Good morning. This hearing will come to order. , want to thank eyewitnesses first of all for your service to this nation. On behalf of the committee, if you can thank the men and women who worked with you and apron pretty tremendous effort, trying to deal with an overwhelming situation, as a nation, we need to be grateful for your effort. Had thebly have not days off. I really do appreciate that. Toant to ask for consent have my statement entered into the record. Just a couple of facts. Just to lay out how extraordinary and overwhelming this effort has been. Not thatanuary 21, long ago, we had the first case reported of covid and eight days later on january 29, the administration established the task force. At that time, we only had five cases and zero deaths. Two days later, President Trump announced travel restrictions in china. That was not a popular decision, but it probably saved many lives and but as time to flatten what bought us time. Fema began assisting hhs. 12 cases and zero
Consulted with the centers for disease. Individuals are at least six feet apart. Theres no room for public to attend in person. Representatives of the press are working as a pool to relay their observations to colleague. The hearing may be watched online. An unedited recording will be available on the website. Witnesses are participating by Video Conference in a onetime exception. Some senators, including the chairman, are participating by Video Conference. Senators, we have been advised may remove masks, talk into the microphone when in the hearing room as they are six feet apart. Im grateful to the roall for t hard work to keep us safe. In our hearing last thursday, i said that all roads back to work and back to school run through testing. What our country has done so far on testing is impressive. Not nearly enough. Over the weekend, senator schumer, the democratic leader, was nice enough to put out a tweet quoting half of what i said. He left out the other half, the impressive part.
Really did the impossible by developing safe and effective coronavirus vaccines as quickly as they did. But then the government blew it. The government did not come up with any sort of National Plan at all to get the vaccines these scientists had made actually distributed at scale and administered to people with any sort of efficiency. And so even though those vaccines were developed and approved and produced with such alacrity all that got us is the situation were in tonight where millions of doses of the vaccine are sitting in freezers where every single passing day another 200,000 plus americans get infected. Just today state governments all over the country are reeling once again after Trump Health Secretary alex azar told states they were going to get a whole bunch of vaccine doses next week that they arent actually going to get. This is at least the second time the Trump Administration has told the states there were doses shipping out to them, doses that didnt actually exist. Whi
Us live tonight in just a moment. Were also going to be joined live tonight by the man who president elect biden Just Announced will be in charge of the countrys Vaccination Efforts against covid19. Scientists and researchers, of course, did their part. They moved heaven and earth and really did the impossible by developing safe and effective coronavirus vaccines as quickly as they did. But then the government blew it. The government did not come up with any sort of National Plan at all to get the vaccines these scientists had made actually distributed at scale and administered to people with any sort of efficiency. And so even though those vaccines were developed and approved and produced with such alacrity all that got us is the situation were in tonight where millions of doses of the vaccine are sitting in freezers where every single passing day another 200,000 plus americans get infected. Just today state governments all over the country are reeling once again after Trump Health Se
They need. This is added with timely monitoring systems. It is systems where we bring together the ability to not only diagnose the symptomatic, but p pro proactively work with those at high risk. We see it occurs often in places of closed settings, among native americans and longterm care for the elderly. And the third element, the Rapid Response programs. Relying on the cd drorch woc to state and local government to be sure cases are quickly tracked to be sure we cannot only control the epidemic, but trace them before they break out. And we look to have newer platforms, efficient testing, and being sure that the tests have high quality in predicting exposure to the virus. And working on innovative tests and antigen point tests and expanded nucleic tests. Thank you, mr. President and ambassador birx. I want to spend a couple of minutes going over where we have been, but more importantly where we are going. I think we all can understand how we can group this into three distinct phases.