More than three months after President Barack Obama requested $1.9 billion in emergency funds to fight the Zika virus, Congress has taken the first step on May 17 to grant it with the Senate passing a compromise $1.1 billion fund.
The U.S. Senate voted 68-29 in favor of spending $1.1 billion for fighting Zika, however, setting up a confrontation with Republicans in the House who have presented a plan of just $622 million re-channeled from other programs.
The White House dubbed the Republican budget bill as “woefully inadequate” to combat the rapidly spreading virus, shown to cause serious birth defects in infants. Republicans initially resisted allocating any new funds for Zika, harping on leftover funds from the recent Ebola outbreak to be used first.
"[T]he Administration's full request of $1.9 billion is needed to reduce the risk of the Zika virus, particularly in pregnant women,” argued the White House in a statement (PDF), focusing on vector control, developing vaccines and new diagnostics, and conducting research to better understand Zika effects.
The vote on the Senate bill saw 22 Republicans joining the Democrats in favor, with no Democrats opposed. A number of Republican senators, specifically from southern states facing the most immediate Zika threat, forcefully called for government action on the crisis.
Johnny Isakson, a Republican senator from Georgia, said it is a lot of money, but considered it “only a pittance” compared to the cost of an uncontrollable epidemic.
CDC Director Dr. Thomas Frieden criticized the funding in a phone interview with the New York Times, saying it is “no way to fight an epidemic.”
“We’re scraping together dollars to try to move as quickly as possible,” he said, citing borrowings from other programs and the lack of long-term studies on how to stop the Aedes aegypti mosquito due to funding concerns.
In April, the CDC said that Zika outbreaks could be anticipated in the summer across a great swath of the U.S., including Central and Southern California and as far east and north as New Jersey.
The Obama administration has already started to move around $600 million in Ebola funds, but health authorities consider this a very risky step.
“It’s like saying we haven’t had a fire in town for the last year, so let’s disband the fire department,” explained epidemiologist Jennifer Nuzzo from Baltimore’s UPMC Center for Health Security, warning that public health offices are already grappling with insufficient infrastructure.
The Ebola virus stays active in West Africa and, thus, remains a health threat to the rest of the world.
Government spending on public health has been on the decline for years now. The inflation-adjusted budget of the CDC, for instance, has dropped from $7.07 billion in 2005 to $5.98 billion in 2013, revealed a Trust for America’s Health analysis.
The country’s public health workforce, too, has been dwindling and now sitting at nearly 20 percent smaller than it was back in 2008.
This chronic underfunding of health initiatives is seen instrumental in the repeated passage of emergency measures in Congress, as what was done by lawmakers in 2014 in response to Ebola and in 2005 and 2006 with the pandemic flu virus.
Photo: NIAID | Flickr
