Minimum Wage Fairness Act - Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Madam President, the World Health Organization has deemed this week ``World Immunization Week.'' Every year the WHO designates a whole week to promote the world's most powerful tools in public health--the use of vaccines to protect people of all ages against disease.

Immunization is one of the most successful and cost-effective health interventions ever introduced, preventing up to 3 million deaths a year from diseases such as diphtheria, tetanus, polio, and measles. Thanks to decades of research, there are 25 diseases that can be prevented by vaccines, including some forms of influenza, meningitis, and even certain types of liver and cervical cancer.

The theme this year is ``Are you up-to-date?'' This year one in five children worldwide will not receive the vaccinations they need, some because their parents choose not to and others because it is just not available. Through the Global Vaccine Action Plan, the WHO and other members of the World Health Assembly are working to close this gap and promote equitable access to vaccines for every adult and child in the world. The aim--their goal--is to have all people vaccinated against preventable diseases by 2020.

One of the diseases the WHO is targeting is polio. I have a few years on the Presiding Officer, but I can recall growing up in the 1950s. When you grew up in that era, polio was a real concern. In some years 60,000 kids would come down with polio, and at that time nobody knew why. They could not figure out where it was coming from or how to stop it.

Parents--my mom included--had their theories. Some of those theories were based loosely on health and others on legend. My mother used to say: Don't you go play in that rainwater outside in the street after it rains; you could get polio. I can remember hearing that.

When we were kids, I remember the earliest television shows showed people in iron lungs and surviving in that machine that kept them alive and looking at the world through a mirror that was perched above their heads. Many people were afflicted by polio. Some of my closest friends growing up had polio. Our Republican leader, Senator McConnell, suffered from polio as a child. It was not uncommon. It was way too common.

Then came the day in 1955 when Jonas Salk came up with the Salk vaccine. It was such an amazing piece of news. It was shared in every classroom across the country. They had a vaccine. It involved a shot, and none of us were excited about that, but the idea of being protected for life from polio was worth it.

Then came along the Sabin oral vaccine, which we were even happier to hear about.

It was an indication to a lot of people that with hard work and research cures could be found.

It was April 12, 1955, when Dr. Thomas Francis, Jr., an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan and a mentor to Salk, announced that Salk discovered a polio vaccine that was safe and effective. When that announcement was made, families across America celebrated. We couldn't wait to get in line. April 12 was deliberately chosen for the announcement because it marked the 10th anniversary of the death of the most famous polio survivor of all--President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Roosevelt also founded the March of Dimes Foundation in 1938, without which Salk may not have had the resources to complete his research. A massive field trial led to the release of the vaccine, the first of its kind. It was conducted on 1.8 million children in America, and it was proven 80 to 90 percent effective. We achieved this victory over polio. It really was a big deal. As a result, polio was eradicated in the United States of America in 1979.

In February the Senate passed a resolution I cosponsored with Senator Kirk of Illinois supporting World Polio Day. This resolution commended not only the work of Jonas Salk but also the Rotary Club, WHO, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and UNICEF for their work to eradicate polio. These organizations have joined with the United States and other national governments to successfully reduce cases of polio by more than 99 percent. We now believe there are only three nations on Earth where there is evidence of polio: Nigeria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The success of the polio vaccine showed the public what medical research could accomplish and encourage.

Yesterday Chairman Mikulski of the Senate Appropriations Committee had a hearing on research, and we had some great witnesses. Among them was Dr. Francis Collins, who is the head of the National Institutes of Health. They came to talk about America's investment in research and innovation. You would think that with the success of the Salk polio vaccine and all the other things that have followed, that America would have learned a valuable lesson about this investment. Sadly, today, some 60 years after the discovery of the Salk polio vaccine, we are not making progress as we should. In fact, in some respects we are falling behind.

Because of our failure to adequately fund the National Institutes of Health over the last 10 or 12 years, we have seen a 20-percent decline in the awards for medical research.

I talked to Dr. Francis Collins about this 2 or 3 months ago. He heads up the NIH. He is a brilliant, wonderful man who was in charge of mapping the Human Genome Project. He did it ahead of time and on budget and produced a wealth of information that is now being used to find cures for diseases.

A month or so ago, the National Institutes of Health introduced their AMP Program where they engaged the 10 largest pharmaceutical companies in America to join with the NIH to use the human genome to find cures for the following diseases: Alzheimer's, type 2 diabetes, and rheumatoid arthritis. Those are the first three targets they are going to go after. We need to go after more, and we need to encourage them for several reasons:

First, if we don't make an investment in medical research that future generations of researchers can count on, young people will not dedicate their lives to medical research.

Think of this for a moment: 30 years ago 18 percent of all the NIH medical researchers were under the age of 36. Now it is 3 percent. Younger people are not moving toward medical research because they are uncertain of our national commitment in this area. Shame on us. At a time when we should be enticing the best and brightest in the world to get involved in biomedical research, our indecision and lack of leadership at the governmental level is failing to fund these entities and this effort.

I asked Dr. Collins: What is the kind of commitment we should make as a nation in medical research that can make a dramatic difference?

He said: Senator, if you could give us 5 percent real growth a year beyond inflation, 5 percent a year for 10 years, I will promise you we will make dramatic progress.

So I did a calculation. I asked my staff what it would cost us as a nation to increase medical research 5 percent a year for 10 years. Well, they added the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, the Department of Defense medical research, and the Veterans' Administration medical research. They said: All right. Put them all together. If we gave them a 5-percent raise each year, how much would it cost over 10 years? The answer: $150 billion.

That is a huge sum of money, but in that same period of time we are likely to budget over $18 trillion in spending for the government. It is a very tiny piece of the overall spending of our government.

Some people who are budget hawks will step back and say: Great idea, Senator, but we just can't afford it. We can't afford to commit to coming up with $150 billion over 10 years.

I would ask them to consider two things:

First, last year in the United States of America, the Federal Government spent, through the Medicare and Medicaid Programs, over $200 billion treating one disease: Alzheimer's. If through our medical research we could find some blessed cure for this terrible disease or even delay its onset, it would more than pay for the amount of money we would have to invest in medical research. It is that important.

Secondly, there are things we can do which I will stand up and say I am prepared to do which would fund a major part of this research. If we increased the Federal tax on tobacco products by 95 cents a package, it would pay for more than half of the medical research I just suggested.

Over a 10-year period of time, 900,000 American lives would be saved because children wouldn't be able to afford to buy these tobacco products.

So this medical research commitment is not only a good one in terms of reducing our costs of medical care, but it also is something we ought to achieve in order to make sure there will be breakthroughs in the years ahead to eliminate and treat many of the diseases which haunt us and our families across America.

The American Cures Act is a bill I have introduced. I am happy to have a number of my colleagues cosponsoring it. It has the support of virtually all of the major medical research organizations. It should be bipartisan, and I hope those on the other side of the aisle who share my commitment to medical research will join me.

Discovering the polio vaccine won Jonas Salk the Nobel Prize and allowed him to create the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, one of the premier institutes for biomedical research. If he had done nothing else, Salk's place in history would have been honored and assured. But Jonas Salk wasn't content to rest on past achievement. After all, he was an American. In the last years of his life, he spent his time searching for a cure for AIDS. When his early efforts failed, he was undeterred. When asked why, he said: You can only fail if you stop too soon. This is a decisive moment in the history of our Nation. We have to continue to invest in order to reap the immense rewards of decades of work by the best scientific and medical minds in the world. The only way we can fail is by stopping too soon.

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