POSSIBILITY OF rationing covid supplies seen.

WASHINGTON — The white House is planning for “dire” contingencies that could include rationing supplies of vaccines and treatments this fall if Congress doesn’t approve more money for fighting covid-19.

In public comments and private meetings on Capitol Hill, Dr. Ashish Jha, the white House coronavirus coordinator, has painted a picture in which the U.S. could be forced to cede many of the advances made against the coronavirus over the past two years.

Biden administration officials have been warning for weeks that the country has spent nearly all the money in the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan that was dedicated directly to covid-19 response.

A small pool of money remains, and the administration faces critical decisions about how to spend it.

That decision may be made in this week, according to the administration.

Jha has warned that without more money, vaccines will be harder to come by, tests will once again be scarce, and the therapeutics that are helping the country weather the current omicron-driven surge in cases without a commensurate increase in deaths could be sold overseas before Americans can access them.

“I think we would see a lot of unnecessary loss of life if that were to happen,” Jha said last week. “But we’re looking at all the scenarios and planning for all of them.”

He said the administration was “getting much more into the scenario-planning business to make sure that we know what may be ahead of us so we can plan for it and obviously also lay those out in front of Congress.”

Jha, has become the face of the Biden administration’s efforts to persuade Congress to approve an additional $22.5 billion for covid-19 response.

“The scenarios that we’re planning for are for things like what if Congress gives us no money and we don’t have adequate vaccines,” Jha told reporters May 12. “we run out of therapies. we don’t have enough tests. what might things look like? Obviously, that’s a pretty dire situation.”

Already, the domestic production of at-home testing is slowing, with workers beginning to be laid off. In the coming weeks, Jha said, manufacturers will sell off equipment and “get out of this business,” leaving the U.S. once again dependent on overseas suppliers for rapid test.

Drug manufactures and the food and Drug Administration, meanwhile, are working on evaluating the next generation of vaccines, potentially including ones that are targeted at the dominant omicron strain. But getting them ready before the predicted case surge in the fall means placing orders now, since they take two to three months to produce.

Jha said last week that the U.S. has yet to start negotiations with drugmakers because of the lack of money.

“we’ve had some very preliminary conversations with the manufacturers,” he said. “But the negotiations around it have not yet begun, partly because we’re waiting for resources.” He added: “The truth is that other countries are in conversations with the manufacturers and starting to kind of advance their negotiations.”

WHO WARNING

Meanwhile, the covid-19 pandemic is “most certainly not over,” the head of the world Health Organization warned Sunday, despite a decline in reported cases since the peak of the omicron wave. He told governments that “we lower our guard at our peril.”

The U.N. health agency’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, told officials gathered in Geneva for opening of the WHO’s annual meeting that “declining testing and sequencing means we are blinding ourselves to the evolution of the virus.” He also noted that almost 1 billion people in lower-income countries still haven’t been vaccinated.

In a weekly report Thursday on the global situation, WHO said the number of new covid-19 cases appears to have stabilized after weeks of decline since late March, while the overall number of weekly deaths dropped.

while there has been progress, with 60% of the world’s population vaccinated, “it’s not over anywhere until it’s over everywhere,” Tedros said.

“Reported cases are increasing in almost 70 countries in all regions, and this in a world in which testing rates have plummeted,” he added.

Reported deaths are rising in Africa, the continent with the lowest vaccination coverage, he said, and only 57 countries — almost all of them wealthy — have vaccinated 70% of their people.

while the world’s vaccine supply has improved, there is “insufficient political commitment to roll out vaccines” in some countries, gaps in “operational or financial capacity” in others, he said.

“In all, we see vaccine hesitancy driven by misinformation and disinformation,” Tedros said. “The pandemic will not magically disappear, but we can end it.”