Obama Administration May Transfer $510M from Ebola Funds for Zika Research
In an effort to break the two-month deadlock over funding to fight the encroaching Zika virus, Obama administration officials announced on Wednesday that, as congressional Republicans had demanded, they would transfer $510 million originally intended to protect against Ebola to the Zika battle.
Officials from the Office of Management and Budget, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the State Department said they would move a total of $589 million to efforts to contain Zika. In addition to funds moved from the Ebola budget, an additional $79 million would come from several other accounts, including money previously allotted to the national strategic stockpile of vaccines and other emergency supplies for epidemics, said Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.
Despite the transfers, “these repurposed funds are not enough to support a comprehensive Zika response and can only temporarily address what is needed,” said Shaun Donovan, director of the Office of Management and Budget
In February, the Obama administration asked Congress for a more than $1.8 billion emergency appropriation for the effort to defeat the Zika virus. Congressional Republicans said that the administration
should first spend the money previously allocated to the fight against Ebola in West Africa. The administration’s emergency request still stands, officials said. “Our $1.9 billion request remains our $1.9 billion request,” Mr. Donovan said.“We should not play with fire here,” he added. “We risk the disease getting out of control before Congress acts.”
In the United States and its territories, the mosquito-borne Zika virus has now infected 672 people, 64 of them pregnant women, who are considered the most at risk. The infection has been linked to birth defects and brain damage in infants born to infected mothers, and to paralysis in adults. About half of those cases involved local transmission within Puerto Rico, the United States Virgin Islands and American Samoa. Almost all the remainder occurred in travelers who returned from countries where the Zika epidemic was raging.
Until recently, officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Health and Human Services had been adamant that they could not spare any Ebola funds because they had already been spent or had been allocated to strengthening surveillance and health care systems in Africa to spot and suppress any new outbreaks.
There have been more than 20 Ebola outbreaks since the disease was first described in 1976. The one that began two years ago in West Africa was by far the worst, and it was the first to reach the United States. Several doctors and nurses with the disease were brought back here to recover, and two nurses caught it from a Liberian man who died in a Texas hospital.
Early in April, at the Zika Action Plan Summit at the C.D.C. headquarters in Atlanta, Amy E. Pope, a White House deputy assistant for homeland security, said, “Congress is asking the American people to choose what disease they want protection from — when Ebola threatened, they didn’t do that.” A spokeswoman for the Office of Management and Budget declined to say whether a deal had been reached with Republicans who opposed funding for control of Zika in return for the administration’s moving the funds.
She pointed out that Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, had previously said that some Ebola funds might eventually be used “for other things without impacting our critical efforts against Ebola.”
The West African Ebola outbreak, which has claimed more than 11,000 lives, has several times come close to being declared over, but a dozen new cases recently appeared in Liberia and Guinea. More than 1,000 contacts of those cases are being traced, and people close to them are being vaccinated with experimental Ebola vaccines. American funds are paying for many of those efforts. Alarms over the Zika virus were first raised in this country in late December, when its effects appeared to be spreading outward from Brazil.
On February 1, because of the suspected connection to microcephaly — in which babies are born with tiny heads and damaged brains — the World Health Organization declared a public health emergency.
