President Obama Already Has An Ebola Czar. Where Is She?
As
the Ebola situation in West Africa continues to deteriorate, some U.S.
officials are claiming that they would have been able to better deal
with the public health threat if only they had more money.
Dr. Francis Collins, who heads the National Institutes of Health (NIH), told The Huffington Post,
“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.”
Hillary Clinton also claimed that funding restrictions were to blame for
inability to combat Ebola.
Conservative critics have pointed out that the federal government has spent billions upon billions of dollars on unnecessary programs promoting a political agenda rather than targeting those funds to the fight against health threats.
Other limited government types point to the Progressive utopian
foolishness seen in opposing political factions, both sides of which
seem to agree humanity could somehow escape calamity if only we had a
properly functioning government. People who don’t want an all-powerful
government shouldn’t blame it for not having competence when crisis
strikes.
What’s particularly interesting about this discussion, then, is that
nobody has even discussed the fact that the federal government not ten
years ago created and funded a brand new office in the Health and Human
Services Department specifically to coordinate preparation for and
response to public health threats like Ebola. The woman who heads that
office, and reports directly to the HHS secretary, has been mysteriously
invisible from the public handling of this threat. And she’s still on
the job even though three years ago she was embroiled in a huge scandal
of funneling a major stream of funding to a company with ties to a
Democratic donor—and away from a company that was developing a treatment
now being used on Ebola patients.
Before the media swallow implausible claims of funding problems,
perhaps they could be more skeptical of the idea that government is
responsible for solving all of humanity’s problems. Barring that,
perhaps the media could at least look at the roles that waste, fraud,
mismanagement, and general incompetence play in the repeated failures to
solve the problems the feds unrealistically claim they will address. In
a world where a $12.5 billion slush fund at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is used to fight the privatization of liquor stores,
perhaps we should complain more about mission creep and Progressive
faith in the habitually unrealized magic of increased government
funding.
Lay of the Land
Collins’ NIH is part of the Health and Human Services Department. Real spending at that agency has increased nine-fold since 1970 and now tops $900 billion. Oh, if we could all endure such “funding slides,” eh?
Whether or not Dr. Collins’ effort to get more funding for NIH will
be successful—if the past is prologue, we’ll throw more money at him—the
fact is that Congress passed legislation with billions of dollars in
funding specifically to coordinate preparation for public health threats
like Ebola not 10 years ago. And yet the results of such funding have
been hard to evaluate.
See, in 2004, Congress passed The Project Bioshield Act.
The text of that legislation authorized up to $5,593,000,000 in new
spending by NIH for the purpose of purchasing vaccines that would be
used in the event of a bioterrorist attack. A major part of the plan was
to allow stockpiling and distribution of vaccines.
Just two years later, Congress passed the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act, which created a new assistant secretary for preparedness and response to oversee medical efforts and called for a National Health Security Strategy. The Act established Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority
as the focal point within HHS for medical efforts to protect the
American civilian population against naturally occurring threats to
public health. It specifically says this authority was established to
give “an integrated, systematic approach to the development and purchase
of the necessary vaccines, drugs, therapies, and diagnostic tools for
public health medical emergencies.”
Last year, Congress passed the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Reauthorization Act of 2013 which keep the programs in effect for another five years.
If you look at any of the information about these pieces of
legislation or the office and authorities that were created, this brand
new expansion of the federal government was sold to us specifically as a
means to fight public health threats like Ebola. That was the entire
point of why the office and authorities were created.
In fact, when Sen. Bob Casey was asked if he agreed the U.S. needed an Ebola czar, which some legislators are demanding, he responded: “I don’t, because under the bill we have such a person in HHS already.”
The Invisible Dr. Lurie
So, we have an office for public health threat preparedness and response. And one of HHS’ eight assistant secretaries is the assistant secretary for preparedness and response, whose job it is to “lead the nation in preventing, responding to and recovering from the adverse health effects of public health emergencies and disasters, ranging from hurricanes to bioterrorism.”
In the video below, the woman who heads that office, Dr. Nicole
Lurie, explains that the responsibilities of her office are “to help our
country prepare for, respond to and recover from public health
threats.” She says her major priority is to help the country prepare for
emergencies and to “have the countermeasures—the medicines or vaccines
that people might need to use in a public health emergency. So a large
part of my office also is responsible for developing those
countermeasures.”
Or, as National Journal
rather glowingly puts it, “Lurie’s job is to plan for the unthinkable. A
global flu pandemic? She has a plan. A bioterror attack? She’s on it.
Massive earthquake? Yep. Her responsibilities as assistant secretary
span public health, global health, and homeland security.” A profile of
Lurie quoted her as saying,
“I have responsibility for getting the nation prepared for public
health emergencies—whether naturally occurring disasters or man-made, as
well as for helping it respond and recover. It’s a pretty significant
undertaking.” Still another
refers to her as “the highest-ranking federal official in charge of
preparing the nation to face such health crises as earthquakes,
hurricanes, terrorist attacks, and pandemic influenza.”
