Scott Powers
Florida’s Democratic U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson declared Monday the Senate is close to another Zika deal, and expressed urgency that this one needs to go through cleanly.
“I am here to share with the Senate that I think we have finally found a path forward to fund the fight against Zika,” Nelson announced on the Senate floor this afternoon.
“The specifics are still being worked out,” Nelson said. “But it seems that there will be a deal and we will soon be able to move forward on doing what we tried to do last summer, which is fund … the Zika crisis.”
This deal, like the one overwhelmingly passed by the Senate in June, is for $1.1 billion in funding, according to his office. He said the effort aims to strip away highly partisan provisions that led to the last deal’s death in the U.S. House of Representatives.
“I can tell you that the people in Florida are pretty agitated,” Nelson told the Senate in his floor speech. “I’ve been there the last two weekends, and I can tell you, it’s the No. 1 issue on their minds. So, the fact that some of our Republican colleagues — particularly down in the House of Representatives — are willing to put on the Zika funding bill ridiculous riders and insist on that now for three votes. Let me take you back.”
Nelson said there are 756 confirmed cases of Zika virus in Florida including 84 pregnant women, who risk catastrophic brain birth defects in their children. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control reports 571 cases, including all 43 cases reported to have been contracted locally, most likely through bites by infected mosquitos in Miami.
The CDC also reports 15,600 confirmed cases in Puerto Rico, almost all of them locally contracted.
“The CDC is estimating that there are four people walking around with the virus for every one that we know,” Nelson said.
