Most experts think that Ebola presents low risk to US so I am not sure why CDC should spend significant resources on it. Private company is working on vaccines and at current funding CDC is perfectly capable of handling a few cases of Ebola in US. Voiding visas of everyone who was in Liberia, Sierra Leone and other affected countries together with mandatory three week quarantine for few US citizens who was there is probably all that is needed to be done. Should not be too expensive.
CDC budget for 2014 is $6.8B so 25 million is drop in a bucket anyway.
This donation was made to the CDC Foundation, not the CDC. The CDC Foundation does most of its work outside of the United States.
Zuckerberg's donation is meant to help reduce the novel growth rate seen with 2014 West Africa Ebola. We have little experience with Ebola in urban areas. We're currently seeing a doubling of case rates nearly within the the Ebola generation time of 16 or so days. If that reproductive rate is not slowed quickly, in the next few months, then one possible outcome is that Ebola will never go away, and will exist as yet another terrible disease afflicting the poor.
Moreover, imagine if we could eliminate a disease like malaria for a few billion dollars. The cost-benefit of that would be astounding. It makes sense to try and eliminate Ebola now, not just prevent it from reaching the US.
How about this: the risk model for ebola is based on limited empirical data from past strains. The current outbreak already exceeds past outbreaks. If the virus is different than the past, or it mutates, then the model from which we assess that the risk is low could be wrong.
So helping to end the outbreak, for one, would cutoff many, many opportunities for ebola to mutate into something even worse.
CDC should be able to re-allocate budget on a short notice - I am sure there are contingency plans for it. On CDC website they list priorities - Food Safety, Healthcare-associated, Infections, HIV in the U.S.,Motor Vehicle Injuries, Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Obesity, Teen Pregnancy, Tobacco. I am sure they can cut 1% from these programs - none of them is any kind of emergency.
If there was a risk of Ebola reaching African proportion in US, I am sure there are emergency funds to bolster up CDC. But currently there is no such risk and realistically there is no good way to spend significant amount of money in US on Ebola.
Not sure this deserves the downvotes it's getting. Perhaps the statement is not perfectly accurate, but the fact is the CDC was decimated by the sequester, with more steep cuts on the plate for 2014 -- including emergency and disaster preparedness.
The Post office sells stamps, the courts charge fees, FCC sells radio space, don't know if the CDC has a source of extra income. Maybe that is why this foundation for private funds exist
Unclear. There's somethign to be said about asking people to put money where their mouth is to set some priorities, instead of voting for other people's tax payments.
There's also a corruption concern, of course, but I don't see that in today's case.
Call me "shameful, cynical [and] fearmongering" but I don't think the ineffectiveness of the CDC on Ebola is due to lack of resources or that $25 million will make a difference. They have a $6 billion plus annual budget ($25 million is a 0.4% increase) and rarely pay for the actual treatment of patients. Instead they are primarily supposed to do research and disseminate information in advance of health threats.
I think it is pretty clear the the CDC has become just another calcified government bureaucracy who ordinarily gets very little oversight or feedback from the outside world. As they recently admitted - just like the Houston nurse they blamed - they cannot even follow their own safety protocols (anthrax and H5N1 debacles) because of their toxic culture[1]. It is a real challenge (perhaps impossible) to prevent these problems from developing in any large organization - including private sector firm (think big semi-monopolies) but even more so in government. More money could even make it worse as bigger bureaucracies are even less effective - just like putting more programmers on the failing project.
I don't get it. There's 1 domestically transmitted case of Ebola. There are ~200 new cases of leprosy per year. How much more effective do you want them to be?
And sticker shock aside, $6B is less that any annual super-pharma R&D budget that I was able to find in a brief search (Merck, Pfizer, GSK). And that is just R&D, not even SG&A.
edit: look, they can fit all domestic rabies cases in a small table on a single page: http://www.cdc.gov/rabies/location/usa/surveillance/human_ra... The CDC is a bunch of miracle workers, in partnership with medical and pharmaceutical advances. Does anyone recall that no less than 100 years ago the US has a president that was partially paralyzed by a disease that afflicted 20K/yr that is now domestically eradicated?
They have a $6 billion plus annual budget ($25 million is a 0.4% increase).
That's why the Zucks made what's called a "targeted donation." Just because an agency has a budge for $X.y billion doesn't mean they can slosh it around to overloaded departments at the drop of a hat.
Or are you proposing that the CDC just lay off half of the Atlanta office, and devote those resources to Ebola prevention?
I always understood the version with no apostrophe as a general imperative statement, with 'hats' being plural - not an abbreviation of 'my hat's off' but of 'we should take our hats off'.
That said, hat's off to Zuckerberg. His reaction sharply contrasts with so much of the shameful, cynical fearmongering from some quarters.