Becerra: COVID remains dangerous, spurs health care change

Xavier Becerra, secretary of Health and Human Services, said that despite substantial progress in combatng the coronavirus, it remains dangerous.

“COVID is still with us," Becerra said at a Feb. 8 National Press Club Headliners luncheon. "It’s still killing hundreds of people a day.”

Becerra said he is concerned that because of congressional budget cuts, trials of new vaccines have been limited. The  coronavirus “could mutate into something very dangerous at any time," he said.

The reduction in vaccine trials is making it more difficult to determine which vaccine will be most effective in dealing with the next generation of the coronavirus next fall, Becerra said. 

“We’re doing far less” than in the first phase of vaccine development several years ago, Becerra said, “because we don’t have the resources to have that big of a [testing] universe, but we’re doing what we have to do.”

He is hopeful that international negotiations will succeed in sharing the cost of COVID-vaccine research and development.

“I think at the end of the day, we can get countries around the globe to say yes” to sharing vaccine development costs and data, Becerra said.

He added: “One way or the other, we’re going to take care of our own people.You [have to] take care of your family before you take care of your neighbors.”

The pandemic had provided the opportunity “to make a big change in our health care system” that President Joe Biden has seized, Becerra said. Nearly 700 million COVID injections have been administered without any charge to recipients.

The proportion of Americans without health insurance has dropped to about 7 percent, he said, and the number covered by the Affordable Care Act has climbed from 12 million to nearly 21.5 million since Biden took office.

Since Becerra entered the California state legislature in 1990, he said he has been an advocate of a “single-payer” health care system in which the government provides medical care for all either directly or through a universal insurance program. President Biden has not endorsed such a plan, but Becerra said the president is trying to reach that goal by “patching the holes” in the current system.

“Will we get to universal coverage?” Becerra asked. “I believe so [and] we’re already on our way.  This president has taken us farther than any president before. I don’t think he’s going to stop.”

He “could almost guarantee” that recently-started negotiations between his department and manufacturers of 10 widely-prescribed drugs will bring price reductions, Becerra said. The negotiations were authorized by Congress two years ago for drugs used by Medicare but only began this month. Becerra said prices charged for these medicines in the United States are two or three times higher than in other countries.

The Biden administration has spent more than $1 billion over the past three years on a mental-health hotline that the Trump administration funded at $20 million a year. The hotline, staffed by crisis counselors, can be reached by telephone at 988 throughout the country or by text or chat. Over the past 18 months,  Becerra said, about 8 million people have used the service.