency response, including Project BioShield, and enacted measures to strengthen the part of the Meals and Drug Administration in the improvement of healthcare countermeasures.
Considering that PAHPA’s inception and subsequent reauthorizations, each Republicans and Democrats showed overwhelming assistance for strengthening our nation’s preparedness for the complete variety of all-natural or manmade threats and hazards. Safeguarding our nation’s well being and effectively-becoming need to not be a partisan situation, and we contact on our leaders to continue that bipartisan tradition.
This year will mark the initially time Congress will be tasked with reauthorizing PAHPA following the COVID-19 pandemic. Congress should take the lessons we’ve discovered more than the previous 3 years to boost our nation’s preparedness capabilities ahead of the subsequent pandemic — as it is not a query of if, but when, the subsequent 1 will happen. We urge Congress to prevent becoming distracted by previous partisan fights or tangential policy concerns. Our nation’s preparedness is as well critical to jeopardize, and these important applications should not be permitted to lapse.
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Congress has taken meaningful measures to enhance our public well being preparedness all through the COVID-19 pandemic, like the enactment of the bipartisan PREVENT Pandemics Act in final year’s omnibus appropriations package. Congress has shown, time and time once more, that it recognizes the basic significance of fortifying our defenses against disasters and public well being crises. Even so, considerably remains to be performed.
We urge Congress to capitalize on this momentum to bolster our national safety and boost our public well being preparedness by reauthorizing PAHPA ahead of its expiration on Oct. 1.
Former Sen. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), a Bipartisan Policy Center co-founder, served in the Senate from 1987 to 2005 and as Senate majority leader from 2001 to 2003. Former Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), a BPC senior fellow, is a doctor. He served in the Senate from 1995 to 2007 and as Senate majority leader from 2003 to 2007.
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