WASHINGTON/LONDON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama will ask the US Congress for more than $1.8 billion in emergency funds to fight Zika at home and abroad and pursue a vaccine, the White House said yesterday, but Obama also said there was no reason to panic over the mosquito-borne virus.
Zika, spreading rapidly in South and Central America and the Caribbean, has been linked to severe birth defects in Brazil and public health officials’ concern is focused on pregnant women and women who may become pregnant.
Obama’s request to Congress includes $200 million for research, development and commercialization of new vaccines and diagnostic tests for the virus.
In addition, the London-based European Medicines Agency (EMA), Europe’s drugs regulator, said it has formed a task force on Zika to advise companies working on vaccines and medicines against the virus.
There are no vaccines or treatment for Zika and none even undergoing clinical studies, as the disease had previously been viewed as relatively benign. Most infected people either have no symptoms or develop mild ones like a fever and skin rashes.
“The good news is this is not like Ebola, people don’t die of Zika. A lot of people get it and don’t even know that they have it,” Obama told CBS News in an interview aired yesterday. “But there shouldn’t be panic on this. This is not something where people are going to die from it. It is something we have to take seriously.”
In a separate White House briefing yesterday, senior US health official Anthony Fauci said he was not expecting a large-scale Zika infection in the continental United States. He said a widely available vaccine would not be ready for a few years.
“We have already started to develop the vaccine in the early stages and we can predict that we likely would be in phase 1 trial – just to determine if it’s safe and if it induces a good response – probably by the end of the summer and get that going by the end of this year,” Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told reporters.
Scientists are working to find out if there is a causal link between Zika and babies born with microcephaly, meaning they have abnormally small heads and can suffer developmental problems. The research began after a huge rise in such birth defects last year in Brazil at the same time the virus took hold there.
