It is long past time to ensure women get the answers they need when it comes to their health — from cardiovascular disease to autoimmune diseases to problems from menopause. President Joe Biden is on it. And Dr. Jill Biden is leading the effort.
From the White House fact sheet on the move last November:
To pioneer the next generation of discoveries, the President and the First Lady launched the first-ever White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research, which aims to fundamentally change how we approach and fund women’s health research in the United States.
It’s a game-changing effort, as described in the Executive Order for the initiative:
President Biden signed a new Executive Order that directed the most comprehensive set of executive actions ever taken to expand and improve research on women’s health. These directives will ensure women’s health is integrated and prioritized across the federal research portfolio and budget, and will galvanize new research on a wide range of topics, including women’s midlife health.
Does it stop with launching the initiative? Nope:
The President and First Lady are also announcing more than twenty new actions and commitments by federal agencies, including through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Defense, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the National Science Foundation. This includes the launch of a new NIH-wide effort that will direct key investments of $200 million in Fiscal Year 2025 to fund new, interdisciplinary women’s health research—a first step towards the transformative central Fund on Women’s Health that the President has called on Congress to invest in.
These actions also build on the First Lady’s announcement last month of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) Sprint for Women’s Health, which committed $100 million towards transformative research and development in women’s health.
As this AP story from two months ago makes clear, our first lady is playing a leading role in this (she really DOES care).
Jill Biden announced $100 million in federal funding for research and development into women’s health as part of a new White House initiative that she is heading up.
The money is the first major deliverable of the White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research, which was announced late last year. The money comes from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H, which is under the federal Department of Health and Human Services.
The $100 million will be used to invest early in “life-changing” work being done by women’s health researchers and startup companies that cannot get private support, Biden said.
The first lady said last year that the initiative grew out of a meeting she had had with former California first lady and women’s health advocate Maria Shriver. Shriver, Biden said, spoke of the need for a public-private effort to close the gaps in women’s health research. As the AP reported:
“When I brought this issue to my husband, Joe, a few months ago, he listened. And then he took action,” the first lady said. “That is what he does.”
Jill Biden has worked on women’s health issues since the early 1990s.
Is there still more work to be done? 100%! Lots more work. But Biden has done so much more than many people guessed could be done. He deserves a lot of credit. AND he deserves to be re-elected.
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These posts are written by Goodnewsroundup (Goodie),
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