Roy Blunt

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. I ask unanimous consent that the bill be considered read a third time.

Mr. BLUNT. I know of no further debate on the bill.

Mr. BLUNT. I ask unanimous consent that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, as if in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of H.R. 1240, which was received from the House.

Mr. BLUNT. I ask unanimous consent that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, as if in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs be discharged from further consideration of S. 3952 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration.

Mr. BLUNT. I ask unanimous consent that the Van Hollen substitute amendment, which is at the desk, be considered and agreed to and that the bill, as amended, be considered read a third time.

Mr. BLUNT. I know of no further debate on the bill, as amended.

Mr. BLUNT. I ask unanimous consent that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, as if in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of H.R. 6535, which was received from the House.

Mr. BLUNT. I ask unanimous consent that the bill be read a third time.

Mr. BLUNT. I know of no further debate on the bill.

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, as if in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 627, S. 2716.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, as if in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 575, S. 3099.

Mr. BLUNT. I ask unanimous consent that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, as if in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 576, S. 3100.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the mandatory quorum call be waived.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I want to talk today for a few minutes about something that I don't think has gotten the attention it deserves, and that is the many successes in foreign policy over the last 4 years. I think at the top of my list of foreign policy successes in terms of unanticipated accomplishments that we would not have thought would happen would be the Abraham accords that were signed at the White House in September. This agreement paves the way for normalized relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Israel and Bahrain and I believe really establishes a way where the rest of the Middle East could hopefully follow this step in the right direction. I think not only is this one of the most significant moves in decades to promote peace and understanding in the Middle East, but, frankly, it probably wouldn't have happened if we hadn't had a President who hadn't spent years hearing how something like this was impossible. The President believed it was possible, and it was because of his strong leadership that the countries involved made it a priority to bridge the gap that everyone thought was unbridgeable, that really had separated these neighbors for generations. What we see when we look at this and other events in recent times is that when our friends become friends with each other, we win. The United States wins when our friends also become friends with each other. This agreement can be a model for future progress in the region. It is the first time in four decades that any Arab country has recognized Israel, and you can see it is already making a difference. We had debate on the floor yesterday about our continued partnership--our defense partnership--with the United Arab Emirates, and this was, obviously, an element in that debate. That partnership, over three different administrations, produced something that nobody would have anticipated in any of the earlier decades. The President started his Middle East efforts by acknowledging Jerusalem as the capital of Israel in his first year in office. A few months later, he moved the U.S. Embassy there. Now, was this a new idea? Absolutely not a new idea. American Presidents have been saying for years that this was a good idea. Party platforms have said for years that Israel should be able to have their capital in Jerusalem acknowledged, but nobody had done it before. Congress had said repeatedly this should happen, but it hadn't happened and didn't happen until the Trump administration decided to make it happen. Critics actually said that moving our embassy would hurt our credibility in the region, and, 3 years later, the Abraham accords proved that that was 100 percent wrong. Another reason American credibility has soared in the Middle East is that President Trump took a strong stance against Iran. He did that by dealing with the nuclear agreement that President Obama and the Obama administration had struck with Iran as a bad idea. It was an idea that actually allowed Iran to eventually get a nuclear weapon and reduced sanctions on the country's leaders as they continued to sponsor terrorism around the world. In fact, he even returned substantial amounts of money that we now know went, in large part, into terror- building network efforts. The agreement was badly handled from the start. It didn't work after we entered into it. We didn't enter into it in any kind of binding way because it was clear, at the time, that if this agreement would have been presented as a treaty, it had no chance of being approved by the Senate. So it was entered into, thinking: This is such a great idea that the next President