American people would be, elect people who are going to work with, cooperate with the president of the United States. That does not mean agree on every issue. We are a separate and coequal branch of the government of the United States. We need to reflect thoughtful consideration of the president s proposals and propose to the president. We are the Article One Branch of government that poses policy. He executive carries out policy. That is the context in which we ought to operate. Having said that, i think the American People made it clear they think the obstructionism is largely the responsibility of the republican party. Thomas mann and norm ornstein, along with the brookings institution, American Enterprise institute wrote a book. Essentially the theme of the book was there is gridlock on the confrontation, refusal to compromise, and while they say they have come together to criticize in the past, at this point in time there theyre only conclusion is the responsibility of the republicans vote in the house and senate which have led to the confrontation. Refusing to compromise. Ayn rand said compromising or the middle is evil. If you believe that, if you simply believe it is my way or the highway or my way or no way, then you look at the gridlock and competition the American People hate. My proposition to the American People in this speech, if you do not like what is going on, a elect a party that will work with the president in order to create a better economy and more secure country. Congressman hoyer, i thought it would be too partisan if we were to exchange mementos representing our respective universities. So i chose a more professional neutral approach for the Traditional National press club mug. We thank you for being here. [applause] thank you. Good luck on saturday. Thanks a lot. You wished me good luck on saturday [indiscernible] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2014] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] next, todays cdc briefing on the ebola outbreak, Vice President biden on Job Opportunities for youth, and a conversation with retired Supreme CourtJustice John Paul stevens. Today, cspans campaign 2014 coverage continues in arkansas where former president bill clinton attends a rally for senator mark pryor. The senator is running for reelection in a race listed as a tossup. Live today at 1 30 eastern on cspan. Officials from the centers for Disease Control in atlanta held a briefing sunday to update reporters on the latest information concerning the dallas ebola case diagnosed here in the United States. Among the speakers, cdc director dr. Tom friedman. This is just under an hour. Good afternoon. You are joining cdcs daily update on the ebola response. I am barbara reynolds, director of Public Affairs at cdc. You will be hearing from three speakers and we will take questions. Our first speaker is cdc director dr. Tom friedman. Dr. Friedman. Hello, everyone. It is exactly one week since the first patient with ebola in this country was diagnosed in dallas, texas. It is a good time to look back on what has happened in that week. Diagnosed onwas tuesday. Within about two hours, we announced that. We had to staff on the ground helping the terrific staff in dallas to respond to this case. We have no doubt we will stop it in its tracks in texas. Its worth stepping back and seeing how ebola spreads. It only spreads by direct contact with someone who is sick or with their body fluids. The core of control is identifying everyone who may have had contact with them and making sure they are monitored 21 days and immediately isolating them to break the chain of transmission. There is no doubt we can stop ebola. I want to talk about what has happened in dallas and turn to my colleagues. Then about what is happening in the u. S. More broadly and finally where we are in the epidemic in west africa. In terms of dallas, the work there by the staff of local and state Health Departments has been terrific. They have been able to assess all 114 individuals make possibly have had contact. They ruled out 66 did not have contact. 10 appeared to have contact with the individual when he might possibly have been infections. Of those 10, seven are Health Care Workers and three were family or community contacts. There are about 38 other people whom we cannot rule out had contact. All of those people will be tracked for 21 days to term and to determine whether they had fever. They will immediately be isolated, tested, and if they have ebola they will they will determine if there were any additional contacts. That is how we have stopped every outbreak of ebola in the world until this one in africa. That is how we will stop it in texas. Going on to the u. S. Situation, we see a lot of understandable concern. Were really hoping for the recovery of the patient in dallas. We understand his situation has taken a turn for the worse. We know this is a serious disease and we are hoping for his recovery. People are scared and it is normal to be scared. For healthcare workers that are caring for people with ebola, we want them to be scared. Have a healthy risk of any lapse in procedure. We want them to channel that fear into being incredibly meticulous about Infection Control. Many people have pointed out that the individual was not diagnosed. We will be doing a lot more in the coming days and weeks to inform and empower not just doctors but nurses, Health Care Professionals of all kinds, to think about ebola and anybody who was been in guinea, syria, liberia, toone, make sure that our index of suspicion is such that if that happens we rapidly isolate them, assess them, and