With Ebola off the front-pages of every media outlet, President Obama appears to finding it tough to get his $6 billion funding request to fight the deadly disease... time for some hope (things are good in America, Spain delcared Ebola-free) and fearmongery (5,987 deaths and 16,889 cases currently) as The White House increases Ebola response units in the US and sends more military and civilians into Africa...
Does not look like any inflection points in Sierra Leone or Guinea...
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President Obama is due to speak at 1705ET (plan accordingly
As AP reports,
The White House says the Obama administration is making strides in the fight against Ebola, citing an expanded hospital network and testing capacity at home and gains confronting the deadly disease in West Africa. To sustain that, President Barack Obama was prodding Congress Tuesday to approve his request for $6.2 billion in emergency spending against the outbreak.
Obama was to visit the National Institutes of Health in Washington's Maryland suburbs Tuesday to highlight advances in research for an Ebola vaccine. He planned to congratulate NIH director Francis Collins and the director of NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci, for their work on a vaccine.
The public attention to Ebola by the president comes as Congress is assembling a massive spending bill to keep the government operating. But the legislation has become entangled with Obama's executive actions on immigration, which Republicans want to block.
Any final spending bill is expected to contain a pared down version of Obama's Ebola request. Obama asked for $2 billion for the United States Agency for International Development, $2.4 billion for the Department of Health and Human Services, and more than $1.5 billion for a contingency fund, the first item that lawmakers would likely trim.
The White House said Tuesday that Obama Ebola Response Coordinator Ron Klain, in an update to Obama, reported that the U.S. is better prepared to deal with Ebola at home and that administration efforts to confront the virus in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone are further along than two months ago.
The administration announced Tuesday that it has set up a network of 35 hospitals across the country to deal with Ebola patients. It also said that the number of labs that can test for Ebola has increased from 13 in 13 states in August to 42 labs in 36 states.
The White House said the administration has also increased the deployment of civilians and military personnel in West Africa, bumping the U.S. presence to about 200 civilians and 3,000 troops. It said the U.S. has opened three Ebola treatment units and a hospital in Liberia.
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