Zika Virus
Floor Speech
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Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, if this isn't an emergency, then I don't know what is. Zika is a public health emergency. It defines a public health emergency, and we really have to act now to fund the administration's full $1.9 billion supplemental funding request.
I want to respond to the assistant majority leader's concerns that there is no plan. With due respect--and I know he is working hard on this as well--that is just not accurate. The legislation propounded by Senators Nelson and others has a very specific plan. I was fortunate enough to visit the headquarters for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. They have a very specific plan. It is vector controlled. It is developing the diagnostic tests necessary to figure out whether or not people are carriers of the Zika virus. It is working on a vaccine. They have a high degree of confidence that they are eventually going to get a vaccine. But this takes time, and this takes resources. It is public health outreach regarding mosquitos and how this is transmitted, and it is assurance regarding the safety of our blood supply. So they have a plan.
Let me be a little more specific: $743 million for CDC--this money would include grants and technical assistance to Puerto Rico and the U.S. territories and help our domestic and international response activities; about $250 million for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, or CMS, to increase the Federal match rate to Puerto Rico where there have been 500 active transmission cases--and, unfortunately, that number continues to go up; several hundred million dollars for the National Institutes of Health and BARDA to invest in vaccine research and development. That is the end game, but in the meantime, we have to prevent the transmission as our country warms up and as the mosquitos become more prevalent across the country with $10 million to the FDA for a vaccine and diagnostics development review and $335 million to USAID's efforts abroad to support affected countries' public health efforts on mosquito-borne diseases.
I will make a couple of specific procedural points. As a member of the Appropriations Committee, I believe it is really important that we are trying to move in the regular order on each individual Appropriations subcommittee. We have been working on a bipartisan basis. So we are trying to move in the regular order, and that is good news. We are moving a little more quickly than I think has been done in many years. That is good news. But the practical fact of that also means that we are not in the middle of working on legislation that must be passed by today or must be passed by next week because whatever we do--whether it is the Energy and Water title, whether it is THUD coming next, maybe MILCON-VA after, whatever it may be--we are going to be waiting for the House to act, and we are going to be conferencing. It is not at all clear when we will actually move appropriations measures to the President's desk, but it is fair to say those things are not exactly legislatively on fire. We could wait 2 or 3 legislative days. We could wait 2 or 3 legislative weeks. We are ahead of the game. That is not to say we don't have our own challenges with each of these individual appropriations measures, but this defines an emergency. This defines an emergency. This is an actual public health emergency, which means the idea of a pay-for for this is antithetical to the way we ought to work. This is what government does.
Whatever your political persuasion, whatever your ideology is about the size and scope of the Federal Government, I think we can all agree that the most basic responsibility of the Federal Government is to keep us all safe. This is a real risk. This is not an imaginary risk, this is not a trumped-up risk, and this is not a partisan thing. If you talk to the CDC, if you talk to your local departments of health, vector controls, mosquito control areas--talk to them. They are very nervous, and it is increasing. The only reason this hasn't totally popped both epidemiologically and politically is that it is still cold in a lot of places and mosquitos aren't out. This is a real emergency. There is no reason we shouldn't be taking this up as the emergency starts to happen. There is no reason we can't take a couple legislative days to deal with that.
To address the senior Senator from Texas, the assistant majority leader's questions about whether the plan addresses his concerns about accountability, about the ability to move money from one account to the other, about backfilling the Ebola funding--fine. Those are all legitimate questions, and I think they can all be addressed.
But here is my question: Why not get on the bill? Why object to a UC request that we get on the bill? All of those questions can be addressed on the floor or in committee or in conversation. There are many ways to address those questions. But the refusal to even acknowledge that this matter is sufficiently urgent that it should be the thing we are dealing with right now, that THUD could wait a week, and that whatever we are planning to do next is not quite as urgent as the Zika virus--that is the point we are making today. Not that there isn't going to be some legislative wrangling and not that we are supposing that the President's request is exactly perfect, it is just that this is a real emergency, and we ought to get this thing onto the floor so we can take some action. That is what we have to do.
I know the Senator from Missouri is working very hard on this. I know others are too. We don't want this to be a partisan issue either. But to object to a request to get on this bill fails to acknowledge what a serious public health emergency the Zika virus is.
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