test them for ebola. The cdc has already reached hundreds of thousands of Health Care Professionals with alerts, information, materials, tools, a webinar, and we will ramp that up, working closely with medical associations, groups of doctors, nurses, and others. This basic issue that making sure at this time ebola remains top of mind is something that we will continue to focus on. We have seen the level of interest increase. We were getting about 50 calls or emails per day before the initial patient was diagnosed. It is about to 800 calls or emails today. We understand the levels of concern. We also understand people would like to do Everything Possible to keep ebola out of the u. S. Our top priority is to protect americans from threats. We work 24 seven to do that. We are doing that by many different ways. One of them is working to stop the outbreak at its source. As long as cases continue there, there is a possibly someone will affect someone else and possibly have another case of ebola. As long as the outbreak is continuing in africa, there is a risk in other places. An outbreak anywhere is potentially a threat everywhere. That doesnt mean we cant do anything. One of the things we cannot do is making sure everyone leaving those countries is being screened, being observed to see if they appear to be ill. That screening has removed 77 people who would have boarded planes to leave those three countries and didnt. I can assure you the leadership of each of those countries wants to make sure that screening is as good as it can be because they need the airlines to keep flying. Otherwise they wont be able to keep society moving and we wont be able to stop the outbreak there. In addition, we work with Health Care Workers and there is rapid identification of cases. We are now looking at the issue of entry screening. There have been suggestions from people in congress, the public, the media. We will look at those and see what works to protect americans and make sure what we do does not unintentionally increase our risk. Those of the criteria we are using. There are many agencies focused on this. We are committed to doing whatever we can to further increase the safety of americans. The situation remains very fluid. When i speak with the cdc leaders who are there and we sent 135 of our top disease detectives in each of the three countries, one of the things that is striking is the diversity of the experience. Each of the individual countries has its own patterns of disease spread. In some of them, there are districts that have not had a case of ebola. In some of them there are only a handful of cases. We are working across these three countries to see what can be done to call this forest fire. Will we have seen Real Progress in the response over the last two weeks. The department of defense has made a big difference. They are moving out and helping with operations. Increaseden usaid support for families that want to respectfully and safely bury people who have died. It reduces the spread of ebola. While we are still not ahead of it we are good and further along than where we were before. Im looking forward to briefing president obama on the situation in west Africa Tomorrow and to further ensuring the president s direction that we move rapidly to do as much as we can to stop this and what we are not only doing in cdc but globally. We are seeing a tremendous Global Coalition committed to doing this. That is where we are in dallas and globally. Before i turn it over to my colleague in texas, one thing that did not get much notice this past week, we published a report on what happened in nigeria. When they had a single case and they didnt do any Infection Control, they ended up with 19 secondary cases, additional cases. Because of a Rapid Response effectively tracking 900 contacts, they apparently have been able to stop the outbreak in nigeria. It does look like the outbreak is over there. Anywhere we apply the fundamental principles of Infection Control and Public Health followup, we can stop ebola. Thank you. Next speaker is dr. David lakey, the commissioner of the department of state health services. Good afternoon. I want to thank dr. Friedman for the support of the cdc as we are working on this effort right now. As i start off i want to say that my thoughts and prayers are with the patient right now. But also with the family and the contacts that have been identified. Indeed the hospital workers are caring for that patient right now. Were doing our work with the partnership with the cdc. A lot of important hard work is taking place right here in texas to ensure that the people of dallas are safe. The good news is we have not had more cases. No one has reported any symptoms. We are still very cautious to make sure we can continue to care for individuals, monitor the situation it needs to be done. Our focus is to monitor every contact and to identify our priority is to keep tracking those individuals. We want to make sure we arm of closely monitoring them. Also, as we identify needs that they may have, we are working to make sure those issues are addressed. Making sure food issues are identified or if electricity was turned off during the storm, that those issues are resolved. Neighbors have had concerns and we have tried to have Health Educators address those issues in the community. Our focus is to make sure you are informed and understand how the Public Health system works. It works to prevent and contain these risks. A lot of people are listening right now. I want to reemphasize ebola is not spread through the air. People are not contagious unless they have symptoms. I think