WH warns of 'dire' consequences if Congress doesn't provide more funding to fight COVID

During the White House briefing on Tuesday, press secretary Jen Psaki urged Congress to pass $22.5 billion in emergency funding to fight COVID-19 and warned that the “consequences are dire” if a bill is not passed.

Video transcript

JEN PSAKI: First, as you may have seen and many of your reported, today we've outlined severe and immediate consequences that the United States will face if Congress fails to provide us with $22.5 billion in emergency funding to fight COVID-19. Those consequences are dire-- fewer monoclonal antibodies sent to States and inability to purchase additional treatments, fewer tests available to Americans, less surveillance for future variants, and a risk of running short on vaccines.

For months, we have been engaging Congress about our needs for additional COVID response funds. Just to give you a few examples, in January, we notified Congress that responding to the unprecedented surge in cases due to Omicron would exhaust our funds. Throughout February, we held briefings about the lack of funding and what the consequences would be if we didn't get additional funds.

In the president's State of the Union Address, the president called for additional COVID funding, and our national preparedness plan made clear that funding is needed. In total, senior administration officials have held more than three dozen calls and meetings with Congress and at least 10 briefings to committees to communicate our needs so that we can do what Americans should expect from their government, protecting them from a once-in-a-generation pandemic.

I'll finally say on this with cases rising abroad, scientific and medical experts have been clear that in the next couple of months, there could be increasing cases of COVID-19 here in the United States as well. We talked about this a bit yesterday.

Waiting to provide funding until we're in a worse spot with the virus will be too late. We need funding now, so we're prepared for whatever comes.