will just have to do it, whether the country is bound to it or not. The hard work of doing our work the right way makes a difference, and, in fact, that agreement would have been changed before a Senate would have considered ever approving it. But it would have been either approved or not approved rather than the process we went through, which was a lot of Senate opposition but no response to that opposition. President Trump put a spotlight on the deal's failure to protect our national security. He took a strong new approach to applying maximum pressure on the Iranian regime, and it has had impact. Eventually, that new view led to eliminating Qasem Soleimani, who was clearly the architect of Iran's terrorist activities and the attacks on Americans. There has been no doubt about that for a long time. Iran was the No. 1 state sponsor of terrorism. General Soleimani was the No. 1 architect of that state sponsorship of terrorism, and the President was willing to do what needed to be done there. The world is a safer place with him gone. Iran knows that we will not turn a blind eye on aggression or on false promises or, often, even on things being said that, on the face of them, are clearly not true and the world community is expected to agree with them, and, frankly, in the case of Iran, often decides that the best course is to agree to the things that you know are not true which are presented as if they are true and accepted as if they are true. This doesn't get you where you want. Accommodating or rewarding our enemies doesn't advance peace in the Middle East or anywhere else. Supporting our allies and building stronger alliances and holding terrorists accountable does. Stronger alliances are also a goal of the Trump administration's new focus on the Indo-Pacific region. The President recognized that China is the greatest threat to democracy and freedom in the world. He understands that America cannot counter that threat alone, and because of that, has reached out in meaningful ways. While other administrations have said they would pivot to the Pacific, the Trump administration actually oversaw a period of renewed engagement in the area and renewed branding of the area that indicated that the Indo- Pacific is now that command and the Indo-Pacific is now that focus. We have strengthened our alliances with India and with Australia and other countries in the region. We began working to foster a multilateral community--one that will protect the free and open nature of the region from the threat of China. I was just reading in the news today that China clearly is sending a message in Hong Kong: If you don't want to be in jail and you are for Hong Kong freedom, you just need to leave right now. And, apparently, they are willing to help you get to where your thoughts don't impact others who are willing to live under--and, maybe, have no choice but to live under--the repression of China. The President also took action to strengthen global security and stability by asking our allies to pull their weight. For too many years, other countries seemed content to let American taxpayers bear the cost of defending freedom everywhere in the world. President Trump challenged the other members of NATO to meet the organization's guideline of spending 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense. Our allies stepped up in many cases and did better than they had been doing. In 2016, just 4 of the 28 countries in NATO met the 2 percent guideline--4 out of 28. Today, that number is still not at 28, but it is at 10 countries that now exceed the guideline. Remember, four countries met the guideline 3 years and 10 months ago. Ten countries have now exceeded the guideline, and every country in the alliance with a military has increased its defense spending. That is important progress, and it wouldn't have happened if the President of the United States had not been willing to say the obvious, and, frankly, be very direct about it and make himself an uncomfortable partner at the negotiating table. But if what you are uncomfortable about is that you are willing to say, ``Do what you have agreed to do,'' it is about time somebody not only said, ``Do what you have agreed to do,'' but said it in a way that other countries took it seriously. The President sought to address imbalances and protect U.S. interests in the area of global trade. The Trump administration replaced the NAFTA agreement with a new trade deal with Mexico and Canada. NAFTA was great for all three countries, but it needed to be improved. It needed to be updated, and now it has been. In my State, Missouri, those two countries are our two biggest trading partners, and that is the case for the United States. Mexico and then Canada dwarf trade with almost every other country in the world as they trade with the United States, and the new agreement will lead to more jobs and bigger paychecks in all three countries. Our goal in our neighborhood should be not just to make ourselves stronger but to make our neighbors stronger, because we are stronger when our neighbors are stronger. Nationwide, exports are expected to grow by $2.2 billion under the USMCA. And our trade relationship with Japan, the world's third largest economy, is even stronger, thanks to a new agreement that went into effect at the start of the year. So it is clear that there has been lots of activity in America's foreign policy over the past 4 years. There has been a lot of important progress and a lot of success stories, and an awful lot of it was done in a very unconventional way. So, frankly, it just doesn't get covered by the traditional trade press or the traditional foreign policy press or the traditional defense press in ways that really the results should produce. These are not areas that get the attention that they deserve. I think, when people look back at the 4 years that we have just completed in foreign policy, they are going to look at what has happened, understand it in the context of what was happening, and I am sure they will believe that these items I talked about today led to a stronger and safer country as we approach the years ahead of us. