MCLENNAN COUNTY, Texas (KXXV) — “It's never been just a cold, and it's still not just a cold,” CEO of Waco Family Medicine Dr. Jackson Griggs MD said.
Federal health officials say they are retracting more than $11 billion in COVID related funds for state and local health departments across the country.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement on Wednesday that “the Covid-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago…”
“Texas was seeing around 9,000 deaths a month. That was in 2021,” Griggs said. “And Texas, let's see, in the past year, has seen fewer than 2000 deaths, but it is much less severe, because we see so much cellular immunity throughout the community,”
Central Texas doctors told 25 News there has been a dramatic drop in Covid cases since the pandemic, though they still see cases in our county.
“During the pandemic itself, we were receiving covid funding through grants from the federal government,” Griggs said. “Those were vital in a time where we didn't have enough resources to take care of the community that were that we were serving at the time. We were purchasing personal protective equipment and vaccinations and reagent for our lab so that we could decipher who had Covid and who didn't,”
But with less cases, what impact does this change have on facilities in Central Texas…
“We won't be directly impacted. We're not receiving any funding for Covid research,” Griggs said. “There's always the risk of funding cuts to research having indirect impact,”
Griggs told 25 News this cut could result in less resources for medical research.
“To understand long Covid and to understand virulence patterns and understand new variants that were coming out from in Covid that continues to have mutations,” Griggs said. “Sometimes discoveries in one area can translate to discoveries and related areas,”
