DeLauro Offers Zika Amendment During Defense Appropriations Hearing
WASHINGTON, DC (May 17, 2016) — Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (CT-03) today joined Congresswoman Nita Lowey (NY-17) and Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (FL-23) to offer an amendment to the FY2017 Defense Bill. The amendment would provide the Administration’s $1.9 billion emergency supplemental funding request to respond the Zika virus. DeLauro noted that millions of dollars have already been directed away from states’ emergency preparedness funds.
Click here to watch the full remarks.
Here are the remarks, as delivered:
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
I think the fastest way that we can address this problem is to really agree to the $1.9 billion that the President has requested, which he did in February in order to meet this crisis. And it isn’t, quite frankly, that we’ve made up the number of 1.9, and there for a while in this Committee, there was a view that the Administration had not provided enough background documentation of where they would use it.
The fact of the matter is we can take out the charts, the bells, the whistles, and show precisely where the money is going to be used. I think I may have said this before here, we had more information on where these dollars are going to be used, than we did on the Iraq War, and we didn’t find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
We clearly know we have a very serious crisis on our hands and that is what the science community is talking about. And if you listen to the scientists around the country and around the world, they are talking about the window of opportunity closing on the ability to address this problem. It needs to be addressed now.
My colleagues have talked about the numbers, and the number of pregnant women. The temperatures are rising in the U.S. I will tell you, from my colleagues who represent Gulf States; I just say beware, because it’s on its way.
There are 79 representatives from Gulf States in this body, most of whom don’t come from the Democratic side of the aisle, and my colleague from Florida said ‘The mosquitos don’t select who they bite.’ I welcome what my colleague from New York said, ‘You know why the baseball league made the decision? Because they don’t want to put their players at risk. They don’t want to put their health and safety at risk.’
We are—this body is—putting the health and safety of Americans and others at risk today. In less than 100 days, our young athletes, men and women, and their families, are supposed to go to Brazil. I don’t know where the Olympic Committee is going to go on this, but if they follow the advice of the CDC they’ll think twice about whether or not we will participate in those games.
I think my colleague from Oklahoma talked about—and I also want to just say with all due respect, and we are good friends—but I think that that wasn’t solely a Republican initiative to deal with increasing the funding for the NIH. We were able to go as far as we did based on our ability. And I’ll talk about personally having been able to get, on a bipartisan basis, additional funding so we could do it without robbing Peter to pay Paul.
The fact of the matter is already $50 million has been taken from the Public Health Emergency Preparedness Fund. Now, you may think that doesn’t have any effect on your states and their ability to address crises and emergencies, including Zika.
Alabama has lost 6.9 percent, California 9.3 percent of their funds, Connecticut 6.3 percent, Florida 9 percent, Georgia 8 percent, Illinois 8 percent, Indiana almost 8 percent, Kentucky almost 7 percent, Maryland 7 percent, Minnesota 6 percent, New York almost 8 percent, North Carolina 8 percent, Ohio 8 percent, Virginia 7.6 percent.
That’s money already gone from your emergency preparedness funding that your public health departments will not be able to get in order to deal with an impending crisis—any emergency that they can’t deal with.
So if you think that this doesn’t come with any expense, sit down with the public health infrastructure in your state and figure out whether or not they are going to be able to meet any kind of a crisis, given that we’re shifting funds because we do not want to provide this Administration with the money that it needs in order to move forward.
We have physicians advising women not to get pregnant. They’re saying avoiding conception is the only way to avoid the birth of a deformed baby. What are we telling American women today, especially coming from some folks who don’t believe in contraception, so the fact of the matter is why are we delaying?
We’ll look back at this and say ‘We put people’s health at risk, we have delayed, we have caused people to suffer, and we have put this nation’s healthcare and the healthcare of others at real jeopardy for some ungodly reason.”
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
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