Scott Powers
Florida’s senior U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson and other Senate Democrats on Tuesday urged immediate action by Congress to fund efforts to stop the Zika virus and accused Republicans of playing politics with the looming crisis.
Nelson, joined by Sens. Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, held a national telephone press conference Tuesday at which they urged the Republican leadership to support President Barack Obama‘s $1.9 billion emergency funding request for prevention and treatment of the Zika virus outbreak both in the United States and abroad.
The Democrats were joined by Dr. Peter Hotez, chief of Baylor College of Medicine’s National School of Tropical Medicine, who called Zika “the virus from Hell,” and Ron Klain, White House coordinator of the 2014 federal response to the Ebola outbreak, who predicted the Zika outbreak will only get worse.
The Zika virus is mostly spread by mosquitoes, and can having devastating effects on brain development in fetuses, leading to brain defects including microcephaly. Pregnant women are the greatest concern. In the past few months there have been widespread outbreaks in Latin America and the Caribbean, while U.S. cases so far have been limited to people who traveled here from those areas.
It’s not mosquito season yet, but it’s coming, Nelson warned.
“We’re coming into the summer and that’s when mosquitos swarm,” Nelson said.
So far there have been 91 cases, including five pregnant women, reported in Florida, Nelson said.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control reports Tuesday that there have been 358 cases of Zika reported in the United States, all of them among people who had traveled to high-risk areas. However, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands have seen 461 cases between them, and almost all of those people contracted the disease locally.
On Tuesday Obama signed a bill that Nelson sponsored and which received bipartisan support, to offer financial incentives to drug manufactures to work on a Zika vaccine. That will help, Nelson said, but the country needs more immediate funding to fight the virus now, in the United States and overseas.
“This is an emergency,” Nelson said.
In February Obama sought $1.9 billion for a federal response to Zika.
Republicans in Congress have been reluctant to act because the request is open-ended. They have called for more details on what the White House intends to do, and have pushed Obama to first spend money left over from the 2014 Ebola emergency funding. In 2014 the White House requested $6 billion to fight the Ebola outbreak, and Congress approved $5 billion.
“Every day that the Republican leadership waits to act on funding, the threat gets greater,” Murphy said. “It’s frustrating, because I don’t know when public health epidemics became political.”
Klain said there are an estimated 1 million infected people in Brazil, Haiti is being ravaged by the disease because of the lack of health care infrastructure, and predicted Puerto Rico will be hit hard.
Hotez said that in the United States the Gulf Coast is most at risk, including “virtually all of Florida.”
