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Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, now on COVID, yesterday afternoon I announced that Senator Romney and I had reached an agreement for a $10 billion COVID supplemental appropriations package. It took many rounds of bipartisan talks, many days and nights and weekends of negotiations, but we have shaken hands on a compromise that the Senate can and should move forward very soon.

I thank the Senators on both sides of the aisle who participated in this, and Senators Burr, Blunt, and Graham were involved with Senator Romney. Senator Coons gets a special shout-out because of his fierce determination to work on international, on getting an international thing done. Senator Murray, as well, was very helpful in our negotiations.

The deal we announced yesterday has the support of Speaker Pelosi and President Biden, who urged Congress to work quickly to get a bill to his desk. We are going to work hard to get that done, and I hope my Republican colleagues will join us to move forward on this legislation.

There is no reason why we shouldn't be able to get this funding passed. The administration needs it right now, and we all know that our country is in great need of replenishing our COVID health response funding. Putting in the work, today, to keep our Nation prepared against new variants will make it less likely that we get caught off guard by a new variant down the line.

So this is really essential to America's well-being. It is essential to getting back to normal. All those who decried that we didn't get to normal quickly enough should be supportive of this legislation, because the longer we wait, the more difficult it will be when the next variant hits.

This $10 billion COVID package will give the Federal Government and our citizens the tools we need--we depend on--to continue our economic recovery, to keep our schools open, to keep American families safe. The package we agreed to will provide billions more for vaccines, more testing capacity, and--essential--$5 billion for more lifesaving therapeutics, arguably the greatest need right now for the country.

These therapeutics are great drugs, but if we don't have them at the ready when the new variant hits, it will let the variant get its tentacles deeper into our society. But this money will go a long way at keeping our schools, our businesses, our churches, our communities running as normally as possible, should a future variant rear its nasty head.

Approving this package is simply the sensible, responsible, and necessary thing to do. Republicans and Democrats alike should now work together to make sure we can move this package through the Chamber.

Now, while this funding is absolutely necessary, it is far from perfect. I am deeply disappointed that some of our Republican friends could not agree to include $5 billion for global response efforts. I pushed them hard to include this international funding, as, of course, did Senator Coons and Senators Graham and Romney because fighting COVID abroad is intrinsically connected to keeping Americans healthy at home.

It is not just the right thing to do to help struggling nations, though we certainly have an obligation to help. It is also good for our country. So it is putting money overseas to prevent COVID from spreading here, because, remember, every variant--all three variants-- that hit us started overseas and then came here. So that is not only humanitarian and the moral and right thing to do, but it is in our own self-interest. I know it sometimes sounds anomalous--sending money overseas is in our interest--but with COVID, where it germinates and starts the new variants, inevitably overseas, and then comes to hurt us is the right thing to do in our own self-interest, even if you had no humanitarian interest in doing it, which, of course, many of us do have a great deal of humanitarian interest.

If we don't help the developing nations of the world with vaccines and treatment, we leave ourselves seriously at risk for potential new variants. Omicron, after all, started, in all likelihood, in South Africa, where today less than a third of the population is vaccinated-- fully vaccinated.

It is thus my intention for the Senate to consider a bipartisan international appropriations package that will include funding to address COVID-19, as well as other urgent priorities, like aid for Ukraine and funding for global food insecurity.

I know that many on both sides--I mentioned the names earlier--are serious about reaching an agreement on this issue. Nevertheless, this week's agreement is carefully negotiated. We bent over backward when our Republican colleagues did not want to accept certain kinds of pay- fors which we thought were appropriate and have always been used, but we thought it was so important to get this done that we did that. It is a very important step to keeping the country healthy and keeping life as close to normal in the future as we can.

I want to thank, again, Senator Romney for leading the negotiations for the Senate Republicans and working in good faith to reach agreement. I also want to thank, as I mentioned, Coons, Murray, Burr, Blunt, and Graham for their help and support to reach this bipartisan agreement, and Chairman Leahy and his staff for their assistance in putting the legislation together.

Finally, I want to thank the staff of the CBO, the Congressional Budget Office. They worked around the clock with us to score this legislation.

So we have taken a massive step closer to getting this important funding done, and I thank everyone for their good work to reach this point.

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