Global Hope Act of 2019

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCAUL. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Madam Speaker, I rise in strong support of my bill, the Global Hope Act. I am proud to have introduced this bill with my good friend, Chairman Eliot Engel. I thank the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Phillips) for his strong support and his personal story. I also thank the co-chair of the Childhood Cancer Caucus, Jackie Speier, for her tireless work with me in the caucus to help these children.

I have been a tireless advocate for these children with cancer since I first came to Congress. In 2010, I helped found the Childhood Cancer Caucus really to give a voice to patients, advocates, and the children.

This endeavor is deeply personal for me, as well. Growing up in elementary school, my best friend passed away from leukemia. Back then, it was a death sentence.

Since founding the caucus, we have been very successful. Congress passed bipartisan legislation to improve cancer treatment options, boost research opportunities, and address health issues of the nearly 500,000 long-term childhood cancer survivors.

Today, childhood cancer is largely treatable with an 80 percent, 5- year survival rate in the United States.

Unfortunately, in developing countries, the opposite is true. Children diagnosed with cancer in developing countries have an 80 percent mortality rate.

Madam Speaker, in sub-Saharan Africa, the mortality rate of children diagnosed with cancer is as high as 90 percent. This says nothing of the tens of thousands of cases that are believed to go undiagnosed every year.

I truly believe that a child's birthplace should not determine their fate from cancer. That is why I introduced the Global Hope Act.

My bill authorizes the Secretary of State to pursue public-private partnerships, increase access to treatment options, train health professionals, and, ultimately, improve care for children with cancer in developing countries. These partnerships will leverage decades of U.S. investments to strengthen health infrastructure and build the capacity of health ministries.

This legislation does not take away funds from other critical global health interventions and infectious disease efforts. Rather, these public-private partnerships will build on existing programs to improve childhood cancer survival rates.

Organizations such as Texas Children's Hospital and St. Jude, private sector partners such as Bristol-Myers Squibb and Teva, and nonprofits such as ACCESS are already starting this important work and are now seeing results in Botswana and other nations. These efforts are also supported by the World Health Organization's Global Childhood Cancer Initiative.

Launched in 2018, the WHO aims to build political support and institutional capacity to treat childhood cancer in developing countries. The initiative set a goal of saving an additional 1 million lives by 2030.

For the past two decades, the United States has been a global leader in funding health programs around the world, and I am proud to support this lifesaving work.

Most recently, we passed a resolution affirming the U.S. commitment to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and secured robust funding in the fiscal year 2020 appropriations bill.

Our work to fight HIV/AIDS and eradicate other infectious diseases is far from over. But there is a critical opportunity to build on the successes of these global health programs and integrate projects aimed at improving childhood cancer care and available treatment options.

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Mr. McCAUL. Madam Speaker, I am prepared to close, and I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Madam Speaker, let me thank my dear friend, Jackie Speier, for her leadership on this issue and as the co-chair of the caucus. I think we can prove that, in this toxic, partisan, difficult time in this Congress, we can work across the aisle, Republican and Democrat, but most importantly as Americans, to get good things done for not only the American people but for the world and save the children of the world.

I think Congresswoman Speier is correct. We passed a lot of bills together that have saved lives, but I think this one probably is the most profound one. It is very difficult to pass a bill in the Congress, much less get it signed into law, but when you pass a bill and see it saving lives, that is perhaps the most remarkable and gratifying experience I have personally had in my eight terms in Congress.

Madam Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman so much for her friendship.

Madam Speaker, in closing, I remember being in Texas Children's Hospital in September 2018 to hear from the President of Botswana about the project Global HOPE initiative inspired by Baylor College of Medicine and their early work against HIV/AIDS and the epidemic in Africa. Global HOPE is starting to deliver childhood cancer care in sub-Saharan Africa, as I speak.

At the event, when I met the President of Botswana, where the Global HOPE Act was recently constructed in a new pediatric facility in Botswana, which I will be visiting next month with my little, childhood cancer survivor, Sadie Keller. It is starting to train a new generation of Botswanan oncologists.

What I was most impressed by was when he told me about the legacy of PEPFAR and what we did as a Nation. He said: PEPFAR saved a generation of my people from extinction--from ``extinction.''

It is my hope that this bill saves a generation of children from this dreaded disease. I believe that childhood cancer can be the next successful Global HOPE initiative that will save lives.

Madam Speaker, I want to thank, particularly, Dr. Poplack, who was the chief oncologist at Texas Children's. He is the one who is responsible for this initiative. We are taking their initiative and turning it into law in the Congress. I will be there next month to commemorate International Children's Cancer Day.

Madam Speaker, I do want to reference, too, my little childhood cancer fighter and survivor, Sadie Keller. She came into my office, and there are a lot of lobbyists in this town, but the children had no voice. They had no power. That is why Jackie and I formed the Childhood Cancer Caucus, to give them a voice.

When she entered my office--she is 7 years old here--in her pink dress, I knew I had met somebody very special. I canceled my calendar, my schedule for the rest of the day, and I took her on a tour of the Capitol.

Here we are looking--we had no idea they were even taking pictures-- but I took her to the Rotunda in the Capitol. I remember we spun around and looked at the top of the Capitol.

Then I took her out to the Speaker's balcony, one of the most beautiful views in this Capitol building. Looking out on the horizon toward the future, seeing the ominous dark clouds, but also a ray of sunshine. The sunshine that is coming in, the sunshine that little Sadie has brought to my life, the sunshine that we are trying to bring to all these children out there who have gone through some really tough experiences. I have met many of them, like the Congressman from Minnesota's daughter, and it is very heartbreaking to see them in the hospitals. Some survive, and some don't.

But this effort will take it to the next step, to take our fight against this dreaded disease. We have done so much to help children in the United States. The FDA's approval of CAR T, which takes your own immune system and attacks your own cancer through your own T cells, rather than injecting chemo--which is really a derivative of World War I mustard gas, which has been banned from the battlefield, which kills the cancer just before it kills you.

You can imagine the survivorship issues with these children, because they have the rest of their lives, if they survive, to deal with.

So, I want to thank all those friends of mine on the other side of the aisle for helping me move this forward. This is a momentous day for our fight against childhood cancer. It is a momentous day to take it global and take the fight globally.

I look forward to this bill's passage in the Senate and it being signed into law.

Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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