A new ad running in states with tight Senate races blasts Republicans for the budget cuts to the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and bio-disaster preparedness programs in hospitals. The ad cuts in testimony from government healthcare officials with dozens of clips of Republicans demanding cuts and pictures of Ebola sufferers and response teams.
All this just cuts a little too close to home for Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus. He gets just a little shrill in his response.
“Obviously, this is just desperation on the part of this idiotic group,” Priebus said on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” on Tuesday, referring to the Agenda Project, which released an ad that blames the GOP for slashing funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. […]
Priebus fired back, saying, “They’re walking this dangerous path of trying to point out blame on Ebola when, in fact, if you look at the president’s record on anything from ISIS to the Secret Service to the CDC to Syria to the border, I mean, you name it and for whatever reason, every single thing the administration as well as these Democrats running for office touches, it’s not turning to gold, I can tell you that. It’s turning into something else.”
Of course, if you actually ask the CDC, as the Senate did in a recent hearing, you’ll get a different story. Dr. Beth Bell, director of the CDC’s National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases testified that the budget cuts allowed the epidemic to explode in Africa. “If even modest investments had been made to build a public health infrastructure in West Africa previously, the current Ebola epidemic could have been detected earlier, and it could have been identified and contained.” Or you could ask NIH Director Francis Collins.
“NIH has been working on Ebola vaccines since 2001. It’s not like we suddenly woke up and thought, ‘Oh my gosh, we should have something ready here,’” Collins told The Huffington Post on Friday. “Frankly, if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would’ve gone through clinical trials and would have been ready.”
Clearly, these budget cuts have stymied the U.S.’s response to the crisis. Because the private sector isn’t going to invest the millions necessary into finding a vaccine or a treatment for Ebola, the response falls largely on the U.S. What’s happening in West Africa now, and the cases that have come home, is the inevitable result of Republican politics with the budget.
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Preibus is well aware of how vulnerable Republicans are to this attack. That’s clear in his response. The desperation in this one is all on the Republican’s side.
