A painful and foreboding reality is setting in for the White House as it enters a potentially dangerous stretch of the Covid fight: It may soon need to run its sprawling pandemic response on a shoestring budget
Among the sacrifices being weighed are limiting access to its next generation of vaccines to only the highest-risk Americans. | Jens Schlueter/Getty Images.
“There’s a great deal of concern that we’re going to be caught shorthanded,” said one person familiar with the discussions. “On the face of it, it’s absurd.” The roughly $5 billion remaining would likely be split among investments to bolster supplies of tests, treatments and vaccines. Under a best-case scenario, the administration might make those stockpiles last through the end of the year. Even then, the White House’s ability to react to a dangerous new variant would be severely limited, and funding to aid the global response would be nonexistent.
The White House in recent months sought credit for effectively ending the crisis, touting its vaccination campaign and widespread distribution of tests and therapeutics as key to allowing most Americans to safely resume their everyday lives.
Biden officials have stressed to lawmakers that securing funding now is critical to the administration’s preparedness later this year, particularly when it comes to purchasing new vaccines meant to better target Omicron variants. The government can’t commit to purchasing them until it has the money, sparking concerns that competing countries will get first access to the limited supply or that the U.S. will only be able to afford enough shots for the highest-risk populations.
“They’ve never suggested that $10 billion would last very long,” said Sen. Roy Blunt , who met last week with White House Covid coordinator Ashish Jha on the issue. “But $10 billion may be the most that there’s any appetite for right now.”
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