Cspan radio area cspan, your unfiltered view of politics area. This week cdc director doctor Robert Redfield took questions from senators on the us Coronavirus Response and how soon a vaccine might be available to the public. He said a vaccine might not be widely available until next year and that facemasks are an effective way of fighting the disease. Afterwards President Trump contradicted doctor redfield coronavirus treatments on timing for a vaccine. Heres a look at thatsenate appropriations hearing from wednesday. Appropriations subcommittee on labor health and human services, education and related agencies will come to order. Ri want to thank our witnesses for appearing before the subcommittee today. To provide an update on where we are on the areas that they are so involved in on the covid19. As we continue to be challenged by this pandemic in the country we know that 195,000 961 americans have died as part of the pandemic and 6. 6 million have tested positive during the process of testing in the pandemic. This is rapidly swept across the globe and even countries who thought their cases were contained are facing new outbreaks and dealing with those new and unanticipated outbreaks. This new disease in many ways even after nine months, we still know relatively little or about this disease or coronavirus generally. This has hindered our Public Health response in many ways this has been like trying to build theplane while we were flying a plane. That is a challenging, challenging thing to deal with. The, thats not to fully exonerate certainly the way the administration has dealt with it or the way its been funded and im sure that justified criticisms can and will be level l but history allows us to look back over past events and put current ones intoperspective. If we wanted to look back just six years to 2014 for instance when west africa face the largest evil okoutbreak the world hadever seen , and unlike covid19 we knew a lot about people at the time. Its a disease that had been around since the mid70s. It was a disease that scientifically we knew a lot more about in 2014 and we do about covid19 even today. And frankly we just didnt handle it very well. We made significant mistakes and weve seen those mistakes occur in other disease areas. Members of congress use words when they talked about the cdc response like cryptic and misleading and thought that the information provided wasnt enough. We even had a case that was found in a dallas hospital and the cdc director blamed the hospital. At the same time one of nurses in the hospital was allowed to board a commercial flight with cdcs consent. So we seem to keep having to learn these lessons over and over again that we have to be better prepared. Public health is hard. And it seems to be hard for us to keep our eye on what might happen in the future once we get beyond that moment. We should have learned and more importantlyimplemented more than we did from evil up or from h1 and one , both of which created real response problems but the real lessons we tried to learn and hopefully we will do a better job learning the lessons we need to learn right now. Neither this ministration one last one frankly prioritized Research Like this committee has. And h1we know that in our Committee Report card in the last six years and in the last five budgets in a bipartisan manner to increase the funding and the annual Appropriations Bills for the nih by nearly 40 percent for cdc by 21 percent and for preparedness by 84 percent. But those numbers all have to be coming together before we begin to use them the way that our Witnesses Today or this committee would like to see them used. Weve proven in our committee medical research, Public Health preparedness are all priorities and because weve done so we are more ready than we were. Where more ready than we were last time or hopefully more ready anin the future for the next pandemic. Right now, 238 fda emergency use authorizations for diagnostic tests and antigen test are on the market and every day we get closer to an affordable rapid test where you can get an answer in a way that allows us to really fight the pandemic rather than have another data point. When someone get gives a History Lesson about our response there will be criticism and it will go back about 20 years and it will be significant but i know there are things we all agree on. We need to have more testing, more resources for our vaccine candidates to finish their files, manufacture the vaccine and or cdc to distribute prophetic, wellthoughtout plan. I hope we learn more about and im going to insist that we learn more about all of those things today. I hope you might be able to include childcare in our hearing today. We werent able to do that because of time but clearly if youre going to get back to school, back to work and back to better health, child care has to be part of that and do something this committee bahas to stay focused on so again, welcome our witnesses and senator murray is joining us from her office i believe. Senator murray, were ready for your opening comments. Thank you very much mister chairman and thank you to all of our witnesses are joining us today. Rr as our country approaches a tragic milestone in this pandemic, 200,000 dead. I want to recognize there are Rising National death count represents countless personal losses. Family parents and grandparents and children. Communities have lost educators and Healthcare Providers and other frontline workers dand people have not only lost loved ones but many have lost those comfort zones