WASHINGTON – Today, U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a member of the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee and the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, released the following statement after President Obama announced that nearly $600 million of funding to fight Ebola will be redirected to the Centers for Disease Control to combat the Zika virus. 

“The outbreak of Zika is a global public health crisis that could affect up to 4 million people just this year. It’s a scary prospect that requires the U.S. to take immediate, science-based action. The President’s action to immediately apply resources to confront this threat is necessary, particularly in light of continued obstruction by my Republican colleagues who refuse to allocate emergency funding for it. But I remain gravely concerned that cutting funding for Ebola research to fight Zika is robbing Peter to pay Paul – and endangers public health infrastructures we built to prevent another global outbreak. We cannot continue this game of whack-a-mole, funding one deadly disease at a time.”

“Getting in front of the Zika outbreak must be a priority, but so must our work to confront and prevent another serious epidemic like Ebola. That’s why I led almost two dozen senators in calling on the Senate Appropriations Committee to fully fund the president’s $1.9 billion emergency supplemental request to combat the Zika virus – without undermining our efforts to address other public health crises. I call on my colleagues to consider and pass emergency funding to stop Zika in its tracks and protect those most at risk.”

Murphy has supported numerous initiatives to combat the outbreak of Zika in Connecticut and across the United States. He has continuously called for $1.9 billion of emergency funding to address the outbreak. He is also a cosponsor of the Adding Zika Virus to the FDA Priority Review Voucher Program Act, a bill that will add Zika as an eligible disease to receive a priority review voucher from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and incentivize the development of new Zika vaccines, which unanimously passed the Senate last month. Forty-one states, the District of Columbia, and several U.S. territories have reported travel-related cases of Zika. There have been no locally acquired reported cases in the United States.