[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 204 (Thursday, December 3, 2020)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7206-S7208]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          CORONAVIRUS VACCINE

  Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, the Presiding Officer and I are here, and 
we have been meeting today in Washington at, really, a groundbreaking 
moment as we continue this battle for our health, for our economy, and 
against the virus. What makes this such a critical moment are the 
developments we have seen in the last 10 days regarding a vaccine.
  Public health experts around the world have agreed, almost from day 
one, that the way to really find the end of this pandemic--the ultimate 
weapon--would be to develop a vaccine that worked. Less than a year 
ago, which was in January and February of this year, we were hearing 
that 2 years would set a record for developing a vaccine and that 
sometimes a vaccine that has been developed on a new disease like this 
has taken 3 and 5 and even 10 years or more. Yet here we are, less a 
year from the discovery of COVID-19, with not just one vaccine but two 
vaccines that have already applied for their use permits. Both vaccines 
have shown an effectiveness of more than 90 percent, and a third 
vaccine with a similar response is about to get to the place at which 
it, too, can apply for use.
  These are incredible numbers. It wasn't that many months ago that 
healthcare experts were saying, if we get a vaccine that is effective 
50 percent of the time or more, that the government should consider 
accepting that vaccine and making it available to people, and here we 
are with a 90 percent effective vaccine. I had the measles, and my kids 
had the measles shot, which seemed to pretty much eliminate the 
measles. It was 90 percent effective. This is the kind of vaccine that 
has been the most effective among the most effective vaccines we have 
ever had.
  Pfizer and Moderna have both come forward and asked for their 
emergency use authorizations. The emergency use doesn't really mean 
they have cut any corners. The only thing we have failed to do is to 
watch the 30,000 or so people for another 2 or 3 years who were in both 
of these trials. That is why we can't say with certainty if this 
vaccine will last for a lifetime or if this vaccine will be a 3-year 
vaccine or even a 1-year vaccine. What we can say with certainty is 
that, about 95 percent of the time, it will prevent you from getting 
the disease. Of course, if people are prevented from getting the 
disease, they can't spread the disease, and that is why a 90 percent 
effective vaccine, like the measles vaccine, was basically 100 percent 
effective as long as people took it.
  So we need to step back, really, I think, and look at the 
unconventional way we got here. How did we get from 3 to 5 to, maybe, 
10 years to less than a year of discovering a virus for the very first 
time to our having a vaccine?
  The way that researchers have been able to move forward with this and 
the way that Congress and the Trump administration have responded to 
this pandemic has been extraordinary. In our country, Operation Warp 
Speed has accelerated the development of this new vaccine through a 
fast-track process that could be described, really, in one word--
unprecedented. Normally, vaccines take years. Researchers have to go 
out and secure funding, get approvals, and study results step by step 
to get to where we are today. Only then would a vaccine be determined 
to be safe and effective, and only then would manufacturing begin.
  Normally, with a vaccine, the day the vaccine is approved is the day 
you start manufacturing. We know that this is not what is happening 
here. In fact, in just a few minutes, I am going to mention that the 
head of distribution is saying, on the day the vaccine is approved, we 
will start shipping millions of copies of that vaccine all over the 
country.
  This all really started with Congress's deciding, as we put these 
COVID relief packages together from the very first couple of packages, 
that when it came to a cure, we were not going to let funding stand in 
the way nor were we going to let it stand in the way of investing some 
money somewhere that just simply didn't work because, by investing 
money where it didn't work, it allowed us to invest money where it did 
work. Congress appropriated $18 billion for vaccines and testing. About 
$12.5 billion has gone into the vaccine side. Most of the rest has gone 
into testing, with some going into therapy. This is a decision Congress 
made. With this vaccine, we are going to become partners in developing 
how we fight back.

[[Page S7207]]

