[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 165 (Wednesday, September 23, 2020)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5823-S5825]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                              Coronavirus

  Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, I come to the floor to talk about 
COVID in two ways. The Senator from Tennessee, who is presiding today, 
will appreciate this. She and I have a regular call with Governor Lee, 
our Governor, and we just finished part of it. Her staff was on part of 
that.
  He gave some very interesting information that I think would be 
important to all Senators and to our country, and that is the 
significant learning loss that occurs when children aren't in school. 
In Tennessee, Governor Lee and some national researchers have completed 
a study of the learning loss in the third grade for reading and math 
proficiency for children who were not in school from March through the 
summer.
  Now, you always have a learning loss in the summer, but for March 
through summer, this is what they found. Preliminary data shows an 
estimated 50-percent decrease in proficiency rates in third grade 
reading and a projected 65-percent decrease in proficiency in math. 
That, in the Governor's words, is a dramatic decrease. It shows that 
the vast majority of students learn in person, the Governor said, with 
their teacher, and he is working to get a safe environment so that they 
can get back to school.
  The good news on that is, according to the Governor, 1,800 schools in 
Tennessee are open, in person, and only 7 of those schools have any 
sort of closure incident today--in other words, one class or one school 
closed because of COVID. So, this problem we are just discussing, 
hopefully, will not be as pronounced this semester in Tennessee 
because, except in Memphis and except in Nashville, almost all of our 
schools are open in person to some degree.
  The Governor went on to say that the March through the summer school 
closings produced a learning deficiency that is expected to be 2.5 
times that of a normal summer rate. He also said the learning loss 
impacts early grades greater than later grades, placing those students 
further behind in the learning trajectory. Students with lower 
proficiency rates are also disproportionately impacted by learning 
loss. In other words, students who are already behind fell behind even 
further as a result of leaving school in March.
  Then it shows that the research from the Organisation for Economic 
Co-operation and Development, which worked with the Governor on these, 
shows that each additional year of schooling increases life income by 
an average of 7.5 to 10 percent. And with the loss of one-third of a 
year in effective learning--which is what we just heard about for just 
the students affected by the closures--that organization estimates it 
would lower a country's gross domestic product by an average of 1.5 
percent for the remainder of the century.
  I don't know whether those numbers are exactly accurate, but the 
message is clear. Children, especially young children and especially 
young children who are further behind already, need to be in school so 
that they can be taught in person or their learning loss is dramatic.
  I ask unanimous consent to include in the Record the press release 
that Governor Lee of Tennessee released detailing this dramatic 
learning loss
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

 Tennessee Releases Data Showing Significant Learning Loss Among K-12 
                                Students


 Projected Losses Tied to Prolonged School Closures and Time Away From 
                               Classroom

       Nashville, TN--Tennessee Governor Bill Lee and the 
     Tennessee Department of Education today released estimated 
     data regarding learning loss for Tennessee students resulting 
     from COVID-19 school closures through the summer months. 
     Preliminary data projects an estimated 50% decrease in 
     proficiency rates in 3rd grade reading and a projected 65% 
     decrease in proficiency in math.
       ``This data highlights the immense challenges that the 
     COVID-19 pandemic has created for our students and 
     educators,'' said Gov. Lee. ``The vast majority of students 
     learn best in-person with their teacher, and we'll continue 
     to help provide a safe environment for Tennessee students to 
     get their educational journeys back on track.''
       While many students traditionally experience learning loss 
     over the summer, projections show that learning loss from 
     March school closures through the summer is expected to be 
     2.5 times that of a normal summer rate. Projections were 
     developed in partnership with national researchers using 
     historical, Tennessee-specific data to provide additional 
     learning loss estimates based on the extended school 
     closures.
       ``We know that increased time away from school has negative 
     implications for students, which is compounded during 
     extended building closures,'' said Tennessee Commissioner of 
     Education Penny Schwinn. ``The department is focused on 
     ensuring we provide essential services and resources to 
     mitigate learning loss and keep students on a path to success 
     this new school year.''
       The learning loss impacts early grades greater than later 
     grades, placing these students further behind in the learning 
     trajectory as they progress through school. Students with 
     lower proficiency rates are also disproportionately impacted 
     by learning loss, further exacerbating existing achievement 
     gaps.
       Research from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation 
     and Development on the economics of education shows that each 
     additional year of schooling increases life income by an 
     average of 7.5-10%. Further, a loss of one-third of a year in 
     effective learning for just the students affected by the 
     closures of early 2020 will, by historical data, lower a 
     country's GDP by an average of 1.5% over the remainder of the 
     century.

