He began efforts to shore up abortion rights as soon as he was elected.

In his first 100 days in office, Biden broadened access to abortion pills, reversed restrictions on funding Planned Parenthood and overseas groups that provide abortion referrals and removed hurdles to medical research that uses fetal tissue obtained from abortions.

Following the Supreme Court’s decision, Biden issued executive orders funding service members’ travel across state lines for an abortion, allowing abortions in some circumstances at VA clinics and clearing the way for retail pharmacies to dispense abortion pills. Another rule still in the works would expand federal privacy rules to cover abortion.

The Biden administration is also fighting several legal battles over abortion rights, including in two upcoming Supreme Court cases targeting federal policies expanding access to abortion pills and requiring hospitals to provide abortions to patients experiencing a medical emergency.

However, Biden has rejected calls from activists to test the boundaries of what’s possible — such as declaring a public health emergency for abortion and exploring the possibility of opening up clinics on federal land in states that ban the procedure.

While the original 2016 moonshot focused on making a decade of scientific progress on cancer prevention and treatment in five years, Moonshot 2.0 has broader aims.

In addition to cutting the cancer death rate, the reignited moonshot is meant to improve the lives of patients with cancer and their caregivers; increase screening and early diagnosis; expand access to treatment; bolster prevention efforts like smoking cessation, identify environmental risks; and address disparities in who gets access to cancer treatment and clinical trials.

The White House announced dozens of federal and private moonshot programs and partnerships last year to support those goals. It has leaned on the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, which Biden created to take on high-risk, high-reward research. The White House directed ARPA-H to build a national clinical trial network, as well as team up with the National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute on a biomedical toolbox for cancer research.

He set a goal of getting 70 percent of the country vaccinated by July 4, 2021, while amping up non-pharmaceutical interventions like a nationwide mask requirement on public transit.

The Biden administration organized thousands of free vaccination clinics across the country, and opened test-to-treat sites where people could also receive antivirals. It mailed free at-home testing kits to any household that wanted them and ramped up surveillance efforts, such as the National Wastewater Surveillance Program.

“It tracked data systematically, it communicated that data well and it took appropriate action,” former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Tom Frieden told POLITICO.

In 2023, the White House began shifting the responsibility for distributing Covid vaccines and treatments to the private sector, with an initially bumpy rollout.

The administration has sought to prepare for the next pandemic, launching the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy, and building up a forecasting unit at the CDC.

He helped to extend existing rules permitting eased access to the opioid addiction treatments buprenorphine and methadone via telemedicine, and he signed legislation in December 2022 making it easier to prescribe buprenorphine by removing a requirement that doctors apply for a waiver.

The administration has also worked to make the opioid overdose reversal drug naloxone available in more places, such as federal facilities and schools. The FDA has approved a naloxone nasal spray for over-the-counter sales.

In November, Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to restart counternarcotics cooperation. The U.S. hopes China will crack down on companies selling chemicals used to produce illicit fentanyl.

And the White House and the State Department have continued putting pressure on the Mexican government to crack down on the production of fentanyl and its traffic into the U.S., with mixed results.

He fulfilled his pledge in the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, empowering Medicare to negotiate prices for a limited number of medicines for the first time.

“He cracked the code,” said Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.), a frequent critic of pharmaceutical companies. “This has been an upmountain battle for years.”

The process enters a pivotal phase this year. The administration selected 10 high-cost drugs for negotiation, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services made its initial price offers Feb. 1.

Drugmakers rejected the offers in early March. They now will enter a series of negotiations slated to end by Sept. 1. CMS has until March 1, 2025, to release the negotiated prices, which will take effect on Jan. 1, 2026.

A company could decline the negotiated rate but would risk losing all Medicare and Medicaid sales.

The Inflation Reduction Act also limited monthly cost sharing for insulin at $35 for those on Medicare and eliminated cost sharing for vaccines covered under Medicare’s drug benefit. Other reforms have yet to fully take effect, chief among them a $2,000 cap on out-of-pocket costs in the Medicare drug program starting next year.

The administration looked to build its public health communication strategies on a number of fronts.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has begun changing its communications with the public in mind, and the White House chose the agency’s new chief, Mandy Cohen, in part because she was seen as an effective public health messenger.

The White House pushed social media companies to crack down on anti-vaccine misinformation, though some public health experts and Republican politicians have said it went too far in trying to censor competing viewpoints.

Two states, Missouri and Louisiana, sued, arguing the administration violated First Amendment rights, and their case is now before the Supreme Court.

The U.S. lagged behind its peer nations in initial Covid vaccination rates, and uptake of the updated shots remains low.

Increasing politicization of the pandemic has made building trust difficult. Anti-vaccine groups and Republican skeptics of the pandemic response were among the forces weakening trust in public health writ large.

Critics say the Biden administration had its own missteps by saying that vaccines would stop transmission of the disease and by siding with teachers’ unions in setting guidance that kept many schools in more Democratic parts of the country closed for most of the 2020-21 school year.

Some in the administration, frustrated by their inability to turn the tide on public health messaging, now say the government should pare back its communications efforts.

They’re hoping messaging from vaccine makers and persuasion by primary care doctors could get more shots in arms.

In 2021, he signed the American Rescue Plan Act, which made Obamacare plans more affordable by eliminating a cap on eligibility for subsidies above 400 percent of the poverty level and limiting how much people pay for premiums to no more than 8.5 percent of their income.

The law also created a financial incentive to persuade a dozen holdout states to expand their Medicaid programs to cover more low-income people, as Obamacare permits. Two states — South Dakota and North Carolina — have since opted in, together opening up coverage to more than 650,000 people.

And it allowed states to extend coverage for postpartum people from 60 days to 12 months, an option that 44 states and Washington, D.C., have implemented.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services also withdrew approvals states received from the Trump administration allowing them to mandate work as a condition of receiving Medicaid. The agency is still trying to undo the Trump administration’s work in promoting two types of health insurance — short-term limited duration plans and association health plans — that skirted ACA requirements.

Biden fixed the so-called family glitch that blocked millions of people from affordable health coverage. His administration approved requests from states to innovate with their marketplaces and Medicaid, including establishing state public health insurance options, providing coverage to undocumented immigrants, continuously covering kids, addressing poor access to care in some communities and assisting people leaving incarceration. It has also significantly boosted spending on marketplace outreach and assistance.

Biden also proposed a rule to allow hundreds of thousands of immigrants who came to the United States as children, known as Dreamers, to enroll in Medicaid and exchange plans, but it has yet to be finalized.

Additionally, Biden failed to create a public health insurance option as he promised in his campaign, with the idea quickly fizzling when he took office.