Now, you might be wondering why the person in charge of all this is a
name you’re not familiar with. Apart from a discussion of Casey’s
comments on how we don’t need an Ebola czar because we already have one,
a Google News search for Lurie’s name at the time of writing brings up
nothing in the last hour, the last 24 hours, not even the last week! You
have to get back to mid-September for a few brief mentions of her name in minor publications. Not a single one of those links is confidence building.
So why has the top official for public health threats been sidelined
in the midst of the Ebola crisis? Only the not-known-for-transparency
Obama administration knows for sure. But maybe taxpayers and voters
should force Congress to do a better job with its oversight rather than
get away with the far easier passing of legislation that grants
additional funds before finding out what we got for all that money we
allocated to this task over the last decade. And then maybe taxpayers
should begin to puzzle out whether their really bad return on tax
investment dollars is related to some sort of inherent problem with the
administrative state.
The Ron Perelman Scandal
There are a few interesting things about the scandal Lurie was embroiled in years ago. You can—and should—read all about it in the Los Angeles Times‘ excellent front-page expose from November 2011, headlined: “Cost, need questioned in $433-million smallpox drug deal: A company controlled by a longtime political donor gets a no-bid contract to supply an experimental remedy for a threat that may not exist.” This Forbes piece is also interesting.
The donor is billionaire Ron Perelman, who was controlling shareholder of Siga. He’s a huge Democratic donor but he also gets Republicans to play for his team, of course. Siga was under scrutiny even back in October 2010 when The Huffington Post
reported that it had named labor leader Andy Stern to its board and
“compensated him with stock options that would become dramatically more
valuable if the company managed to win the contract it sought with
HHS—an agency where Stern has deep connections, having helped lead the
year-plus fight for health care reform as then head of the Service
Employees International Union.”
The award was controversial from almost every angle—including
disputes about need, efficacy, and extremely high costs. There were also
complaints about awarding a company of its size and structure a small
business award as well as the negotiations involved in granting the
award. It was so controversial that even Democrats in tight election races were calling for investigations.
Last month, Siga filed for bankruptcy after it was found liable for
breaching a licensing contract. The drug it’s been trying to develop,
which was projected to have limited utility, has not really panned
out—yet the feds have continued to give valuable funds to the company
even though the law would permit them to recoup some of their costs or
to simply stop any further funding.
The Los Angeles Times revealed that, during the fight over
the grant, Lurie wrote to Siga’s chief executive, Dr. Eric A. Rose, to
tell him that someone new would be taking over the negotiations with the
company. She wrote, “I trust this will be satisfactory to you.” Later
she denied that she’d had any contact with Rose regarding the contract,
saying such contact would have been inappropriate.
The company that most fought the peculiar sole-source contract award
to Siga was Chimerix, which argued that its drug had far more promise
than Siga’s. And, in fact, Chimerix’s Brincidofovir is an antiviral
medication being developed for treatment of smallpox but also Ebola and
adenovirus. In animal trials, it’s shown some success against
adenoviruses, smallpox, and herpes—and preliminary tests show some
promise against Ebola. On Oct. 6, the FDA authorized its use for some
Ebola patients.
It was given to Ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan, who died, and
Ashoka Mukpo, who doctors said had improved. Mukpo even tweeted that he
was on the road to recovery.
Back to that Budget
Consider again how The Huffington Post parroted Collins’ claims:Money, or rather the lack of it, is a big part of the problem. NIH’s purchasing power is down 23 percent from what it was a decade ago, and its budget has remained almost static. In fiscal year 2004, the agency’s budget was $28.03 billion. In FY 2013, it was $29.31 billion—barely a change, even before adjusting for inflation.
Of course, between the fiscal years 2000 and 2004, NIH’s budget jumped a whopping 58 percent. HHS’s 70,000 workers will spend a total of $958 billion this year, or about $7,789 for every U.S. household. A 2012 report on federal spending including the following nuggets about how NIH spends its supposedly tight funds:
- a $702,558 grant for the study of the impact of televisions and gas generators on villages in Vietnam.
- $175,587 to the University of Kentucky to study the impact of cocaine on the sex drive of Japanese quail.
- $55,382 to study hookah smoking in Jordan.
- $592,527 to study why chimpanzees throw objects.
And we’re not even getting into the problems at the CDC or the confusing mixed messages on Ebola from the administration. CDC director Tom Frieden noted:
The enemy is a virus and there is no blame to place on anyone on the frontlines of the #Ebola fight.
Dr. Tom Frieden (@DrFriedenCDC) October 13, 2014
Indeed. The Progressive belief that a powerful government can stop
all calamity is misguided. In the last 10 years we passed multiple
pieces of legislation to create funding streams, offices, and management
authorities precisely for this moment. That we have nothing to show for
it is not good reason to put even more faith in government without
learning anything from our repeated mistakes. Responding to the missing
Ebola Czar and her office’s corruption by throwing still more money,
more management changes, and more bureaucratic complexity in her general
direction is madness.
No comments:
Post a Comment