The Ebola outbreak’s aftermath and the creeping threat of Zika virus underscore the need to fund basic research and gird for epidemics before they hit, members of Congress said Wednesday, signaling they are weary of emergency funding requests to deal with global health scares.
President Obama this week requested $1.9 billion from Capitol Hill to fight the Zika virus at home and abroad, even though Republican lawmakers told the administration to rely on about $2.7 billion in leftover Ebola funds first, arguing the money could be backfilled as needed.
The administration asked Congress for the flexibility to use a portion of the funds left over from the Ebola fight on top of its massive request, though it hasn’t assigned a dollar figure to how much it might use. It also insists that most of the Ebola money is obligated.
“We need to both finish the job of responding to the Ebola crisis, and act to address the growing threat of the Zika virus. Families’ health and safety should not be a zero-sum game,” the Senate Health Committee’s top Democrat, Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, said at the outset of a Zika hearing Wednesday.
Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander, Tennessee Republican, said committee members didn’t see eye to eye on the funding, although he expressed hope they could “work it out on the floor.”
The Zika virus is a mosquito-borne disease that is fanning across Latin America and has been linked to an uptick in the number of babies born with abnormally small heads, a condition known as microcephaly. While the link hasn’t been confirmed, U.S. officials have asked pregnant women to defer travel to hard-hit areas such as Brazil.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Massachusetts Democrat, said funding for the National Institutes of Health failed to keep up with inflation for years, even if the agency received an injection of funds last year, so Congress has effectively weakened the country’s defenses against infectious disease.
“Hearings may be good PR, but it’s time to step up and fund more medical research and more preparedness efforts,” Mrs. Warren said. “Until then, our response to the latest crisis will always be too little, too late.”
Sen. Richard Burr, North Carolina Republican, said that’s why he pushed in 2007 to create the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Agency (BARDA), which would entice the private sector to partner with the government in pursuit of vaccines and other countermeasures against bioterrorism and disease.
“Senator Warren is partially right that over time, the Congress has not funded the mechanisms that were embraced so enthusiastically in a bipartisan way at the time, and we tried to get by on the cheap with a lot of the tools that were needed to supply interest by the private sector to be a partner,” he said.
Anne Schuchat, principle deputy director at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said she supports efforts to shore up front-line defenses.
“It is much better to detect, prevent and respond early, than to come in when you have a multiple-country collapse,” she said.
CDC has reported 82 cases of Zika among travelers who returned to the U.S. from hard-hit countries, although the virus is not being transmitted by mosquitoes within the 50 states.
However this week, the CDC said scientists are investigating 14 suspected cases of transmission between sexual partners.
“We are concerned now about sexual transmission as a possible route,” Dr. Schuchat told the committee.
• Tom Howell Jr. can be reached at thowell@washingtontimes.com.
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