08-04-2016, 05:42 AM
Rubio: Trump ‘hopefully’ will pay attention to Zika, Politico, 3/8/16.
Quote:Sen. Marco Rubio called on both political parties in Washington to do more to fight the Zika virus, but he was almost mum Wednesday when asked about why his party’s presidential nominee has essentially said nothing about the disease now that it’s spreading in Miami and throughout Florida.As I thought, Trump is incapable of handling the Zika issue with any common sense. He needs Florida and Florida is concerned. Therefore, he should be concerned too, whatever he might think of the issue. The fact that Rubio thinks it's a major issue in his Senate re-election campaign should be a bit of a hint. He doesn't say about terror that Americans have much less chance of being killed by a car or a gun in the hands of a non-terrorist. Actual statistics don't stand a chance when confronting fear. That's something he should well know given he ran an entire convention on the basis of scare-mongering.
“I’m not a spokesperson for their campaign and so I’m not going to speak on their behalf,” Rubio said when asked by POLITICO about Trump’s relative silence on the spread of Zika. “I can talk to you about where I stand and what I’m saying about it. I think this is a big issue for anyone who seeks public office.”
When questioned more about why he wouldn’t discuss Trump’s position on Zika, Rubio noted he hadn’t either mentioned the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton. But Clinton since March made it a priority issue and her running mate, Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, took the time at a campaign stop in Daytona Beach to call out Trump for not talking about the disease.
"If you look at what Donald Trump has said about Zika, it's like, crickets," Kaine said, according to The Miami Herald. Just a day before the Centers for Disease Control issued a first-ever travel advisory warning pregnant women about traveling to Miami. The Zika virus can cause microcephaly in newborns.
Hope Hicks, Trump’s spokeswoman, could not be reached. Juan Fiol, the Trump campaign’s vice chairman in Miami-Dade County, where Rubio lives, recently bashed Clinton for discussing the issue and said her campaign was “sophomoric” for “taking on such an insignificant issue,” according to The Boston Globe, which also couldn’t reach Hicks.
“We have bigger mosquitoes to squash than Zika — like ISIS, the national debt, Iraq, and Afghanistan,” Fiol told the Boston Globe. “We have a wall to build to keep the illegals out. We have so many other issues that are more important than this.”