Where did the tax-payers’ money go when it was entrusted to the Centers for Disease Control, leaving insufficient funds for the development of an Ebola vaccine?

This information and comment come from Newsbusters:

For years, government watchdog groups have chronicled numerous instances of waste and abuse at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and its National Institutes for Health (NIH).

An establishment press corps doing its job, upon hearing the director of the National Institutes for Health claim that “if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine” for Ebola by now, and especially upon hearing leftist politicians then claim that it’s all Republicans’ fault [for “making cuts in public expenditure”], would look into whether part of the problem might be poor bureaucratic stewardship. But they’re not doing their job.

The CDC’s budget today is 25% bigger than it was in 2008 and 188% bigger than in 2000.

The NIH budget [is] at a level that’s more than double what it was 14 years ago.

If the NIH was really so concerned about developing an Ebola vaccine, it could have directed more grant money to that effort, rather than wasting it researching such things as:

• diseases among male sex workers in Peru ($400,000)
• sexual attraction among fruit flies (nearly $1 million)
• a study that will send text messages in “gay lingo” to meth-heads ($509,840)
• a study on “Massage in Rabbits” ($386,000)
• numerous studies exploring the effects of meditation (costing hundreds of thousands of dollars each)

The CDC –

• dumped $106 million into a swanky visitors’ center in Atlanta even though it already had one
• bought $10 million worth of furniture for its lavish new headquarters
• spent $1.7 million to advise Hollywood on medical plots
• granted $702,558 for a study of the impact of televisions and gas generators on villages in Vietnam
• granted $175,587 to the University of Kentucky to study the impact of cocaine on the sex drive of Japanese quail
• granted $55,382 for a study of hookah smoking in Jordan
• granted $592,527 for a study to determine why chimpanzees throw objects