Covid-19 Pandemic Timeline

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. BABIN. Mr. Speaker, I can't thank Dr. Roe enough for this initiative and his leadership. And so many people have gotten up at the mike and said he was their mentor. He actually was my mentor, and I really appreciate him very much.

Mr. Speaker, as a healthcare professional for nearly 40 years and a member of the House Doctor's Caucus, I am very pleased to report on the Trump administration's groundbreaking, unprecedented initiative to develop a safe and effective vaccine and treatment for COVID-19, called Operation Warp Speed.

I remember well as a boy back in the 1950s, and several of my schoolmates were stricken with polio. And I remember well standing in line at our elementary school to take the new vaccine, which virtually has eliminated polio in the United States of America.

Well, our Nation's best scientists and researchers, doctors, and manufacturers are now collaborating and working around the clock to research, test, approve, and manufacture a vaccine in record time. This is the very key to restoring our way of life and rebuilding our economy to get back to those normal summers that we were talking about a while ago.

The President has capitalized on the ingenuity and the drive of the private sector and the scientific community, putting the United States at a better position than any other country in the world to develop a vaccine that the entire world can then benefit from.

The goal of Operation Warp Speed is to deliver 300 million doses of a safe and effective vaccine by January 2021. And by removing all unnecessary red tape and barriers, the President is on track to meet this goal.

The administration is cutting the development time to a matter of months by allowing development steps to occur simultaneously. Despite what the media may incorrectly report, the testing standards for this are the same as any other vaccine developed here in the United States of America. No safety shortcuts are being taken. The health and safety of the public remains the number one priority of this administration, and we have every reason to be hopeful.

The advances that the scientific community has made since the beginning of this pandemic are nothing short of remarkable and are directly responsible for a 40 percent decrease in the mortality rate from COVID-19 that we have seen.

Our knowledge about this novel virus grows every single day. And with our Nation's leaders and brightest minds working together, we will defeat this disease with unprecedented speed.

As a practicing dentist for nearly four decades, I believe that prevention is the best treatment, and that is exactly what this vaccine will do. While finding treatments and the therapeutics to fight this disease and its symptoms are a very worthwhile cause, actually blocking the virus from infecting us in the first place is the very strongest defensive strategy that we can have.

President Trump and his administration are bravely blazing a trail forward and leading our country out of this challenging time of global pandemic. So thanks to Operation Warp Speed, the world is only months away from a safe and reliable vaccine.

Mr. DAVID P. ROE of Tennessee. Mr. Speaker, I might point out that I have never seen a Republican or Democratic virus in my life. Just like I have never seen a Republican or Democratic cancer. This just affects people. The virus will be safe, it will be effective, and it will be voluntary. It will be a person's decision, or their family's decision, who actually receives the vaccine.

Mr. MURPHY of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Roe for yielding, and thank him for gathering everyone together.

Mr. Speaker, I will give a summary here this evening. Since the end of January, the world has been attacked essentially by a virus that none of us can see. I will say that since May 15, our administration has put in play Operation Warp Speed, and this is meant to save American lives.

Mr. Speaker, $10 billion was allocated by this body to develop a safe and effective vaccine in record time. It has literally been today's Manhattan Project. It is combining the resources and the brilliant minds of private industry and governmental researchers in an unprecedented effort of cooperation. We have used decades of previous research combined with today's new technology and research to help us end the COVID-19 pandemic.

The objective is to deliver 300 million doses by the end of December, early January, to the citizens of the United States.

What do vaccines do? I think it is very important for people to understand what vaccines do.

They stimulate the immune system to produce antibodies exactly as it would happen if you were exposed to the disease. After you get vaccinated, you develop immunity to that disease without having to get the disease first.

We have two trials, two companies--Moderna and Pfizer--that are furthest along in their developments; 20,000 individuals so far have been accrued in the trials--half have been getting the vaccines, half placebo, and we need more.

The highest at-risk populations are those being targeted: The elderly, those with comorbidities, Black Americans, Hispanic Americans. As we have heard earlier, Black Americans are under-enrolling in the vaccine and we need them to enroll.

So how can this process, which normally takes years, be done in 8 months?

It is that research is being done concurrently rather than in parallel; our phases are going at the same time; and production is going at the same time, fully understanding that we may have millions of doses of a vaccine that we will never use.

How do we develop this at warp speed? Just to give folks one example, how do we develop a vaccine this quickly?

If you can imagine the space shuttle, the space shuttle is a transport mechanism. It carries things out to the space station. We already have the space shuttle. We use that in vaccines. But what we have now is a different payload, a different payload going out to the space station. And the space shuttle is taking that into viruses with a different payload now specific to the coronavirus.

What all Americans are talking about now is not only the development of a vaccine but a safe vaccine. We have proof that the processes that are in place to develop safe vaccines are working.

As we have talked about, AstraZeneca stopped its trial because there was one untoward event. We have done research, and now they have started that trial again. Stopping trials is very commonplace in vaccine development, and the American people need to understand this.

We went through this once before with polio. Polio in the fifties was killing thousands and disabling many, many more. Jonas Salk developed the vaccine. What he did was remarkable, but what he did also was led by example. He took the vaccine himself, and he had his family take the vaccine.

This is what the Doctors Caucus is going to do. I will take the vaccine. The other members of the Doctors Caucus will take the vaccine because we need to tell the American people that we, physicians who have trained our entire lives in medicine, believe that what we are doing and what we are doing for the American people is safe.

What this will come out to is that we will have 300 million doses. Right now, our government is working on how to get those doses out to the American people. In an unprecedented effort, the CDC is working with HHS and the Department of Defense to develop a mechanism to get the vaccine out and to track the vaccine.

Finally, I will say this to the American people. There are two ways out of this pandemic, two ways on the pathway back to normalcy. One is to become infected with the virus, develop antibodies, and you recover. The second is to take the vaccine, develop antibodies without ever having the disease, and we can move forward as a Nation.

Mr. DAVID P. ROE of Tennessee. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleagues for being here tonight. I look forward to continuing this debate and this discussion here on the House floor.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source