With Katherine Ellen Foley 

PROGRAMMING NOTE: We’ll be off for Thanksgiving this Thursday and Friday but back to our normal schedule on Monday, Nov. 28.

GOP INFIGHTING OVER ABORTION MESSAGING — Opponents of abortion are pushing the GOP to campaign more openly and forcefully against the procedure after the party suffered a string of losses in House, Senate, state legislative and ballot initiative fights, POLITICO’s Alice Miranda Ollstein and Megan Messerly report.

Less than six months after celebrating their decadeslong goal of toppling Roe v. Wade, conservatives saw their hard-fought court victory galvanize abortion-rights supporters to outspend and outvote them in the midterms.

Catching the flak: Now the anti-abortion movement is fighting over what messages and messengers they should embrace in a post-Roe era. Some are faulting party leaders like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and GOP candidates like Senate contender Mehmet Oz for not running harder on abortion restrictions.

They are lashing out at McConnell — the person arguably most responsible for securing the Supreme Court majority that overturned Roe — for keeping the issue at arm’s length while voters in his home state considered and rejected a Republican-sponsored ballot initiative limiting abortion rights.

The big picture: The divisions among anti-abortion groups and Republican leaders threaten to undercut a movement that for decades has shaped party platforms, tipped the scales in primaries, and helped steer the federal judiciary rightward.

WELCOME TO TUESDAY PULSE — Avian influenza. Ill-timed rains. Paltry cranberry crops. These are but a few of the events conspiring to make your dinner on Thursday expensive. What are the family dishes you wouldn't mind seeing left off the table this year? Send us your worst (aspic, I'm looking at you), along with news and tips, to [email protected] and [email protected].

TODAY ON OUR PULSE CHECK PODCAST, Ruth Reader and Katherine Ellen Foley discuss the impact on long Covid treatments if the new Congress doesn’t approve additional funding for Covid-19 research.

DWINDLING FEDERAL FUNDING COULD STALL LONG COVID RESEARCH — The divided incoming Congress is unlikely to back federal requests for funds needed to bolster research into viable treatments for long Covid, Katherine reports.

The backstory: Long Covid affects as many as 16 million people in the U.S. by some federal estimates. But without a clear understanding of the condition — which can cause symptoms like fatigue, difficulty breathing and brain fog — major drugmakers have yet to launch robust studies or other efforts into coming up with treatment.

What’s at stake: Though Congress directed the National Institutes of Health to allocate $1.15 billion to study the long-term effects of Covid-19 — including long Covid — for four years, most of that funding has gone toward understanding the cause of the persistent symptoms. Smaller biotech companies and scientists at research universities and medical centers are studying possible treatments. They’re assessing whether existing therapies like Pfizer’s Paxlovid, stimulants like Adderall and even dietary supplements can alleviate some symptoms of the disease’s symptoms.

Those studies, while a start, are too small to produce the robust data needed to find a new treatment. The Biden administration has asked Congress for more than $9 billion in additional funding for Covid-19 that would go toward next-generation vaccine development and long Covid research. But Republicans aren’t likely to support the administration’s call for more money for Covid — particularly after they rejected the administration’s request for an additional $22 billion for pandemic response in March.

Also: HHS released a new report Monday that focuses on the experiences of people living with long Covid-19 and offers recommendations on delivering care and support to individuals and families affected by the condition.

LESS ACCESS TO CARE ALONG TEXAS BORDER — Residents of counties in Texas that border Mexico fare worse than those who reside in other states’ border counties when it comes to health insurance and access to care, according to a new report from KFF.

Eight million people live in the 44 counties in Arizona, Texas, California and New Mexico, according to the report. Most of those counties are in Texas, where residents face greater barriers to accessing health care than residents of the state’s nonborder areas. More than 75 percent of the residents in Texan border counties are Hispanic.

Lack of coverage: One in three adults lacks coverage in border counties in Texas. The state hasn’t implemented ACA Medicaid expansion, which leaves some 770,000 poor adults in the coverage gap across the state. But the rate is higher in the border areas due to lower rates of private insurance coverage and more residents not being eligible for Medicaid, according to the report. Other border states, by contrast, have no significant difference in coverage between border and nonborder areas.

Not enough doctors: Residents in Texas borders also have far more limited access to doctors, including primary care physicians, OB-GYNs, dentists and emergency care providers. One-third of adults in Texas border counties say they’re in “fair” or “poor” health compared with a quarter to a fifth of adults in the rest of the counties in the other four states.

IN EUROPE, TOO, DOCTORS ARE SCARCE — European residents are feeling the continent’s 2-million-worker health care shortage, POLITICO’s Sarah-Taïssir Bencharif reports.

In Greece, first responders are sounding the alarm over slowed emergency response times because of a personnel shortage. England lacks tens of thousands of nurses and reports a record number of vacancies. Nurses top the list of all occupations experiencing shortages in Finland. Maternity wards in Portugal are struggling to stay open because of a lack of doctors. And in France, there were fewer doctors per capita in 2021 than in 2012.

The European Junior Doctors Association is warning that the health care system could soon collapse, a crisis some say was preventable.

Europe has long relied on foreign health care workers from low-income countries as a stopgap to fill the shortage, said Martin McKee, professor of European public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

“Clearly, there’s a huge problem. And we need to increase the health workforce, but I think the difficulty is that other things have overtaken it, like gas prices, the war in Ukraine,” McKee said. “Political attention spans are short.”

CHRIS SMITH’S NEW PRIORITIES— Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), the presumptive incoming chair of the Foreign Affairs Africa, Global Health and Human Rights Subcommittee, plans to shift the panel’s focus, reports POLITICO’s Carmen Paun.

His new priorities? Reauthorizing PEPFAR, promoting childhood vaccinations and passing the Global Brain Health Act.

CALL TO INVESTIGATE GPOS —Several groups, led by American Economic Liberties Project, an anti-monopoly organization, are calling on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate group purchasing organizations.

The signatories sent a letter to the commission asking it to conduct a study into GPOs and the sector’s alleged impact on medical shortages. The letter cites early-pandemic shortages of personal protective equipment and pediatric chemotherapy drugs as potential examples.

“We believe GPOs play a key and under-appreciated role in fostering and exacerbating shortages and the offshoring of production, while their influence on costs remains chronically under-analyzed,” the groups wrote.

Carlos del Rio, president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, argues in STAT that Congress should pass the Pasteur Act.

KHN reports on California AG’s Rob Bonta’s next target: racial discrimination in health care.

The Washington Post reports on this grim reality: how to stay safe in a mass shooting.