>In 2017, mosquito-borne West Nile virus, which currently infects about 2,000 people annually in the U.S. received $42 million in support from the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Lyme disease, with 20 times the number of reported cases, got half as much, a figure that has changed little in a decade.
Doubling allocations for Lyme research and prevention to $50 million doesn't seem like an unreasonable or overcomplicated request. Congress allocated over a billion dollars for Zika [1] - a disease that something like 10 Americans ever had. How does it make sense that a disease actively affecting 400,000 Americans each year is allocated effectively $0 by the same Congress?
[1] https://www.statnews.com/2016/09/28/senate-approves-zika-fun...
I guess you wouldn't mind if I dumped a bunch of Lyme-carrying ticks in your home, then.