Government-funded clinical vaccine trials will grind to a halt by August without congressional action, researchers warn, as 1,300 have been diagnosed in US

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

Congress left town on Thursday without funding any emergency preparations against the Zika virus.

Frustrated vaccine researchers predicted clinical trials would grind to a halt by August. Local mosquito control departments, without federal resources, will maintain wildly disparate resources, leaving some cities and towns with world-class virology laboratories and others with part-time, one-man operations expected to spray for a mosquito less susceptible to the controls which dominated the past two decades.

Already, more than 1,300 travelers infected with Zika have been diagnosed in US states. In Puerto Rico, where local mosquitoes acquired the disease, more than 2,900 infections have been confirmed.

Dr Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said up to 50 pregnant women per day are infected with Zika in Puerto Rico. Nine American children have been born with birth defects.

Politicians did attempt to fund public preparations.

An Obama administration request for $1.9bn pittered out, though Florida’s senators supported it. A bill to provide $1.1bn for emergency preparations died in the Senate. And a House bill for $622m sank, loaded with partisan amendments.

The failure to fund the viral threat stands in stark contrast to Republican criticism that fueled a $5.4bn Ebola response before the 2014 mid-term elections.



The virus, primarily spread by mosquitos, was discovered in the eponymous Ugandan forest in the 1940s. The disease leapt to international prominence in January after it was connected to a dramatic increase in birth defects in Brazil.



By February, the virus was declared a global public health emergency by the World Health Organization, as epidemiologists confirmed Zika caused microcephaly. Children with microcephaly are born with abnormally small heads and experience severe, lifelong developmental problems.

In four out of five cases, individuals infected by Zika show no symptoms, and the mosquito that transmits the disease is endemic along the American Gulf coast.

There is no vaccine or quick diagnostic test for Zika, but researchers are working to develop one.

“Vaccines are just one of the things that will be impacted,” said Dr Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, of the failed congressional funding bills.

Fauci warned government vaccine trials will grind to a halt after money raided to fight diseases such as tuberculosis runs out by the end of the summer, even though it is scientifically feasible for the second phase of trials to begin in early 2017.

“I have enough money that we’ve moved around from other areas to create the Phase I trial,” Fauci said.

“We will run out of money by the end of August, the beginning of September.”

Mosquito control experts, meanwhile, said they are relying on a wait-and-see approach, hoping the south’s widespread use of air conditioning and window screens will tamp down on potential outbreaks.

“I don’t feel as threatened as a lot of other people, and the reason for that is that we didn’t see it with Dengue, and we didn’t see it with Chikungunya,” said Mark Latham, director of the Manatee County mosquito control program in Florida, about two more viruses spread by the same mosquito as Zika.

The Manatee County program is relatively well funded, though like many other communities it will not surveil for the Zika virus in the mosquito population.

“We live in air-conditioned and screened houses. The majority of people are not exposed in the same way 24 hours a day” as many are in the Caribbean, Latham said. “The chances of local transmission occurring are much much less here.”

Congress’s failure to pass funding is likely to have an international impact. All three proposals contained cash for the US Agency for International Development global health programs, ranging from between $100m (House) to $325m (administration), according to the Congressional Research Service. The US funds 45% of global biomedical research.

In Florida, one of the states most vulnerable to the spread of Zika, mosquito control experts said they would continue to work with the varying resources available to them. Depending on the town, city and county, mosquito control can range from full-scale catch-and-test virology labs to a side duty assigned to a single public works employee.

“There are other programs that come under general, county government that are very poorly funded, that don’t have our power to respond,” said Latham, about other Floridian mosquito control. “They’re the programs that would really suffer.”

In Puerto Rico, the CDC has spent months begging Puerto Rican officials to control the mosquito population with pesticide sprayed from planes, and Frieden called local officials’ failure to spray a question of “negligence”. Protests against the fumigation drew hundreds of protesters, fueled in-part by anger with a Congressional plan to deal with the island’s debt crisis.

“We’re walking a fine line, and so is CDC,” said Joe Conlon, a spokesperson for the American Mosquito Control Association, “about being prudent in mosquito control and preparing for the eventual arrival of Zika and being alarmist. We don’t want to be either.”

“If we spin up all of this concern and nothing happens with Zika, are we going to run into the boy who cried wolf syndrome?” asked Conlin.