  Mr. ALEXANDER. Today, our committee--the Health, Education, Labor, 
and Pensions Committee--had its last

[[Page S5824]]

hearing of the year, and it was my last hearing as chairman of the 
committee. While we are on the theme of education, one of the 
interesting--and I am here today to give a little report on what I 
consider to be an unprecedented sprint toward success in three areas: 
vaccines, treatments, and diagnostic testing.
  I asked Dr. Fauci, who was one of the witnesses, this question: Dr. 
Fauci, there are a lot of outbreaks on college campuses around the 
country as millions of students go back to thousands of colleges. Is 
the right thing to do to send the students home?
  He said: Absolutely not. That is the wrong thing to do. Segregate the 
students from the other students in the college until they are well--
and the people they have exposed until they are well--and then go on. 
Don't send them home to infect their parents and their grandparents and 
the community from which they came.
  I think that is important advice for the college administrators all 
over America who are dealing with this issue very bravely. I know at 
the University of Tennessee they had a big outbreak. It was some poor 
judgment on behalf of a number of students who had just gone back to 
school. You can just imagine 18-, 19-, and 20-year-olds, they all want 
to get together. Well, they got together, and they infected one 
another, and they had a big outbreak--maybe 750, the Governor said, but 
it is now down to 150.
  So Dr. Fauci's advice to the school administrators is this: Isolate 
them, segregate them, track them, and don't send them home.
  The hearing today included Dr. Fauci and Dr. Redfield from the 
Centers for Disease Control. It included Admiral Giroir, who is in 
charge of testing, and it included Dr. Hahn, who is the head of the 
Food and Drug Administration.
  Here was the first question I asked Dr. Hahn, who is the only person 
who knows when the vaccines that are being developed will be 
distributed. He doesn't really know because he doesn't know the date, 
nor do any of the career scientists at the FDA know the date when the 
data will show that the vaccine is safe and effective, and it will not 
be distributed until it is.
  So I said to Dr. Hahn: Who makes the decisions at FDA? Do you make 
the decisions? Do the career scientists make the decisions? Or does the 
White House make the decisions about safety and effectiveness of a 
vaccine?
  He said: The career scientists make the decisions. The White House 
does not, and I will not make a decision about the safety and 
effectiveness of vaccines unless the career scientists and I agree that 
it is safe and effective according to independent and transparent data.
  I asked Dr. Fauci this question. I said: Dr. Fauci, you have been 
around a while. You came on in the Reagan days. You have been in your 
job as head of infectious diseases since 1984. Here is my question: Is 
this administration cutting corners on safety and efficiency?
  Dr. Fauci said: Absolutely not.
  I asked all four of the witnesses: If the vaccine is approved by the 
FDA, would you take it, and would you recommend your family take it?
  They said yes, that they had great confidence in the FDA.
  Here is a summary of what they told us today. Let's start with 
vaccines:
  According to the administration, it is already manufacturing tens of 
millions of doses of six vaccines, and by the end of the year, there 
will be tens of millions of doses of these vaccines already 
manufactured, ready to distribute--first, of course, to the priority 
individuals, those who are most vulnerable, healthcare workers, and 
others.
  Then, according to the administration, they expect to be able to 
produce 300 to 700 million doses of vaccines by March or April of next 
year. That is unprecedented.
  When I was a kid, we were terrified by polio. I had classmates who 
were in an iron lung and parents who were worried their children might 
be just as well. It took 10 years to get a polio vaccine, and polio is 
now eradicated.
  For most of the vaccines that our children take before they go to 
school--like mumps, measles, and chickenpox--you have to take these 
vaccines in all 50 States and the District of Columbia before you go to 