they care about in their final moments. My heart goes out to everyone who is struggling with hardship caused by this virus whether they are suffering with the loss of life or likelihood. You all deserve leaders who take this crisis seriously, who take action to support and protect you. Your families and your communities. Argue with the facts you need to stay safe. Unfortunately we have yet to see that leadership from the president. Like Many Americans i was deeply angered last week to hear President Trump admitting that even though he understood covid19 was more deadly and even your flu, he was intentionally playing down this crisis. But i was not surprised. These recordings were not a revelation. The reality has been painfully obvious for months. Early on, President Trump not only claimed this virus was contained, control, going away, he claimed it was a democratic hoax. His Vice President wrote on an oped arguing there would be no second wave just before we saw a heartbreaking and recordbreaking increase in new cases and deaths across our country. When it came to testing, President Trump didnt just say he no responsibility at all. He said he liked the renumbers where they were. He said he wanted to slow down testing and he blamed testing for the rising case numbers. When it came to Wearing Masks , he not only said masks cause problems to also shared a tweet saying masks represent a culture of silence, slavery and social death and a video falsely claiming people dont need to wear masks and there is no cure. He made false claims on treatments as well. Continuing to promote hydroxychloroquine and suggested we look at leach as an option and he is still, still downplaying this virus. He is still in it will just go away. He is saying we are quote, rounding the finalturn. Doctor found she has made it clear that not true and pointed out we have plateaued at around 40,000 cases a day. Daily deaths are still regularly around thousand. And experts warned that we still need to come prepare for a wave that will coincide with the flu season President Trump has not been listening to the publichealth experts. He has been fighting them and suggesting that fda is part of a deep state conspiracy and the cdc is overstatingthe death count. Not only is he spreading inaccuracy and outright lies at the time when truth is a matter of life and death and trust in our Public Health agencies is paramount, his administration has been recklessly interfering nwith the work of these agencies for political benefit to promote unproven treatments, alter cdc guidance on reopening and testing and more. Just over the last week we have learned that President Trump put pressure on the nih and fda to authorize convalescent plasma and political appointees at hhs have worked unsuccessfully to dictate talking points or doctor fauci and demanding oversight of cdc scientific publications for morbidity and mortality which they report. That is a cornerstone of Public Health works across the world. It is dangerous and unprecedented political appointees are editing, censoring and openly undermining a report that is intended to give family Public Health professionals, researchers and Healthcare Providers what they need the truth. The Trump Administrations political meddling shows a dangerous disregard for truth , facts, science and most importantly peoples lives. Data and science are key tools in our fight against any Health Crisis and the damage being done to public trust ain those tools by this administration threatens to undermine our ability to respond to thispandemic , public trust and an eventual vaccine and Public Health efforts for years to come. The trumpet Administration Needs to leave the science to the scientists immediately. The leaders of our Public Health agencies need to provide a full account of what political pressure has been and what steps they are taking to make sure it does not influence their work or the work of the agencies they leave. Congress needs to act now to demand that transparency we do all thisand is accountable. Democrats will be laying out soon for how we can do that and i hope every republican who has said they believe we need to follow science will prove it by working with us on this. Because you cannot be for science if you are against political interference. I also hope republicans will come to the table to work with us in earnest on a larger package our communities so desperately need. Unfortunately i have not taken this seriously so far and when democrats put forward the heroes acting may republicans said there was no rush. I would wait to see if more was needed. When republicans finally did put forward a proposal much later it was woefully inadequate to address the crisis at hand. All while democrats have moved to find Common Ground and even offered to negotiate towards a lower top line number republicans refused the offer and instead put forward a bill moved even further away from Common Ground. This isnt tereus negotiating and the ideas that have been put forward are not solutions. But the crisis we face remains deadly serious. We cant afford to waste anymore time. We need to stabilize the childcare sector and make sure pools and educate students safely whether there remotely or in person. We need to make significant investments in Public Health, particularly regarding testing and Contact Tracing and distributing and administering a safe effective and trusted vaccine. E and we need to demand the type of comprehensive National Plans for those efforts that have been long overdue. The Distribution Plan that