WASHINGTON -- As partisan rancor around stalled Zika legislation continues, the chances of reconciling the bill before the Senate's 7-week recess vanished.
On Thursday, the House version of the Zika bill failed a test vote in the Senate with a 52-44 tally. The vote signaled that the bill would not come to an up-or-down vote.
"The problem is only getting worse," said Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere, Transnational Crime, Civilian Security, Democracy, Human Rights, and Global Women's Issues in his opening remarks at a hearing a day earlier, speaking of the Zika virus epidemic.
"It is our duty to act now while we can still get ahead of this disease and before it is simply too late," he said.
Physician and health policy groups were disappointed with Congress's inaction.
"Without ensuring there are sufficient resources available for research, prevention, control and treatment of illnesses associated with the Zika virus, the United States will be ill-equipped to deploy the kind of public health response needed to keep our citizens safe and healthy -- especially since the spread of mosquito-borne illness is accelerated during the summer months," said Andrew Gurman, MD, president of the American Medical Association, in a press release on Thursday.
"By the time Congress returns in a couple of months, the damage to our nation from Zika will likely be irreversible. This failure to act severely hampers the full response that is greatly needed," said Richard Hamburg, interim president and CEO of Trust for America's Health, a health advocacy non-profit.
Democrats continue to oppose the latest version of the Zika bill, while acknowledging that the politicking in Congress has inflamed the public.
"This is why people hate Congress. This is why people hate Washington," said Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) at Wednesday's hearing.
Kaine, who has emerged as a potential pick to be Clinton's running mate, argued that the bipartisan $1.1 billion bill the Senate passed was originally a "clean bill."
"It was about one thing: fighting Zika," he said, but then the House revisions loaded the bill with other provisions targeting Planned Parenthood and the Affordable Care Act.
A visibly irritated Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) said the new bill could do more harm than good by undercutting family planning services.
"Birth control should not be controversial and it's part of the first line of defense," she said, reminding the committee that Zika is sexually transmissible.
The House version of the bill also "eviscerates" the Clean Water Act, she said.
Under current law, pesticides from an approved list can be sprayed near water sources without a permit in emergencies, but the Environmental Protection Agency must be notified.
Under the Zika bill, however, "[t]here's no more right to know ... you may not get the Zika but your kid could get cancer from swimming in water that's laden with a pesticide that's very harmful."
Senators on both sides tried to bully witnesses over to their camp.
Frieden parried, saying he didn't know the "exact funding allocations."
"I believe the answer is 'no.' And if you can, get back to me on that," Gardner shot back.
Boxer badgered Irene Koek, acting deputy assistant administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development, who struggled to get her words out without interruption.
Boxer asked whether specific countries in Latin America and the Caribbean where women had been warned to postpone pregnancy actually had the infrastructure to provide free contraception.
Koek said that in most cases supplies were available but delivering them was sometimes a challenge.
Boxer also questioned Frieden about rumors that Olympic athletes would be tracked after the events to see whether or not they contracted Zika.
Frieden confirmed that the CDC has a "memo of understanding" with the U.S. Olympic Committee and said that a university in the U.S. would be testing the athlete volunteers to see who was infected and who wasn't.
"If the risk is so great that you're going to spend money following them maybe they ought to know it," she said.
Rubio pressed Frieden to explain how delaying funds would impact his agency.
Frieden said delaying funding meant delaying long-term research into understanding how to effectively protect pregnant women from the virus. He noted that the CDC had already borrowed emergency funding from states and that those monies needed to be repaid.
"This is not the way to fight epidemics," he said.
But Frieden didn't stop there. He also lobbied for a public health fund similar to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) where resources could be tapped during health emergencies like this one. Boxer, who has a bill outlining plans for such a fund, made a similar pitch during her opening statement.
Kaine also backed the idea.
"We don't know where a hurricane will hit. We don't know where there will be a forest fire, where there will be a flood but we do know from experience that there will be these items and so we budget for them. And then we deal with them. We don't do that with respect to infectious disease," he said.