White House Pushes For Continued COVID Relief Funding As New Variants Spread

The White House is urging leaders in Congress to find a path forward in approving $22.5 billion in emergency funding to continue the fight against COVID-19. Administration officials say the government is running out of funds for vaccines, testing and treatments, just as the latest variant is beginning to spread in the U.S.

Leaders on the Hill had included about $15 billion in relief funding in the $1.5 trillion omnibus spending bill that Congress passed two weeks ago. Insistence by Republicans that about $7 billion in additional funds be clawed back from relief dollars already allocated (but not yet spent) to state and local governments angered many Democrats. Ultimately the bill’s COVID relief portion was set aside.

Now the Biden administration is turning up the pressure and warning this is no time to stop funding the battle against COVID-19.

"It’s not a moment to spike the football," said Dr. Cameron Webb, White Senior Policy Advisor for COVID-19 Equity and a member of the White House Covid-19 Response Team. Dr. Webb said cases, hospitalizations and deaths are all down, but we've seen that before.

"Like at the end of the Alpha wave last January, at the end of the Delta wave last summer into the fall," said Webb in a zoom interview Friday, "and so we just can’t assume that this is over."

With about 65 percent of all Americans now vaccinated, epidemiologists don't see the new omicron variant, BA.2, producing the same surge that BA.1 did at the beginning of the year. Still, Webb said, without additional funding, Oklahomans and other Americans who are uninsured who do get COVID could find there's a financial barrier to testing and treatment.

"Already the uninsured fund is not able to support free tests and treatments for folks in Oklahoma," Dr. Webb explained, "The oral antivirals, the monoclonal antibodies, we don’t have the ability to purchase more of those, we had to decrease the number that were sending to Oklahoma just the other week."

Webb said members of Congress who are hesitant to support the additional dollars to fight COVID should try to view it as if this were an actual military battle.

"If we’re in the midst of any battle, any military engagement and we are ahead -- we are pressing forward and we are winning the day," Webb said, "we don’t pull the funds out from that effort, we make sure we continue to support it to finish the job and that’s what we need to do here."