Before you read this, you may want to make sure you secure any heavy objects nearby, so that you won’t hurl them through your computer monitor.
Republican perversion with starving government has helped land West Africa in an Ebola crisis. steep budget cuts by Congress has set back the NIH work on both prevention and treatment for the disease and that if it hadn’t been for a decade’s worth of cuts. Says its director:
“we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would’ve gone through clinical trials and would have been ready.”
It’s not just the NIH that’s suffered, and it’s not just in Africa where the cuts are harming people. The Center for Disease Control’s emergency preparedness budget has been nearly cut in half in just the past seven years. That means preparation at home. That means that local health departments in this country don’t have the funding—or the staff—they need to do the necessary preparation and training to deal with any epidemic. Judy Stone, MD is an infectious disease specialist, details the cuts at Scientific American.
The CDC’s discretionary funding was cut by $585 million during [2010-14]. Shockingly, annual funding for the CDC’s public health preparedness and response efforts were $1 billion lower for 2013 fiscal year than for 2002. These funding decreases have resulted in more than 45,700 job losses at state and local health departments since 2008. Again, it is not just the Ebola that is a looming threat. We need to worry about vaccine-preventable but neglected infections like influenza, measles, and whooping cough; the serious emerging viral infections in the US like Enterovirus-D68, chikungunya and dengue, as well as overseas MERS and bird flus, and natural disasters.
Just let that sink in for a minute.
$1 billion less for infectious disease control in 2013 than in 2002.
The problems in the Texas hospital that led to one of the nursing staff contracting the disease could potentially have been prevented if the local public health infrastructure had the funding and the staff it needs to deal with a serious health public health threat. Meanwhile, Republicans will continue to screech like rabid bald eagles that it’s all Obama’s fault and will do everything they can to terrify Americans about an Ebola epidemic at home.
This is what it looks like to “Drown the gov’t in the tub”… thanks Grover Norquist, Irrelevant short-bearded sad bear. Your scotch-soaked, life-defining tax pledge seeming to lose grip on legislators who decided in ever-growing numbers to abandon irresponsible platitudes in favor of actually legislating. Of actually protecting the American people. Mission fucking accomplished – maybe you can form a bucket brigade to put out the fire of Ebola:
The loudest criticism came from Grover Norquist, whose group, Americans for Tax Reform, is the author of the Taxpayer Protection Pledge that has become a sacred covenant for virtually anyone wishing to run as a Republican. More than 95 percent of the Republicans in Congress have signed it (including Senator Coburn), as have many Republican governors and state lawmakers. … The pledge is really less about keeping taxes low than it is about holding down government revenues, which prevent the growth of government services. Mr. Norquist has famously said his goal is to shrink government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”
Starving the government is anarchy, you treasonist asshole. The point of government is to do things and to pay for them as a group because we each can’t afford to pay for this individually. Grover Norquist is also a board member of the NRA…that suggested a tax on guns and ammo to fund security guards in schools. HAW HAW HAW!
Keep in mind the next time you hear some Republican fearmongering about Ebola. Their destructive budget cutting is killing people. There are some governmental services which are vital for the health and security of our nation. Across the board cuts and forever beating the drum that all government is bad — fed by the talk show frenzie — has destabilized our nation and endangered the health of the American people.
Opossum-eyed Jesus geologist /congressman from Texas Joe Barton – who famously argle-bargled: “I have one simple question for you in the last six seconds. How did all the oil and gas get to Alaska and under the Arctic Ocean?” — at Nobel laureate Steven Chu, who then laughed before trying to outline 100-million-year-old geological processes in six seconds, or however long he had before being interrupted with more nonsense from Joe Barton – brags about his “Service” on the committee which reviewed the NIH and on Energy and Commerce. He’s been in office over 30 years and has not solved any of the problems facing veterans, He voted for cuts to funding for the Veterans Administration when our troops were coming home from war injured. He voted to cut funding to the NIH and CDC. Now he grandstands at the airport trying to get on television during the 90 days before an election when the media isn’t supposed to have incumbents on air without their opponents. Both the Democrat and the Libertarian running against Barton this year says that the CDC is underfunded. David E. Cozad knows that GOP austerity and obstruction has hampered the Obama administration in providing necessary health services and in funding the CDC and NIH at levels which address pandemics such as the ebola virus. But. It’s Obama’s fault.
This is what happens when we allow our medical system to be run by greed-sickened capitalists. Doctors are so much more educated, have so much more responsibility, and take greater personal risks than any of the 1% thieves. Yet the entitled banksters, congenitally greedy families and bigoted religionists are the ones profiting from their work.
Republicans are bad for your health remember to use full body protection when interacting with one or when you suspect that they may be one . Wash your hands of them .