WhatFinger


In an hour of need, our assortment of national and international public health administrators

Obama's response to Ebola, unfortunately, has been far more political than responsible dropped the ball with deadly consequences.



ARLINGTON, Virginia—As the Ebola epidemic deepens in West Africa and new isolated cases surface in the United States, critics increasingly are questioning the Obama Administration’s halting response to the crisis. Complaining that the public was being misinformed about the crisis and then blaming the unfolding tragedy on spending cuts was bad enough.
The appointment of political fix-it man with flimsy medical credentials as Ebola Czar confirmed the White House response is more political than responsible. In an hour of need, our assortment of national and international public health administrators—including the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the United Nation’s World Health Organization (WHO)—dropped the ball with deadly consequences. That’s due to the way government bureaucrats generally allocate public resources and the poor coordination plaguing the agencies who are tasked with fighting the epidemic on the front line.

Support Canada Free Press


Take the CDC whose mission to “develop and apply disease prevention and control” takes a backseat to more political concerns like fighting obesity and gun violence. From 2004 to 2014, total CDC spending grew by almost 30 percent, from $8.3 billion to $10.7 billion. Yet funding its National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases—which aims to prevent diseases like Ebola—received only $1.6 billion, a tiny sliver of total CDC funding over the past four years. Funding for the CDC’s climate change and chronic disease programs—which aim to prevent smoking, alcohol consumption, and poor diets—received $6.5 billion over that same time. While these issues are real and problematic, they take the focus away from the CDC’s original mission and divert resources away from emerging disease response. The same is true at the National Institutes of Health, regardless of its director’s erroneous public statements about budget cuts being at the core of NIH’s lack of preparedness. Recent NIH funding levels are actually higher than historical norms. In 2000, its total budget was $24.1 billion. By 2014, that grew by roughly 25 percent to a more than adequate $29.7 billion. Much of NIH’s budget goes to projects that have nothing to do with researching vaccines for emerging diseases like Ebola—ones like studying the behavioral attributes of feces-flinging chimpanzees or “facilitating a pleasurable and safe sexual experience for male” by developing hand-rolled “origami” condoms. But funding for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the NIH department that actually researches infectious diseases, has retained stable levels of roughly $4.5 billion since 2003. These are only symptoms of a deeper problem. In 2011, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported that NIH’s broad range of activities, large personnel and consecutive funding increases make “inefficiencies and duplicative or wasteful efforts” likely. The CBO concluded that NIH funding could be “reduced or eliminated without harming high-priority research.” Then there’s the World Health Organization (WHO), whose director ignored a plea for more support in West Africa from the highly effective Doctors Without Borders in July. The Associated Press recently obtained a leaked private WHO document admitting that “nearly everyone involved in the outbreak response failed to see some fairly plain writing on the wall.” The problem? WHO acknowledges its African office directors were “politically motivated appointments” unaccountable to leadership in Geneva. The co-discoverer of the Ebola virus, Dr. Peter Piot, agreed, noting that “the regional office in Africa didn't do anything.” That office, he said, “is really not competent.” Poor government planning and unaccountability are wasteful and inefficient in the best of times, but the worsening Ebola crisis shows that they can be downright deadly in the worst of times. It’s time our public health officials learned from these mistakes. Veronique de Rugy is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center (mercatus.org), a non-profit education and research think-tank at George Mason University. She received her PhD in economics from the Pantheon-Sorbonne University in Paris. Readers may write her at 3434 Washington Boulevard, Arlington, VA 22201


View Comments

Guest Column Veronique de Rugy -- Bio and Archives

Items of notes and interest from the web.


Sponsored