The Big Apple has reportedly been awarded $28 million to spend on “disease detectives” and other health professionals allegedly to better equip the city should future outbreaks of new COVID-19 variants, mpox, Ebola, and/or polio plague its community.
In a series of public notices, the Health Department said, “New variants of COVID-19 are likely to emerge in the fall/winter, along with other infectious disease outbreaks such as polio and Ebola, causing extensive strain on personnel if temps are unable to be utilized to support NYC’s response activities.”
According to a Health Department spokesman, the $28 million is to be used in two-year contracts with a pair of temp agencies who will search high and low across the country to provide 48 licensed laboratory technicians, clinicians and disease investigators to assist with detecting the diseases and testing antibiotic resistance.
The grant money for the disease detectives comes after close to 125,000 migrants have been illegally bused, flown, and/or dumped into the city since April of 2022.
A crisis that Mayor Eric Adams says he sees no end in sight and that will “destroy New York City.”
According to the New York Post, city Health Commissioner Dr. Ashwin Vasan previously warned that nearly half of the migrants entering the city were unvaccinated for polio and that many were coming from or passing through countries with high rates of infectious diseases.
Bill Hammond, senior fellow for health policy at the government watchdog group Empire Center for Public Policy, said that an influx of tens of thousands of individuals unvaccinated for contagious and deadly diseases is cause for concern.
“Making sure that immigrant arrivals are properly immunized makes sense not just for them,” he added, “but for the whole city. The fewer unvaccinated people there are living in New York, the better.”
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