The man who led the successful White House response to the Ebola outbreak says the Zika virus is a slow-motion public health disaster — and Congress is to blame.

Ron Klain, who served as White House Ebola czar and as Vice President Joe Biden’s chief of staff, told POLITICO's “Pulse Check” podcast that Congress has failed to heed the lessons of the Ebola epidemic and that the Zika funding battle has become unforgivably partisan in the face of such dire human costs, including severe brain defects in infants.


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“The babies being born are neither Democrats or Republicans,” he said. “They're babies.”

The House’s patchwork $622 million funding plan is especially “irresponsible,” said Klain. That Republican-backed bill would fund Zika research partly by taking money previously appropriated to fight Ebola. “They’re fighting over a difference of money that the Pentagon spends every eight hours,” said Klain, who now works as a venture capitalist. “In the context of Washington, this is relatively small sums.”

The White House in February requested $1.9 billion to fight the Zika virus, which is spreading quickly through the Americas. Three months later, Congress is still debating that, with competing packages in the Senate and House, and the possibility that Zika funding might stay unresolved until a July conference committee — well into the summer mosquito season.

More than 1,200 U.S. residents have already been infected with the virus, including more than 100 pregnant women. All of the domestic cases of Zika — about 500 in the states and 700 in the territories — are travel-associated, but public health experts expect that to change in the coming months. Most people have mild symptoms, if any, but researchers are probing whether the virus can cause severe neurological problems in some cases. And it can be devastating to babies.

Klain said he doesn’t understand why securing Zika funding has become a political battle. He’s especially unhappy over some Republicans’ insistence that no new money be devoted to research and prevention, that all of it has to come from another health program.

The House on Wednesday night voted along mostly party lines to approve its funding package — one-third of the White House’s original request and which repurposes funds being used to fight Ebola and other infectious diseases around the world.

“This is as crazy as saying we’re going to take a fire hydrant out of the ground in one place and move it some place else to fight a different fire,” Klain said. “To rip money away from [Ebola] to fight Zika is about as irresponsible as you can get.”"

Public health officials say the leftover Ebola funds have been promised to set up health systems in West Africa and to guard against a potential resurgence of the disease. For instance, Liberia’s Ebola outbreak was declared over in May 2015 — but there have been at least three Ebola deaths in the country since then.

Between insufficient preventive efforts and the natural cycle of an outbreak, Klain predicts that local transmission of Zika virus inside the continental United States — potentially in the Gulf Coast, Southeast or other mosquito-rich regions — looms within the next few weeks.

And looking ahead, he foresees a public health catastrophe that will begin with the first wave of U.S. infants born with microcephaly and other severe brain defects.

“We are going to see … the birth of babies who will suffer a horrible impairment for the rest of their lives,” he said. “However long or short those lives are.”

Klain argues the worst effects of Zika could be averted with a well-funded, coordinated response that draws on the lessons of Ebola. For instance, he says, the White House funding package could enable better tracking and management of potential Zika victims, boost state and local government efforts to eliminate mosquitoes and speed production of treatment. The White House funding request includes vaccine development as well.

“All of this is preventable,” Klain said. “Outbreaks are inevitable. Epidemics are preventable.”

Some Republicans have questioned whether Zika’s effects are fully understood, and Klain acknowledged the science is still in progress.

But “even if we don’t really know all about Zika [yet], we know what the enemy is,” he said, pointing to the aedes aegypti mosquito, the most common vector of Zika transmission, which is common in the southeastern U.S. “There are a lot of reasons, beyond Zika, to go attack these mosquito populations” and curb other diseases like Dengue or yellow fever.

A growing number of Republicans have raised the idea of restricting the U.S. borders, with Texas Rep. Michael Burgess this week proposing a ban on travel from Zika-affected countries — encompassing much of Latin America and the Caribbean.

But Klain blasts the suggestion. Travel bans “were a horrible idea on Ebola, and they’re a pointless idea on Zika,” he said, arguing the restrictions hurt only aid workers and ignore the realities of global travel.

“We live in an interconnected world,” Klain said.

He also said that while leaders need to take public health precautions, they also need to avoid overreacting and generating panic — and given what’s known right now, the Olympics in Brazil should go on this summer. “Brazil has 500,000 tourists a month, even before the Olympics come,” he said.

“I’m more concerned about the person laying on the beach right now in Rio de Janeiro,” adds Klain. “An American, enjoying their vacation, [who] gets Zika and comes back to the United States.”

“Instead of worrying about the Olympics in a few months, we should be worrying about fighting Zika today.”

Public health officials, including Centers for Disease Control director Tom Frieden, have floated the idea of creating a new public health emergency fund, that could be tapped without congressional wrangling, an idea that Klain endorses. Klain also would like to see the government establish a stand-alone public health agency to fight pandemics. He acknowledged both would be difficult in the current political climate.

But Klain adds that the 2014-15 Ebola response showed how public health can — and should — rise above partisan squabbles.

“We showed Congress that by working together on a bipartisan basis, by taking prompt action, by using all the agencies of the federal government to fight this epidemic, that we were able to beat Ebola,” he says.

“That should be something that gives the Congress confidence — that if they fund another disease response, we’ll have another successful result," he added. "We live in a weird system if success doesn't inspire repeating those same things and learning from those things.”