One Ebola Czar Is Never Enough
[From article]
July 16, 2013 Lurie's job is to plan for the unthinkable. A global flu pandemic? She has a plan. A bioterror attack? She's on it. Massive earthquake? Yep. Her responsibilities as assistant secretary span public health, global health, and homeland security. That means a lot of coordination with her colleagues at HHS, as well as state and local officials and other federal agencies. It also means a mission that includes both science and communications strategy. In the digital age, she is working to improve the department's data capabilities—the better to know who lives in a given community when disaster strikes—and its ability to harness social media to deliver messages about how to stay safe.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/decision-makers/health/nicole-lurie-assistant-secretary-preparedness-and-response-20130716
Health and Human Services Department
Nicole Lurie, Assistant Secretary, Preparedness and Response
By Margot Sanger-Katz
* * *
[From article]
Dr. Francis Collins, who heads the National Institutes of Health (NIH), told The Huffington Post, “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 that would’ve gone through clinical trials and would have been ready.” Hillary Clinton also claimed that funding restrictions were to blame for inability to combat Ebola.
[. . .]
Conservative critics have pointed out that the federal government has spent billions upon billions of dollars on unnecessary programs promoting a political agenda rather than targeting those funds to the fight against health threats.
[. . .]
What’s particularly interesting about this discussion, then, is that nobody has even discussed the fact that the federal government not ten years ago created and funded a brand new office in the Health and Human Services Department specifically to coordinate preparation for and response to public health threats like Ebola. The woman who heads that office, and reports directly to the HHS secretary, has been mysteriously invisible from the public handling of this threat. And she’s still on the job even though three years ago she was embroiled in a huge scandal of funneling a major stream of funding to a company with ties to a Democratic donor—and away from a company that was developing a treatment now being used on Ebola patients.
[. . .]
perhaps the media could at least look at the roles that waste, fraud, mismanagement, and general incompetence play in the repeated failures to solve the problems the feds unrealistically claim they will address. In a world where a $12.5 billion slush fund at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is used to fight the privatization of liquor stores, perhaps we should complain more about mission creep and Progressive faith in the habitually unrealized magic of increased government funding.
[. . .]
Collins’ NIH is part of the Health and Human Services Department. Real spending at that agency has increased nine-fold since 1970 and now tops $900 billion. Oh, if we could all endure such “funding slides,” eh?
[. . .]
If you look at any of the information about these pieces of legislation or the office and authorities that were created, this brand new expansion of the federal government was sold to us specifically as a means to fight public health threats like Ebola. That was the entire point of why the office and authorities were created.
http://thefederalist.com/2014/10/14/president-obama-already-has-an-ebola-czar-where-is-she/
President Obama Already Has An Ebola Czar. Where Is She?
By Mollie Hemingway
October 14, 2014
http://americanthinker.com/blog/2014/10/the_case_of_the_invisible_ebola_czar.html
October 15, 2014
The case of the invisible Ebola Czar
By Thomas Lifson
Uploaded on Feb 4, 2010
Dr. Lurie is Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response at the US Department of Health and Human Services at HHS. Prior to that, she was Senior Natural Scientist and the Paul O Neill Alcoa Professor of Health Policy at the RAND Corporation. There she directed RANDs public health and preparedness work as well as RANDs Center for Population Health and Health Disparities.
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