Sen. Marco Rubio is joining Senate Democrats in urging the GOP to approve President Barack Obama’s request for $1.9 billion in emergency funding for Zika virus research.
The former Republican presidential candidate said on the floor of the Senate that in his home state of Florida, health officials are “freaked out about this Zika thing.”
“If they’re freaked out, then I’m very concerned about it as well, and that’s why I do support fully and immediately funding this situation, and I’ve asked our colleagues to do so as quickly as possible,” Rubio said, reports CNSNews.com.
Rubio added that the spread of mosquitoes in Florida is “massive.”
He continued:
Just a few weeks ago, they said … Zika only impacts a small population of people. We’re learning that this disease impacts whoever it touches. You don’t have to be symptomatic to spread it. There are multiple ways. In Florida alone, we’ve had at least two cases of transmission – sexually transmitted.
By the way, it’s just a matter of time before someone in Florida gets bit by a mosquito … before you’ll open up a newspaper, turn on the news and it’s going to say someone in the continental United States was bitten by a mosquito and they contracted Zika.
When that happens, then everyone’s going to be freaked out – not just me and not just the people that work for the health department in Florida. This is going to happen. There’s just way too many mosquitoes to avoid it.
Rubio’s Republican colleagues have opposed Obama’s requested funds, arguing that the call to approve them amounts to a “blank check” for the Obama administration.
“I think responsible members of the Senate – and I would expect all 100 of us would put ourselves in that category – would want to know where the transparency is, where the accountability is, where the plan is, so we can sit down and do this as mature adults in a nonpartisan way in order to solve the problem,” said John Cornyn of Texas, the second-leading Republican in the Senate, reports News-Press.com.
Rubio countered, however, that failing to act quickly could allow the Zika virus to spread during the upcoming warm mosquito season.
“My advice to my colleagues is, we’re going to deal with this, and I hope we deal with it at the front end, because not only is it better for our people, it’s better for you,” Rubio said. “You’re going to have to explain to people why it is that we sat around for weeks and did nothing on something of this magnitude.”
Rubio joined Democrats such as Sen. Patty Murray in a push for the emergency Zika funding.
“Too many of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle still don’t seem to see Zika as an emergency,” Murray said Thursday, reports The Atlantic, adding that some Republicans think it can wait “weeks, or even months.”
“Republicans in Congress might be able to wait that long—but families across the country simply can’t,” she pressed.
The report continues:
Murray claimed that “extreme right-wing” conservatives have “beaten back” colleagues more willing to work on funding. Never one to mince words, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren accused Republicans of “failing” Americans and shirking their governmental duty to protect “from serious threats.”
The urgency about the spread of the Zika virus among the Obama administration and its leftwing supporters has indeed been called into question, especially since abortion advocates have attached fears of the virus and its link, in some cases, to birth defects, to the need for more access to abortion in countries that have refused to legalize the procedure.
The CDC has recently stated that the Zika virus “can be passed from a pregnant woman to her fetus, and infection during pregnancy can cause a serious birth defect of the brain called microcephaly and other severe brain defects.”
Planned Parenthood – and its colleagues in the fetal tissue business – has latched on to the message that Zika is an urgent crisis.
“Zika has made a long-standing public health crisis impossible to ignore and demonstrates the critical need of government support for sexual and reproductive health care,” Chloe Cooney, director of global advocacy for Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said. “The ability to decide if and when to have children is basic health care, but it’s a basic human right as well, and yet it’s not realized for so many women across the region, which this outbreak is making so crystal clear.”
A special House panel investigating the fetal tissue practices of Planned Parenthood is also scrutinizing StemExpress, the primary biomedical company that has engaged with the abortion business in the transfer of the body parts of aborted babies. As the Washington Post reports, StemExpress names Zika as one of the reasons why it requires fetal tissue procurement:
“Many researchers throughout the medical community have shared with StemExpress that their institutions are waiting for the Select Panel to complete its investigation before going forward with additional fetal tissue research specific to the Zika virus and potential treatments,” the firm said.
At the panel’s first hearing in March, a University of California San Diego researcher, Lawrence Goldstein, testified that new restrictions on fetal tissue research would “absolutely delay” a vaccine or cure for Zika or the fetal disorders it is believed to cause.
