Scott Powers
An increasingly frustrated-sounding Bill Nelson said Thursday he has sent another letter to U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell urging him to take action — even using arcane Senate rules — to try again to get major funding to fight the spread of the Zika virus.
Nelson, a Democrat, proposed to McConnell, a Republican, earlier this week that the leader could use a little-known Senate procedure to pass an emergency Zika-funding bill without reconvening the entire Senate. When that was ignored, Nelson said he sent McConnell a letter Thursday reminding him of ways Zika could quickly become a crisis outside of Florida and even spread easily to McConnell’s home state of Kentucky.
Florida is now dealing with the reality of the Zika virus being spread by mosquitoes in Miami, a prospect that could lead to an epidemic and spread up through the peninsula. Nelson said his letter to McConnell was sent to remind him of the prospect it will spread to other states.
Several attempts for major funding to combat the Zika virus died in Congress this spring, including a bipartisan, $1.1 billion funding bill that passed the U.S. Senate 69-30 only to go into the House and get weighed down with highly partisan, poison-pill amendments that assured its death.
Nelson, Florida’s Republican U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, and others have been trying to get the Senate and the House leaders to try again, but Congress is in recess.
Thursday’s letter was signed by 41 senators, all Democrats, asking McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan to cancel the remainder of the Congressional recess and call both chambers back into session to pass a Zika-funding bill.
“It is simply unacceptable that efforts to counter the spread of Zika and develop a vaccine are being held hostage by Republican partisanship,” the lawmakers wrote. “Congressional leaders should call both the Senate and the House back into session to pass a real and serious response to the burgeoning Zika crisis.”
The call comes as health officials in Miami-Dade County work to contain the spread of the virus to a one-square-mile area north of downtown Miami where at least 15 people have been infected by mosquitoes carrying the virus.
“We’ve got to get it through their thick heads, the hard heads of the other senators and particularly the majority leaders, Zika can be spread by not only by a mosquito bite. But if one of the residents in Miami-Dade that has been infected travels to the state of the majority leader, Kentucky, and if another mosquito bites that infected person in Kentucky, and that mosquito goes and feeds on other people, Zika is spreading.
“Or that infected person, a male, can have the Zika virus in his semen for two months. And now the blood, the tainted blood,” Nelson said, referring to the prospect that the Zika virus could infect the donated blood supply and move elsewhere that way.