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Thank you, Chairman Roberts. I was pleased the Rules Committee favorably approved H.R. 2420, the National Museum of the American Latino Act, earlier this month. There is no doubt the stories of the American Latino are important and must be told more fully than they have been in the past. I want to commend Senators Cornyn and Menendez on their diligent efforts to get here. I know it has been a long road. In order to keep this legislation moving forward, I agree with Chairman Roberts on the need to state for the record the importance of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's historic main headquarters. While that building is listed in the bill as a potential location for the museum, the Senate recognizes the extreme imposition this would place on the Department and the people it serves. As a member of the Appropriations Subcommittee for Agriculture--and that subcommittee's former ranking member--I couldn't agree more with Chairman Roberts that the work of the USDA is crucially important to Missouri, to Kansas, to the Nation, and the international community as well. Clearly, that work would be disrupted if the USDA and its staff were forced to relocate. I join Chairman Roberts in encouraging the Smithsonian's board of regents to recognize the role and expanse of the USDA when selecting a location for the museum and to look for a more appropriate site for the museum. I now yield to the Senior Senator from Texas, an early champion of this legislation, for his remarks.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, later today, we will vote on whether to go forward with the arms sales that the administration notified the Congress of a few weeks ago. These would be arms sales to the United Arab Emirates, equipment sales. These sales clearly would continue the 20 years of growth in our relationship, working side by side against common concerns and common enemies. This really goes back through three different administrations, going back to 9/11 and beyond, where the UAE has consistently been willing to stand with us in at least six long-term deployments. They come; they stay. They are side by side with us in the field. They have been with us in the air. They are flying what has previously been our best piece of aircraft at a level that we would share it with other countries that are friends of ours. This sale will continue that. It continues to allow even more interoperability between the United States and the UAE and Israel. Israel, by the way, is totally supportive of this sale. The Ambassador from the United Arab Emirates and the Ambassador from Israel earlier this week had a public event where they both talked about the support of Israel for this sale. As you know very well, our law requires a quantitative advantage for Israel when we sell them equipment. We have even a slightly different advantage, but being able to continue this relationship is important. The F-35 jets, the MQ-9 unarmed aerial vehicles, advanced munitions-- I think the total sale is about $23.5 billion. And this is not any kind of gift from the United States to the UAE. This is the UAE making a purchase totaling $23.5 billion for equipment that is made by American companies and almost always by American workers. In August, we had the first breakthrough in a diplomatic sense in the Middle East in a long time. President Trump deserves credit for that. Israel deserves credit for that. But the UAE deserves credit for that. The Abraham accords, where the UAE formally recognized Israel, began to have flights back and forth and other things that were significant in changing the environment in the Middle East, the most difficult part of the world--the greatest breakthrough in 40 years. But that followed a number of breakthroughs that weren't quite as public, where this relationship has grown--the Israel relationship with the UAE--just like our relationship has gotten stronger over time. To see the recognition of the two governments together, to see Bahrain follow that--I think we are going to see other countries in the area decide that a region that lives in peace with Israel is a good thing for everybody involved, not a bad thing for anybody. So it is important. I think how the Congress deals with this is significant. We have been notified as the law requires us to be notified. Under this notification process, I don't believe any sale has been denied, and only one sale has been altered. The President has to agree. So if we debate this for hours and somehow it narrowly passes and the President vetoes it and we don't have the votes to override the veto, which I am confident we would not