SPOKANE — With additional federal COVID funding in jeopardy, state health officials warned that treatments and preventative pandemic resources, including booster doses, could become more scarce if the federal government has to stop purchasing them.
The White House staff wrote a letter to Congressional leaders this week warning them that without the $22.5 billion in requested funding for continued pandemic response, there would be “severe disruptions to our COVID response.”
Planned purchases of monoclonal antibody treatments, as well as securing booster doses or variant-specific vaccines, and ensuring testing, treatment and vaccines for people without health insurance in the United States, are among the line items that will go away without the requested funding.
Washington health officials said federal funding has helped the state respond to the pandemic in many ways.
State Secretary of Health Dr. Umair Shah said that funding from the federal government has helped sustain the continued response of the department, and local health jurisdictions.
Some local efforts in responding to the pandemic have been funded by the Department of Health or federal government, not locally.
“The federal funding is absolutely critical to the work ahead, so we want to continue to advocate for those federal resources,” Shah said.
No new surge detected in Washington
While many countries in Europe and Asia see COVID case counts increasing once again, State Epidemiologist Scott Lindquist said that’s not the trend in Washington.
He noted that the new increases in cases abroad are not due to a new variant, but instead the subvariant of omicron, BA.2.
This subvariant has been detected in Washington already but so far is not exploding as the original strain of omicron did.
“It’s not becoming the dominant force or driving an increase in cases,” Lindquist told reporters on Wednesday.
In the state health department’s most recent variant data, BA.2 made up just 9% of sequenced cases, while the original omicron strain made up 90% of those cases sequenced.
