[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 91 (Thursday, May 14, 2020)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2446-S2447]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              CORONAVIRUS

  Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in 
the Congressional Record Senator Alexander's opening statement that he 
delivered yesterday at the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor 
and Pensions.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

        COVID-19: Safely Getting Back to Work and Back to School

       Mr. Alexander. The Committee on HELP will please come to 
     order. First, some administrative matters based on the advice 
     of the Attending Physician and the Sergeant at Arms after 
     consulting with the Department of Health and Human Services 
     and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
       Individuals in the hearing room are seated 6 feet apart. As 
     a result, there is no room for the public to attend in 
     person. Representatives of the press are working as a pool to 
     relay their observations to colleagues. The hearing may be 
     watched live on-line. An unedited recording will be available 
     on the Committee's website--www.help.senate.gov.
 Witnesses are participating by videoconference in a one-
     time exception. Some senators, including the chairman, are 
     participating by videoconference. Senators may remove their 
     masks to talk into the microphone since they are all six feet 
     apart. I am grateful to the Rules Committee, Sergeant at 
     Arms, the press gallery, the Architect of the Capitol, the 
     Capitol Police, and our committee staff, Chung Shek and Evan 
     Griffis, for all of their hard work to help keep all of us 
     safe.
       At our hearing last Thursday, I said that all roads back to 
     work and back to school lead through testing and that what 
     our country has done so far on testing so far is ``impressive 
     but not nearly enough.'' Over the weekend, Sen. Schumer, the 
     Democrat leader, was nice enough to put out a tweet quoting 
     half of what I said. He left out the other half, the 
     ``impressive'' part. So let me say it again in more specific 
     terms.
       When I said ``impressive,'' I meant that, according to 
     Johns Hopkins University, the United States has tested over 9 
     million Americans for COVID-19. That is twice as many as any 
     other country--we don't know what China has done--and more 
     per capita than most countries including South Korea, which 
     several committee members have cited as an example of a 
     country doing testing well.
       According to Dr. Deborah Birx, the U.S. will double its 
     testing during the month of May and be able to do at least 10 
     million tests per month. Here is what ``impressive'' means in 
     Tennessee: First, anyone who is sick, or a first responder or 
     a health care worker can get tested. Next, Governor Bill Lee 
     is also testing every prisoner, every resident and staff 
     member of a nursing home, offered weekend drive-thru testing, 
     and has done specific outreach to increase testing in low 
     income neighborhoods. A Tennessean can get a free test and a 
     free mask at the local public health clinic. The governor's 
     slogan is: ``If in doubt, get a test.''
       Gov. Lee sent his testing goals for May to the federal 
     government, as every state has done. The federal government 
     will help make sure the state has the supplies it needs if 
     the labs and hospitals in our state have trouble getting them 
     through the usual commercial

[[Page S2447]]

