[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 58 (Friday, April 1, 2022)]
[House]
[Pages H4124-H4126]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           ISSUES OF THE DAY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 4, 2021, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. 
Grothman) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, I have to make a plane, so I won't be 
here for the whole 30 minutes. It will be probably more like 15 
minutes.
  Before addressing the issues I wanted to talk about today, I want to 
one more time talk a little bit about vitamin D, because earlier today 
I talked to Dr. Amiez Dror from Israel about a study that he conducted.
  The study is absolutely amazing. In Israel about 45 percent of the 
population is vitamin D deficient, and that is really deficient. By 
deficient, they mean less than 20 nanograms per milliliter. About 75 
percent of the Israeli population has vitamin D less than 30 milligrams 
per nanoliter.
  In any event, it wasn't a huge study, but he looked to see how people 
who had adequate levels of vitamin D performed once they came into the 
medical system compared to people who were under that 20 nanograms. He 
found people who were vitamin D deficient, which is almost half the 
Israeli population, were 14 times more likely to have severe or 
critical COVID than the people who were above 20 nanograms per 
milliliter.
  As far as people who died, 25 percent of the people who were 
hospitalized and were vitamin D deficient died compared to only 2.3 
percent of those who had adequate vitamin D.
  Think about that. You are 11 times more likely to die, Madam Speaker, 
if you are vitamin D deficient.
  When he looked at adequate prelevel hospitalization for vitamin D, it 
was a better predictor of how you would turn out than having COPD, 
having diabetes, or having congestive heart failure. Unbelievable what 
a great predictor it was.
  Nevertheless, continued our kind of asleep public health 
establishment has still not talked about this like they could have. We 
recently went over 1 million deaths in the United States attributed to 
COVID, but we can't talk about the fact that--and he is not the only 
doctor who feels that way--you could have cut that number in half or 
maybe well time more than half, if out of the chute well before we had 
such things as vaccines, we knew about vitamin D being good for people 
back in April or May of 2020.
  If they had spent some of these advertising dollars they spent on 
other things en masse or whatever, they could have, I believe, saved 
half the lives. I right now personally know nine people who have died 
of COVID, and I can't help but think how many of these people or which 
of those people would have survived if they had publicized the 
importance of taking vitamin D.
  Now, of course, I also asked the doctor how much vitamin D you should 
take. He felt for people in good shape it would be 2,000 to 3,000 
international units.
  If you are overweight, because the fat cells absorb the vitamin D, 
you should take more, maybe 4,000 or more international units.
  He points out that even if you are in the sun, one of the things that 
creates so many people in Israel to be vitamin D deficient is--as the 
United States--so many people take sunscreen. It is important to 
protect yourself from skin cancer, but you have to remember, if you are 
one of these people who put sunscreen all over yourself, even in a 
sunny climate, you are not going to get adequate vitamin D levels.
  He is a very important doctor. He has a Ph.D. in genetics. He is also 
a medical doctor. He also has degrees in molecular biology. So you are 
talking about a real sharp guy here.
  If we had an on-the-ball press corps paying attention today, they 
should give him a call in Israel. He loves to talk to people about 
this, and you could get something that is very important in your local 
newspapers.

                              {time}  1415

  If anybody connected to the public health establishment is hearing 
this speech, they should give my office a call. We will give them the 
contact information.
  It would have been better if this sort of stuff were out there 2 
years ago, but the COVID infection rate goes up and down. We are on a 
downswing right now, though we are not as low as we were last July.
  Vitamin D helps prevent other diseases as well. I realize a lot of 
the medical establishment in the United States does not like to focus 
on things in which people don't make a lot of money. But for people who 
want to save lives, there is still time to get the story of vitamin D 
out there. I certainly think every major and minor newspaper in the 
United States should be covering it.
  He happened to mention that he got something in the New York Post, 
but it should be in more than just the New York Post.
  Right now, we have our President, who I watched a little bit 
yesterday,

[[Page H4125]]