have--in fact, I think we very likely have the votes to go ahead and deal with this right here, right now. It is the right thing to do. It is the right time to do it. We will never have more of a long-term runway of how things under the Bush administration, the Obama administration, and the Trump administration have continued to progress to where the UAE has become a trusted ally. Now, they have become a trusted ally and a trusted diplomatic partner in this important breakthrough. Having this kind of equipment not only allows us to be interoperable, but frankly, it creates the opportunities for American military and American technicians to be working with them every time you have an upgrade, every time you have a significant maintenance issue. That just further enhances, as does working through how that equipment is used afterwards--all of that further enhances the constant dialogue, the constant reinforcement of our friends who see common enemies and are working directly to move their country and their region in a much better direction. I hope that the Senate today does what it needs to do and sends that message that we understand what Israel would like to see happen, what the UAE would like to see happen, and, frankly, what will happen and happens better if this debate focuses more on what that outcome produces, rather than a debate that makes people wonder exactly what do you have to do to continue to be a trusted partner of the United States. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, well, some farewell speeches are different than others. I think this farewell speech should very much be just a momentary pause for us to think about what comes next. Cory Gardner is incredibly accomplished. He has been good for the Senate. He has been great with his colleagues, and he has been, beyond that, even more constantly focused on Colorado. He has become, for me, a valued personal friend. Our families, for whatever reason, from almost the first time we spent any time together, sort of gravitated toward each other and continued to do things together. And why not? Jaime is great. Cory is that beam of sunshine that Senator Bennet and Senator Collins both have talked about, 365 days a year. He is optimistic. He is determined. He is realistic. Those are all three pretty doggone good characteristics for a successful legislator. He also continues to figure out, OK, that didn't work and what can we do that makes that work in some other way, to be determined to get the job done, to be realistic about how an obstacle can be in the way and understand how to come together and make all those things work. Now, Senator Collins, particularly, mentioned that long list of truly great legislative fights that Cory has successfully led in. One of them we worked together on has been the effort to be sure that people who weren't able to get broadband--people in rural areas and people in urban areas who maybe had broadband but couldn't afford it. By the way, I think that is the next big fight about broadband. It is not just accessibility but also, even though it may be running right by where you live, how do we work in ways that assure you are part of it. In little towns like I grew up in or Cory grew up in, it is the difference in whether you can compete or not. We have seen that so dramatically in the last few months, where kids going to school without the ability to have that access were dramatically hampered by that. People who couldn't use broadband for mental health or telehealth and people who just couldn't live where they prefer to live because they didn't have the connectedness they need to have are hampered by that. That is a fight that Cory has been in the middle of, and he understood it only maybe as you would understand it if half of your State is vertical and the other half is horizontal. You have got to figure out how to get the connectedness you would like to have. The second century of the National Park System, one of the truly great American miracles, will be dramatically different than it would have been otherwise because of the legislation that Cory led on. In thinking about the future of that system and thinking about the future of the country, I remember one of the first stories I heard Cory tell, after he got here, in a small group of people. I think his son Thatcher was headed out the door that he wasn't supposed to be going out, and Cory said: That reminds me of one of my speeches late in the campaign. I was done. I thought we were all done. I look around, and Thatcher's shoes are still on the platform, even though Thatcher shouldn't have ever been on the platform. And as Cory goes back to pick up Thatcher's shoes, he holds them up and says: This is why I am running. This is why I am running--for this little pair of shoes and all the other pairs of shoes that represent the future. I think Cory has done an incredible job here focusing on not just the present but the future. Frankly, as Senator Bennet said, I am personally interested in seeing what comes next in the future of a person and a family who have so much to offer and are willing to offer it in service to others. This is a day that I am ready to look and see what the next chapter of the Gardner story looks like and I think it is going to be optimistic and I think Cory will be smiling all the way through it. