Rubio, State Dept. Step In To Restore Funding For International Vaccines Amid Ebola Outbreak

from the about-face dept

While we’ve focused a great deal on RFK Jr.’s war on vaccines in America, it’s worth remembering that his ambitions for making people sicker extend beyond the American border. We’ve already discussed Kennedy’s 2019 trip to Samoa, where he used the unfortunate accidental mixing of vaccine doses with muscle relaxers that killed two young children, about which he appears to have lied to Congress during his confirmation hearing. Once in office, roughly a year ago, Kennedy also decided to pull all funding from Gavi, an international public/private partnership to get vaccines to underserved nations, claiming that there would be no American funding because it “ignored vaccine safety”. He followed that up in April of this year by withholding hundreds of millions of dollars that Congress had appropriated for international vaccination programs for the same reason.

Kennedy says the children are getting obsolete shots with dangerous ingredients that the U.S. has long since phased out. He is holding up $600 million Congress appropriated for the vaccines to pressure the international humanitarian group, Gavi, that distributes them.

“Gavi has refused to provide the United States with the specific data, studies, or detailed accounting of how U.S. funds are used,” Emily Hilliard, senior press secretary at the Health and Human Services Department, said in a statement to POLITICO.

That’s an excuse, of course. Kennedy doesn’t like vaccines, so he’s keeping poor people around the world from getting them. It’s as simple as that. Why he’s been allowed to veto the powers of the purse in Congress as the Secretary of HHS is a question that can be answered by pointing and laughing at our feckless Congress, but the result is the poorest human beings in the world being less protected from dangerous, infectious diseases.

It’s easy to be anti-vax when you aren’t confronted with the realities of these diseases. When, however, you get a vicious outbreak of a new strain of Ebola in Africa, and you start seeing pictures and hearing stories about the rashes, the uncontrollable bleeding, the piercing stomach pain, and the fountains of waste leaking out of people, well, that seems to have a way of clarifying the mind.

I can’t think of a better explanation as to why Marco Rubio informed Congress recently that the State Dept. was going to get involved to get us back to funding Gavi to combat this and other diseases.

U.S. Secretary of ​State Marco Rubio said on Tuesday that the U.S. would re-engage with the global vaccine alliance Gavi amid the Ebola outbreak ‌in several African countries. Rubio told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the decision had been made a few weeks ago to re-engage, after the Trump administration pulled funding from Gavi last year.

Rubio said that Secretary Kennedy had taken a leading role in determining what was going to happen next with Gavi, but the State Department would now re-engage because “we need to drive this to an outcome”.

“The State Department a few weeks ago made the decision that we were going to re-engage on this issue of Gavi, respecting what ​HHS’ (Department of Health and Human Services) views are on it as well,” Rubio said. “We’d like to get this issue resolved in an outcome that’s ​acceptable both to Congress and also to our goals on global health.”

Rubio can massage the messaging on this all he likes, but it’s plain what is going on here. Craven as he may be in this current time, Rubio also isn’t an idiot. He damn well knows that outbreaks of infectious diseases, particularly those as horrifying as Ebola, will eventually impact his State Department and the homeland. This is him figuring out how to get an actual adult in the room to counteract Kennedy’s obstinate insanity.

And given that we don’t really know yet just how bad this Ebola outbreak is, it’s understandable that Gavi is sighing in relief at this news.

Gavi’s chief executive Sania Nishtar said she was “very encouraged” by Rubio’s remarks.

“Unlocking the funds that Congress has appropriated to Gavi would enable us to keep the world safe from infectious disease threats,” she said in a statement. Gavi’s work on Bundibugyo underlined the importance of this work, she said.

Between the courts and the Trump administration itself, there has been a great deal of blocking, tamping down, and walking back RFK Jr.’s activities.

So why not just get rid of him?

Filed Under: ebola, health & human services, marco rubio, rfk jr., state department, vaccines

Companies: gavi