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Thousands of nonviolent federal prisoners were allowed to serve their time at home last year to slow the spread of coronavirus inside prison walls. But a Justice Department legal memo issued earlier this year concluded that allowing inmates to stay at home was not meant to be permanent, and they must return to prison once the pandemic is over. .... More than two dozen small business owners who hired inmates are now asking President Joe Biden to grant clemency to prisoners. Some say losing employees to prison during a national labor shortage would not only be detrimental to their business, but would also keep their companies from growing. (Philips, 8/26)

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said President Biden has failed to “end covid” and should follow his state’s lead, even as Florida experiences record-breaking cases, deaths and hospitalizations. ... But in a Wednesday interview with Fox News, DeSantis defended his response, saying Florida is seeing “great success” in treating covid patients with monoclonal antibodies — an effective, widely available therapy that few people are receiving. The governor, considered a potential contender against Biden in the 2024 presidential election, said the treatment should have been “a bigger part of this whole response throughout the country from the beginning.”(Bella, 8/26)

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, speaking to Fox News on Wednesday, said that President Joe Biden had failed to “end COVID,” whereas his state was experiencing “great success” in treating patients. “You know, he said he was going to end COVID. He hasn’t done that. We are the first state to start the treatment centers for monoclonal antibodies. We're having great success with that. That should have been a bigger plan, a bigger part of this whole response throughout the country from the beginning. At the end of the day, he is trying to find a way to distract from the failures of his presidency,” DeSantis said. What DeSantis did not mention, however, was that Florida hospitals have operated at full capacity for weeks now, buckling under a crush of new coronavirus cases despite the availability of vaccines. Funeral homes across the state have told local TV stations that they are full to the ceiling with the bodies of COVID-19 victims. The governor has refused to implement mitigation measures to slow the spread of the virus and even barred schools and government agencies from requiring face masks or vaccines. (Montgomery, 8/25)

The Biden administration has hired several separate outside contractors to police the billions in Covid-19 grants it sent to hospitals and health care providers, federal records show. The contracts, which have not previously been reported, are a sign that the federal government is beefing up enforcement on the grants that were intended to help health care providers recover from the pandemic. The Trump administration faced criticism for initially sending money out to health care providers based on past income, and not on need, and punted a difficult oversight process to the Biden team. (Cohrs, 8/27)

Less than a week after the Biden administration delayed enforcement of controversial provisions of an insurer price transparency rule, a business group dropped its lawsuit seeking to block the rule. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce earlier this month sued HHS, CMS, the Labor Department, the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. The complaint alleged that provisions in the so-called Transparency in Coverage Rule are unlawful and overly burdensome and urged a judge to throw them out. (Bannow, 8/26)

A decade ago, scientists funded by the National Institutes of Health used ferrets to engineer a highly lethal flu virus. The purpose of the research — known as “gain of function” — was to better understand how viruses evolve and to help devise medicines to combat the potential disease threats .It also came with a risk: A laboratory mishap could unleash a devastating pandemic. The research, conducted in the Netherlands and at the University of Wisconsin, sparked an international controversy and led to new safeguards for such experiments. But over the past four years, NIH leaders and other U.S. officials have weakened key aspects of those controls, a Washington Post examination found. (Willman and Muller, 8/26)