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The head of the National Institutes of Health doesn’t specifically call out the Republican Party in this statement, but I will; the anti-science, anti-research GOP is the main reason why America hasn’t been able to do the basic scientific research necessary to be ready for diseases like Ebola.

And I’m saying “diseases like Ebola” because there will be more of these rapidly evolving viruses and bacteria to deal with in the future. This is an object lesson in why the Republican Party’s agenda is so incredibly harmful to the country.

Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health, said that a decade of stagnant spending has “slowed down” research on all items, including vaccinations for infectious diseases. As a result, he said, the international community has been left playing catch-up on a potentially avoidable humanitarian catastrophe.

“NIH has been working on Ebola vaccines since 2001. It’s not like we suddenly woke up and thought, ‘Oh my gosh, we should have something ready here,’” Collins told The Huffington Post on Friday. “Frankly, if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would’ve gone through clinical trials and would have been ready.”

It’s not just the production of a vaccine that has been hampered by money shortfalls. Collins also said that some therapeutics to fight Ebola “were on a slower track than would’ve been ideal, or that would have happened if we had been on a stable research support trajectory.”