America Goes Viral, Con't

As the Biden administration has been warning for weeks now, the funds for COVID-19 response are being exhausted because Republicans have blocked appropriations in budget fights, and now the White House says there's not enough money to buy a second booster dose of vaccine for everyone who needs it.

 

The Biden administration lacks the funds to purchase a potential fourth coronavirus vaccine dose for everyone, even as other countries place their own orders and potentially move ahead of the United States in line, administration officials said Monday.

Federal officials have secured enough doses to cover a fourth shot for Americans age 65 and older as well as the initial regimen for children under age 5, should regulators determine those shots are necessary, said three officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to detail funding decisions. But the officials say they cannot place advance orders for additional vaccine doses for those in other age groups, unless lawmakers pass a stalled $15 billion funding package.

“Right now, we don’t have enough money for fourth doses, if they’re called for,” White House coronavirus coordinator Jeff Zients said on a forthcoming episode of “In The Bubble with Andy Slavitt,” which was recorded Monday and shared with The Washington Post. “We don’t have the funding, if we were to need a variant-specific vaccine in the future.”

Federal regulators and health officials have not yet determined whether a fourth shot is needed, and some experts question whether the extra dose will be necessary to boost protection for the general population.

But administration officials said placing orders for additional doses ahead of time — rather than waiting for the United States to be swamped with another wave of the virus — was imperative and a key lesson from the pandemic’s past two years. They also noted that the fast-moving omicron variant evaded some immune protection conferred by existing vaccines, demonstrating the need to invest in more targeted shots that could better fend off omicron and potential future variants.

“Vaccines don’t just appear when you snap your fingers and say, ‘Okay, I want the vaccine.’ We’ve got to make it,” said a senior administration official. “And this year, it’s going to be more complicated, because there’s a very significant chance — although we’re still waiting for data — that the vaccines are going to need to be tweaked to cover omicron.”

Analysts at Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health research organization, independently confirmed that the United States would need to purchase hundreds of millions of additional doses to ensure that every American could receive four shots, if necessary, said Jen Kates, who leads global health policy for the organization and previewed the forthcoming analysis.

“If their policy goal is to have enough doses available to provide a fourth dose to everyone, there are not enough doses purchased. They will run out of supply,” said Kates, estimating that the White House needed to purchase about 750 million additional doses to reach that goal.

Kates said her team reviewed several alternate scenarios, such as lowering its projection to 70 percent of Americans who would be vaccinated with four doses, rather than 100 percent. Even with that lower target, “there’s not enough” doses already purchased, Kates said, adding that the full analysis would be published later this week.

 

So even with the 30% of Americans who refuse to get the vaccine, we still won't have enough doses unless Republican stop blocking the $15 billion COVID package for 2022.

 

And believe me, Mitch McConnell and friends know precisely what they are doing as elections draw closer. It's only a question of what McConnell and the GOP get as concessions from the Democrats in order for the money to be released.

You didn't think Republicans were going to let the White House have the money it needs for COVID prevention in an election year, did you?