Desperate Dems: You know who is responsible for Ebola outbreak in America? The GOP!
Late Sunday night, the Huffington Post's Sam Stein published an interview with National Institutes of Health director Dr. Francis Collins who assured the HuffPo scribe that his agency would surely have developed an Ebola vaccine by now if it were not for reductions in his agency's budget after 2004.
"NIH has been working on Ebola vaccines since 2001. It's not like we suddenly woke up and thought, 'Oh my gosh, we should have something ready here,'" Collins told The Huffington Post on Friday. "Frankly, if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would've gone through clinical trials and would have been ready."
"We would have been a year or two ahead of where we are, which would have made all the difference," he said.Collins later conceded that experimental vaccines are often not, pardon the expression, a cure-all. An experimental HIV vaccine, he said by way of example, actually made the trial patients sicker due to its suppression effect on the immune system.
Nevertheless, the partisan point that Stein and his cohorts were trying to make was effectively made. The left gleefully jumped at the dubious opportunity to suggest that pro-limited government conservatives are somehow to blame for this deadly Ebola outbreak.
"Gee, thanks, Republicans!" the Democratic strategist Paul Begala exclaimed. "We'd Have Ebola Vaccine if Not for Budget Cuts." He was one of many to proclaim that this witless plea from an agency head for more funding (a not unusual occurrence, to be sure) represented the GOP's Waterloo.
Not all were so impressed with this unsubtle attempt by the allies of expanded government to use the Ebola outbreak as just one more opportunity to demand more government. "This was a really bad strategy," columnist Rich Galen observed. "Oppo researchers find every dumb program CDC/NIH ever funded and make them look silly."
And that is exactly what they did...Also read:
Can You Honestly Blame Ebola Outbreak on "Republican Cuts" to Health Budgets?
The media is ignoring the whiff of desperation emanating from Democrats
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