The U.S. will stop buying Covid shots at reduced price for the entire country and shift vaccine distribution to the private market as soon as early fall, shifting the cost to U.S. insurers and uninsured Americans who stand to lose access to the free vaccines.

Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House Covid response coordinator, said in an an interview with UCSF Department of Medicine on Thursday that the shift to a private market will happen over the summer or early fall, though no exact date has been set.

A senior official with the Health and Human Services Department told CNBC the fall would be a natural time to transition to a private market, particularly if the Food and Drug Administration selects a new Covid strain for the vaccines and asks the manufacturers to produce updated shots ahead of the respiratory virus season.

For the past two years, the U.S. has bought the vaccines directly from Pfizer and Moderna at an average price of about $21 per dose, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

The federal government has required pharmacies, doctor’s offices and hospitals to provide these shots for free to everyone regardless of their insurance status.

When the federal Covid vaccination program ends, the shots will remain free for people who have health insurance due to requirements under the Affordable Care Act.

But uninsured adults may have to pay for their immunizations when Pfizer and Moderna start selling the shots on the private market and the current federal stockpile runs out. There is a federal program to provide free vaccines to children whose families or caretakers can’t afford the shots.

Jha said on Tuesday the planned switch is not tied to the end of the Covid public health emergency in May.

“The end of the PHE does NOT mean people will suddenly not be able to get the vaccines and treatments they need,” Jha wrote in a Twitter thread on Tuesday.

When the federal government no longer buys vaccines at a discount for the entire nation, individual health-care providers will purchase the shots from the vaccine makers at a higher price.

Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel told CNBC last month that the company is preparing to sell the vaccines on the private market as early as this fall. Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla told investors during the company’s earnings call this week that he is preparing for the vaccines to go commercial in the second half of the year.

Pfizer and Moderna have said they are considering hiking the price of the vaccines to somewhere around $110 to $130 per dose once the U.S. government pulls out of the vaccine program.

“If you’re uninsured, then you might be faced with the full cost,” said Cynthia Cox, an expert on the Affordable Care Act at the Kaiser Family Foundation.

But the U.S. still has a substantial stockpile of free vaccines left. The Biden administration ordered 171 million omicron boosters last year. About 51 million boosters have been administered so far, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The uninsured will continue to have access to these 120 million doses for free, but it’s unclear how long the supply will last.

The HHS official said one tool the federal government plans to use is a program called Section 317 that provides funding to procure and administer shots to uninsured adults at no cost.

In addition, some short-term insurance policies might not pay for the vaccines, Cox said. These plans were expanded during the Trump administration and aren’t required to comply with the ACA.

The ACA also allows private insurance to limit vaccine coverage to in-network providers, Cox said. People who have grown accustomed to getting vaccinated at any pharmacy during the pandemic might have to go to a specific drugstore in the future to get a free shot, she said.

Consumers could also see their health insurance premiums increase if Pfizer and Moderna hike the price of the shots, Cox said.

Dawn O’Connell, who heads the federal office responsible for the U.S. stockpile, said last August that the Health and Human Services Department expected to run out of Paxlovid by mid-2023.

Jha said on Tuesday that there are still millions of doses of Paxlovid and omicron boosters in the U.S. stockpile. “They will continue to be available for free to all Americans who need them,” Jha said of the remaining federal supply.

LONG BEACH, California – It was a few days into the new year yet Relativity Space’s factory was anything but quiet, a din of activity with massive 3D printers humming and the clanging of construction ringing out.

Now about eight years on from its founding, Relativity continues to grow as it pursues a novel way of manufacturing rockets out of mostly 3D-printed structures and parts. Relativity believes that its approach will make building orbital-class rockets much faster than traditional methods, requiring thousands less parts and enabling changes to be made via software — aiming to create rockets from raw materials in as little as 60 days.

The company has raised over $1.3 billion in capital to date and continues to expand its footprint, including the addition of more than 150 acres at NASA’s rocket engine testing center in Mississippi. Relativity was named to CNBC’s Disruptor 50 last year.

The company’s first rocket, known Terran 1, is currently in the final stages of preparation for its inaugural launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida. That rocket was built in “The Portal,” the 120,000-square-foot factory the company built in Long Beach.

But earlier this month CNBC took a look inside “The Wormhole:” The more than one-million square foot facility where Boeing previously built C-17 aircraft is where Relativity now is filling in with machinery and building its larger, reusable line of Terran R rockets.

“I actually tried to kill this project several times,” Relativity CEO and co-founder Tim Ellis told CNBC, gesturing to one of the company’s newest additive manufacturing machines – this one given an internal codename “Reaper,” in reference to the StarCraft games — which marks the fourth generation of the company’s Stargate printers.

Unlike Relativity’s prior Stargate generations, which printed vertically, the fourth generation ones building the main structures of Terran R are printing horizontally. Ellis emphasized the change allows its printers to manufacture seven times faster than the third generation, and have been tested at speeds up to 12 times faster.

“[Printing horizontally] seems very counterintuitive, but it ends up enabling a certain change in the physics of the printhead which is then much, much faster,” Ellis said.

So far, the company is utilizing about a third of the cavernous former Boeing facility, where Ellis said Relativity has room for about a dozen printers that can produce Terran R rockets at a pace of “several a year.”

For 2023, Relativity is focused on getting Terran 1 to orbit, to prove its approach works, as well as demonstrate how “fast we can progress the additive technology,” Ellis said.

“Given the overall economy, we’re obviously being very scrappy still, and making sure we’re delivering results,” he added.

Correction: A previous of this story misstated the speed the company’s 3D-printers had been tested.