[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 53 (Thursday, March 19, 2020)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1823-S1825]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              CORONAVIRUS

  Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, the response to the coronavirus has made it 
clear that there are lots of things that

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are the responsibility of individuals, things like staying at home if 
you are sick--frankly, staying home if you are more likely than others 
to be sick--and practicing the kinds of hygiene our mothers taught us 
we should follow all along. Personally, I may have set a new personal 
record for just washing my hands in the last 2 weeks. I have never been 
averse to washing my hands, but I don't know that I have ever washed 
them half a dozen times a day or more before. Those kinds of things are 
left up to us.
  Then there are things that are left up to the local level, things 
like determining in a local community whether things should be open or 
not and what kinds of activities should be the activities where you 
draw the lines in terms of crowds. That is more likely to be better 
decided at a local level by even a State or, more likely, by a mayor or 
a county executive than by somebody here in Washington.
  Then at the national level, we are moving toward our third package 
now in the last few days to try to deal with this. The first package 
was about $8 billion, which was really focused on the immediate health 
response--supplies, developing a vaccine, trying to figure out what the 
right therapies were, understanding the things we needed to do to 
further help hospitals get ready and to further encourage people to go 
places other than hospitals when that worked. All of those things were 
part of that first package.
  The package we sent to the President that the President signed last 
night was about $100 billion. By almost any standard, it is a huge 
amount of money to put together in just a short period of time. That 
$100 billion, while it continued to work on the healthcare side, was 
also very focused on just keeping people on a payroll if they are on a 
payroll. That $100 billion focused to a great extent on how you keep 
people who have decided they need to be quarantined or who were in 
quarantine by a doctor or by a business that, in fact, was quarantined 
because it was closed--keeping those people on that payroll and 
continuing to keep that part of our economy going.
  Today, we move to the third package, which is $1 trillion--$8 
billion, $100 billion, now $1 trillion. That $1 trillion is designed to 
continue to do all the other things that I talked about but also 
designed to keep this economy at a point where, when we get through 
this, we will be as nearly to where we would have been otherwise if at 
all possible.
  You know, interestingly, here we are going into a situation where we 
are trying to protect an economy that didn't have any systemic problems 
with it. It was an economy that was by all measures unbelievably good, 
and then suddenly people are encouraged--sometimes required--to back 
away from that economy and to cease participating in lots of that 
economy, partly because we have encouraged part of that economy to 
cease being part of the active economy.
  What do we do there? This is going to be a different kind of 
response, more focused in many cases. Where, in the past, people have 
said ``We need more of your money,'' many of the requests are ``We just 
need to have access to more money that we can easily pay back when we 
get through this. We are willing to have securitized loans. We are 
willing to have lots of things,'' figuring out how to deal with that 
liquidity issue.
  Then there are some things we need to put in this package that simply 
the government is going to have to look at in ways we haven't looked at 
before. I want to spend a few minutes talking about one of those things 
today, which, just frankly, is securing our medical supply chain.
  In the past, the idea that we would worry about the supply chain 
would not have been at the top of the list of the things the American 
people would be thinking needed to be on the first list they needed to 
look at when they think about public health, but what we see happening 
now is a direct reminder that the medical supplies we use can come from 
all over the world.

  In a pandemic, everybody in the world may think they need what you 
think you would have received and expected to get more than they think 
they should send it to you.
  We depend on manufacturers in other countries. Approximately 40 
percent of the finished drugs and 80 percent of the active 
pharmaceutical ingredients are manufactured overseas--primarily in 
China and India. The ongoing global coronavirus outbreak has really 
highlighted for the first time in today's supply chain what happens if 
you might not be able to get what you need when you need it. It is also 
a spotlight on our supply chain challenges generally. I think that, as 
a result of this, we are going to look at that sooner than we would 
have, but right now, in this bill, I am hoping we include an immediate 
look because we have quickly gone through a series of warning signs now 
that make us understand why we need to look at this and look at it now.
  On February 27, the Food and Drug Administration announced the first 
coronavirus-related drug shortage--February 27. On March 10, the FDA 
halted its routine overseas inspections of drugs and devices. Last 
week, State health departments and the Centers for Disease Control and 
Prevention raised concerns about the looming shortage of coronavirus 
extraction kit reagents needed to actually conduct the diagnostic test, 
not to mention some concerns about the swab you might need, in some 
cases, to take just the normal flu exam.
  It is more and more clear that protecting our Nation's medical supply 
chain is both a priority for public health and for national security.
  Obviously, the supply chain has become more and more global. Economic 
efficiency makes sense, and being more competitive makes sense. It is 
fine to buy things from other countries, but it is better if you have 
multiple options. It is better if you have other options, including 
domestic production. That is especially true when it comes to vital 
things, like medical devices, medical supplies, pharmaceuticals, or the 
products we need for public health and safety.
  We see how this is a problem. It is a problem that has sort of come 
upon us in this pandemic environment in a way that we had not thought 
we would have to deal with before, but we do have to deal with it. We 
are hoping, with this bill, this is one of the places we can deal with 
it.
  You know, in our supply chain, generally, if you are making something 
and it takes 300 parts and you have 299 of them, you are in really good 
shape, except you can't make what you hope to make because you don't 
have that one essential 300th part. If you are relying on factories in 
China or South Korea or some other place that have shut down 
temporarily, suddenly your factory has become too dependent on a 
partner that is no longer there.
  So a bipartisan group of Senators--including myself and Senator 
Alexander and Senator Durbin and Senator Murray--has written 
legislation to figure out how to assess our vulnerability in the global 
supply chain for medical supplies. We want the National Academy of 
Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to look at this issue and to look 
at it now, to look at this issue and determine how dependent we have 
really become on supplies from other countries and then to make 
recommendations as to what some of our options might be. We would also 
like to hear their views on how they can make our supply chain more 
resilient for critical drugs and equipment; what kind of backup plan we 
need to always be thinking about if our frontline plan continues to be 
that other partner in another country; what our quick, go-to backup is 
and how essential it is that we have that backup. That would include 
asking how we can encourage domestic manufacturers of some things to be 
able to step up and reorient what they do when they need it and in a 
crisis.
  The President, to some extent, addressed this idea yesterday by 
talking about a defense manufacturing strategy. That defense 
manufacturing strategy may need to be more robust in some areas. 
Whether it is component parts to a medical device or pharmaceutical 
ingredients or simply the gloves and masks and swab sticks and things 
that you need for basic healthcare when you are trying to determine 
what your healthcare environment is and then deal with it, we need to 
look at it.
  One example may be just, again, the daily dependence on the daily 
protective equipment that our healthcare providers have. We are 
interested to know what we need to do over the next 60 to 90 days and 
what we need to do

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over the next 2 or 3 years. That is what we are going to be asking this 
commission to look at, and we want it to look at it quickly.
  This is a priority. It has become an immediate priority. We need to 
know, as we now look at another one of these in a series of epidemics 
where this has been a concern; whether it is Ebola or swine flu, or 
bird flu or Zika or SARS, we have had too many of these in too short a 
period of time. And during that same period of time, the globalization 
of the supply chain has dramatically changed.
  So as we prepare for future hazards, we want to ensure that a supply 
chain is in place to allow us to provide the kind of healthcare we 
need, the kind of response we need, and the kind of protection we need. 
This should be part of the bill we send to the President, hopefully, 
between now and no later than the end of next week. It is one of the 
things that will begin to move us in a better direction and create 
greater security--greater health security--as we look at our other 
security concerns.
  With that, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Virginia.

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