Yahoo Finance's Anjalee Khemlani explains how the Biden administration is moving into a new phase when it comes to the pandemic.

Video Transcript

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AKIKO FUJITA: The White House has announced it will stop buying COVID vaccines as early as this fall. The Biden administration says this is all part of an effort to move COVID-19 prevention and treatment into the commercial market.

Let's bring in Yahoo Finance's Anjalee Khemlani with the very latest. And Anjalee, it feels like this is kind of an entry to a new phase in how we deal with the pandemic.

ANJALEE KHEMLANI: It is. And it kind of got spurred because of Congress's inability and unwillingness to fund more of the testing, and the treatments, and vaccines. So what happened was we saw, you know, the ask for that $10 million in order to help fund all of that. And it didn't really come through.

And so now with that stalemate in play-- you know, we heard from Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House COVID task force coordinator saying, quote, yesterday, "My hope is that in 2023 you're going to see the commercialization of almost all these products. Some of that is actually going to begin this fall in the days and weeks ahead."

Now, that sounds a lot sooner than what we know say, for example, the vaccines were planning on. We knew that they were looking at the commercial market, especially starting at the start of 2023. But that brings in a lot of other questions in play-- regulatory approval, logistics, how they're going to distribute all of these doses.

Right now, only two of the four vaccines that are available in the US have market approval, and that's Moderna and Pfizer. The other two are still in emergency-use authorization so they don't have approval yet to go commercial. And so all of these factors are at play right now.

And it seems like, you know, with conversations with insurers and the like, it seems like things are still very, very early stage. No one's really set to, you know, go full speed ahead by fall.

And we-- and we already have a shortage of booster doses. The booster doses plan for the fall is about 2/3rds of what all adults will need for a booster shot.

BRIAN CHEUNG: So how about the government buying of, let's say, for example, tests and treatments, right? Tests, I feel like a lot of people are actually going and already doing the commercial buying. But what about treatments, per se?

ANJALEE KHEMLANI: So that's exactly what I was gonna say. The testing has already been sort of figured out. They've been available commercially. But treatments is another one because there, too, we've been dealing a lot with emergency-use authorizations. We have seen some fall off in terms of effectiveness.

And so what happens there? How the administration and how these companies are going to handle, you know, less efficacy and moving in and out of the market. It's also-- it's a very complex situation. And that's sort of why maybe the plans are starting by fall, but we certainly aren't expecting this to come any time soon.