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Senate Appropriations Committee considers emergency funding for Ebola

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A full committee hearing on the US government’s response to the Ebola outbreak is under way and members of the Senate Appropriations Committee are receiving testimony from many urging the committee to approve the Obama administration’s request for emergency funding.

President Barack Obama requested $6.18 billion in an emergency appropriations request for fiscal year 2015 to implement a strategy to contain and end the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. The request includes $4.64 billion for immediate needs and $1.54 billion for a contingency fund for potential future needs related to the rapidly changing outbreak. A similar structure was used by Congress for emergency funding for the pandemic influenza H1N1 outbreak of 2009.

“My foremost priority is to protect the health and safety of Americans, and this request supports all necessary steps to fortify our domestic health system and prevent any outbreaks at home,” Obama wrote in a letter to Congress. “Over the longer term, my administration recognizes that the best way to prevent additional cases at home will be to contain and eliminate the epidemic at its source in Africa.”

Numerous organizations have voiced support for the emergency funding, including the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA), the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society, the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America, the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology, and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Stephen Calderwood



“The way to approach this most effectively is to stop the outbreak at its source in West Africa, by reducing the case numbers and also to build the public health infrastructure to look ahead and be prepared for future outbreaks of Ebola or other infectious diseases,” IDSA President Stephen Calderwood, MD, chief of the division of infectious diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital, told Infectious Disease News. “We hope to learn from this experience to make small, but incremental investments in the public health infrastructure to respond to other outbreaks more rapidly and effectively.”

Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell, CDC Director Thomas R. Frieden, MD, MPH, and Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony S. Fauci, MD, are witnesses testifying at the hearing. — by Emily Shafer