Avoiding crowds. We learned last week that despite knowing in january how serious covid19 was, President Trump has been working to down play this is acrisis and on fri night, we learned that trump political operatives in hhs Communications Office have been manipulating cdcs flag ship for months to align with that messaging. Dr. Redfield, did anyone at cdc advise the president to down play this crisis . No. Did you agree with the president s decision to down play it . Im not going to comment on that, but no one advised the president to down play this crisis. Well, understanding the dangers, why have you not done more to push back on President Trumps political interference and his efforts to down play this . I want to make it really clear, senator, and i appreciate your question and the opportunity that, the respect for the science at cdc. At no time has the scientific integrity of the mmwor been compromise and i can say that under my watch, it will not be compromised. Well, i understand the efforts to edit the cdc publication started in response to a may report that reviewed the spread of covid19 in the u. S. , it was by cdc, highly respected career deputy, hhs political officials perceived this report as reflecting negatively on the president. Yes or no. Did that may report as drafted, adhere to the agencys strict code of scientific integrity . Yes. Will the spokesperson for hhs claimed that there is a Resistance Unit at cdc and voiced concerns about ulterior deep state motives and President Trump has bolstered skepticism in the agencys pool. Do you agree with me theres no truth to all those claims . Absolutely, senator. And i want to make a comment that not only is it not true, it deeply saddened me when i read those comments because as i said in my statement, cdcs made up of thousands of dedicated men and women, highly confident. It is the premier Public Health agency in the world. Dedicated 24 7 to use their skills to protect the American Public and the world from the Health Issues and it deeply saddened me that those false accusations were made by a group of really unbelievably professional people that serve this nation. Subcommittee on labor health and human services, education and related agencies will come to order. Want to thank our witnesses for appearing before the subcommittee today to provide an update on where we are in the areas that they are so involved in on covid19. As we continue to be challenged by this pandemic in the country, we know that 195,961 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 is a new disease in many ways and 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, its been like y trying to build a plane while we were flying it and that is a challenging, challenging thing to deal with. The, its 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 levelled, but history allows us to look back over past events and to put current ones into perspective. If we wanted to look back to 2014 for instance when west africa faced the largest Ebola Outbreak the world had seen and unlike covid19, we knew a lot about it at the time. The disease had been around since the mid 70s. It was a disease that scientifically, we knew a lot more about in 2014 than 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 in the cdc director blamed the hospital. At the same time, one of the nurses at 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 importantly, implemented more than we did from ebola and h1n1, both of which created real response problems, but real lessons if we would have had try ed to learn them. Hopefully, well do a better job learning the lessons we need to hearn right now. Neither this administration or the last one, frankly, prioritized Research Like this committee has, and we know that in our committee, weve worked hard in the last six years and in the last five budgets in a bipartisan manner to increase the funding in the annual Appropriations Bills for the nih by nearly 40 for cdc, by 21 and for preparedness, by 44 , 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. Ke to see them use weve prove in our committee that medical research, Public Health, preparedness, are all priorities and because weve done so, were more ready than we were, more ready than we were at the last time or hopefully more ready in the future for the next pandemic. Right now, 238 fda emergency use authorizations for diagnostic tests and antigen tests are on the market and every day, we get closer to an affordable, reliable 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. In a few years, when someone gives a History Lesson about covid19 response, there will be criticism. 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 investment in testing. More resources for our vaccine candidates to finish their trials, manufacture the vaccine and for cdc to distribute through a vetted, well thought out plan. I hope we learn more about and im going to insist that we learn more about all of those things today. Id hope we might be able to include child care in our hearing today. We werent able to do that because of time, but clearly, if your going to get back to school, back to work and back to better health, child care has to be part of that and something this committee has to stay focused on. So, again, welcome our witnesses and senator murray is joining us from her office, i believe, and senator murray, were ready for your opening comments. Well, thank you very much, mr. Chairman. And thank you to all of our witnesses who are joining us today. You know, as our country approaches a tragic milestone in this pandemic, 200,000 dead, i want to recognize that our Rising National death count represents countless personal losses. Families have lost parents and grandparents and children. Communities have lost educators and Health Care Providers and other front line workers. And people have not only lost loved ones, but many have lost the small solace of being able to visit and comfort those they care about in their final moments. My heart goes out to everyone whos struggling with the hardship caused by this virus. Whether they are suffering with the loss of life of livelihood. You all deserve leaders who take this crisis seriously. Who take action to support and protect you, your family and your community. Who arm you 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 than even your strenuous flu, thats a quote, 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, controlled, going away. He claimed it was a democratic hoax. His Vice President wrote on an oped arguing that there would be no second wave just before we saw a heartbreaking and record breaking increase in new cases and deaths across our country. When it came to testing, President Trump didnt just say he took no responsibility at all, he said he liked the num r numbers 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 they caused problems, too, he 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 continued to promote hydroxychloroquine and suggested we look at bleach as an option and he is still, still, down playing this virus. He is still saying it will just go away. He is saying we are quote, rounding the final turn. Dr. Fauci has made it clear thats not true and pointed out that we have plateaued at around 