Shortage of COVID funding puts aid at risk
WASHINGTON — The White House is planning for “dire” contingencies that could include rationing supplies of vaccines and treatments this fall if Congress doesn’t approve more money for fighting COVID-19.
In public comments and private meetings on Capitol Hill, Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House coronavirus coordinator, has painted a dark picture in which the U.S. could be forced to cede many of the advances made against the coronavirus over the last two years and even the most vulnerable could face supply shortages.
Biden administration officials have been warning for weeks that the country has spent nearly all the money in the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan that was dedicated directly to COVID-19 response.
A small pool of money remains, and the administration faces critical decisions about how to spend it. That means tough decisions, like weighing whether to use it to secure the next generation of vaccines to protect the highest risk populations or giving priority to a supply of highly effective therapies that dramatically reduce the risks of severe illness and death.
That decision may be made in the coming week, according to the administration, as the White House faces imminent deadlines to begin placing orders for vaccines and treatments before other nations jump ahead of the U.S. in accessing supply.
Jha has warned that without more money, vaccines will be harder to come by, tests will once again be scarce, and the therapeutics that are helping the country weather the current omicron-driven surge in cases without a commensurate increase in deaths could be sold overseas before Americans can access them.
“I think we would see a lot of unnecessary loss of life if that were to happen,” Jha said this past week. “But we’re looking at all the scenarios and planning for all of them.”
Jha has become the face of the Biden administration’s efforts to persuade Congress to approve an additional $22.5 billion for COVID-19 response.
“The scenarios that we’re planning for are for things like what if Congress gives us no money and we don’t have adequate vaccines,” Jha told the AP in a May 12 interview. “We run out of therapies. We don’t have enough tests. What might things look like? Obviously, that’s a pretty dire situation.”
The U.S., he said, doesn’t have enough money to purchase additional booster vaccines for anyone who wants one. Instead, the supplies of those vaccines may be restricted to just the most vulnerable — not unlike the chaotic early days of the COVID-10 vaccine roll-out.
And while the U.S. has built up a stockpile of the antiviral pill Paxlovid, which has been widely effective at reducing severe disease and death, it’s running out of money to purchase new doses — or other, even more effective therapies that are in the final stages of development.
There is no guarantee of swift action on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers — particularly Republicans — have grown newly wary of deficit spending. On Thursday, a $40 billion measure to assist restaurants that struggled during the pandemic failed on those grounds. GOP lawmakers have also objected to additional funding for the global pandemic response, and called for any new virus response funding to come from unspent economic relief money in the $1.9 trillion rescue plan.