A dose of self-awareness is in order for critics of the Obama administration’s response to this Ebola matter.
Pay attention, congressional Republicans. I’m talking about you.
The head of the National Institutes for Health says budget cuts have derailed efforts to find a vaccine for the deadly disease that has killed thousands of people in West Africa — and one in the United States.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/12/ebola-vaccine_n_5974148.html
As the Huffington Post reported: “Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health, said that a decade of stagnant spending has ‘slowed down’ research on all items, including vaccinations for infectious diseases. As a result, he said, the international community has been left playing catch-up on a potentially avoidable humanitarian catastrophe.”
The Post goes on: “Money, or rather the lack of it, is a big part of the problem. NIH’s purchasing power is down 23 percent from what it was a decade ago, and its budget has remained almost static. In fiscal year 2004, the agency’s budget was $28.03 billion. In FY 2013, it was $29.31 billion — barely a change, even before adjusting for inflation. The situation is even more pronounced at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a subdivision of NIH, where the budget has fallen from $4.30 billion in FY 2004 to $4.25 billion in FY 2013.”
Here’s the maddening part, from my perspective.
The very people who now complain about government’s inability to deal with this matter (I refuse to call it a “crisis” in the United States) are the same folks who keep slashing money because — they contend — the United States cannot afford to spend it. They are critical of the NIH, calling it some sort of “liberal-leaning arm of government” that pushes “agendas.”
And yet these are the folks who are feeding much of the hysteria that keeps showing up on right-wing mainstream media outlets by contending that Ebola is about to break out badly in this country, even though health professionals insist that is not the case.
What can be done? How about giving the NIH the resources it needs to find a vaccine for Ebola before it becomes a crisis in the United States?
Again the High Plains’ blogger extraordinaire has proven himself to be at best blindly partisan and misleading and at worst outright dishonest. Over the last decade and a half the two major decreases to HHS funding came while Democrats had a veto-proof hold on the federal government and from the sequester which was a proposal of … wait for it … Barack Obama. Washington Posts fact checked has looked at these wild claims and called them “absurd.”
“In 2014, the administration again proposed reducing the budget, but Congress boosted it to $6.9 billion.”
“On many levels, this line of attack is absurd. Obama’s Republican predecessor oversaw big increases in public-health sector spending.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2014/10/15/the-absurd-claim-that-only-republicans-are-to-blame-for-cuts-to-ebola-research/
Just a thought, but this medical “expert’s” ridiculous partisan actions might be one of the reasons many people think politics rather than sound medical and public health priorities are driving our government’s reaction to this issue.
At best partisan, at worst dishonest? Is this one way to accuse someone of the “worst” without actually saying it? Hmmm.
I learned from the best when you wanted to accuse your “conservative friends” of being motivated by racism but not actually have to defend such slanderous accusations, John.
Thank you for your comments.