With Congress unwilling to approve new spending, the White House is making tough choices to avoid being caught short if new, more dangerous COVID variants emerge.

“These trade-offs we are being forced to make because of Congress will have serious consequences,” a White House official told Axios, ticking off therapeutics and diagnostics, domestic vaccine production capacity, stockpiling of PPE and tests and testing supplies for community health centers as examples of what could go wanting.

By the numbers: The Biden administration is redirecting $5 billion to purchase doses of updated versions of the vaccine for the fall.

Another $4.9 billion will be redirected to buy 10 million courses of Pfizer’s Paxlovid oral antiviral treatment, while $300 million will be reallocated for more monoclonal antibody treatments, the official said.