Remember
the sequestration that Republicans forced America into after they took control
of the House in 2010? It cut $1.55 billion from federal health organizations
such as the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institute of Health.
Remember
the war on science that Republicans are still currently waging?
Remember
how the GOP refused to comply with President Obama’s request to pour $1 billion
into the fight against Ebola, instead only approving $50 million?
Well,
it’s cuts and slashes like these that have prevented the development of a
vaccine against the Ebola virus, according to NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins.
NIH has been working on Ebola vaccines since 2001. It’s not like we suddenly woke up and thought, ‘Oh my gosh, we should have something ready here.’ Frankly, if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would’ve gone through clinical trials and would have been ready… We would have been a year or two ahead of where we are, which would have made all the difference.
Collins
also had something to say about how media outlets such as Fox News have hyped
up the Ebola threat to scare viewers. In short, he blasted the fear-mongering.
Certainly there’s been a lot of fear [in the] response from people who are probably at essentially zero risk, that this might somehow take over our country, which is really not going to happen. And despite all the assurances, it still hasn’t quite sunk in. There’s still the cable news people who are whipping this up, and frankly sometimes using it for political purposes to sort of shoot at the government. More people will die today of AIDS than have died so far in the entire Ebola epidemic. We’ve somehow gotten used to that, and it doesn’t seem to be so threatening or frightening.
To
recap, the very people who are going out of their way to frighten Americans
into a countrywide panic are those who also slashed the national health budget
or served as cheerleaders for the cuts in the first place. And Dr, Collins
isn’t the only health official who has called out the way conservatives are
acting.
Dr.
Anthony Fauci of the NIH has appeared multiple times on Fox News to
counter the ignorance as host after host has gone on the air to push conspiracy
theories and make Ebola seem like a worse threat than it actually is.
Clearly,
America could have led the way in combating Ebola and could very well have
created a vaccine that would have prevented the outbreak in west Africa from
getting so out of hand.
At
the very least, Americans would know that their government had a way to fight
the virus, but it’s all hypothetical now because Republicans have waged a war
against public health funds over the last decade.
In
the end, the cuts to public health have been more dangerous to the lives of
Americans than the Ebola virus itself.
