Less than two weeks after the first person with Ebola in the United States was admitted to Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital on September 30, 2014, Democrats and their allies began blaming Republicans for his plight and everything else connected with preventing and treating the disease.

On Monday, October 13, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) launched banner ads that asked, “Did You Know?  Republicans Voted to Cut CDC’s Budget to Fight Ebola,” based on a vote that occurred at the beginning of the 112th Congress.  The ad was closely followed by the release of a one-minute video from the Agenda Project Action Fund, entitled, simply, “Republican Cuts Kill.”  The video includes cherry-picked statements from federal health officials that claimed budget cuts caused drastic research shortfalls; images of body bags, corpses, and hazmat suits; and prominent Republican lawmakers simply saying “cut.”

The material played off of a statement by National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins, who said that, “… if [the NIH] had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would’ve gone through clinical trials and would have been ready.”  However, his premise was undermined by National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, whose congressional testimony was spliced into the Agenda Project’s video.  Fauci, described in a September 29, 2014 USA Today article as “the nation’s top expert on infectious diseases,” said on “Meet the Press” that “You can't say that -- I think you can't say we would or would not have this or that.  Everything is slowed down, but I wouldn't make that statement.”

Indeed, the attempted Democratic meme was also busted by numerous other sources.

Speaker of the House John Boehner’s office issued the following counterpoints on October 16:

• Congress Has Released Up to $750 Million in Funding to Combat Ebola.  The House last week released up to $750 million to support Operation United Assistance, the mission “to provide medical, logistical and security support” to combat Ebola in West Africa.
• Congress Provided More CDC Funding Than the President Requested Last Year.  The FY 2014 budget agreement reached in January of this year provided the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC] “an 8.2 percent budget increase for fiscal 2014,” The Atlanta Business Chronicle reported at that time.  “This is more than the agency anticipated, because the president's fiscal year 2014 budget request for it was just $6.6 billion -- a decrease of $270 million from fiscal 2012,” the Chronicle adds.  Even The Huffington Post admits “President Barack Obama hasn’t been consistent on funding the [CDC], the dominant U.S. public health agency combating the outbreak,” and “indeed explicitly posed significant cuts at times.”
• The White House Proposed the Sequester.  This isn’t the first time the White House has tried to shirk responsibility for the sequester it proposed, and the president signed into law, in 2011.  But as Politico reported back in 2012, “the book ‘The Price of Politics,’ by Washington Post Associate Editor Bob Woodward, makes it clear the idea for the draconian spending cuts originated in the White House – and not in Congress.”  In fact, Congress’s 2014 budget agreement restored $1 billion worth of National Institutes of Health [NIH] cuts made under the president’s sequester.  In addition, “It’s worth noting that President Obama’s 2015 budget request did not call for a major increase in funding for the NIH,” The Washington Post reports.

The false premise of the Democrats’ attacks was also confirmed on October 15 by Glenn Kessler, who writes the “Fact Checker” section of The Washington Post:

On many levels, this line of attack is absurd. … Obama’s Republican predecessor oversaw big increases in public-health sector spending, and both Democrats and Republicans in recent years have broadly supported efforts to rein in federal spending.  Sequestration resulted from a bipartisan agreement.  In some years, Congress has allocated more money for NIH and CDC than the Obama administration requested.  Meanwhile, contrary to the suggestion of the DCCC ad, there never was a specific vote on funding to prevent Ebola.

Despite the public’s anxiety about the potential spread of Ebola (stemming more from concern about how its containment and prevention is being handled by the government than from the lack of an approved vaccine), the DCCC narrative did not appear to gain any traction with the electorate.

On November 4, the Republican Party did “kill” something:  the Democrats’ majority in the Senate.  Republican now control 31 governorships, and pending the outcome of a few races, already has the largest Republican majority in the House of Representatives since the election of 1928.  That’s enough to make Democrats feel quite ill.