Ten New Zika Cases Reported In Florida And Our Congress Is On Vacation.....

[Igel]

4. The NIH and CDC have unrestricted funds.

Just for such things.

They've allocated the money for other purposes, and won't change those priorities. In other words, zika is less important than things like ebola, and the only way they'll add anti-zika initiatives (most of which would take years to come to fruition, by which time the disease will be past epidemic and simply be endemic) is to get more money. Those agencies knew this over a year ago and did little. However, I will say at the time there was that horrible "immigrants bringing in diseases from south of the border" rhetoric, with so many saying that there weren't such diseases and pointing to measles vaccination programs.


The other fun fact is that the zika funding would have been forthcoming but for two things. (1) the (R) required that the funding be deficit neutral, i.e., that funding be shifted from some other source, and (2) all current programs were too important to lose the funds. Planned Parenthood was the (R)'s preferred funding source, but the (D) refused to allow its funding to be shifted. And, yes, (R) considered their pet programs to be more important and wouldn't allow those programs to undergo budget cuts.

Not that it matters. Until very recently government scientists couldn't get good virus samples because the Brazilians (etc.) wouldn't release them. Private researchers hired people to go to the countries and collect samples or get unofficial samples from researchers in those countries, but the government couldn't use them because they weren't properly acquired. Moreover, it's unlikely that in the last 4 months the CDC would have developed a vaccination and put it through clinical trials by the end of this year.