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, the Presiding Officer and I are here, and we have been meeting today in Washington at, really, a groundbreaking moment as we continue this battle for our health, for our economy, and against the virus. What makes this such a critical moment are the developments we have seen in the last 10 days regarding a vaccine. Public health experts around the world have agreed, almost from day one, that the way to really find the end of this pandemic--the ultimate weapon--would be to develop a vaccine that worked. Less than a year ago, which was in January and February of this year, we were hearing that 2 years would set a record for developing a vaccine and that sometimes a vaccine that has been developed on a new disease like this has taken 3 and 5 and even 10 years or more. Yet here we are, less a year from the discovery of COVID-19, with not just one vaccine but two vaccines that have already applied for their use permits. Both vaccines have shown an effectiveness of more than 90 percent, and a third vaccine with a similar response is about to get to the place at which it, too, can apply for use. These are incredible numbers. It wasn't that many months ago that healthcare experts were saying, if we get a vaccine that is effective 50 percent of the time or more, that the government should consider accepting that vaccine and making it available to people, and here we are with a 90 percent effective vaccine. I had the measles, and my kids had the measles shot, which seemed to pretty much eliminate the measles. It was 90 percent effective. This is the kind of vaccine that has been the most effective among the most effective vaccines we have ever had. Pfizer and Moderna have both come forward and asked for their emergency use authorizations. The emergency use doesn't really mean they have cut any corners. The only thing we have failed to do is to watch the 30,000 or so people for another 2 or 3 years who were in both of these trials. That is why we can't say with certainty if this vaccine will last for a lifetime or if this vaccine will be a 3-year vaccine or even a 1-year vaccine. What we can say with certainty is that, about 95 percent of the time, it will prevent you from getting the disease. Of course, if people are prevented from getting the disease, they can't spread the disease, and that is why a 90 percent effective vaccine, like the measles vaccine, was basically 100 percent effective as long as people took it. So we need to step back, really, I think, and look at the unconventional way we got here. How did we get from 3 to 5 to, maybe, 10 years to less than a year of discovering a virus for the very first time to our having a vaccine? The way that researchers have been able to move forward with this and the way that Congress and the Trump administration have responded to this pandemic has been extraordinary. In our country, Operation Warp Speed has accelerated the development of this new vaccine through a fast-track process that could be described, really, in one word-- unprecedented. Normally, vaccines take years. Researchers have to go out and secure funding, get approvals, and study results step by step to get to where we are today. Only then would a vaccine be determined to be safe and effective, and only then would manufacturing begin. Normally, with a vaccine, the day the vaccine is approved is the day you start manufacturing. We know that this is not what is happening here. In fact, in just a few minutes, I am going to mention that the head of distribution is saying, on the day the vaccine is approved, we will start shipping millions of copies of that vaccine all over the country. This all really started with Congress's deciding, as we put these COVID relief packages together from the very first couple of packages, that when it came to a cure, we were not going to let funding stand in the way nor were we going to let it stand in the way of investing some money somewhere that just simply didn't work because, by investing money where it didn't work, it allowed us to invest money where it did work. Congress appropriated $18 billion for vaccines and testing. About $12.5 billion has gone into the vaccine side. Most of the rest has gone into testing, with some going into therapy. This is a decision Congress made. With this vaccine, we are going to become partners in developing how we fight back. There was a risk that some of the vaccine candidates we supported wouldn't make it, but there was never a risk that the vaccine candidates that did make it wouldn't be as safe as any vaccine has ever been. In fact, many of these vaccines have had more people involved in the studies than ever before. Because of the virulence of the virus, the people in the studies, frankly, were more likely than not to be exposed to COVID, and a bunch of them were more likely than not to catch it. Of course, that is the moment when you decide if the group that caught the virus was the group that had the virus--the group that had the vaccine in these studies--or if it were the group that didn't have the vaccine. What we found out was, 95 percent of the time, it was the group that didn't have the vaccine, which is where you get that 95 percent number. Congress provided that we would take some risk. We so often hear that failure is not an option. In this case, if you didn't fail, you were not trying hard enough. If all you wind up with are things that have gotten approved, then you probably