March 19, 2020 - Issue: Vol. 166, No. 53 — Daily Edition116th Congress (2019 - 2020) - 2nd Session
All in Senate sectionPrev15 of 29Next
CORONAVIRUS; Congressional Record Vol. 166, No. 53
(Senate - March 19, 2020)
Text available as:
Formatting necessary for an accurate reading of this text may be shown by tags (e.g., <DELETED> or <BOLD>) or may be missing from this TXT display. For complete and accurate display of this text, see the PDF.
[Pages S1823-S1825] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov] CORONAVIRUS Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, the response to the coronavirus has made it clear that there are lots of things that [[Page S1824]] are the responsibility of individuals, things like staying at home if you are sick--frankly, staying home if you are more likely than others to be sick--and practicing the kinds of hygiene our mothers taught us we should follow all along. Personally, I may have set a new personal record for just washing my hands in the last 2 weeks. I have never been averse to washing my hands, but I don't know that I have ever washed them half a dozen times a day or more before. Those kinds of things are left up to us. Then there are things that are left up to the local level, things like determining in a local community whether things should be open or not and what kinds of activities should be the activities where you draw the lines in terms of crowds. That is more likely to be better decided at a local level by even a State or, more likely, by a mayor or a county executive than by somebody here in Washington. Then at the national level, we are moving toward our third package now in the last few days to try to deal with this. The first package was about $8 billion, which was really focused on the immediate health response--supplies, developing a vaccine, trying to figure out what the right therapies were, understanding the things we needed to do to further help hospitals get ready and to further encourage people to go places other than hospitals when that worked. All of those things were part of that first package. The package we sent to the President that the President signed last night was about $100 billion. By almost any standard, it is a huge amount of money to put together in just a short period of time. That $100 billion, while it continued to work on the healthcare side, was also very focused on just keeping people on a payroll if they are on a payroll. That $100 billion focused to a great extent on how you keep people who have decided they need to be quarantined or who were in quarantine by a doctor or by a business that, in fact, was quarantined because it was closed--keeping those people on that payroll and continuing to keep that part of our economy going. Today, we move to the third package, which is $1 trillion--$8 billion, $100 billion, now $1 trillion. That $1 trillion is designed to continue to do all the other things that I talked about but also designed to keep this economy at a point where, when we get through this, we will be as nearly to where we would have been otherwise if at all possible. You know, interestingly, here we are going into a situation where we are trying to protect an economy that didn't have any systemic problems with it. It was an economy that was by all measures unbelievably good, and then suddenly people are encouraged--sometimes required--to back away from that economy and to cease participating in lots of that economy, partly because we have encouraged part of that economy to cease being part of the active economy. What do we do there? This is going to be a different kind of response, more focused in many cases. Where, in the past, people have said ``We need more of your money,'' many of the requests are ``We just need to have access to more money that we can easily pay back when we get through this. We are willing to have securitized loans. We are willing to have lots of things,'' figuring out how to deal with that liquidity issue. Then there are some things we need to put in this package that simply the government is going to have to look at in ways we haven't looked at before. I want to spend a few minutes talking about one of those things today, which, just frankly, is securing our medical supply chain. In the past, the idea that we would worry about the supply chain would not have been at the top of the list of the things the American people would be thinking needed to be on the first list they needed to look at when they think about public health, but what we see happening now is a direct reminder that the medical supplies we use can come from all over the world. In a pandemic, everybody in the world may think they need what you think you would have received and expected to get more than they think they should send it to you. We depend on manufacturers in other countries. Approximately 40 percent of the finished drugs and 80 percent of the active pharmaceutical ingredients are manufactured overseas--primarily in China and India. The ongoing global coronavirus outbreak has really highlighted for the first time in today's supply chain what happens if you might not be able to get what you need when you need it. It is also a spotlight on our supply chain challenges generally. I think that, as a result of this, we are going to look at that sooner than we would have, but right now, in this bill, I am hoping we include an immediate look because we have quickly gone through a series of warning signs now that make us understand why we need to look at this and look at it now. On February 27, the Food and Drug Administration announced the first coronavirus-related drug shortage--February 27. On March 10, the FDA halted its routine overseas inspections of drugs and devices. Last week, State health departments and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention raised concerns about the looming shortage of coronavirus extraction kit reagents needed to actually conduct the diagnostic test, not to mention some concerns about the swab you might need, in some cases, to take just the normal flu exam. It is more and more clear that protecting our Nation's medical supply chain is both a priority for public health and for national security. Obviously, the supply chain has become more and more global. Economic efficiency makes sense, and being more competitive makes sense. It is fine to buy things from other countries, but it is better if you have multiple options. It is better if you have other options, including domestic production. That is especially true when it comes to vital things, like medical devices, medical supplies, pharmaceuticals, or the products we need for public health and safety. We see how this is a problem. It is a problem that has sort of come upon us in this pandemic environment in a way that we had not thought we would have to deal with before, but we do have to deal with it. We are hoping, with this bill, this is one of the places we can deal with it. You know, in our supply chain, generally, if you are making something and it takes 300 parts and you have 299 of them, you are in really good shape, except you can't make what you hope to make because you don't have that one essential 300th part. If you are relying on factories in China or South Korea or some other place that have shut down temporarily, suddenly your factory has become too dependent on a partner that is no longer there. So a bipartisan group of Senators--including myself and Senator Alexander and Senator Durbin and Senator Murray--has written legislation to figure out how to assess our vulnerability in the global supply chain for medical supplies. We want the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to look at this issue and to look at it now, to look at this issue and determine how dependent we have really become on supplies from other countries and then to make recommendations as to what some of our options might be. We would also like to hear their views on how they can make our supply chain more resilient for critical drugs and equipment; what kind of backup plan we need to always be thinking about if our frontline plan continues to be that other partner in another country; what our quick, go-to backup is and how essential it is that we have that backup. That would include asking how we can encourage domestic manufacturers of some things to be able to step up and reorient what they do when they need it and in a crisis. The President, to some extent, addressed this idea yesterday by talking about a defense manufacturing strategy. That defense manufacturing strategy may need to be more robust in some areas. Whether it is component parts to a medical device or pharmaceutical ingredients or simply the gloves and masks and swab sticks and things that you need for basic healthcare when you are trying to determine what your healthcare environment is and then deal with it, we need to look at it. One example may be just, again, the daily dependence on the daily protective equipment that our healthcare providers have. We are interested to know what we need to do over the next 60 to 90 days and what we need to do [[Page S1825]] over the next 2 or 3 years. That is what we are going to be asking this commission to look at, and we want it to look at it quickly. This is a priority. It has become an immediate priority. We need to know, as we now look at another one of these in a series of epidemics where this has been a concern; whether it is Ebola or swine flu, or bird flu or Zika or SARS, we have had too many of these in too short a period of time. And during that same period of time, the globalization of the supply chain has dramatically changed. So as we prepare for future hazards, we want to ensure that a supply chain is in place to allow us to provide the kind of healthcare we need, the kind of response we need, and the kind of protection we need. This should be part of the bill we send to the President, hopefully, between now and no later than the end of next week. It is one of the things that will begin to move us in a better direction and create greater security--greater health security--as we look at our other security concerns. With that, I yield the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Virginia. ____________________
All in Senate sectionPrev15 of 29Next