White House says U.S. will run out of money to fight pandemic if Congress doesn’t pass Covid funding bill

A healthcare worker prepares a dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine at a vaccination clinic in the Peabody Institute Library in Peabody, Massachusetts, on Wednesday, Jan. 26, 2022.

The White House warned that the U.S. won't have enough booster shots and Covid treatments if Congress fails to pass additional funding.

Senior Biden administration officials told reporters on a call that the US could face another wave of Covid infections in the coming months. The U.K. and Germany have seen an increase in infections. The outbreak in China is the worst since 2020.

The funding is needed to get ahead of the next wave. After failing to reach a bipartisan agreement with Republicans, the House Democrats stripped the funding from the broader spending bill. Many Democrats were unwilling to accept the GOP's demand that Congress cut funds for state and local governments in order to offset new Covid money.

If more funding isn't approved, the federal government won't be able to purchase enough booster shots, vaccines that target specific variant or more antiviral pills beyond the 20 million already on order from Pfizer.

The officials said that there was no more funding for additional treatments. The federal government will have to cut state allocations of monoclonal antibodies by more than 30% if more funding doesn't come through.

In the event of another surge, the federal government will not be able to maintain sufficient Covid testing capacity beyond June. There was a run on at- home tests and in-person clinics that resulted in hourslong lines and empty pharmacy shelves.

According to the White House, uninsured people will no longer have coverage for Covid testing and treatments. The fund that covers them will stop accepting new claims a week from now, forcing health-care providers to either absorb the costs or turn patients away. The uninsured will no longer have coverage for vaccinations when the fund ends in April, they said.

The U.S. will not be able to stay on top of how the virus is evolving without some of the investments made in the new Covid variant being wound down. The emergence of the omicron variant shocked the U.S. and much of the world in November.

The White House said the money is needed to fund the development of a vaccine that covers a range of Covid variants, and to support the administration's efforts to increase the vaccination rate in developing nations. The officials said that the risk will increase if the money is not present. The Omicron variant was first identified in India.

CNBC's Ylan Mui contributed to the report.