Coronavirus

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. SCHUMER. Madam President, after the Senate Republicans spent 4 months dithering and delaying, last week, Leader McConnell pushed a partisan, emaciated COVID bill. It was so paltry and ladened with poison pills that it was clearly designed to fail. And fail it did.

It is time for the Senate Republicans to wake up to the gravity of the crisis in our country and work with Democrats on a comprehensive bill that delivers real help to Americans.

Speaker Pelosi and I have already come down $1 trillion from our initial request. Leader McConnell and Senate Republicans must drop the cynical and political games and instead work with Democrats to find common ground and reach a compromise.

If Republican leadership lets the 20 Members of their caucus who barely want to provide any more relief and allows them to dictate their party's agenda, it will block the path to a compromise, and Republicans will have to answer to the American people.

Our country still does not have a strong grasp on COVID-19. America continues to lead the world in the number of confirmed cases by far-- over 6.5 million. Nearly 200,000 Americans have died. Yet, unthinkably, it was reported that in one of his interviews with Bob Woodward, President Trump said that ``nothing more could have been done'' to combat the coronavirus. ``Nothing more could have been done''--that is what President Trump said. Of the many lies the President has told about COVID-19, this is one of the most monumental and one of the most galling.

There were so many vital things the President could have done to fight COVID-19 and protect our country. In the early days of the virus, hospitals, medical centers, and essential workers were short on PPE, ventilators, swabs, masks, and gloves. President Trump never mobilized the resources of the Federal Government, never fully invoked the Defense Production Act, and never set up a national clearing house to get resources where they needed to go.

It has been 7 months and President Trump still doesn't have a national testing strategy. There has never been a national plan for contact tracing. The President took months before he even encouraged Americans to wear a mask. This is an entire universe of actions that President Trump could have taken to help slow the spread of the virus and save American lives and American jobs, but he didn't. He never took strong action, never took responsibility. It is what it is.

In many cases, it would have been better, actually, if the President did nothing instead of what he did. It would have been better if the President never downplayed the virus, never called it a hoax, never pushed quack medicines, never speculated about injecting bleach, and never held rallies.

Every week--every week--brings new evidence that his administration is totally unequipped to right the ship, especially the Department of Health and Human Services. Over the weekend, there were numerous reports that political appointees at HHS have been interfering with CDC's report on COVID-19, trying to delay, edit out, or halt the release of facts that would have been politically embarrassing to the President. This is not the first time the administration has tried to hide reports and facts that would better inform the American people.

Meanwhile, as that is happening, President Trump has pressured HHS to ``slow the testing down.'' He has overstated the benefits of certain treatments and pressured the FDA to approve them and accused FDA officials of holding back a vaccine, and too many people within HHS are trying to suppress the science.

The Secretary of Health and Human Services, Alex Azar, has not only failed to push back against these outrageous moves by President Trump, but he has been almost entirely silent about the chaos and mismanagement in his own agency.

In Trump's administration, the most important skill is the ability to stand up to the President and resist political influence--more so in an agency like HHS than others, where the health of Americans is at stake.

It has become abundantly clear that the leadership of the Department of Health and Human Services has allowed perhaps the most important Federal agency right now to become subservient to the President's daily whims.

So, today, I am calling on Secretary Azar to resign immediately. We need a Secretary of Health and Human Services who will look out for the American people, not President Trump's political interests.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source