President Joe Biden’s latest executive push is aimed at healthcare as he spent Thursday showcasing the reopening of health insurance marketplaces under the Affordable Care Act. Mr. Biden also plans to address women’s access to reproductive health. The new president is showcasing his agenda with a new theme for every day and this week alone addressed American manufacturing, racial justice, and climate change.

Biden has also resumed regular coronavirus briefings at the White House and during one of the first such briefings officials admitted that it would indeed take months for most Americans to get vaccinated. Worse, Americans were warned to expect another 90,000 deaths in the next month alone. One bright spot is that daily documented cases of infections have begun to fall across the nation. One report pointed out that Wednesday was the, “10th day in a row that case counts have numbered less than 200,000.” But scientists are warning that the world is in a “race against time” with the emergence of new mutations of the COVID-19 virus that appear to be more transmissible. A variant of the virus first documented in the U.K. has just been found infecting several people in Alabama, including children.

Meanwhile a federal watchdog has concluded that a government agency named, “Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority” or BARDA, has for the past decade been used as a “slush fund” of sorts for all manner of expenses unrelated to its mission. According to the New York Times, millions of taxpayer dollars meant to fight threats to public health such as infectious diseases, were instead spent on, “the removal of office furniture, administrative expenses, news subscriptions, legal services and the salaries of other department employees.” Indeed, “the practice of diverting funds was so common, investigators found, that employees had a name for it: the “Bank of BARDA.” In a separate story, the House of Representatives has just opened an investigation into the Trump administration’s purchases of ventilators during the early months of the pandemic. The Washington Post found that, “11,200 ventilators made by a well-connected company were ill-suited for covid-19 patients and remain in a warehouse.” The government spent $70 million to buy the ventilators from a company named Combat Medical Systems. But the ventilators are inadequate and remain unused.

The Commerce Department on Thursday released its assessment of the U.S.’s economic activity in 2020 and found that although the