Obama's Ebola Czar Conspicuously Absent

Dr. Nicole Lurie

I guess there wasn't enough political currency to be gained by touting her-- unlike claiming that the new, agenda-driven CDC and NIH needs mountains of more money to do their job. Oh, and then there was the $400 million+ scandal involving her back in 2011.

From The Federalist article by Mollie Hemingway (via Instapundit):

...nobody has even discussed the fact that the federal government not ten years ago created and funded a brand new office in the Health and Human Services Department specifically to coordinate preparation for and response to public health threats like Ebola. The woman who heads that office, and reports directly to the HHS secretary, has been mysteriously invisible from the public handling of this threat. And she’s still on the job even though three years ago she was embroiled in a huge scandal of funneling a major stream of funding to a company with ties to a Democratic donor—and away from a company that was developing a treatment now being used on Ebola patients.  

[...]  

So, we have an office for public health threat preparedness and response. And one of HHS’ eight assistant secretaries is the assistant secretary for preparedness and response, whose job it is to “lead the nation in preventing, responding to and recovering from the adverse health effects of public health emergencies and disasters, ranging from hurricanes to bioterrorism.” 

In the video below, the woman who heads that office, Dr. Nicole Lurie, explains that the responsibilities of her office are “to help our country prepare for, respond to and recover from public health threats.” She says her major priority is to help the country prepare for emergencies and to “have the countermeasures—the medicines or vaccines that people might need to use in a public health emergency. So a large part of my office also is responsible for developing those countermeasures.”

Hemingway goes on to suggest that perhaps one of the reasons for Dr. Lurie's absence is a $433 million scandal involving Lurie, billionaire Democrat donor Ron Perelman, and a no-bid contract for small pox vaccines. She's probably right, although really what is one more scandal involving graft and another democratic donor?

Regardless, we can see that, once more, the Obama administration has subverted the original purpose of many government agencies (IRS, CDC, NIH, HHS), some of which are quite valuable in times of crisis, for pushing political agendas and for facilitating graft.

What a legacy Obama has left for us...