  There was a risk that some of the vaccine candidates we supported 
wouldn't make it, but there was never a risk that the vaccine 
candidates that did make it wouldn't be as safe as any vaccine has ever 
been. In fact, many of these vaccines have had more people involved in 
the studies than ever before. Because of the virulence of the virus, 
the people in the studies, frankly, were more likely than not to be 
exposed to COVID, and a bunch of them were more likely than not to 
catch it. Of course, that is the moment when you decide if the group 
that caught the virus was the group that had the virus--the group that 
had the vaccine in these studies--or if it were the group that didn't 
have the vaccine. What we found out was, 95 percent of the time, it was 
the group that didn't have the vaccine, which is where you get that 95 
percent number.
  Congress provided that we would take some risk. We so often hear that 
failure is not an option. In this case, if you didn't fail, you were 
not trying hard enough. If all you wind up with are things that have 
gotten approved, then you probably have left some things on the table 
that you should have tried.
  The Presiding Officer is a great businessman, and he knows, if you 
are in a business that is growing, you are going to have some failures. 
If you have never had failures in your business, you have not tried 
anything new, which means you probably haven't grown. So we would have 
failures not in a vaccine that we would give to people but by thinking: 
This would appear like it would have a good chance of being approved, 
so let's put it in the group of vaccines that we are working on.
  President Trump and Operation Warp Speed stepped up and decided they 
were going to move at a faster pace than ever before but with more 
safety than we have had in most vaccine developments in the history of 
the country. So we decided to support several vaccines that, again, we 
thought had a better chance of being approved than not. Now, you take 
some risk in that because all of the vaccines won't be approved, but 
you take no risk if you are going to support a vaccine that is approved 
but that is not safe. Yet that is not what happened at all. You just 
put a lot of racehorses in the race.
  The dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor 
University says, if you are racing to get a vaccine quickly, one way to 
do it is to put as many horses in the race as you can, and that is 
exactly what we have done. We have invested in several potential 
vaccines and, I think, three different paths to a vaccine, which means 
that all of the vaccines that are approved will not be exactly the same 
in how you have to store them, in how you have to transport them, and 
whether you have to have one shot or two to have the full vaccine.
  And we have signed contracts with six leading candidates already. We 
have invested $2.5 billion to help develop and purchase 100 million 
doses of the vaccine being developed by Moderna. That was jointly 
developed by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases 
and the company.
  We have dedicated $2 billion in a different pattern to purchase 100 
million doses of the Pfizer vaccine, and we have done that with that 
investment in a way that allows us to shorten the processing time, 
combining various study phases and clinical trials going on at the same 
time and moving forward in a way that also allowed us to be 
manufacturing vaccines while we were still studying and moving toward 
final approval by the FDA.
  So we have two vaccines standing and ready now for final approval, 
another one to join them soon, and another one to join them quickly 
after that. But all of them are already in the stage of manufacturing.
  So what is the worst thing that could have happened to taxpayers? We 
invest in a vaccine that turns out not to work, and, at that point we 
step in, meet our commitment--in essence, buy the vaccine that didn't 
work--be sure that it is effectively destroyed, and realize that that 
was a chance that we took that didn't produce a result. But the other 
vaccines that did work had a result and had vaccine available as soon 
as they were approved.
  In fact, General Perna, Operation Warp Speed's chief operating 
officer, said the government would begin vaccinations within 24 hours 
after a vaccine secures FDA approval. In the past, I would say you 
would be closer to saying it will be 12 or 24 months after approval 
before the first vaccine is ready to go to the first person, but now we 
are saying 24 hours, and we are on the edge of that 24 hours.
  I talked today with the Governor of my State, the Governor of 
Missouri, Mike Parson, and the head of the Missouri Department of 
Health and Senior Services, Dr. Randall Williams, about what they were 
doing. They submitted a plan early. I was with the Governor--I think it 
was in mid-August--when the Centers for Disease Control told all the 
Governors: We want to have a plan by the end of October of how you are 
going to distribute this vaccine when you get it.
  I said at about that same time that if we failed in our effort to get 
the vaccine effectively distributed after the effort we made to get it, 
it would be one of the great government failures of all time.
  But Governor Parson, Dr. Williams, and others who have worked hard on 
this in our State put a plan in and put it in pretty early and now are 
ready to execute that plan as soon as they have the vaccine available 
to them.
  About 2 percent of the population of the country lives in Missouri, 
and so about 2 percent of every distribution will go to Missouri as 
vaccines are ready.
  Pfizer will have about 25 million vaccines to distribute almost 
immediately. Moderna will have about 20 million to distribute almost 
immediately. And we know that others are standing right behind them.
  Another thing that Congress asked the Centers for Disease Control to 
do was to come up with a recommendation on who the vaccine should be 
given to. And just this week the CDC advisory committee made their 
recommendation to the Centers for Disease Control. Either today or 
sometime soon after today, the CDC, in all likelihood, will adopt those 
recommendations as they have in this past.
  The recommendations go something like this: First, you want to 
prioritize healthcare workers and people most likely to have the worst 
result if they catch the virus. So if you take all the healthcare 
workers in America and all the people in a senior living kind of 
condition in America, you are talking about around 15 percent of the 
population.
  Somewhere in there, either in that group or the next group, you 
include all the first responders and police officers in the country, 
who come into situations so often that they have no control over, and 
then you go to the other essential employees in America--the childcare 
center worker, the schoolteacher, the busdriver, the grocery store 
clerk, the food processing person who is out there making this happen.
  I think there has been some decision made on the healthcare workers 
that we should include clergy in the healthcare workers because they 
are so often present in hospitals and with people in circumstances 
where they would like to see someone from their faith present, but that 
person also is a healthcare provider in the healthcare network and, 
just like others working in the hospital, will be able to get that 
early vaccination.
  But let's go back to the essential workforce. The essential workforce 
of the groups we have talked about and others who come into lots of 
contact with people are often least able to make arrangements in their 
own time to even get a vaccine if it is for free. They are going to be 
a bi priority.