have left some things on the table that you should have tried. The Presiding Officer is a great businessman, and he knows, if you are in a business that is growing, you are going to have some failures. If you have never had failures in your business, you have not tried anything new, which means you probably haven't grown. So we would have failures not in a vaccine that we would give to people but by thinking: This would appear like it would have a good chance of being approved, so let's put it in the group of vaccines that we are working on. President Trump and Operation Warp Speed stepped up and decided they were going to move at a faster pace than ever before but with more safety than we have had in most vaccine developments in the history of the country. So we decided to support several vaccines that, again, we thought had a better chance of being approved than not. Now, you take some risk in that because all of the vaccines won't be approved, but you take no risk if you are going to support a vaccine that is approved but that is not safe. Yet that is not what happened at all. You just put a lot of racehorses in the race. The dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor University says, if you are racing to get a vaccine quickly, one way to do it is to put as many horses in the race as you can, and that is exactly what we have done. We have invested in several potential vaccines and, I think, three different paths to a vaccine, which means that all of the vaccines that are approved will not be exactly the same in how you have to store them, in how you have to transport them, and whether you have to have one shot or two to have the full vaccine. And we have signed contracts with six leading candidates already. We have invested $2.5 billion to help develop and purchase 100 million doses of the vaccine being developed by Moderna. That was jointly developed by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the company. We have dedicated $2 billion in a different pattern to purchase 100 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine, and we have done that with that investment in a way that allows us to shorten the processing time, combining various study phases and clinical trials going on at the same time and moving forward in a way that also allowed us to be manufacturing vaccines while we were still studying and moving toward final approval by the FDA. So we have two vaccines standing and ready now for final approval, another one to join them soon, and another one to join them quickly after that. But all of them are already in the stage of manufacturing. So what is the worst thing that could have happened to taxpayers? We invest in a vaccine that turns out not to work, and, at that point we step in, meet our commitment--in essence, buy the vaccine that didn't work--be sure that it is effectively destroyed, and realize that that was a chance that we took that didn't produce a result. But the other vaccines that did work had a result and had vaccine available as soon as they were approved. In fact, General Perna, Operation Warp Speed's chief operating officer, said the government would begin vaccinations within 24 hours after a vaccine secures FDA approval. In the past, I would say you would be closer to saying it will be 12 or 24 months after approval before the first vaccine is ready to go to the first person, but now we are saying 24 hours, and we are on the edge of that 24 hours. I talked today with the Governor of my State, the Governor of Missouri, Mike Parson, and the head of the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, Dr. Randall Williams, about what they were doing. They submitted a plan early. I was with the Governor--I think it was in mid-August--when the Centers for Disease Control told all the Governors: We want to have a plan by the end of October of how you are going to distribute this vaccine when you get it. I said at about that same time that if we failed in our effort to get the vaccine effectively distributed after the effort we made to get it, it would be one of the great government failures of all time. But Governor Parson, Dr. Williams, and others who have worked hard on this in our State put a plan in and put it in pretty early and now are ready to execute that plan as soon as they have the vaccine available to them. About 2 percent of the population of the country lives in Missouri, and so about 2 percent of every distribution will go to Missouri as vaccines are ready. Pfizer will have about 25 million vaccines to distribute almost immediately. Moderna will have about 20 million to distribute almost immediately. And we know that others are standing right behind them. Another thing that Congress asked the Centers for Disease Control to do was to come up with a recommendation on who the vaccine should be given to. And just this week the CDC advisory committee made their recommendation to the Centers for Disease Control. Either today or sometime soon after today, the CDC, in all likelihood, will adopt those recommendations as they have in this past. The recommendations go something like this: First, you want to prioritize healthcare workers and people most likely to have the worst result if they catch the virus. So if you take all the healthcare workers in America and all the people in a senior living kind of condition in America, you are talking about around 15 percent of the