the cdc finally put out just today is a long overdue step forward but there is still more to do area im still reviewing this and ill have more to say but its clear that this is still not the kind of comprehensive and and National Plan as called for and that we desperately need. We are still missing important details on research and review area thats what standards fda would use authorized vaccine for emergency use. Like how we make sure that addressing Clinical Trials and manufacturing like how we address the supply chain issue and a bottleneck and we still need more details on addressing disparities. We also need to protect the safety and civil rights of those going to work and provide for those who have lost their jobs. We need to support families struggling to make rent and get nutritional meals and we need to address the severe disparities were seen and how much harder this crisis is hitting black and latino and tribal communities. We need to provide relief around state, local and federal governments last as we have seen recently certainly not least, we need to make sure once and for all , that political interference from the President Trump does not further undermine our response to this crisis. And im going to have several questions for our witnesses i hope we are all able to get more than just answers in the daysahead. I hope we are all able to finally come together and take action before we lose anymore time to save lives and present possibly mistakes. Thank you mister chair. Thank you senator murray and let me welcome our guests today, our Witnesses Today. The admiral is the assistant secretary for health, Robert Catholic is the assistant secretary for preparedness and response and doctor Robert Redfield is the director of the center for Disease Control and prevention. We are pleased you are here. Id like to give you time to makean Opening Statement. We have statements you presented, you can summarize those if you want but we are eager to get to o questions you are also eager to hear from you though admiral why dont you start with your Opening Statement. Chairman blunt, Ranking Member murray and the state was members of the c subcommittee on honor to update you on our nations d efforts to combat covid19 with a focus on testing. Testing is an essential component of americas Public Health response to the. Recommended practice like wearing a mask, avoiding crowds, especially indoor and washing your hands combined with smart testing is the formula to effectively slow the spread, flatten the curve and stabilize. Fighting evidencebased providing avcounty specific weeklyguidance to governors , expanding supplies and managing their distribution, providing the right tests to the right person at the right time, and developing and allocating safe and therapeutics , we are seeing promising results. Specifically, since the post memorial day from Community Spread the number of new covid19 cases is down 40 percent. The number of people hospitalized with covid19 is down 49 percent. The number of people in an intensive care unit due to covid is down 62 percent deaths associated with covid are down 38 percent say emphatically that these gains could be fleeting or even reversed if we do not continue to follow the National Plan and exercise personal responsibility, especially Wearing Masks and cavoiding crowds. Now specifically regarding testing, the nation will surpass 100 million viral tests completed this week. We have purchased and shipped over 95 million slot slot and 81 million tubes of media. The states, tribes and federal partners. Starting april 7 we have purchased and delivered to Public Health laboratories in the Indian Health service 2. 3 million pointofcare molecular tests to support outbreak control and rural testing. We have established federal search testing in 19 different sites helping to squelch emerging outbreaks typically among asymptomatic young adults. These sites are in addition to the over 2700 federally supported or federally enabled communitybased testing sites and trusted retailers focusing in areas of moderate to high social durability area and a literally thousands of federally qualified Health Centers offer testing to predominately racial or ethnic minority patients. We are now at an Inflection Point in testing. This month we anticipate the availability of approximately 3 million tests per day and at least half of these will be rapid pointofcare. We will have available more pointofcare tests in september and the total number of tests performed in august. We have been building towards this Inflection Point and ive previously testifiedto pits coming of old times over the past month. As a result of regulatory flexability , investments and coordinations of public and private sectors we have limited comprehensive cuttingedge testing initiatives to flatten the curve and save lives while supporting reopening of f america to let me discuss two of these. Protecting the elderly has been, is and will continue to be a foremost priority for this administration. On july 14 announced every single eligible nursing home in america would receive a pointofcare instrument and pointofcare testing supplies area we have delivered on this promise. All 13,850 eligible Nursing Homes have now received a total of 13,985 instruments and over 4. 9 million rapid pointofcare tests ahead of schedule. On august 27 after months of planning and only one day after its fda authorization the administration announced a 760 Million Contract for the delivery of 150 million rapid pointofcare tasks. This test is easy to p