Congress never acted on President Barack Obama’s emergency spending request. “This issue is only magnified as we enter deeper into the summer mosquito season and have had possibly the first locally transmitted case of the Zika virus in Miami, Florida”.
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Lynch, co-sponsor of a bill that provides $1.9 billion in emergency funding to fight Zika, is talking with “Morning Meeting” hosts Jaclyn Cashman and Kevin Franck about his letter urging House and Senate lawmakers to return to Capitol Hill immediately to address President Obama’s request for the funding as the risk of transmission spreads across the United States.
The CDC also received a separate $78 million in repurposed funding to be used exclusively for worldwide response efforts, bringing the HHS grand total to $452 million.
As of Wednesday, there are 15 Zika cases in Florida acquired from local mosquitoes.
“The keys here are sitting with Congress, and they have to turn them to unleash more federal funding”, he said.
“If we do not have money soon, it is going to impact getting to phase II of the vaccine trials”, Griffis said. The secretary of Health and Human Services says the National Institutes of Health will exhaust its resources for vaccine development by month’s end. BARDA is responsible for funding private-sector partners in development of medicine and vaccines.
“His office added: “[The letter] says they have funds that will last through the end of the fiscal year that are not yet allocated”. “I urge you to work with Sen”.
In an opinion piece in a newspaper in his home state of Kentucky, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blamed Democrats for the failure to pass Zika funding.
The Senate did come to a bipartisan agreement in May for around $1.1 billion.
Later Tuesday, Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) told reporters at a White House state dinner for the prime minister of Singapore that he had sent a letter to McConnell asking him to again pass the original bipartisan Senate Zika bill in one of the many “pro forma” sessions the Senate is holding while it is out.
White House and public health officials on Friday came close to publicly demanding that the House and Senate interrupt a seven-week recess and return to Washington to give federal agencies up to $1.9 billion to counter the mosquito-borne virus.
The House is also scheduled to be out of session until September.
“We did what we could earlier this year to reprogram funds, take them away from projects like Ebola, which still pose a threat to public health”, he said.
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In a letter signed by every member of the Florida delegation, Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen said the $720,000 the state received out of $16 million in new CDC grants was a “paltry sum”, amounting to about 4 percent of the grants despite the urgent needs particular to Florida.