school. Most of them took 10 years to develop.
  If the optimism of the administration--they call it Operation Warp 
Speed--is accurate, vaccines will have been manufactured, and they are 
optimistic that at least one of them will be approved before the end of 
the year. They know they will be manufactured because they are already 
doing that.
  They don't know for sure, and they say: There is no guarantee of 
success, but we are optimistic that we will reach a goal that once was 
considered impossible and now seems likely.
  In other words, instead of waiting 10 years for a vaccine to save 
lives, this vaccine for COVID-19 will be developed in less than a year 
if it is approved before the end of the year.
  That is an unprecedented success story, and it is only possible for a 
variety of reasons, which I will go into in a minute.
  The same is true with treatments. There are five treatments--
medicines--for those who have contracted COVID-19. That is especially 
interesting to teachers and faculty members at schools and colleges. 
The children don't seem to get as sick, but the older teachers could, 
and they do get sicker. So it helps to know that there is a treatment 
for COVID if you get sick.
  What we are told by Dr. Fauci, Dr. Redfield, Dr. Hahn, and others is 
that they are cautiously optimistic that new treatments will be 
available in the next few weeks--specifically, the monoclonal 
antibodies, the antibody cocktails that were developed and used during 
the Ebola crisis to help prevent and cure it.
  If these work--and, again, they only can be approved based on data 
from the FDA. They are not approved yet. They are in clinical trials, 
but late clinical trials. If they are approved in the next few weeks, 
then, if you come down with COVID, you will have an antibody cocktail 
that, in the case of the Ebola, proved to prevent and help cure it.
  Knowing that these vaccines are being manufactured and are likely to 
be approved by the end of the year and that treatments will be broadly 
available by the end of the year, in addition to the five that now 
exist, should help give Americans more confidence in going back to 
school, back to college, back to childcare, back to work, and out to 
eat.
  Then, there is a third success story, and that is diagnostic testing. 
The United States got off to a bumpy start with diagnostic testing. The 
first CDC test flopped, and we lost some time. But since then there has 
been an explosion of diagnostic testing.
  Today, we have a capacity to deal with 90 million tests a month. 
Abbott Laboratories has announced that in October, it will produce 50 
million rapid tests. You can get a result in 15 minutes with a higher 
degree of specificity--that means accuracy--and it costs $5. The 
administration has bought 150 million--the whole output--for the first 
3 months of Abbott Laboratories' fast tests and is in the process of 
distributing them to nursing homes, schools, colleges, childcare 
centers, and States.
  I was able to say to the Governor that if Tennessee gets its rough 
share of 2 percent of 150 million tests, that is a lot of tests for the 
State of Tennessee to be receiving over the next few weeks.
  Again, the importance of that is, between now and the time a vaccine 
is administered and treatments are widely available, the surest path 
back to school, back to work, and out to eat is an oversupply of 
diagnostic testing so you could have it whenever you want.
  Just as Governor Lee was saying, we have 1,800 schools open in 
person, Nashville and Memphis worrying about whether they should open. 
I think if the teachers knew they had more treatments and if they could 
test whenever a class needs to test--a whole class--and do surveillance 
testing, that people would be safer and feel better about going back to 
school.
  The same would be true with the colleges and universities. If there 
is a breakout of 750 cases at the University of Tennessee and you can 
quickly do random surveillance testing of an entire dorm or a dorm 
floor or a class of students, then you can feel better about keeping 
the place safe.
  The hearing was a good hearing. During the hearing, I thanked Senator 
Murray, my partner over the last 6 years, the ranking Democrat. She is 
a