Last week, CDC researchers published a paper claiming that “sufficient evidence has accumulated to infer a causal relationship between prenatal Zika virus infection and microcephaly and other severe brain anomalies.”
At Wednesday’s hearing, Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) asked why the Zika threat wasn’t getting more attention from the panel given its moniker: “Considering Zika-affected infants suffer from brain damage, severe seizures and other medical problems, why aren’t we talking about protecting those infant lives?”
Recently, however, a Fordham University social ethics professor wrote that the radical left could well be using the Zika virus to impose its eugenicist impulses on countries that prohibit abortion.
Charles C. Camosy wrote at the Los Angeles Times that the “eugenic impulse” is “so deeply embedded in U.S. culture that we don’t even recognize it.”
Even if a definitive link between Zika and birth defects is determined, he observed, “Abortion is a crude response to the possibility of microcephaly.”
Dr. Michelle Cretella, president of the American College of Pediatricians, sees the left’s Zika scare as part of a plan to promote abortion at a time when Planned Parenthood’s fetal tissue practices have been exposed through the recent baby parts video scandal.
“Planned Parenthood’s use of Zika virus in promoting abortion amounts to an act of desperation,” she tells Breitbart News. “As usual, the abortion giant plays on people’s fears (of having a disabled child) and omits important facts.”
#ZikaVirus is making the need for access to sexual & #reprohealth, including abortion available around the globe: https://t.co/FKAZlsJuY9
— Planned Parenthood Action (@PPact) February 13, 2016
Dr. Jane Orient, executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, told Breitbart News recently that, if Zika is such a true scare, the government should wipe the virus out completely by lifting the ban on DDT.
“DDT was the most effective public health weapon of all time,” she explains, adding:
The ban on DDT was basically the decision of one man, William Ruckelshaus [the first head of the EPA], going against a mountain of evidence on safety and enormous health benefits. It was said that, “If they can ban DDT, they can ban anything.” And that’s how the EPA power grab started. Millions of African babies have died and are still dying of malaria because if it.
“Substitute pesticides are far more toxic and expensive,” Orient adds. “People are advised to use insect repellents such as DEET — which is absorbed through the skin, and safety in pregnancy is not established.”
Pioneer Energy president Dr. Robert Zubrin recently echoed the same idea at National Review: “The most effective pesticide is DDT. If the Zika catastrophe is to be prevented in time, we need to use it.”
Orient further writes at the Heartland Institute about the Zika “scare:”
CDC is in high gear, with politically correct advice on Zika. Meanwhile, cases of dengue in Mexico have topped 10,000. Dengue is caused by a related but far more serious virus, carried by the same Aedes aegypti mosquito. And 78,000 people in Africa die every year of another relative, yellow fever. The vector was coming under good control decades ago, but is re-emerging now. Asking “why” should be the main response to Zika.
Instead the advice seems to be: “Don’t travel, don’t have a baby, don’t let a mosquito bite you, stop climate change” – and give the authorities billions of dollars for a crash vaccine development program.
While Orient says Zika – like German measles or rubella – can apparently cause microcephaly, she asserts, “MOST microcephaly is NOT caused by Zika. About 7 of 10,000 babies born in the U.S. have microcephaly – no thanks to Zika. Most (more than 90 percent) of the Brazilian babies recently confirmed to have microcephaly tested negative for Zika.”
Cretella agrees, stating, “Those of us who value the lives of all patients respond with the obvious: ‘Kill mosquitoes not babies.’”
“Internal residual spraying of households with DDT is recognized as an effective means of controlling another devastating mosquito-borne illness: malaria,” she notes, adding:
There is no question that this limited use of DDT has saved many lives. While there are concerns about the health implications of high doses of DDT, in the long run, however, there is no reason not to use limited dosing while a more long term and safe life-preserving alternative, such as a Zika vaccine, is pursued.
According to the CDC, Americans should “use an outdoor flying insect spray where mosquitoes rest” as a mean to control the mosquitoes carrying the Zika virus. Inside the home, CDC suggests keeping doors and windows closed and using an indoor flying insect fogger or spray such as those containing Tetramethrin or Imidacloprid.
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