ウィスパリング同時通訳研究会コミュのHouse hearing on Covid-19 Chairman Blunt, Senator Murray

Chairman Blunt: (00:17)
Health and Human Services, Education and related agencies will come to order. Want to thank our witnesses for appearing before the subcommittee today to provide an update on where we are on the areas that they are so involved in on COVID-19. As we continue to be challenged by this pandemic in the country, we know that 195,961 Americans have died as part of the pandemic and 6.6 million have tested positive during the process of testing in the pandemic. This has rapidly swept across the globe and even countries who thought their cases were contained are facing new outbreaks and dealing with those new and unanticipated outbreaks. This is a new disease and many ways and even after nine months, we still know relatively little about this disease or coronavirus generally. This has hindered our public health response. In many ways, this has been like trying to build the plane while we were flying the plane. And that is a challenging, challenging thing to deal with.

Chairman Blunt: (01:42)
That’s not to fully exonerated, certainly, the way the administration has dealt with it or the way it’s been funded. And I’m sure that justified criticisms can and will be leveled. But history allows us to look back over past events and to put current ones into perspective. If we wanted to look back just six years to 2014, for instance, when West Africa faced the largest Ebola outbreak the world had ever seen. And unlike COVID-19, we knew a lot about Ebola at the time, the disease had been around since the mid-seventies, it was disease that scientifically, we knew a lot more about in 2014 than we do about COVID-19 even today. And frankly, we just didn’t handle it very well. We made significant mistakes and we’ve seen those mistakes occur in other disease areas. Members of Congress use words when they talked about the CDC response like cryptic and misleading and thought that the information provided wasn’t enough.

Chairman Blunt: (02:55)
We even had a case that was found in a Dallas hospital and the CDC director blamed the hospital. At the same time, one of the nurses in the hospital was allowed to board a commercial flight with CDC’s consent. So we seem to keep having to learn these lessons over and over again, that we have to be a better prepared. Public health is hard, and it seems to be hard for us to keep our eye on what might happen in the future once we get beyond that moment. We should learned, and more importantly, implemented more than we did from Ebola or from H1N1, both of which created real response problems, but real lessons, if we’d have tried to learn them. Hopefully we’ll do a better job learning the lessons we need to learn right now. Neither this administration or the last one, frankly, prioritized research like this committee has.

Chairman Blunt: (03:55)
And we know that in our committee, we’ve worked hard in the last six years and in the last five budgets in a bipartisan manner to increase the funding in the annual appropriations bills for the NIH by nearly 40%, for CDC by 21%, and for preparedness by 44%. But those numbers all have to be coming together before we begin to use them the way that our witnesses today or this committee would like to see them used. We’ve proven in our committee that medical research, public health preparedness are all priorities and because we’ve done so, we’re more ready than we were at the last time, or hopefully more ready in the future for them next pandemic. Right now 238 FDA emergency use authorizations for diagnostic tests and antigen tests are on the market and every day we get closer to an affordable, reliable, rapid test where you can get an answer in a way that allows us to really fight the pandemic rather than have another data point.

Chairman Blunt: (05:17)
In a few years, when someone gives a history lesson about COVID-19 response, there will be criticism. It’ll go back about 20 years and it will be significant, but I know there are things we all agree on. We need to have more investment in testing, more resources for our vaccine candidates to finish their trials, manufacture the vaccine and for CDC to distribute through a vetted well thought out plan. I hope we learn more about, and I’m going to insist that we learn more about all of those things today. I’d hope we might be able to include childcare in our hearing today. We weren’t able to do that because of time, but clearly if you’re going to get back to school, back to work and back to better health, childcare has to be part of that and something this committee has to stay focused on.

Chairman Blunt: (06:09)
So again, welcome our witnesses and Senator Murray is joining us from her office, I believe. And Senator Murray, we’re ready for your opening comments.

Senator Murray: (06:22)
Well, thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to all of our witnesses who are joining us today. You know, as our country approaches a tragic milestone in this pandemic, 200,000 dead, I want to recognize that our rising national death count represents countless personal losses. Families have lost parents and grandparents and children. Communities have lost educators and healthcare providers and other frontline workers. And people have not only lost loved ones, but many have lost the small solace of being able to visit and comfort those they care about in their final moments. My heart goes out to everyone who’s struggling with the hardship caused by this virus, whether they are suffering with the loss of life or livelihood. You all deserve leaders who take this crisis seriously, who take action to support and protect you, your family and your community, who arm you with the facts you need to stay safe.

Senator Murray: (07:25)
Unfortunately, we have yet to see that leadership from the President. Like many Americans, I was deeply angered last week to hear President Trump admitting that even though he understood COVID-19 was more deadly than even your strenuous flu, that’s a quote, he was intentionally playing down this crisis, but I was not surprised. These recordings were not a revelation. The reality has been painfully obvious for months. Early on, President Trump not only claimed this virus was contained, controlled, going away. He claimed it was a democratic hoax. His vice president wrote on an op-ed arguing that there would be no second wave just before we saw a heartbreaking and record-breaking increase in new cases and deaths across our country. When it came to testing, President Trump, didn’t just say he took no responsibility at all. He said, he liked the numbers where they were. He said he wanted to slow down testing and he blamed testing for the rising case numbers.

