Covid-19 Pandemic Timeline
Floor Speech
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Mr. DUNN. Mr. Speaker, I thank Chairman Roe for putting on this opportunity for us to address the American people directly and reassure them that this Operation Warp Speed is truly an amazing accomplishment for our country.
Mr. Speaker, if you were born after 1969 you didn't get a chance to celebrate with us on the original moonshot, those heady days of the Apollo landing and all the run-up science to get that done.
This is America's new moonshot. This is an amazing program. By leveraging the private sector and all parts of the private sector, as well as all of the agencies and all of government effort, we are making progress on medical science at a rate that has literally never been seen before. Every living Nobel Prize laureate with a Nobel Prize in medicine is cooperating with the government and rushing forward. The science on all these areas is really making a difference and making a difference very quickly.
The administration put $10 billion with a B--bravo--in supplemental funding into the Operation Warp Speed and separately another $1.5 billion into developing Shark Tank testing. So we are not only working on vaccines, we are working on testing for the virus, we are working on prevention of the virus, and we are working on therapeutics, that is medicines that are true antivirals.
We already have new protocols so that we are improving the treatment. The mortality rate for this disease has plummeted.
I mentioned that innovative and creative people are coming out and working on all facets of this disease. I have a story. This is a mask. Every one of you has a mask. This is a different kind of a mask. This is made out of a polyester fiber, and it is impregnated with bionic silver. It is virucidal. It kills the virus. It kills bacteria as well. So when you take your mask off, Mr. Speaker, and you put it down on the table, it sets about sterilizing itself. When I pick it back up, it will be sterile. That is an amazing accomplishment. That happened just this year, just since this started.
It is amazing these things can happen. All the science and all the medical experimenters and all the researchers are running flat out. We are pushing new frontiers in medicine. We are doing things that we never thought we would do in my lifetime in medicine. We have broken the mold, and I am so grateful to all the brilliant innovative men and women who are pushing out these frontiers and helping everybody. Medicine will never be the same after this just because of the advances in this time to this threat. We will be treating all of our diseases differently in the future.
Before I close I would like to associate myself with the comments Chairman Roe made earlier about the heroism of the medical care people and the healthcare people at all levels, including the ambulance drivers and the police who have to go out and respond to people. It is heroic for them to go out there and do that and continue to work in very difficult and challenging circumstances. But I think what this amounts to is America's shining moment in medicine. I can't think of a better time I have ever seen American medicine respond.
It has been a pleasure working with Chairman Roe.
Mr. DAVID P. ROE of Tennessee. It has been. One of the things that the CARES package did was--this is not Operation Warp Speed--but the CARES package also provided the way we shift when seeing patients in person through telehealth.
The VA, for instance, about 1 year ago did 70,000 or 80,000 telehealth visits a month for their PTSD treatments. That number went to over 900,000 in May of this year. That is unbelievable when you can do that. I think many practices now, including my own at home, have used telehealth to see patients, and I myself have used telehealth which saved me a many-hour drive one way or the other.
The pandemic is not all bad. We have learned some good things and some things I think that are going to persist after we get through this particular pandemic.
I also might add, this is not the first pandemic we have had. That is why I know we were going to be fine. There was an H3N2 pandemic in 1968, a coronavirus pandemic, and we got through that as a country. We have responded so much better this time with the therapeutics, monoclonal antibodies antivirals, just the way we treat it.
Anticoagulation hasn't been mentioned. We know this is an inflammatory response. It causes coagulation in the kidneys, the heart, and the lungs. So we have learned that.
Hats off to our medical professionals who have gone out and literally--it is unbelievable how fast they have upped their knowledge of this.
I appreciate the gentleman's comments.
He is double-boarded in internal medicine and dermatology, is a relatively new representative from Pennsylvania 13th, and has had 31 years in practice.
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