focusing on Transgender Day, saying how important it is we talk about 
transgenders to first and second graders. I can't believe that is where 
we are as a country. That is what President Biden felt was important to 
talk about.
  I am going to talk about some other issues, some suggestions that 
President Biden might want to adapt to something he could talk about a 
little bit more.
  I continue to believe the border is the biggest crisis America faces 
today. In February, we let about 72,000 people, including got-aways, 
into the country. ICE also releases people into the interior.
  Right now, the administration does not release those numbers, so we 
will say 70,000 on the low side. That was this past February. Two years 
ago, well under 20,000 were being let in, in February. We are in a 
situation right now where about four times as many people per month are 
coming into the country.
  I will point out, we are not always getting the best. The last time I 
was down there, I walked down a path that the people coming here 
illegally walked down. It was littered with photo IDs being thrown away 
from Chile, Brazil, Colombia, wherever.
  But we are about to have the situation become much, much worse. We 
are about to get rid of what we refer to as title 42. That means that 
people who are coming here will no longer be held up because of the 
COVID threat.
  There is a concern that the number of people coming here will be 
about 18,000 a day being let in, or 500,000 a month.
  I think we have the biggest crisis in this country, allowing 70,000 
people who are unvetted come into this country. We are about to go from 
70,000 to half a million a month, and our President is focusing on: Are 
we doing enough to educate second graders about transgenders?
  I would hope the press corps would drill him on these questions again 
and again: Who is going to pay for these people? How is it fair for the 
people who are trying to come into this country appropriately? What are 
you going to do about people who are coming here who perhaps are 
breaking the law?
  I haven't touched on the fact that while we are focusing right now on 
people coming into the country, we are now having a fraction as many 
people being deported as we were before. That is another problem that 
we have to address.
  In any event, I hope the press zeros in, when they have a chance to 
talk to President Biden, on what he is going to do since his own 
administration is estimating 18,000 people a day are going to come 
here.
  Other things he is doing to encourage people to come here: We know, 
in the Build Back Better bill he was promoting, he was trying to get 
people who come here illegally to get free college. We know, as a 
practical matter, when you come here, if you are sick, we take you to 
the hospital. You will get free healthcare. I think probably virtually 
every State in the country--certainly, in Wisconsin--if you are ill and 
show up at the emergency room, they will treat you. So, you are getting 
free healthcare, perhaps free college.
  It is just a disaster. It is the end of America. They talk right now 
about this happening the second half of May. America has to look out. 
Like I said, we are heading toward the point where we could have as 
many as half a million people a month coming here--the end of America.
  The other crisis that we should be looking at--not quite as important 
as the border but close--is the amount of inflation.
  We had President Biden show us his new budget. In that new budget, we 
are talking about a 12 percent increase in nondiscretionary spending. 
It is not rocket science as to where this inflation is coming from. 
When you spend money excessively, and the Federal Reserve has to print 
money, you are going to get inflation.
  I had naively hoped, at the beginning of the year, after the huge, 
excessive spending the last 2 years, that Republicans and Democrats 
would get together and hold discretionary spending to even. Of course, 
mandatory spending is going to go up anyway as the population ages--
more money spent on Medicare, more money spent on Social Security. But, 
no, I didn't get my wish of zero percent increase.
  A 12 percent increase in nondefense discretionary, what does that 
mean? It means we are going to continue to have the Fed print more and 
more money.
  We have a graph here to look at. It shows the year-over-year increase 
in M2, one measure of the amount of money in the system, which directly 
leads to inflation.
  Looking at the 1970s--and I was alive in the 1970s--there might have 
been a 7 percent increase, year over year, in the size of the monetary 
supply. Look where we are right now. We are just short of a 40 percent 
increase.
  Look at where we are now compared to the 1970s and how difficult it 
was to get that inflation out of the system in the late 1970s and 
particularly the early 1980s. It really did take a real economic 
downturn to make the dollar have any value again. That is what it took 
in the 1980s, if you remember that downturn, that recession. Can you 
imagine how difficult it is going to be to give the dollar adequate 
value again?

  Not only that, as I look in that budget, it is a divisive budget. One 
more time, we have program after program aimed at certain groups, not 
all Americans across the board, as our forefathers would want.
  When I go back home, I talk to a restauranteur. He has a little 
restaurant. He has his chin up. He doesn't want to be publicized. He 
felt, during the COVID stuff, he was denied a $30,000 grant because of 
his race. He is a White guy.
  This is the type of thing that page after page after page of this 
proposed budget throws out. Again, we have to focus on some people 
rather than other people, which is one of the reasons why I do feel, in 
addition to his incompetence at the border, in addition to his 
incompetence with regard to inflation, in addition to the fact that I 
think he has done a bad job on COVID, as illustrated by the fact that 
he has been there well over a year and still they haven't adequately 
publicized vitamin D--President Trump should have been doing that as 
well, quite frankly.
  Despite all of these other problems, he for sure has become a 
divisive President, trying to lower the opinion of the police by saying 
that they are racist.
  In any event, these are the things that we should be focusing on 
right now.
  I must leave in a second due to a flight, but I will make one more 
comment on Ukraine. It is my belief, talking to other Congressmen in 
this Chamber, as well as talking to people in the Biden administration, 
that they are not adequately preparing for the end of the Ukraine war. 
The longer the war goes on, the more people die, the more both the 
Ukrainian and Russian economies are shattered. If you look at all the 
bombs going off in Ukraine, you can imagine how long it is going to 
take to rebuild that country.
  Therefore, it should be obvious that, like any war, eventually, an 
armistice is going to be signed, and an agreement is going to be met. I 
don't think enough exercise, enough time, is being put into bringing 
both sides to the table and working toward an agreement. As soon as an 
agreement is reached, it will benefit both of these countries as well 
as the rest of the world.
  I strongly encourage the Biden administration to see what they can 
do. I appreciate what France has done, and I appreciate what Israel has 
done, trying to broker a deal.
  There was a time when the United States was the world leader--I still 
like to think we are the world leader--in which we would get involved 
in brokering a deal, certainly brokering a deal before this whole war 
gets so out of line that it begins to affect the rest of the world as 
easily as it could if it would become a world war.
  Like I said, every day that goes by, the more people die, the more 
equipment that is destroyed, it increases the chance that things will 
get out of line. So, I beg the Biden administration to exert a little 
bit of leadership toward trying to get this war to end.
  We all wish the Ukrainians are doing well, but ultimately, an 
agreement will have to be signed.
  I am all for helping Ukrainians. I have certainly voted for billions 
of dollars which will be used by that country. But I am sure the people 
there will be happy when the war is over.

[[Page H4126]]

  Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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