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Nobody should be surprised when the present House of Representatives, dominated by penurious reactionaries, produces a stingy response to a danger that calls for compassionate largess. But for sheer fecklessness it’s hard to top the House’s response this week to the Zika virus. The salient feature is that in providing money to fight one health menace, it steals from other funds meant to fight an even more dangerous threat — the Ebola virus.
In February,President Obamaasked Congressfor $1.9 billion to help fight Zika, a virus that can cause severebirth defectsand has been linked to neurological disorders in adults. Transmittable by mosquitoes and through sex, Zika broke out last year in Brazil and has since spread to the United States and other countries. Experts fear there could eventually be hundreds of thousands of infections in Puerto Rico, wherenearly half the populationlives below the poverty line, with possibly hundreds of babies affected. States in the American South with large mosquito populations are also at particular risk.
On Thursday, the Senate voted for $1.1 billion in emergency funds for research, vaccine development, mosquito control efforts and other programs. The bill does not provide as much money as public health agencies like theCenters for Disease Control and Preventionsay they need, but it is a decent start.
The House bill approved Wednesday would provide just over half that — $622 million. Further, the House insisted that even that sum be offset by cuts to other programs, including those aimed at Ebola. That makes no sense. It would shortchange critical efforts to strengthen public health systems in Africa in order to prevent a resurgence of Ebola, whichkilled more than 11,000 people, and other diseases.
The money in theHouse billwould be available only until the end of September, when the fiscal year ends. That cutoff seems to assume that Zika will no longer be a problem by then, an absurdly risky line of reasoning that most health experts do not accept. Cutting off funds that early would also severely hamper the effort to create a Zika vaccine, which is expected to takemore than a year to developand test.
Some ultraconservative House Republicans have said that theydo not considerZika a major health crisis. Perhaps they have yet to see (or, more distressingly, they deliberately ignore) the photographs ofbabies born with small headsbecause of the virus. Or perhaps they do not think of this as an emergency worthy of their attention because those babies were not born in the United States or to their constituents.
Perversely, while not doing much to contain the virus, some House members have seized upon it as a pretext to weaken environmental regulations. Republicans have introduced a bill that would allow businesses to spraypesticideson or near waterways without first notifying regulators, as now required by law. Once called the Reducing Regulatory Burdens Act, the bill was recently given a more ominous name, theZika Vector Control Act, the idea being that with Zika lurking around the corner, local governments should be able to use pesticides more easily.
The bill,rejected on Tuesdayunder a rule that required a two-thirds majority in favor, could come up again under a rule requiring only a simple majority. In any case, it’s a ruse to benefit pesticide manufacturers and farmers who find the regulation burdensome. TheEnvironmental Protection Agency saysthat in emergencies, spraying can occur without prior notification. The House seems incapable of seeing that Zika is a real threat, not a device to satisfy its anti-regulatory zeal.
(THE NEW YORK TIMES)
