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Floor Speech
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Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, anyone who has tried to buy a carton of eggs at the grocery store lately has probably seen a sign on the empty shelves saying there is a national shortage of eggs because of the bird flu.
The reason notices like this exist is because the Department of Health and Human Services tracks disease outbreaks around the clock and notifies the public in real time. And, of course, we take that for granted. We should take that for granted. It is the kind of thing that the government just does and that we normally don't argue about.
There are a lot of things for us to argue about, but whether or not the government should tell us if there is a public health problem has never been something that we have argued about. We take it for granted, but it is an invaluable service that keeps the public safe and healthy, which is why it was so bizarre that in one of his first acts as President, Donald Trump suspended all--all--communications from HHS-- health advisories, scientific reports, updates on the website, all of it.
What is that supposed to do other than keep people from getting the information that they need to keep their families healthy? This is about being able to know if a certain kind of meat or vegetable has been contaminated and staying away from it.
For instance, when there was an E. coli outbreak at McDonald's last year, the FDA immediately sent out an alert, which the press picked up on and warned the public about. Those communications are paused. Cucumbers at Costco is another example. E. coli at McDonald's--I don't mean to pick on these particular companies; lots of retail operations have their various public health problems.
I understand elections have consequences, right? And it is within the scope of a new administration that is reasonable for them to kind a take a look at all public policy and implement their own public policy. But, look, this is a little nuts.
I am assuming that there was a person in the White House or in the transition team writing up a bunch of Executive orders and thinking through an ideological lens or even an electoral lens. Fair enough. And they wanted to have a bunch of Executive orders ready to roll. So day one--boom, nothing coming out of HHS.
But the problem is, this isn't partisan; this isn't what people thought they were voting for; and this really could jeopardize the public health. So the resolution I am introducing and asking for unanimous consent on is very simple. It reaffirms the very basic belief that people deserve to have timely and accurate information relevant to their health and well-being.
We are not arguing about like a COVID response. We just want to know if there is a problem in what you are about to eat. And suspending those communications has nothing to do with party. It has to do with keeping everybody safe. So if there is a problem during this pause, the Department of Health and Human Services will not communicate to the public about it.
As if in legislative session, notwithstanding rule XXII, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of my resolution at the desk; further, that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and that the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.
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Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, a new story was published today about the extent of Mr. Robert F. Kennedy's involvement in the 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa, and it shot a chill down my spine. That is not a rhetorical flourish. I read it and I felt hot, I felt angry, I felt worried.
We already know that he flew halfway across the world to Samoa to spread lies about the measles vaccine and discourage people from taking it. We already know that as a result, there was a measles outbreak. Five thousand people got measles; 83 people died; 79 of them were children.
But I think there is a new fact here that is worth lingering on. He saw it as a great research opportunity--he saw it as a great research opportunity. He literally took an informatics expert--somebody who studies how people receive information--with him to Samoa to run a ``natural experiment'' studying what would happen to kids if they weren't vaccinated.
Let me tell you why this is personal to me. My dad is my hero. May his memory be a blessing. He is my hero for a number of reasons; but among them, he was a young doctor, and he was reading the New England Journal of Medicine. He was right out of medical school, and he read about something called the Tuskegee experiments.
What happened in the Tuskegee experiments is the United States Public Health Service withheld lifesaving medication from African-American men to ``observe the disease process.'' They considered these men expendable. They provided half of the cohort with penicillin, which they knew would cure syphilis, and half of the men with a placebo without telling them to, again, observe the disease process.
And so my dad went on the record and Congress actually intervened many years later with Tom Harkin, and on a bipartisan basis, making it explicit that the U.S. Public Health Service has to observe the Hippocratic Oath: ``Do no harm.''
Do no harm.
And it is a dark history for America but a proud moment as I think of my father and his legacy.
But the one thing I never thought would ever occur is that more than 50 years later, we would be at the precipice of confirming a person to run the Department of Health and Human Services who, in this era--50 years after the Tuskegee experiments--flew to Samoa, encouraged people not to take the measles vaccine, watched 5,000 people get sick, watched 83 people die, watched 79 kids die and said: This is a real opportunity for data collection so we can see how this plays out.
I am still a little shocked that this person isn't going to be rejected 100 to 0. I understand partisanship. I understand loyalty. I am not immune to partisan pressures on my own side. But this guy is different. This guy is about to run the Department of Health and Human Services and he doesn't have just, like, one weird idea about one certain aspect of public health. He is a person who has flown across the planet to cause outbreaks of diseases that are generations in our past.
And to add insult to injury, he is repeating the moral mistakes of the Tuskegee experiment that has been actually outlawed by the United States Congress.
I will be talking about this more, but I am just hoping that--we fight about a lot of stuff in this building, but I know there are a lot of people on both sides of the aisle that take their obligations seriously to provide advice and consent to the President of the United States, whether you voted for him or not, whether your State voted for him or not.
This is an opportunity to say we are a separate and coequal branch of government and if you are a Republican, say: Listen, I support this President, but I don't support this nominee because I don't want measles or mumps or rubella or polio to make a comeback.
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