WASHINGTON — The Biden administration plans to spend more than $1 billion on a new program to offer free coronavirus shots to uninsured Americans after the vaccines move to the commercial market later this year, administration officials said Tuesday.
The program for the uninsured, which will be modeled partly on an existing childhood vaccination program and will cover an estimated 30 million people, will include a first-of-its-kind partnership with pharmacy chains in which the government will pay the administrative costs of giving the doses to patients. Pfizer and Moderna have pledged to offer the shots at no cost to those who lack insurance.
The administration’s move partly resolves a critical gap in the nation’s coronavirus strategy before a new vaccination campaign with reformulated shots that is likely to begin as soon as late summer. Federal officials have said they no longer plan to purchase doses for all Americans as they have in prior coronavirus vaccination campaigns, allowing the vaccines to be sold commercially and ceding power to manufacturers to set their own prices.
The new vaccine initiative comes as the administration is looking beyond the coronavirus public health emergency, which was first declared under President Donald Trump in 2020 and has been extended under President Joe Biden. The administration plans to allow the emergency to expire on May 11, setting the nation on a course when COVID-19 will be treated as just another respiratory disease, like influenza.
The vaccine initiative has been a priority of Biden’s secretary of health and human services, Xavier Becerra, and will also cover some costs associated with COVID-19 treatments for the uninsured. In addition, the administration is working on a $5 billion program to spur next-generation coronavirus vaccines and treatments, Dr. Ashish K. Jha, Biden’s COVID-19 response coordinator, said in an interview.
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