It includes $20 billion to beef up the speed and scale of the national COVID vaccination program, $50 billion to expand testing, which officials said was critical to the reopening of schools and businesses, $30 billion for the disaster relief fund, which includes providing protective gear to frontline workers, and funding 100,000 public health workers to work in local communities and expanding health services for populations currently underserved.
BIDEN'S COVID RELIEF PLAN TO COST 'TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS'.Biden – as he received his second COVID vaccination shot on Monday – said that on Thursday he would be “laying out the plan, the cost of how I want to proceed, the cost of what we have to do to be able to get the entire COVID operation up and running.”.Senior Biden administration officials highlighted that they and the president-elect have “done a lot of consultation with members of Congress and we have spent a lot of time speaking to and listening to governors and mayors and we think there is a broad understanding of the urgency of the moment, of the immediacy of the crisis, and the need to act and so we’re hopeful that the ideas that are laid out here and the action that is reflected here is something that there’s a lot of support for.”.Looking to the long-stalled COVID relief plan that was passed by Congress late last month – which included $600 payments to Americans – the officials their “strategy is to make the case clearly to the American people about the immediacy of the need and to work to try to build on the spirit of bipartisanship that helped to bring together action in December.The senior Biden administration officials didn’t say when they hoped for congressional passage of the plan, but they stressed that the “need is immediateThey also emphasized that the $1.9 trillion rescue plan is the first of two proposals, and that Biden would unveil a jobs and economic recovery plan in the coming weeksAs he campaigned for the White House last year, Biden pledged to battle the pandemic more seriously than Trump and promised to have a plan ready to go at the start of his administrationMarket data provided by Factset