By Glynn Cosker
Editor, In Homeland Security
Sen. Rand Paul took to the airwaves and Twitter this week to give his take on how President Barack Obama was handling the Ebola emergency.
Speaking to CNN Thursday, the man who many believe is a frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination in 2016, spoke of how the Obama administration should be more straightforward with the U.S. public in terms of how Ebola spreads.
“[The Obama administration] has downplayed how transmissible it is. They say it’s the exchange of bodily of fluids. Which makes people think Oh, it’s like AIDS. It’s very difficult to catch,” said Paul. “If someone has Ebola at a cocktail party, they’re contagious and you can catch it from them,” Paul continued. “[The administration] should be honest about that.”
Paul’s sentiment on the administration’s handling of the deadly virus came on the heels of a Virginia GOP rally where the senator stated that wasteful spending had diminished the National Institutes of Health’s efforts to develop an Ebola vaccine. Budget cuts were recently cited as the main reason the NIH has not made progress on a vaccine. Paul doesn’t buy that notion.
On Tuesday, Mr. Paul retweeted an article posted by The Daily Mail that listed various expensive studies by the NIH including an incredible $257,000 spent on a website for Michelle Obama’s White House flower garden. According to the Daily Mail article, the NIH also spent $592,000 to see if the best dung-throwing chimpanzees were also best at communicating.
What #Ebola? @NIH spent $117,000 in taxpayers’ dollars to discover that most chimpanzees are right-handed: http://t.co/GCnX2wEUVB
— Brad Thor (@BradThor) October 14, 2014
“We have people who go blithely on TV and say ‘we don’t have enough money to study Ebola.’ Have you seen what the NIH spends money on?” said Paul at the rally.
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