White House Leans on Congress for COVID Funds, Warns of Inaction

Without an immediate influx of new COVID monies, stocks of monoclonal antibodies could run dry in months and the federal government won’t be able to secure another round of boosters, if needed, senior Biden administration officials warned on Tuesday.

Additionally, doctors and other providers will be forced to make hard choices: swallow the costs of treating and vaccinating uninsured patients or turn them away.

“Further inaction will set us back, leave us less prepared, and cost us more lives,” said a senior administration official on a call with reporters, held on background. “To ensure enough fourth doses for all Americans or a variant-specific vaccine, should we ever need them, we must have funding in hand.”

The White House has been telling Congress since January that funding for treatments, tests, and vaccines is running low, and has requested $22.5 billion. Yet the $1.5 trillion spending bill that passed the House last week stripped the funding to execute President Biden’s national COVID-19 preparedness plan.

COVID cases in the U.S. could increase over the next few months, just as they have abroad, the officials warned — citing the administration’s scientific and medical experts — and a lack of funding could leave those in charge of response efforts flat-footed.

The government had planned to purchase more monoclonal antibodies as early as next week, but without funding, one official stated, those plans will be scrapped. Instead, the administration will have to cut back shipments to states by 30%, beginning next week.

Moreover, the total supply of monoclonal antibody treatments is expected to run dry as early as late May. The federal government has already shipped more than 7 million doses of coronavirus treatments to Americans, and often helped supply federal personnel to administer them, officials on the call said.

As for monoclonal antibodies for prevention, the White House has already purchased 1.7 million doses of tixagevimab-cilgavimab (Evusheld), a long-acting monoclonal antibody combination for immunocompromised Americans, but those supplies are expected to run dry by the end of the year, if not sooner.

Likewise, an absence of funding will threaten the ability of the NIH and the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority to continue research and development on next-generation vaccines, with the potential to provide “broader and more durable protection,” including a “pan-COVID” vaccine that responds to a range of different variants, noted an official on the call.

In the realm of surveillance, the federal government will also not be able to continue its domestic testing capacity past June.

“With reduced capability to perform adequate surveillance, the country will be prone to being ‘blindsided’ by future variants,” noted a White House fact sheet. And healthcare professionals will be left to make ill-informed treatment decisions, without knowing the real-world effectiveness of current vaccines against potential new variants.

Providers will also be hit hard by a decline in pandemic response resources in other ways. Due to resource constraints, HHS will be forced to roll back the Uninsured Program next week, and the program will no longer accept vaccination claims beginning April 5.

Lastly, an absence of new monies will also affect the U.S. global response to the pandemic. The United States Agency for International Development and other interagency partners will have to rein in their efforts around vaccination campaigns and the administration will have to shelve plans to extend “surge support” to more than 20 undervaccinated countries.

“Leaving large unvaccinated populations worldwide will increase the risk of new deadly … variants emerging that could evade our current vaccines and treatments,” said a senior administration official.

In the last 14 months, the federal government invested resources in the pandemic response ranging from free and accessible vaccines, boosters, treatments, and high-quality masks, all with the help of Congress, which secured those funds.

As a direct result of those investments, the officials said, cases and hospitalizations have fallen and more than 250 million Americans are fully vaccinated, with 95 million also having received a booster.