40,000 cases a day. That daily deaths are still regularly around 1,000. And experts have warned that we still need to prepare for a fall wave that will coincide with the flu season, but President Trump has not been listening to the Public Health experts. He has been fighting them and suggesting fda is part of a deep state conspiracy and cdc is overstating the death counts. But not only is he spreading inacucuracies and lies at a tim when truth is a matter of life and death, and trust, trust in our Public Health agencies is paramount, his administration has been recklessly interfering with 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 learn ed that President Trump pt pressure on nih and fda to authorize convalescent plasma as a treatment and that political appointees at hhs have worked n unsuccessfully to dictate talking points for dr. Fauci and have succeeded in demanding oversight of and changes to cdcs flag ship scientific publication, the morbidity and mortality weekly report. That publication is a corner stone of Public Health work across the world. It is dangerous and unprecedented that political appointees are editing, censoring and ultimately, undermining a report that is intended to give families, Public Health professionals, researchers and Health Care Providers what they need. The truth. The trumps administrations Political Administration 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 in those tools by this administration threatens to undermine our able thety ty respond to this pandemic. Public trust in an eventual vaccine and Public Health eff t efforts for years to come. The Trump Administration needs to leave the science to the scientists immediately. Full stop. The leaders of our Public Health agencies need to provide a full account of what political pressure has been applied and what steps they are taking to make sure it does not influence their work or the work of the agencies they lead. Congress needs to act now. To demand the transparency we need to hold this administration accountable. Democrats will be laying out steps soon for how we can do that and i hope every republican who has said they believe we need to follow the science, will prove it by working with us on this. The science will prove it by working with us because you cannot be for science if you are arent against political interference. I also hope republicans will come to the table to work with us in earnest on a larger covid19 package that our communities so desperately need. Unfortunately, theyve not taken this seriously so far and when democrats put forward the heroes act back in may, republicans said there was no rush. They would wait to see if more was needed. When republicans finally did put forward a proposal, months later, it was woefully inadequate to addrethe crisis ad and while democrats are are moved to find Common Ground and even offered to negotiate towards a lower top line number, republicans refused that offer and instead, put forward a bill last week that moved up even further away from Common Ground. This isnt serious negotiating and the ideas that have been put forward are not serious solutions, but the crisis we face remains deadly serious. We cant afford to waste any more time. We need to stabilize the child care sector and make sure schools can educate students safely, whether theyre 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. And we need to demand the type of comprehensive National Plan for those efforts that has been long overdue. The Distribution Plan that cdc put out just today is a long, overdue step forward, but there is still more to do. Im still reviewing this and ill have more to say, but its clear this is still not the kind of comprehensive, end to end, National Plan ive called for and that we desperately need. We are still missing important details on research and review like what standards fda would use to authorize a vaccine for emergency use. Like how we make sure despairties are used in Clinical Trials and how we address simply chain issues and avoid bottle mechani necks and we still need more details on addressing disparities. We need to affect the safeties and civil rights of those going to work and provide relief to those who have lost their jobs. We need to support families who are struggling to make rent and health care and get nutritional meals and we need to address the severe disparities and how much harder this crisis is hitting black and latino and tribal communities. We need to provide relief to these governments and last, we have seen recently, certainly not least, we need to make sure, once and for all, that political interference from President Trump does not further undermine our response to this crisis. Now im going to have several questions for our witnesses, but i hope we are all able to get more than just answers in the days ahead. I hope we are all able to finally come together and take action before we lose any more time to save lives and prevent costly mistakes. Thank you, mr. Chairman. Thank you, senator murray. Again, let me welcome our guests today witnesses. Admiral is the assistant secretary for health. Dr. Robert catlick is the assistant secretary for preparedness and response and dr. Robert redfield is the director for the center for Disease Control prevention. Were pleased youre here. Like to give you time to make an opening statement. We have the statements youve presented. You can summarize those if you want, but we are eager to get to questions, but were also eager to hear from you, so admiral, why dont you start with your opening statement. Chairman blunt, Ranking Member murray and distinguished members, im honored to update you on our nations efforts to combat covid19 with a specific focus on testing. Testing is an essential component of americas Public Health response to the pandemic. Recommended practices like wearing a mask, avoiding crowds, especially indoors, and washing your hands combined with smart testing is the formula to effectively slow the spread, flatten the curve and save lives. By being evidence based, providing county specific weekly guidance to governors, expanding supplies and managing their distribution, providing the right tests to the right person a at the right time and developing and allocating safe and effective therapeutic, we are seeing promising results. Specifically since the post memorial day peaks in community spread, the number of new covid19 cases is down 48 . The number of people hospitalized with covid19 is down 49 . The number of people in an intensive care unit due to covid is down 62 . And deaths associated with covid are down 33 . But let me 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 avoiding crowds. Specifically regarding testing, million viral tests complete d this week. We have puchlsed and shipped over 95 million swabs and 81 million tubes of media to states, tribes and federal partners. Starting april 7th, we have puchlsed and delivered to Public Health laboratories and the Indian Health service 2. 3 million abbott id now point of care moll eck lar tests to support outbreak control and rural testing. We have established federal surge testing in 19 sites, helpihelp ing squelch emerging outbreaks typically among asymptomatic young adults. These sites are in addition t