The supply of free treatments and vaccines for COVID-19 purchased by the federal government could end as soon as this summer, the White House’s top pandemic official said Thursday, as the Biden administration prepares to transition the medicines to the private market.
“All I can say, because I literally don’t know, we don’t have the specific dates, is that it’s going to happen sometime over the summer into early fall. And you’ll see that transition and we’ll kind of give people as much notice as we can possibly give,” Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House’s COVID-19 Response Coordinator, told a webinar hosted by the University of California San Francisco.
His timeline echoes the one recently laid out by Pfizer executives. The company told shareholders this week they predicted to be able to begin selling their Comirnaty COVID vaccine and Paxlovid pills “at commercial prices” to Americans through the private market in the second half of this year. Federal officials have long warned that they would likely run out of government-bought supplies of COVID-19 vaccines and drugs this year, after Congress failed to pass a White House’s funding request to replenish their stocks. The White House reshuffled funds last year to buy a final tranche of the updated “bivalent” booster shots.