The Biden administration has warned that the country’s ability to confront new variants of COVID-19 as they come will be severely hampered by Congress’s failure to pass additional funding.
COVID-19 tests, therapeutics, and vaccines are covered by the federal government, but the White House said Tuesday that distribution of all three may need to end abruptly or be pared back. Funding for research and development of variant-specific vaccines and more treatments is also drying up, senior administration officials told reporters.
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“As the Administration has warned, failure to fund these efforts now will have severe consequences as we will not be equipped to deal with a future surge. Waiting to provide funding once we’re in a surge will be too late,” the White House said in a statement Tuesday.
Administration officials also warned that the nation’s supply of vaccines will be strained if government health officials recommend the broader population receive a fourth dose of the COVID-19 vaccines. Already, immunocompromised people 12 and older are encouraged to get a fourth shot. The White House said the total supply of vaccines is robust enough for the population with weakened immune systems to get extra doses, but not the general population.
Domestic manufacturing of tests has been scaled up enough that administration officials expect to have enough to last through June. They also said the United States currently has enough Pfizer antiviral treatments to carry out the administration’s “test to treat” initiative, which would give people access to the pills as soon as they test positive for the virus. But the administration has only purchased 20 million doses and does not have the money to obtain more.
The Biden administration has been criticized for failing to preorder millions of doses of the Pfizer pills last year before the treatment was authorized by the Food and Drug Administration. Critics say that Biden missed a crucial opportunity to stock up on the antivirals, which had shown promise in trials and looked to be on the path to authorization last fall, before the omicron surge. Manufacturing of the pills, which takes about six months to complete, has finally started to catch up. Roughly 7 million courses of treatment have gone out to states so far, weeks after the omicron surge began to show signs of receding.
During the omicron surge that began late last year, reliable rapid tests were also exceedingly hard to find. When people were able to get their hands on a pack of two tests, they had to pay about $24 out of pocket and go through the process of getting reimbursed by their insurance providers. Manufacturing of tests plummeted early last year when vaccines became widely available for the first time. That, in addition to a lull between surges, caused demand for tests to take a nosedive. Production and availability of rapid tests have improved drastically since then. The Biden administration moved this year to ship four tests a month free of charge to households, but the tests only arrived after the omicron surge.
The administration also warned that supplies of monoclonal antibody treatments, which were the best chance high-risk people had of avoiding severe illness before Pfizer’s antiviral came to market, are severely strained. Dispensation of the treatments to states will be cut by 30% starting next week, administration officials said. Only two of these treatments, one from GlaxoSmithKline and Vir Biotechnology and another from Eli Lilly, have been found effective at protecting high-risk people from getting severely ill due to the omicron variant. The U.S. government pulled two other treatments from the market in January after they were determined to be ineffective against omicron, leaving healthcare providers around the country scrambling to obtain enough of the already slim supply of effective monoclonal antibody treatments.
The White House had initially requested Congress put $30 billion toward shoring up national supplies of vaccines, therapeutics, and tests, but Republicans balked at the request for more funding, which would not have been paid for. The White House cut that request down to $22.5 billion, but in the end, Congress included a slimmed-down $15.6 billion allocation of pandemic funding. However, the odds of approving additional spending to deal with COVID-19 imploded last week when the party’s own members disagreed with how it would be paid for.
Lawmakers had planned on repurposing more than $8 billion in unused pandemic funding allocated to states, a proposal that sparked outrage among some Democrats who objected to the federal government clawing back needed funding to states.
The administration has been telling lawmakers for weeks that coffers are drying up, officials said, to no avail. Last week, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the effects of a funding shortfall “are dire.”
Public health experts also have warned of impending shortages of COVID-19 antivirals, tests, and other therapeutics now that Congress has jettisoned a White House request for billions more in pandemic funding.
“Congress needs to think of this as an investment as they did before, ensuring that we have the capacity. This virus has fooled us every single time we thought we understood it,” said Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association. “The amount of money they’re asking for in light of the multitrillion-dollar impact in our society I don’t think is unwarranted.”
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Supplies of antiviral treatments that drastically reduce a high-risk infected person’s chances of ending up in the hospital are slim and will be for the next couple of months while manufacturing ramps up. Pfizer’s course of antiviral treatment, marketed under the name Paxlovid, is highly effective. It reduces the risk of hospitalization due to severe illness by about 90% as long as it’s taken early on in the infection. Supply constraints mean that not everyone who could benefit from the pills can get them, though.