population. Somewhere in there, either in that group or the next group, you include all the first responders and police officers in the country, who come into situations so often that they have no control over, and then you go to the other essential employees in America--the childcare center worker, the schoolteacher, the busdriver, the grocery store clerk, the food processing person who is out there making this happen. I think there has been some decision made on the healthcare workers that we should include clergy in the healthcare workers because they are so often present in hospitals and with people in circumstances where they would like to see someone from their faith present, but that person also is a healthcare provider in the healthcare network and, just like others working in the hospital, will be able to get that early vaccination. But let's go back to the essential workforce. The essential workforce of the groups we have talked about and others who come into lots of contact with people are often least able to make arrangements in their own time to even get a vaccine if it is for free. They are going to be a bi priority. When I go to the grocery store and I ask someone for help, which I often need to do to find the one thing on my list I don't know how to find, or when I go by to check out with the grocery store clerk, if the grocery store clerk, no matter how big the shield is between them and me, if they couldn't possibly get it from the person who checked out 2 days earlier or early that day, they can't possibly give it to me. So every step of the way, the whole country becomes safer until, hopefully, by the end of April or so, we are at a place where everybody has access to the vaccine. By the way, by the time you do the 15 percent of the population that is most likely to have a bad result if they get the virus and healthcare workers and add that to the 35 percent of the population that is the essential workforce, that is 50 percent of the population that could have the vaccine if they chose to have it. I think most people think that we are there, in our State and other places, by sometime in April. In fact, Dr. Fauci said that Americans determined to be at the highest risk--healthcare workers, frontline workers, seniors, those with underlying conditions--could be vaccinated by the end of the year. Certainly, if there is a second shot, it might be by the end of January, and you have 15 percent of the whole population vaccinated by the end of January or sometime in January, and another 35 percent would have the vaccine available to them by sometime in April. Then we look at the rest of the population. But in each step of the way--let me say again--every time you take somebody off the playing field of where contact with the virus could successfully occur, everybody else gets safer too. If a person who has been vaccinated is where the germs happen to land instead of the person standing beside them who wasn't vaccinated, the life of that particular germ is gone, and eventually that is how you emerge from a pandemic. There just aren't enough people left for this to land on that either haven't had it or haven't had the vaccine to prevent it. It is a critical time. It is an important time. I think we have written two new chapters in pandemic response, both in testing and in vaccines. Operation Warp Speed has done in months what typically can take 10 to 15 years and, even in an expedited way, can take 2 to 3 to 5 years. Given the urgent need to beat this virus, I think Operation Warp Speed, with the great scientific community--a lot of this is built on research that was funded by NIH. One of the priorities of the Congress for the last 5 years has been to increase NIH funding, at a time when we know more about genetics. Two of these vaccines are basically based on the molecular code that is sort of the software for genetics. It is a different way than vaccines have been developed before and would not have been developed without government-encouraged research. Having a diverse selection of vaccines means there are different people producing vaccines at the same time in different places, and we will have, more likely, a quick and fair distribution of any FDA- authorized vaccines. Certainly, I have been frustrated, as many of us have, to think that we have not been able to reach an agreement on what money we might need to finish this vaccine effort, the distribution effort. Hopefully, we can come to the next round of COVID relief sooner rather than later. As I said earlier this week, a targeted funding package now will have a lot more impact than a much bigger package would have 4 or 5 months from now. There is no reason we shouldn't be able to find common ground. This is a time when we can make that effort to finish the job. The pandemic is affecting Americans every day. I have talked to a lot of people who have seen greater numbers of drug dependency and huge declines in mental health because that support network is gone and isolation has taken over, and worry about family, finances, and health has become a big part of that. Let's show the people we work for that we are going to be able to continue this job, and let's praise the great researchers in our country and others who stepped forward in incredible ways to do things that just 9 months ago nobody thought could possibly be established in the timeframe we are working on right now.