The Republican-controlled Congress has said the White House should draw the money it needs to fight Zika from $2.7 billion in funds set aside for public health projects aimed at the Ebola virus.
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“These efforts can’t be stopped or shortchanged”, said Sylvia Mathews Burwell, secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The Vietnamese CDC and a report by Reuters said that the Vietnamese government has confirmed the nation’s first cases of the Zika virus in a 64-year-old woman in Nha Trang and a 33-year-old woman, who is eight weeks pregnant, in Ho Chi Minh City. But there have been another 352 cases in the territories of Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and American Samoa, where the disease is spreading by local mosquitoes.
According to the press release, Zika is a mosquito-borne virus that can cause birth defects if the virus is contracted during pregnancy.
About 40 million people travel between the continental USA and Zika-affected countries.
Administration officials said they were making the move because Congress hadn’t yet acted on the administration’s $1.9 billion emergency funding request.
The White House did not immediately disclose to Congress which Ebola-related activities it was taking the money from, and which Zika-related programs it would now fund. The administration has requested funding for mosquito control, research into diagnostic tests and vaccines.
Burwell and Donovan reiterated that the administration’s earlier request for supplemental funding from Congress remains in place.
The administration says the new funding will go towards vaccine development as well as mosquito surveillance and control.
“We should not play with fire here”, Donovan told reporters on a conference call.
People in Pinar del Rio, Cuba, make their way through a fumigation fog that’s meant to kill the mosquito that transmits the Zika virus. “We must scale up right now”. The White House said US officials were in contact with Belgian officials about the explosions at the Brussels airport and subway system.
Health officials had said during budget hearings before Congress that the Ebola funding was still needed for that virus; Mr. Earnest said in February there may be some point in time in which some Ebola resources could be used for other things without impacting critical efforts on that disease. “… We are closing in on the concept of the direct connection with Zika and microcephaly, but there are many unknowns”.
We have always said that we were open to using a portion of the existing Ebola balances for Zika, but that this alone would not provide a sufficient enough response to the significant threat posed by Zika.
“There are real consequences and risks in waiting”, Donovan said.
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Here’s Ryan’s tweet where he presents himself as a leader directing the White House on Zika funding: “White House will use pre-allocated funding on #Zika response at our request”. Mosquitoes become infected when they feed on a person already infected with the virus and then spread the virus to other people through bites.
