$15.6 billion in funding for COVID pandemic aid from the $1.5 trillion federal spending bill. When it happened, my knees wobbled. It is one thing to speak sunshine and roses about the current state of the crisis in an election year; it is quite another to close out funding to maintain the level of success we have achieved. If this were a ground war, it would be tantamount to sending the army home just as the enemy’s gates were coming into view.
Upon consideration, I could grudgingly see the logic of it… the Washington, D.C. logic, anyway. Congressional Republicans were prepared to fight to the death over “new spending,” and a tussle like that regarding COVID money, in what had already been an agonizingly protracted budget fight, could have doomed the entire bill.
Fine, I thought at the time, cut the funding, whatever. As soon as the ink is dry on this budget bill, however, you congressfolk better get yourselves back to the drawing board and get this COVID funding nailed down. We are not nearly out of the woods yet, new variants are on the march, and our defenses will wither away before yet another onslaught. This, I thought three weeks ago, was common sense, enlightened self-interest. I watched, and I waited.
Three weeks later, and nothing on that front has happened. This fight for our very lives has been marred from the beginning by deliberate delusion and rampaging ignorance on the part of both government and the public sector. This latest fiasco, after everything we have learned and endured, absolutely takes the cake.
Vivek Murthy is the U.S. surgeon general. David Kessler is the chief science officer for the U.S. COVID-19 Response Team. The pair teamed up
Is anyone surprised about this any more? Really?
Sounds about right ? Killing is more profitable
The pandemic is not over just because you want it to be. People are still getting sick and dying.
MOST OF CONGRESS IS EVIL