Senator Murray: (08:37)
When it came to wearing masks, he not only said that masks caused problems too. He also shared a tweet saying masks represent a culture of silence, slavery and social death, and a video falsely claiming people don’t need to wear masks, and there is no cure. He made false claims on treatments as well, continuing to promote hydroxychloroquine and suggested we look at bleach as an option. And he is still, still downplaying this virus. He is still saying it will just go away. He is saying, we are “rounding the final turn.” Dr. Fauci has made it clear that’s not true and pointed out that we have plateaued at around 40,000 cases a day. The daily deaths are still regularly around a thousand and experts have warned that we still need to prepare for a fall wave that will coincide with the flu season. But President Trump has not been listening to the public health experts.

Senator Murray: (09:41)
He has been fighting them and suggesting FDA is part of a deep state conspiracy and CDC is overstating the death counts. But not only is he spreading inaccuracies and outright lies, at a time when truth is a matter of life and death and trust, trust in our public health agencies is paramount, his administration has been recklessly interfering with the work of these agencies for political benefit, to promote unproven treatments, alter CDC guidance on reopening and testing and more. Just over the last week, we have learned that president Trump put pressure on NIH and FDA to authorize convalescent plasma as a treatment and that political appointees at HHS have worked unsuccessfully to dictate talking points for Dr. Fauci and have succeeded in demanding oversight of and changes to CDC’s flagship scientific publication, The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. That publication is a cornerstone of public health work across the world.

Senator Murray: (11:01)
It is dangerous and unprecedented that political appointees are editing, censoring, and ultimately undermining a report that is intended to give families, public health professionals, researchers, and healthcare providers, what they need, the truth. The Trump’s administration’s political meddling shows a dangerous disregard for truth, facts, science, and most importantly people’s lives. Data and science are key tools in our fight against any health crisis and the damage being done to public trust in those tools by this administration threatens to undermine our ability to respond to this pandemic, public trust in an eventual vaccine and public health for years to come. The Trump administration needs to leave the science to the scientists immediately. Full stop. The leaders of our public health agencies need to provide full account of what political pressure has been applied and what steps they are taking to make sure it does not influence their work or the work of the agencies they lead.

Senator Murray: (12:19)
Congress needs to act now to demand the transparency we need to hold this administration accountable. Democrats will be laying out steps soon for how we can do that. And I hope every Republican who has said they believe we need to follow the science will prove it by working with us on this, because you cannot be for science if you aren’t against political interference. I also hope Republicans will come to the table to work with us in earnest on a larger COVID-19 package that our communities so desperately need. Unfortunately, they’ve not taken this seriously so far. And when Democrats put forward the HEROES Act back in May, Republicans said there was no rush. They would wait to see if more was needed. When Republicans finally did put forward a proposal months later, it was woefully inadequate to address the crisis at hand. And while Democrats have moved to find common ground and even offered to negotiate towards a lower top line number, Republicans refused that offer and instead put forward a bill last week that moved us even further away from common ground.

Senator Murray: (13:31)
This isn’t serious negotiating. And the ideas that have been put forward are not serious solutions, but the crisis we be face remains deadly serious. We can’t afford to waste any more time. We need to stabilize the childcare sector and make sure schools can educate students safely, whether they’re remotely or in-person. we need to make significant investments in public health, particularly regarding testing and contact tracing and distributing and administering a safe, effective and trusted vaccine. And we need to demand the type of comprehensive national plan for those efforts that has been long overdue. The distribution plan that CDC finally put out just today is a long overdue step forward, but there is still more to do. I’m still reviewing this and I’ll have more to say, but it’s clear this is still not the kind of comprehensive end to end national plan I’ve called for, and that we desperately need.

Senator Murray: (14:38)
We are still missing important details on research and review, like what standards FDA would use to authorize a vaccine for emergency use development. Like how we make sure disparities are addressed in clinical trials, and manufacturing, like how we address supply chain issues and avoid bottlenecks. And we still need more details on addressing disparities. We also need to protect the safety and civil rights of those going to work and provide relief to those who have lost their jobs. We need to support families who are struggling to make rent and afford healthcare and get nutritional meals. And we need to address the severe disparities we’re seeing and how much harder this crisis is hitting black and Latino and tribal communities.

Senator Murray: (15:26)
We need to provide relief for our state local and tribal governments and last, but as we have seen recently, certainly not least, we need to make sure once and for all that political interference from President Trump does not further undermine our response to this crisis. Now I’m going to have several questions for our witnesses, but I hope we are all able to get more than just answers in the days ahead. I hope we’re all able to finally come together and take action before we lose any more time to save lives and prevent costly mistakes. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman Blunt: (16:09)
Thank you, Senator Murray. Again, let me welcome our guests today. Our witnesses today. Admiral Brett Giroir is the Assistant Secretary for Health. Dr. Robert Kadlec is the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response. And Dr. Robert Redfield is the Director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. We’re pleased you’re here, like to give you time to make an opening statement. We have the statements you’ve presented. You can summarize those if you want, but we are eager to get to questions, but we’re also eager to hear from you. So Admiral Giroir, why don’t you go ahead and start with your opening statement.