White House short of key funding as U.S. braces for another COVID-19 surge: NBC

WASHINGTON, March 21 (Xinhua) -- The White House is short of key funding for pandemic response as another COVID-19 surge is coming to the United States, NBC News has reported.

The U.S. administration "is bracing for a new wave of U.S. COVID infections in the coming weeks, without key funding or essential tools in its arsenal," said the report published Sunday.

Noting that much of the administration's return-to-normal COVID-19 plan is based on the assumption that billions of U.S. dollars would be distributed for COVID-19 treatments, vaccines and testing, the report said that the money "appears to be in jeopardy."

"Congress dropped 15.6 billion dollars in COVID response money from the massive government funding package signed this week," it noted.

"The federal government has already begun to cut back on purchases of COVID treatments, curtailing shipments of monoclonal antibodies to the states by 30 percent next week, and said a program to provide treatments and testing to the uninsured would run out next month," the report said.

It added that the White House does not have enough money to purchase more booster doses for each American.

The United States has so far reported more than 79 million COVID-19 infections and over 971,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University data.

Earlier this month, U.S. President Joe Biden called on Americans to return to the office and "fill our great downtowns again" in his State of the Union Address.