Covid-19 as a political football: Government funding for more vaccine, treatment supplies stalls
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi late Wednesday had to pull out $15.6 billion in coronavirus relief funds from a massive trillion-dollar spending bill to avert a government shutdown as her colleagues revolted against paying for that aid with their home states’ stockpiles of already-promised pandemic funds.
While the spending bill and billions in Ukraine aid cleared the House last night in a short-term extension that will likely pass in full early next week, what happens next for the Covid-19 funds remains unclear.
Earlier Wednesday, Democratic in-fighting hit a fever pitch as at least a dozen Democrats threatened to revolt over how Pelosi planned to pay for the new Covid funds. CNN reported that some Dems “paraded in and out of Pelosi’s office throughout Wednesday morning and into the afternoon, some noticeably upset and trying to avoid talking to the press.”
Pelosi then sent a letter to her colleagues later in the day yesterday announcing that she would pull the funds, saying, “It is heartbreaking to remove the COVID funding, and we must continue to fight for urgently needed COVID assistance, but unfortunately that will not be included in this bill.”
The White House immediately expressed outrage over the situation, particularly as much of the key funds for effective antivirals and monoclonal antibodies will run dry in the coming months, saying in a statement:
We requested $22.5 billion for immediate needs to avoid severe distributions to our Covid response, and we requested Congress provide these funds as emergency resources – as lawmakers have done multiple times on a bipartisan basis under the prior Administration. Without additional Covid response resources the results are dire: In March, testing capacity will decline; in April, the uninsured fund – which offers coverage of testing and treatments for millions of Americans who lack health insurance – will run out of money; and in May, America’s supply of monoclonal antibodies will run out.
House Democrats also tried to simultaneously introduce a separate, $15.6 billion Covid-19 relief bill last night, but the timeline on that remains unknown. Senate GOP opposition may be fierce, especially as Democrats would need 60 votes for passage (and the Senate is split 50-50).
Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah led a group of fellow Republican senators in a letter last week requesting that the White House explain where the $6 trillion in Covid-19 funds already doled out by the government have been spent.
According to NPR, the White House says the administration spent all of the funds Congress designated for vaccines, treatments, tests, and masks.
That money “supported our forceful response to the surge in infections and hospitalizations caused by the Omicron variant, as well as the earlier surge resulting from the Delta variant. But those demands have largely exhausted existing funds,” Shalanda Young, acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote in a letter to congressional leaders.
Meanwhile, the government spending bill still includes $1 billion to kick-start Biden’s newly proposed Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health or ARPA-H, which is going to sit within NIH but mirror DARPA with risky investments in new research for projects like cancer vaccine development, or making manufacturing processes for patient-specific T cells cheaper and easier.