[[Page S5825]]

member of the Democratic leadership. She is pretty tough when she wants 
to be. Because she is, I like working with her, and we have been able 
to do a lot with our committee.
  We have 23 members on our committee. I thanked them today. I said, 
Senator Ted Kennedy used to say that we have the broadest jurisdiction 
of any committee in the Senate. I think we have the broadest range of 
views in the Senate of any committee. We have some very able advocates 
of those diverse points of view, and still, we have a very impressive 
record from fixing No Child Left Behind to 21st Century Cures, to the 
opioids bill, to passing important bipartisan legislation that is good 
for the country
  President Obama called the Every Student Succeeds Act a Christmas 
miracle. Senator McConnell said the 21st Century Cures Act was the most 
important law of that Congress.
  I thanked Senator Murray and all the Democrats and Republicans on the 
committee for creating an environment where we can have our differences 
of opinion but still get important results.
  There was one other thing we discussed that I would like to mention. 
I see my friend from Connecticut on the floor. I know he wants to 
speak, and I will get out of the way so he can do it. But there were 
actually two things I wanted to briefly summarize, and then I will ask 
to put my statement into the Record.
  One was that the New York Times said on March 1, that the United 
States was as well prepared as any country for COVID. To the extent 
that was true, it was because of several Presidents and several 
Congresses doing such things as, in 2012, authorizing three standby 
manufacturing plants for vaccines. Of Operation Warp Speed, Dr. Slaoui, 
who is their principle adviser, said that they could not be producing 
four of those vaccines if those plants had not been put in place back 
then.
  In addition, earlier Congresses created more authority for the FDA, 
for example, to do emergency-use authorizations, which Dr. Hahn has 
used expertly. They have given the NIH record funding for 5 years in a 
row and new authority. All of this authority has been put to work by 
this administration to do what I would call an unprecedented sprint 
toward success on vaccines, treatments, and tests without cutting 
corners on efficacy and safety. There is a risk, but the risk is to the 
taxpayers.
  The reason things are going so fast is because they are doing 
everything in parallel. They are manufacturing while they are 
developing the vaccine and while they are reviewing whether it is safe 
and effective.
  Then, at the end of that process--say, at the end of this year--if it 
is effective, we are ready to distribute it. The States have been asked 
to get ready. If it is not safe, if it is not effective, then, we lose 
the money. The taxpayers lose the money.
  I think most of us would be glad to lose that money if the result was 
that one or more of those vaccines turned out to be the one that 
produces 300 to 700 million doses of vaccines that are safe and 
effective as we move into the new year.
  There is a lesson from all of this, and that is that the earlier 
Congresses and Presidents were visionary in this respect: They built 
those standby manufacturing plants. They created BARDA. Senator Burr 
from North Carolina was one of the leaders of that, for example. 
Without that, we wouldn't have this explosion of vaccines, treatments, 
and tests on the way. We need to do that again.
  Senator Bill Frist, the former majority leader, testified before our 
committee with some others. He said we go from panic to neglect to 
panic, and we don't do the hard things we need to do after the epidemic 
is over.
  The hardest thing to do is sustained funding. So we need sustained 
funding for manufacturing plants so they don't go cold while we wait 
for the next pandemic. We need sustained funding for our stockpile so 
they are not depleted by budget problems. We need sustained funding for 
the strategic stockpile, and we need sustained funding for our State 
and local public health agencies, which are about 50 percent supported 
by Federal dollars.
  Sustained funding is something we don't do very well--that means 
mandatory funding that needs advanced appropriations. We like to do it 
year by year. But if we don't do it, you can see what it costs us: 
200,000 lives we lost already and $3 trillion we have already spent. So 
a little sustained funding to prevent the next pandemic would be a very 
wise investment, and we ought to do it now while we have our eye on the 
ball.
  Jared Diamond, who wrote ``Guns, Germs, and Steel,'' pointed out in a 
recent article in the Wall Street Journal that, in his opinion, what is 
different about this vaccine is the jet plane--that people can fly from 
Wuhan to San Francisco or from San Francisco to Nashville, and pretty 
soon, suddenly, this is spreading all over the world. Jared Diamond 
said that the next pandemic could be next year. We hope it is not, but 
it could be, and we should be ready for it.
  So I wanted to report to the American people and to my colleagues in 
the Senate that we hear a lot about problems, but I think it is 
important to know that vaccines are being manufactured, that the 
decisions are going to be made by scientists about when they are ready 
to distribute, that the States have been asked to get ready, that there 
are more treatments coming, likely, and that there has been an 
explosion of diagnostic tests. So, really, there should be plenty of 
diagnostic tests for anyone who wants to use them before very long in 
the United States. My theory has been for a long time that as soon as 
we had an oversupply, we wouldn't have a problem or an issue.
  I thanked those four witnesses, Senator Murray, and my Republican and 
Democratic colleagues for monitoring this COVID-19. I am glad the 
hearing was broadly carried for 2 hours on many television networks.
  I hope it gave the American people some relief and sense that our 
chances of going back to school, back to college, back to childcare, 
back to work, and out to eat are increasingly good. It is very simple: 
Wear the mask, wash your hands, stay apart, and keep this unprecedented 
sprint toward vaccines, treatments, and diagnostic tests going.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut.

                          ____________________