WASHINGTON — Republicans continued to press top health officials on the coronavirus response during a Thursday hearing on the National Institutes of Health’s proposed 2024 budget that saw top officials defending President Biden’s relatively flat funding request.
The top-ranking Republican on the Appropriations subcommittee, West Virginia’s Shelley Capito, pushed acting NIH Director Lawrence Tabak to formally review the agency’s Covid-19 response and research spending — and share it with the panel — a prospect he did not rule out at the end of the nearly two-hour hearing.
“I think it will become more formal,” said Tabak, an NIH veteran who has been in the top role since longtime director Francis Collins stepped down in December 2021. “Not to make excuses because we have to own how it came out, I accept that. But, of course, we were dealing with something that was ever-evolving.”
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