Democrats looking to blame Republicans for the lack of an Ebola vaccine may owe Dick Cheney an apology.
It turns out that as vice president, Cheney was the driving force behind more funding for the National Institutes of Health that helped lead to the development of Ebola vaccines being tested today.
From the time scientists first discovered the deadly virus in 1976 to 2012, two dozen outbreaks of Ebola claimed the lives of roughly 1,500 people–far less than the nearly 5,000 killed in the current outbreak in West Africa.
Bloomberg News reports that little money had been available to scientists to work on finding a cure to the disease. But after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Cheney, anticipating the potential for bioterrorist attacks, became the Bush White House’s point man advocating more spending to protect the nation from deadly pathogens.
Cheney told Bloomberg:
It has ramifications when the source of the problem you’re dealing with is something like an outbreak of Ebola, but our prime motivation was to make certain we were prepared to deal with an attempt to use those substances in an attack.
More at the Daily Signal
This is terrific, but….ebola mutates all the time.
I’ve read about the death rates of various strands of ebola.
Some killed as few as single digit percents of those infected, other strands killed up to 70%.
Does one vaccine cover all ebola or just one old strain?
Meanwhile….
Seems members of the medical profession want the ”elites” in charge, not mere elected officials.
(Perhaps they might aim their wrath at Obama for his non-elite ebola czar.)
One doctor and nurse after the next, exposed to ebola, chose to decide for themselves what course of action was ”proper” in their own case.
And, one after another, they chose incorrectly.
Now, perhaps this NJ quarantined nurse (from Maine via Guinea) is going to prove negative for ebola.
But her ”human rights’ trump public health,” scream involves an elitist call for all elected officials to butt out and allow these potentially infected ”experts” to make their own freedom decisions for all of the rest of us.
Does the federal government pay for all the cleaning that restaurants, bowling alleys, airplanes and buses and taxis must do when one of these hotshots decides to come out and potentially infect everybody? No.
Even before a final all-clear can be declared these businesses MUST clean or lose business.
They should ALL sue these exposed medical elites who want to decide for all of us what’s best.
They should collect every penny they spent trying to clean well enough to get their public back in their businesses.
It might take a few jury rulings in businesses’ behalf for these elites in the medical field to understand that they are not the center of the universe.
Maybe the costs would convince other returning exposed people from breaking voluntary quarantines.
Until they learn, they must be under mandatory quarantine.
@Nanny: Did you mean “Obola Czar”?