Ebola would not be as scary had GOP funded vaccine research

Could Ebola be the kind of contagion that has ravaged humanity in an entire genre of movies from “The Andromeda Strain” to “Contagion?” Probably not. In all likelihood, it is less likely to kill us than to make us jump at shadows, do dumb things and use the health scare as a political ploy.

Ebola is pretty darn scary, of course. It is now ranked as the worst pathogen of the modern era. For once, the incessant attention of cable news talkers seems justified. The disease is taking down entire communities in West Africa, and the rest of world is just one airline flight away from infection. And it does not seem as though our vaunted medical system quite has a handle on it. A nurse who was treating the traveler from Liberia who subsequently ended up dying in a Dallas hospital from Ebola has now contracted the virus herself.

Uncertainty about the best way to cope with the disease has spun local authorities across the nation into a panic. On Monday, a man showing symptoms that were similar to those exhibited by Ebola victims was quickly quarantined at a New Mexico hospital. It was just as quickly determined that he did not have the disease. The same day, hazmat crews swarmed an Emirates Airlines flight at Boston’s Logan International Airport because several passengers had exhibited flu-like symptoms -- another false alarm. On Sunday at Los Angeles International Airport, a fire crew boarded a flight that had just come in from New York. A passenger was sick -- flu symptoms again -- and the initial report suggested the person had been to West Africa. It turned out to be just the flu. The traveler had been in South Africa.

What is going to happen when flu season hits and there are lots of people showing up with “Ebola-like symptoms?” Hazmat teams are likely to be chasing a lot of wild geese.

On Monday in L.A., a guy wearing a surgical mask was riding a transit bus when he warned the driver not to mess with him because he had Ebola. The man then hopped off the bus and disappeared. The bus driver was taken to a hospital for examination but appeared to be healthy. A spokesman for the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority said the bus rider was likely lying about being sick and had simply been trying to sow fear.

“Someone who wants to sow fear is a terrorist,” the spokesman declared.

Boy, oh, boy, taking the leap to terrorism didn’t take long. Of course that jump had already been made by Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas, who sounded a fanciful alarm about terrorists teaming up with Ebola victims to sneak across the border from Mexico.

Meanwhile, the dowager empress of the American right wing, Phyllis Schlafly, declared Barack Obama the worst president ever because he had failed to protect the country from Ebola, as if he could send in the Marines to shoot the disease.

Of course, we could all rest easier if there were an anti-Ebloa vaccine. That is something that could protect people far more effectively than any tightening of security at airports or along the border. Dr. Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health said the NIH has been working toward that goal since 2001 and would have gotten there, if not for one thing.

“Frankly, if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this [outbreak] that would’ve gone through clinical trials and would have been ready,” Collins told the Huffington Post.

Why, you may ask, did the NIH not have the money to do the work that, Collins, said, “would have made all the difference?” Easy answer: Republican budget-cutting fanatics in Congress have held down funding for the NIH and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for a more than a decade.

Will Phyllis Schlafly or any other conservative condemn the worst Congress in history for failing to fund the agencies that are our front line of defense against Ebola? Heck, no. They are too busy using the Ebola scare as a point of attack to protect incumbents and gain new seats for the GOP in that most terrible Congress.