White House Launches CFA to Serve as Early Warning System for Health Threats
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy hosted a Summit for Strengthening the Nation’s Early Warning System for Health Threats on Tuesday.
The event was held to discuss the launch of the Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics.
The CFA will serve as a national resource at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to enable timely decision-making and improve outbreak response using data, models and analytics.
The American Rescue Plan provided $200 million to support the center’s creation.
An additional $6 million in funds were requested in the president’s FY23 budget over the next 5 years to advance the CDC’s early warning systems and situational awareness.
During the event, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky discussed the three main pillars of the CFA’s health threat response: predict, inform and innovate.
These pillars will build on models and forecasting disease transmission to predict an outbreak before it happens, enable timely information to be shared between leaders and the public to keep them informed, and innovate the performance of outbreak analysis through collaborations with public and private partners.
According to Walensky, the CDC currently lacks the authority and capacity to ensure it has the full line of sight needed to collect data on disease monitoring, as certain states do not offer the data the CDC needs or in the way it is needed.
“A jurisdiction might give us data in one format, and we might not get it in the same format in another jurisdiction,” said Walensky.
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