Julia Ioffe and Annie Karni, Politico – July 28, 2016
In the lull between last Christmas and New Year’s Day, Chelsea Clinton, three months pregnant, was perusing the Science section of the New York Times, when she came across a story on a surge of Brazilian babies born with a rare birth defect. “The increase in microcephaly—an incurable form of brain damage—has been blamed on an epidemic of the Zika virus, which was unknown in Latin America before this year,” the article said. Worried, Chelsea immediately got in touch with her mom to alert her, and pushed her to get the campaign to develop a policy proposal to address what was then a small outbreak of an obscure disease. Soon, the Clinton campaign was advocating the development of a rapid diagnostic test, a vaccine—and getting down to “mosquito abatement.”
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