Biden Signs $1.5T Spending Bill | Omicron’s Evasion Tactics | Russian Disinfo

Plus: The permanent Daylight Saving Time debate

The federal government is finally funded through September 30, 2022. President Biden signed the $1.5 trillion omnibus spending bill this week, which includes $13.6 billion in emergency aid for Ukraine, Forbes senior reporter Jon Ponciano reports. The Department of Health and Human Services got $108.3 billion, which is $11.3 billion more than last year, according to the summary from House Appropriations Committee. That includes $1 billion for the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (aka ARPA-H) to speed up treatments for diseases including ALS, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, and cancer. But it falls well short of the $6.5 billion President Biden was asking for in his proposed budget last April. The National Institutes of Health gets  $45 billion of the total, while the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gets $8.5 billion. One interesting nugget in the omnibus closes a loophole around e-cigarettes and gives the Food and Drug Administration authority to regulate synthetic nicotine as tobacco products.

So what’s missing? Around $15 billion in Covid-related funding for testing, vaccines, treatments and other efforts to combat the ongoing epidemic. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) blamed Republican resistance and called the move “heartbreaking” (even though some of her Democratic compatriots also balked) and she plans to move forward with a separate coronavirus relief bill. 

Russian authorities have woven a web of false information across social media about their forces’ attack on a Ukrainian hospital last week even after earlier attempts by the platforms to halt this disinformation campaign. Nearly 20 Twitter, Facebook and Telegram accounts belonging to Russian embassies have dispensed the disinformation, which seeks to discredit news reports that Russia shelled the Mariupol hospital and its maternity ward, killing two adults and a child and injuring 17. 

Deals Of The Week

Closing The Arena: On Friday, Pfizer completed its $6.7 billion acquisition of Arena Pharmaceuticals, which has a large development pipeline of treatments for several inflammatory diseases, including Crohn’s Disease, dermatitis and ulcerative colitis. 

Nine Figures For RNA: Nutcracker Therapeutics announced Monday that it’s raised a $167 million series C funding round led by Arch Ventures to advance the development of its mRNA manufacturing platform. The company’s raised $241 million to date. 

HIMSS Dispatch: Google Health announced this week it’s teaming up with Meditech to integrate its search and summary capabilities into the electronic health record system. The aim is to help clinicians be able to find patient information faster. 

Noteworthy

Health insurer Anthem is rebranding as “Elevance Health” and it’s the company’s second rebrand in less than a decade. 

Telehealth accounts for more than one-third of outpatient mental health and substance abuse services two years after the start of the pandemic. 

There are 2-3,000 children being treated for cancer right now in Ukraine. Here’s how the world is working to rescue them as Russia shells hospitals. 

Coronavirus Updates

Omicron is the dominant variant of Covid around the world and it has two different major varieties: BA.1 and BA.2.They are closely related but nevertheless have different mutations in the spike protein. There has been some concern among researchers that because the omicron variant is better able to evade the immune system, people who have been previously infected with BA.1 may still be susceptible to BA.2. This is particularly a concern given that in Europe cases are once again on an uptick, mostly being driven by BA.2 infections. 

New research published today in the New England Journal of Medicine provides some evidence that that fear can be put to rest. This small study found that although patients who have received two vaccine doses showed less robust neutralizing antibody responses against both BA.1 and BA.2, the effect was about the same. Patients who received a booster dose showed an elevated antibody response to both varieties of omicron as well, and a small subsection of patients who’d been vaccinated but infected with BA.1 showed a very strong antibody response against BA.2. The researchers say that the findings suggest that “increasing frequency of BA.2 in the context of the BA.1 surge is probably related to increased transmissibility rather than to enhanced immunologic escape.” In other words, BA.2 appears to be more infectious than BA.1, but not because it’s evading the immune response in a superior way. 

In other coronavirus news:

Coronavirus rates have risen at 38% of wastewater sampling sites tracked by the CDC over the last two weeks, possibly warning of new Covid-19 upticks in some parts of the U.S. even as the number of positive tests plummets nationwide.

More than two years after closing things down at the start of the pandemic, New Zealand will be opening itself back up to international travelers in May. 

A new paper finds that babies and young children infected with the omicron Covid variant are more likely to develop severe croup, and over 10% of those who do end up needing hospital care.

Across Forbes

• War, From The Point Of View Of A Ukrainian Teen, Streams Live On TikTok

• Asteroid The Size Of A Grand Piano Strikes Earth And We Knew Exactly Where And When Says NASA

• How This Startup Rebounded To Raise Its Series C Round After 11 Years

What Else We Are Reading

• With new RSV antibody, Sanofi looks to avoid a repeat of a 20-year-old pricing controversy (Endpoints News)
  
  

• Doctors often turn to Google Translate to talk to patients. They want a better option (Stat)

• A more-inclusive genome project aims to capture all of human diversity (Nature)