it needs to be reassuring to the individuals that are listening today. There are hospitals across the state of texas and the nation. They are on the lookout for any additional cases. We want them on high alert and to identify individuals with a travel history that is consistent with ebola. These individuals can be identified quickly and Health Care Workers can be protected. They are going to call on us and that is how we want the system to work. We are on high alert right now. We continue to plan for contingencies and a lot of of work has taken place to make sure that whatever happens we are as prepared as we need to be to address those issues. I want to thank you for the partnership between the cdc and the state of texas and dallas. Thank you. Thank you, dr. Lakey. Clay Lewis Jenkins is our final speaker. Good morning. Happy sunday to everyone on the call. I want to start off by thanking all of the people currently being monitored and their families. I realize that when you are being monitored, even with a low risk for ebola, it is a very unsettling and terrifying process to worry about. I am praying for all of you and many others are as well. This morning i had the opportunity to participate in half of a mass. It was amassed by the bishop of the archdiocese of dallas, the Catholic Church where 1. 2 million catholics are under his leadership. The sermon was on ebola and remaining calm and showing compassion and our duties to our fellow man. That is a message being preached throughout synagogues, churches, and mosques in the Dallas County area. I want to thank the fate community for stepping up, for the faith leader who found him, for the hope for louise and they have stepped up as they always do in times of crisis. I want the public to remember we have the same sort of concerns as some people have the same types of panic when we had the west nile Virus Outbreak in 2012. Im speaking to you from our eu c sitting next to me as david in Dallas County. Lakey from the state of texas, our Public Health commissioner and highest authority on Public Health. These are the two men in my offices and were at my side when we stopped the west nile Virus Outbreak in 2012. We will contain this ebola situation as well. As the news reports have come out i will answer the first question ahead of time. We are working to find a low risk individual who has been identified as a contact. We have our Dallas CountySheriffs Department and Dallas PoliceDepartment Teams on the ground now. They have been there since last night. We are working to locate the individual and get him to a comfortable compassionate place where we can monitor him and care for his every need during the full monitoring period. This person has not committed a crime. They are a low risk individual. We are doing this as a precautionary measure. Again i want to thank everyone, the staff of Homeland Security and Emergency Management and Dallas County health and human services. As well as my executive staff for all of their hours and hours of work on very little sleep. The individual was seen yesterday, the low risk individual was seen yesterday, was monitored, and asymptomatic low exposure of individual. Remember what we talked about. Asymptomatic people have zero chance of contracting the ebola virus from and asymptomatic individual. We need to locate this individual and we could use your help and letting them know they are not in trouble. We want to move than from a comfortable and compassionate place while we monitor then throughout the monitoring period. We will turn it over for questions. For parties on the phone, star one and record your name clearly. Can you talk about this patient in dallas to take a turn for the worse . Are they getting the same treatment those patients we saw in atlanta and nebraska is there a different treatment . Ebola is a serious infection and can be fatal in many people who get the infection. Some patients received an experimental treatment. It is three specific antibodies but there are a very small number of those in the world. They are all gone. Takes a long time to make more of that medicine so it will not be available anytime soon. There is a second experimental medicine. We dont know if they work or not. In animalre promising models. The second medicine can actually make it sicker like they did. The doctors would be the deciding factor, but if they they wanted to they have access to it. I have two questions. The first one has to ask about protection for Health Care Workers. Health care workers wear a safe mask. There are some experts in respiratory protection that argued the cautionary principle says in the absence of absolute certainty in terms of the mode of transmission that higher levels of protection should be used. Certainly the other patients in the United States were treated in high containment settings. What is your recommendation . What are Health Care Workers using in terms of respiratory protection . The key with the bullet is to is to make sure that barrier and other creek cautions are stripped the following. Where we have seen lapses in infection and control have resulted in spread, it often has been a problem putting on or taking off protective equipment. If you dont do it carefully you might contaminate yourself by mistake. It is very clear from everything we have seen in a west africa, everything we have seen with this virus, the spread is nowhere near as contagious as measles or tv or the common cold. There is an interesting clue here. Although we havent had any ebola patients, we have had five patients in the u. S. None of those five patients were initially diagnosed. There were