by vox_mundi » Thu 17 May 2018, 11:00:16
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White House Announces It Has No Global Health Security Chief the Day After Ebola Outbreak Declared$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '[')b]The White House announced today that Rear Adm. Tim Ziemer, who sat on the National Security Council and was the senior director for global health security and biothreats, left the Trump administration on Tuesday, and
HuffPost reports that Ziemer’s office doesn’t exist anymore, with his staff being rerouted to other NSC departments. Great news.
According to
HuffPost, Ziemer leaving came “
amid a reshuffling” by new national security advisor and NSC head John Bolton ...
The news comes just one day after the World Health Organization announced a new outbreak of Ebola after two new cases were confirmed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In the past five weeks,
HuffPost reported yesterday, the Central African country has seen 17 people die with Ebola-like symptoms.
“It is unclear in his absence who at the White House would be in charge of a pandemic,” Ziemer’s predecessor, Beth Cameron, told HuffPost. Added Jeremy Koyndyk, who previously led the Obama administration’s response to the 2014 Ebola crisis:
“I hope it’s not lost on anyone that it happened the exact week that we have new reports on the Ebola outbreak.”
Ebola Returns To Congo Just as Trump Asks to Rescind Ebola Funds$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '.').. “The last outbreak occurred approximately at the same time of year, and it appears that these outbreaks are occurring with greater frequency,” says Anne Rimoin from UCLA, who has worked in the Congo for 16 years. That could be because the Congolese are getting better at detecting the disease, “but there is some evidence that this outbreak appears to have been smoldering for a few months,” Rimoin adds. “Perhaps the ecology is changing, and it has something to do with the reservoir species.” She means the animals that harbor the Ebola virus—bats are likely candidates, but the exact species is still a mystery.
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Just as news of the Ebola outbreak broke, Donald Trump asked Congress to rescind $252 million that had been put aside to deal with Ebola, as part of a broader move to cut down on “excessive spending.”[/size]
That pot of money is the leftover from a $5.4 billion sum that Congress appropriated for dealing with the West African Ebola epidemic in 2015.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '[')i]“If Congress accepts Trump’s proposal, USAID will have no funding for a response when the next crisis comes,” says Klain, “and it will have to wait until Congress passes new funding, or diverts funds from some other, then-existing disaster response,” ... “It is crazily short-sighted to do this.”