  When I go to the grocery store and I ask someone for help, which I 
often need to do to find the one thing on my list I don't know how to 
find, or when I go by to check out with the grocery store clerk, if the 
grocery store clerk, no matter how big the shield is between them and 
me, if they couldn't possibly get it from the person who checked out 2 
days earlier or early that day, they can't possibly give it to me.
  So every step of the way, the whole country becomes safer until, 
hopefully, by the end of April or so, we are at a place where everybody 
has access to the vaccine.
  By the way, by the time you do the 15 percent of the population that 
is most likely to have a bad result if they get the virus and 
healthcare workers and

[[Page S7208]]

add that to the 35 percent of the population that is the essential 
workforce, that is 50 percent of the population that could have the 
vaccine if they chose to have it.
  I think most people think that we are there, in our State and other 
places, by sometime in April. In fact, Dr. Fauci said that Americans 
determined to be at the highest risk--healthcare workers, frontline 
workers, seniors, those with underlying conditions--could be vaccinated 
by the end of the year.
  Certainly, if there is a second shot, it might be by the end of 
January, and you have 15 percent of the whole population vaccinated by 
the end of January or sometime in January, and another 35 percent would 
have the vaccine available to them by sometime in April.
  Then we look at the rest of the population. But in each step of the 
way--let me say again--every time you take somebody off the playing 
field of where contact with the virus could successfully occur, 
everybody else gets safer too.
  If a person who has been vaccinated is where the germs happen to land 
instead of the person standing beside them who wasn't vaccinated, the 
life of that particular germ is gone, and eventually that is how you 
emerge from a pandemic. There just aren't enough people left for this 
to land on that either haven't had it or haven't had the vaccine to 
prevent it.
  It is a critical time. It is an important time. I think we have 
written two new chapters in pandemic response, both in testing and in 
vaccines.
  Operation Warp Speed has done in months what typically can take 10 to 
15 years and, even in an expedited way, can take 2 to 3 to 5 years.
  Given the urgent need to beat this virus, I think Operation Warp 
Speed, with the great scientific community--a lot of this is built on 
research that was funded by NIH. One of the priorities of the Congress 
for the last 5 years has been to increase NIH funding, at a time when 
we know more about genetics.
  Two of these vaccines are basically based on the molecular code that 
is sort of the software for genetics. It is a different way than 
vaccines have been developed before and would not have been developed 
without government-encouraged research.
  Having a diverse selection of vaccines means there are different 
people producing vaccines at the same time in different places, and we 
will have, more likely, a quick and fair distribution of any FDA-
authorized vaccines.
  Certainly, I have been frustrated, as many of us have, to think that 
we have not been able to reach an agreement on what money we might need 
to finish this vaccine effort, the distribution effort.
  Hopefully, we can come to the next round of COVID relief sooner 
rather than later.
  As I said earlier this week, a targeted funding package now will have 
a lot more impact than a much bigger package would have 4 or 5 months 
from now. There is no reason we shouldn't be able to find common 
ground. This is a time when we can make that effort to finish the job. 
The pandemic is affecting Americans every day. I have talked to a lot 
of people who have seen greater numbers of drug dependency and huge 
declines in mental health because that support network is gone and 
isolation has taken over, and worry about family, finances, and health 
has become a big part of that.
  Let's show the people we work for that we are going to be able to 
continue this job, and let's praise the great researchers in our 
country and others who stepped forward in incredible ways to do things 
that just 9 months ago nobody thought could possibly be established in 
the timeframe we are working on right now.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Missouri.

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