     channels. Tennessee has tested 4 percent of its population. 
     The governor hopes to increase that to 7 percent by the end 
     of May. That impressive level of testing is sufficient to 
     begin phase I of going back to work in Tennessee, but as I 
     said last week, it is not nearly enough to provide confidence 
     to 31,000 students and faculty that it is safe to return to 
     the University of Tennessee Knoxville campus in August.
       Last week I talked with UT Knoxville Chancellor Donde 
     Plowman about what might persuade UT students and 20 million 
     other college students or parents of 50 million k-12 students 
     that it is safe to leave their homes and return to 5,000 
     college campuses and 100,000 public schools in August. That 
     is where the new shark tank, or RAD X, at the National 
     Institutes of Health that we heard about at our hearing last 
     Thursday comes in. Swimming around in that shark tank are 
     dozens of early stage proposals for new ways to create 
     diagnostic tests.
       Three weeks ago, Congress gave NIH $1.5 billion to create a 
     competitive environment in which Dr. Francis Collins, the 
     distinguished scientist who directs NIH, can search for a few 
     new ideas that can create millions more tests by August and 
     even millions more by the Fall flu season. Congress gave 
     BARDA another $1 billion to coordinate the manufacture and 
     scaling up rapidly simple tests with quick results.
       For example, the FDA authorized last week its first 
     diagnostic test using saliva a person provides at home 
     instead of a nose swab or blood. It authorized its first 
     antigen test, like the ones used for flu or strep throat, 
     which involves swabbing the inside of a nose to produce a 
     result in a few minutes.
       Another proposal, not yet approved, is to put in your mouth 
     a sort of lollipop that is a sponge, take a photograph of the 
     lollipop with your cell phone and transmit it to a 
     laboratory. If it lights up, you will know you test positive.
       Or the university might send students' saliva to a gene 
     sequencing laboratory, which can process thousands of these 
     in one night and report to the university the next day. In 
     all of these cases, if anyone tests positive, that student or 
     faculty member will be asked to self-isolate for two weeks, 
     and the rest of the student body can continue their 
     education. The same screening test might be repeated in two 
     or four weeks. That same process could occur at a middle 
     school or factory or in advance of/for players in a sporting 
     event.
       Of course, anyone testing negative one day could test 
     positive the next. But such widespread screening of entire 
     campuses, schools or places of work would help to identify 
     those who are sick and to track down and quarantine those who 
     are exposed. That in turn, should help to persuade parents 
     and students that it is safe to leave home and go back to 
     school.
       In addition to more testing by August, I expect Dr. Fauci 
     to tell us about additional treatments available to reduce 
     the risk of death from COVID-19 and about the 
     administration's plan to do something never done before by 
     this country--start mass manufacturing a vaccine before you 
     know for sure that it works.
       Vaccines and treatments are the ultimate solutions. But 
     until we have them, all roads back to work and back to school 
     go through testing. The more tests we conduct, the better we 
     can identify the small number of those who are sick and track 
     those who they have had contact with. Then we can quarantine 
     the sick and exposed instead of trying to quarantine the 
     entire country with disastrous effects on our economic 
     wellbeing. This will require millions more new tests, many of 
     them new technologies. Some of these will fail. But we only 
     need a few successes to create millions more tests.
       That is why I said last Thursday that what our country has 
     done so far in testing is impressive, but not nearly enough. 
     First, squeeze all the extra tests out of current 
     technologies. But then create new technologies to produce 
     millions more tests to identify and isolate those who are 
     sick and persuade the rest of us it is safe to go back to 
     work and back to school.
       This is a bipartisan oversight hearing to examine how well 
     we are preparing the country to go safely back to work and to 
     school and to determine what more we need to do. Such an 
     exercise sometimes encourages finger pointing. Who did what 
     wrong? Before we spend too much time finger pointing, I would 
     like to suggest that almost all of us--the United States and 
     every country--underestimated this virus. Underestimated how 
     contagious it would be. How it can travel silently without 
     causing symptoms. How it can be especially deadly among 
     certain segments of the population, including the elderly, 
     those with pre-existing conditions, and minority populations.
       At the committee's March 3 hearing on coronavirus--six 
     weeks after the first case had arrived in this country, when 
     there were only two deaths in the US from coronavirus--I read 
     this paragraph from the front page of the March 1 Sunday New 
     York Times: Much about the coronavirus remains unclear, and 
     it is far from certain that the outbreak will reach severe 
     proportions in the United States or affect many regions at 
     once. With its top-notch scientists, modern hospitals and 
     sprawling public health infrastructure, most experts agree, 
     the United States is among the countries best prepared to 
     prevent or manage such an epidemic.
       A lot of effort has gone into trying to make the United 
     States among the best prepared nations. Over 20 years, the 
     last four Presidents and several Congresses--in response to 
     9/11, bird flu, Katrina, SARS, H1N1, MERS, and Ebola--passed 
     9 significant laws that created or contributed to the public 
     health preparedness and response framework we have today.
       These 9 laws stood up the Strategic National Stockpile, 
     created an assistant secretary for preparedness and response, 
     provided incentives for the development and manufacturing of 
     diagnostics, vaccines, and medicines, strengthened the 
     Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and created the 
     Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority 
     (BARDA). Thanks to the leadership of Sen. Blunt and Sen. 
     Murray, Congress increased funding to the National Institutes 
     of Health for five straight years.
       All of this was part of a shared goal--Democrats and 
     Republicans, Congresses and four Presidents--to advance our 
     ability to respond to public health threats, whether known, 
     like anthrax, or emerging, like COVID-19, and they 
     incorporated lessons learned from public health emergencies 
     at the time. But despite all that effort, even the experts 
     underestimated COVID-19.
       This hearing is about how we improve our response now and 
     in the fall when this virus is expected to return. During our 
     oversight hearing today and future hearings, I also intend to 
     focus on the next pandemic: What can we learn from this one 
     to be ready for the next one, which will surely come? Can we 
     learn from the current fast tracking of tests, treatments and 
     vaccines how to make them available even more rapidly next 
     time? How to keep hospitals and states from selling off masks 
     and other protective equipment in between crises because of 
     tight budgets. How to make sure Congress funds our share of 
     the responsibility? How to provide enough extra hospital beds 
     without canceling elective surgeries, hurting other patients 
     and bankrupting hospitals. Whose job should it be to 
     coordinate supply lines so that protective equipment, 
     supplies, and medicines are available and delivered to where 
     they need to be, when they are needed? How can the stockpile 
     be managed better and what should be in it?
       My preacher once said: ``I'm not worried about you on 
     Sunday, it's what you do during the rest of the week.'' I'm 
     afraid that during the rest of the week--between pandemics--
     we relax our focus on preparedness. We become preoccupied 
     with other important things. Our collective memory is short. 
     Just three months ago the country was consumed with 
     impeaching a President. Now that seems like ancient Roman 
     history. Now, while this crisis has our full attention, I 
     believe we should put into law this year whatever 
     improvements we need to be well prepared for the next one. If 
     there is to be finger pointing, I hope fingers will point in 
     that direction.
       We are fortunate today to have four distinguished witnesses 
     who are at the heart of the response to the coronavirus 
     crisis. I have asked each to summarize his remarks in five 
     minutes. Then we will have a five minute round of questions. 
     I have agreed that we will end our hearing at 12:30, which 
     will permit one full round of questions. Sen. Murray will 
     have the opportunity to ask an additional question before we 
     close and all senators will be able to submit questions for 
     the record. There will be other hearings to follow last 
     Thursday's hearing on testing and this one.
       Staying at home indefinitely is not the way to end this 
     pandemic. There is not enough money available to help all 
     those hurt by a closed economy. All roads back to work and 
     back to school lead through testing, tracking, isolation, 
     treatment, and vaccines. This requires widespread testing-- 
     millions more tests created mostly by new technologies--to 
     identify those who are sick and who have been exposed so they 
     can be quarantined and, by containing the disease in this 
     way, give the rest of America enough confidence to leave 
     their homes. For the near term, to help make sure those 
     31,000 UT students and faculty show up in August, we need 
     widespread testing--millions more tests created mostly by new 
     technologies--to identify those who are sick and who have 
     been exposed so they can be quarantined and, by containing 
     the disease in this way, give the rest of America enough 
     confidence to go back to work and back to school.

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