Senate Democrats pleaded with Republican leaders Monday to take up President Obama’s $1.9 billion request to combat the Zika virus “as soon as possible,” saying the mosquito-borne illness poses a real threat to pregnant women.
The Obama administration recently shifted $510 million from the largely successful fight against Ebola in West Africa to the new threat, which has been directly tied to serious birth defects and other problems.
Forty Senate Democrats and two independents said that was a stopgap measure, so new money is still needed.
“Although [the transfer] was necessary in the face of congressional inaction and the growing and rapidly changing public health threat posed by Zika, it would be shortsighted and dangerous for Congress not to act quickly to give the administration the resources it needs to fully fight the Zika virus and protect Americans,” their letter to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said.
The White House has ratcheted up its own rhetoric in recent days, accusing the GOP of sleepwalking while Zika threatens its shores.
House appropriators say they are ready to disburse funds as needed, but want more detailed information about how the money would be used.
Democrats said the request cannot wait. Researchers have confirmed a link between the Zika epidemic and an uptick in the number of babies born with abnormally small heads, and they are investigating its ties to a syndrome that can cause paralysis.
The U.S. territories have reported 471 locally acquired Zika cases, most of them in Puerto Rico.
While it isn’t circulating on the U.S. mainland, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recorded 358 cases that were brought back by travelers to the hot zone and a handful of sexually transmitted cases.
Health officials said they expect locally transmitted cases when temperatures rise, making the climate more hospitable to the Aedes aegypti mosquito that carries the virus.
Democrats said it isn’t clear how far north those mosquitoes will travel, raising the stakes in the fight.
“We cannot delay approving critical resources to assist in the Zika response,” the lawmakers wrote. “We must act now to pass the president’s request for supplemental funding.”
• Tom Howell Jr. can be reached at thowell@washingtontimes.com.
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