Are Anti-Science Obama Administration Policies Fostering Zika?

Former New York Lieutenant Governor Betsy McCaughey, who chairs the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths, says the Obama administration is fostering Zika’s spread through anti-science policies:

Tragically, Obama’s Food and Drug Administration is delaying the release of genetically modified mosquitoes to kill Zika-carrying bugs. Pandering to eco-radicals. Even though the World Health Organization endorses this new technology, which can wipe out 90 percent of Zika mosquitoes in months.

Earlier, I wrote about how the Obama administration illegally diverted money that could have been used to fight Zika to the UN’s Green Climate Fund, and how the Obama administration is blocking an adequate response to Zika by local governments through red tape.

Writing in the New York Post, McCaughey says that if “the president is serious about fighting Zika instead of Republicans, he can dip into ObamaCare’s $2 billion-a-year public health slush fund. Right now a lot of that money pays for nanny-state follies like videos showing how to exercise at your desk and (ineffective) healthy eating programs.”

In May, she lamented that the “Centers for Disease Control and Prevention repeatedly failed to act.” She says that the “agency was warned in 2014 by the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists that local health departments were unprepared for mosquitoes. A 2015 report, ‘Before the Swarm,’ repeated the alarm.” But even “when WHO warned this January that Zika was coming, the CDC waited until April 1 to convene a summit” on what to do.

This Wednesday, she noted that “Zika mosquitoes are biting in America now – and we’re still not ready. . . .Texas clinics are already seeing pregnant women from Central America with Zika,” which the CDC euphemistically labels as “travel-related,” to minimize its implications.