NBC News: GOP Health Care Bill Would Cut CDC Fund to Fight Killer Diseases
“…[T]he new health care replacement bill released Monday night by Republican leaders in Congress would slash a billion-dollar prevention fund designed to help protect against [infectious disease] and other threats. The Prevention and Public Health Fund accounts for 12 percent of the budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. … The CDC uses it to help states deliver vaccines, watch for infectious diseases, keep an eye out for lead in water, promote breastfeeding in hospitals, prevent suicide, and watch out for hospital-associated infections…” (Fox, 3/8).

STAT: Obamacare repeal and Trump’s spending plan put CDC budget in peril
“…Congressman Tom Cole, a Republican who leads a key panel that oversees CDC’s budget, said it was ‘too early to tell’ what would happen or whether his party could do anything to make the agency’s funding whole. … The Oklahoma congressman warned of the consequences of deep cuts to CDC, even if he is at the same time supportive of increased defense spending. ‘What CDC does is probably more important to the average American than, in a sense, the Defense Department,’ he said. ‘You’re much more likely to be killed in a pandemic than you are in a terrorist attack, so you need to look at it that way. Those investments are extraordinarily important for the protection of the country’…” (Facher/Scott, 3/7).