[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 195 (Tuesday, November 17, 2020)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7042-S7043]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              CORONAVIRUS

  Mr. PORTMAN. Madam President, I am here on the floor of the Senate 
tonight to talk about the encouraging progress we have seen in finding 
a vaccine for the COVID-19 virus that has disrupted all of our lives 
and caused such great damage over the past year.
  From the early days of this coronavirus pandemic, a public-private 
partnership has employed scientists who have worked around-the-clock to 
prevent people from getting infected by developing effective vaccines. 
We saw the results of this effort in the last week with announcements 
from Pfizer and now Moderna that their interim success rates were above 
90 percent during their trials. Other companies have vaccines at 
various stages of development, and there is hope that they will have 
similar results.
  Getting safe and effective vaccines across the finish line will be a 
monumental achievement. Not only are we witnessing unprecedented 
progress in creating an effective widespread vaccine, we are doing so 
at a speed unheard of in modern medical history. This result is going 
to be our best hope of getting out of this pandemic. With cases rising 
not only across the country but around the world, we are running out of 
other tools needed to stop the pandemic. I support the social 
distancing, wearing of masks, PPE, the testing, but I believe 
widespread inoculation is the most effective way to avoid the negative 
economic and social impacts the virus and the subsequent mitigation 
efforts have caused.
  If these vaccines receive the expected emergency use authorization 
from the Food and Drug Administration over the coming weeks and months, 
this will be a testament to the unprecedented support that Congress has 
provided for vaccine development, the Trump administration's innovative 
approach to cut bureaucratic redtape with Operation Warp Speed, and the 
commitment and ingenuity of our researchers, our scientists, and our 
manufacturers.
  The bipartisan CARES Act we passed here in March with unanimous 
support provided $27 billion in funding for countermeasures against 
COVID, including funding this important vaccine development research. 
It was money well spent.
  Thanks to these funds and the innovative approach by the 
administration, we have been able to invest in building the 
infrastructure to begin manufacturing these vaccines now so that if the 
vaccine is approved, we can quickly ramp up distribution. This two-
track approach also involves ramping up large-scale clinical trials, 
which are critical to furthering our scientific understanding of this 
pandemic and verifying the safety and effectiveness of these vaccines. 
By using these CARES Act funds to invest in both research and trials 
and in manufacturing at the same time, we are able to ensure that the 
trials are thorough and methodical while also ensuring that if and when 
approved there is vaccine ready to be distributed.
  At the same time, the Food and Drug Administration, which is the 
Federal agency responsible for approving the use of any new vaccine, 
has followed the science and moved cautiously. As an example, they have 
actually raised the standards needed for giving an emergency use 
authorization for a vaccine. Normally, a vaccine only needs to be 
effective about 50 percent of the time to be approved under the EUA, 
emergency use authorization, but with the coronavirus vaccine, the 
standard is much higher. By requiring companies to collect more 
rigorous information to show longer lasting results from their 
respective vaccine candidates, this will help ensure greater confidence 
in the system, and I am grateful that they took these additional 
careful steps.
  This progress on the vaccine is critical for our economic recovery as 
well. When a vaccine and therapeutics are authorized by the FDA and 
made widely available and people actually get vaccinated, all of us 
will feel safer returning to the workplace, retail establishments, 
restaurants, churches and other places of worship, and schools, as well 
as feeling more comfortable gathering with friends and family. We will 
finally be able to truly reopen and get millions of Americans back to 
work. In short, a widely available vaccine is our best bet for getting 
America back to normal--something we all are desperate for.

  Last month, I received a briefing from CTI Clinical Trial and 
Consulting Services, a research company that is based in my hometown of 
Cincinnati, OH. I met with them to receive a briefing to find out what 
is going on in Ohio and what they are doing around the country. CTI is 
a global leader in actually executing these clinical trials that we 
always talk about for these vaccines and therapeutics, and right now

[[Page S7043]]

