Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health
Stagnant budgeting on research for the likes of infectious-disease vaccines has left NIH and other health agencies grasping for viable solutions as the current Ebola outbreak that began in West Africa threatens to spread further.
The latest Ebola crisis - which has claimed at least 4,000 lives, mostly in the West African countries of Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone - has yet to compel lawmakers in Washington to approve emergency funding.
“Nobody seems enthusiastic about that,” Collins said, though legislation has been introduced to boost the NIH budget up to $46.2 billion by 2021.
In the meantime, he said NIH has had to "take dollars that would've gone to something else and redirect them to [Ebola].”
Collins said the best outlook now would be for a clinical trial to begin in December, which it would then take another few months to determine if the drug actually worked.
"If we wait that long to solve this, we will have basically failed with the more traditional measures of contact-tracing to get this epidemic under control," he said, referring to efforts outside of vaccine research.
NIH’s current Ebola vaccine has had positive test results, Huffington Post reported, yet research has been conducted on monkeys, not humans. Limited trials on people have begun in earnest. A vaccine is also being developed in Canada, though it is not quite as far along as NIH’s drug.
The two “candidate” vaccines "have given very promising results in monkeys, but monkeys are not humans," Marie-Paule Kien, assistant director general for the World Health Organization, said last month according to AFP.
Collins said, though, that trials for potential vaccines cannot be rushed.
"Sometimes vaccines not only don't work, they make things worse," he said. "Look at the HIV step trial, where that vaccine not only did not protect HIV, it increased susceptibility because it did something to the immune system that made it more vulnerable. That could happen here too."
The experimental drug mixture known as ZMapp has been used to treat patients that have contracted Ebola, yet a low supply of it can be blamed on, again, a lack of funding.
"Had it not been for other shortages, we might very well by now know that it works and have a large stock of it," he said.
Meanwhile...
“Since the October War in 1973, Washington has provided Israel with a level of support dwarfing the amounts provided to any other state. It has been the largest annual recipient of direct U.S. economic and military assistance since 1976 and the largest total recipient since World War ll. Total direct U.S. aid to Israel amounts to well over $140 billion in 2003 dollars. Israel receives about $3 billion in direct foreign assistance each year, which is roughly one-fifth of America's entire foreign aid budget. In per capita terms, the United States gives each Israeli a direct subsidy worth about $500 per year. This largesse is especially striking when one realizes that Israel is now a wealthy industrial state with a per capita income roughly equal to South Korea or Spain.”
- John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt"The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy"
*Source: The Congressional Research Service’s report “U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel,” written by Jeremy M. Sharp, Specialist in Middle Eastern Affairs, dated April 11, 2014.
According to this report, the Obama Administration gave $3.1 billion in Foreign Military Financing (FMF) for Israel for the Fiscal Year 2014. In addition, the U.S contributed $504 million to the joint U.S.-Israel Missile Defense Program during FY 2014. If we include that number, American taxpayers give Israel $9.9 million per day.
