Negotiations on boosting the World Health Organization’s budget to help it prepare for future pandemics made mixed progress last week, with Washington withdrawing criticism but other donors voicing opposition, sources involved in the talks told Reuters.

The Biden administration wants to expand a federal COVID-19 tracking system created during the pandemic to provide a more detailed view of how respiratory and other infectious diseases are affecting patients and hospital resources, according to a draft of proposed rules reviewed by Reuters.

President Joe Biden said on February 18 the U.S. national emergency declared in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic will be extended beyond March 1 due to the ongoing risk to public health posed by the coronavirus.

U.S. financial contributions to the World Health Organization (WHO) have fallen by 25 percent during the coronavirus pandemic, provisional data show, with Washington’s future support to the United Nations agency under review.

The United States – the World Health Organization’s top donor – is resisting proposals to make the agency more independent, four officials involved in the talks said, raising doubts about the Biden administration’s long-term support for the U.N. agency.

A U.S. appeals court on Aug. 10 threw out a price-fixing lawsuit against two Chinese companies that make vitamin C, a case that spotlighted trade tensions between the United States and China.

University of Oxford researchers started clinical trials for a new vaccine that can potentially target a wide range of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) variants. 

The U.S. Supreme Court on June 17 rejected a Republican bid that had been backed by former President Donald Trump’s administration to invalidate Obamacare, preserving the landmark healthcare law for the third time since the ACA’s 2010 enactment.

A previously undisclosed intelligence report by the U.S. State Department shows that three scientists at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology received hospital care in November 2019 for influenza-like symptoms. The findings were on a State Department fact sheet that said they went to the hospital “with symptoms consistent with both Covid-19 and common seasonal illness.”

GSK and Vir Biotechnology filed an application to U.S. regulators for emergency use authorization of their antibody therapy to treat early-stage Covid-19 infections, the drugmakers said on March 26.