they are helping to conduct clinical trials on a potential COVID 
vaccine being developed by a number of companies, including Janssen, J 
& J. That is Janssen, Johnson & Johnson.
  I was impressed with the progress they had made in their phase 1 and 
phase 2 trials for the J & J vaccine, as well as the precautions they 
are taking with regard to safety and privacy of participants in the 
trial. In fact, the previous trial of this vaccine found 99 percent of 
participants developed antibodies to COVID-19, and 98 percent still had 
these antibodies in their system after 29 days. These are encouraging 
figures that suggest that this J & J vaccine could prove to be another 
useful tool in our toolkit to fight COVID-19, but there is still a lot 
of work to be done.
  CTI explained to me that they were focused on encouraging more people 
to join their trials. I asked if it would help if I signed up, and they 
said yes. Along with tens of thousands of other participants, I am now 
joining this trial for this promising new vaccine. Like other 
participants in the program, I don't know if I got the vaccine or if I 
got a placebo.
  I enrolled in this vaccine trial for really three reasons. One is 
because I think it is so important to get this vaccine moving, and 
these trials are really important to having that be successful. In my 
view, again, the vaccine is the most effective way for us to defeat 
this coronavirus.
  Second, I enrolled because I want to encourage others to join these 
trials around the country. If you are interested, go online. Look at 
the vaccine trials and join one in your community.
  And, third, I hope it will convince my fellow Ohioans and others that 
getting vaccinated makes sense.
  There is a concerning Gallup poll from last month that found that 
only half of Americans are comfortable getting a COVID-19 vaccine, and 
50 percent of us are not comfortable at this point getting vaccinated. 
Actually, that is down from August, when two-thirds of Americans said 
they would be willing to be vaccinated. This concerns me a lot.
  I suspect in part this is happening because of the rhetoric we have 
heard from some public officials casting doubt on a vaccine solely 
because it may be approved by the Trump administration's FDA. We need 
to stop playing politics with people's health and let the science and 
the data determine which vaccines get approved. The FDA is being very 
cautious, and they are being driven by science. Casting doubt on the 
efficacy of a vaccine to try to score political points is dangerous and 
needs to stop.
  Public confidence in vaccines is declining at exactly the time that 
we need these vaccines the most, and we need to do what we can to 
reverse that trend. My hope is that being involved firsthand I can use 
my platform as a Senator to help give people confidence that these new 
vaccines being developed are safe and effective. The more folks 
participate in these trials, the sooner they will have the complete 
data to finalize this phase of the trial and move on to the FDA 
approval process.
  But just as important as participating in these vaccine trials is 
what we do here as legislators in Congress to ensure that these 
vaccines can continue to be developed and deployed safely and rapidly. 
As I mentioned earlier, the CARES Act provided $27 billion for the 
development of vaccines and other countermeasures--an unprecedented 
show of support from Congress in our fight to defeat the underlying 
healthcare challenges of this pandemic.
  Unfortunately, since that bill was passed--the CARES bill--way back 
in March, 8 months ago, we have been unable to focus on following up 
with more funding to help this effort. Twenty-seven billion dollars is 
a lot of money, but it only gets us so far in an effort like this.
  What is also missing from the uses for this $27 billion is the 
ability to fund a campaign to explain to Americans that there is a safe 
and effective vaccine out there that they can use, that the science has 
been followed. As I mentioned, there is a lot of vaccine hesitancy 
right now. It existed before this pandemic. Unfortunately, it has been 
made worse by some elected officials trying to politicize this science-
driven effort.
  That is why I am working on bipartisan legislation to support a 
national awareness campaign that would empower HHS to cut through the 
politics and promote the scientific advancements we have made in order 
to increase public confidence.
  We don't have a vaccine yet, and we are still facing another round of 
shutdowns, with little help to support those who will be impacted by 
it. That is the reason we need to do more here in Washington right now 
to ensure that the healthcare response to this pandemic does not 
falter, because this crisis is getting worse, not better. In my home 
State of Ohio and around the country, we are seeing this, and we can 
make a difference here.
  In Ohio, the number of daily cases has risen every day for the past 
month. We are seeing double what we saw just a few weeks ago.
  In the United States, we are now averaging more than 100,000 new 
cases per day, double the rate from just a month ago. As was predicted, 
it got colder, people are inside more, and the third wave has arrived.
  Unfortunately, we have also seen an increase in Ohio in 
hospitalizations, in ICU patients, and, sadly, in fatalities along with 
these new cases.
  We need to do more to help the economy, too, and that is another 
reason we need a COVID-19 package--a stimulus package--because as the 
pandemic has worsened, the impressive economic growth we were seeing 
has slowed down at a time when the economy is still down 10 million 
jobs since February. What we really don't want is for those ten million 
people, in a slowdown of the economy, to become long-term unemployed 
and who may never reenter the workforce. And, of course, certain 
sectors--like hospitality, restaurants, hotels, travel, and 
entertainment--are still struggling badly, with no end in sight, as 
some States are beginning to re-implement stricter social distancing 
measurers and even to close down these facilities in order to counter 
the spread of the virus
  I am pleased that Leader McConnell has called on Congress to work 
together to pass another coronavirus response package before the end of 
the year. We can't afford to wait any longer. It is my hope that my 
Democratic colleagues recognize the urgency as well. And I have talked 
to a number of them who do. We have to refrain from making this 
political at this point. We have to figure out how to work together to 
find common ground.
  If we can come together and get a bipartisan coronavirus bill passed 
before the end of this year that takes a commonsense approach targeting 
the healthcare challenges of this pandemic, targeting the economic 
consequences, we will not only help the men and women working 
tirelessly in labs around the country to fight this disease, but we 
will send a clear message to the American people that we are with them 
in this fight.
  And as we continue this critical national effort, let's be sure we 
are doing our part here in Congress to pass legislation that provides 
additional funding for treatments and therapies for the coronavirus so 
that we can be sure we have the resources necessary to treat the virus 
as people get it.
  The time is now for us to put the partisanship aside and figure out 
how we can work together to give the American people a little hope, to 
address the healthcare crisis that is in all of our States, and to 
ensure that the economic consequences are not devastating for the 
people we represent.
  I urge my colleagues to come together and to do that before we recess 
for the holidays.
  I yield back my time.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Ohio.

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