Tom Harkin

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, this is the amendment that a lot of us talked about earlier that provides funding for a possible avian flu pandemic. We have worked a lot on both sides of the aisle. I especially thank our chairman, Senator Specter, for his guidance and leadership on this amendment, for working this out and, again, ensuring that we can move ahead to make sure this country is ready with the funds we need to provide for better global surveillance, to provide for stockpiling of antivirals and vaccines, for money that is going to be needed for building flu vaccine manufacturing plants and for making sure our public health infrastructure is adequate and that we have the surge capacity in hospitals. That is all in this amendment. Again, I thank Senator Specter for his leadership on this amendment in working it out so that we can move to a voice vote on this amendment.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from California for offering this amendment and for being, if she doesn't mind my term, the watchdog. We all get wrapped up in a lot of things here. But I can't think of anything more important than what Senator Boxer is talking about right now. We know what is happening in this country. We know more and more people are being squeezed by the fact that we can't raise the minimum wage. They are being squeezed by the lack of adequate housing. They are being squeezed by entry-level jobs that they cannot get. There are all kinds of pressures on families. We passed a law 10 years ago, Welfare to Work, to get people off of welfare to go to work. We always knew that the one big component we never answered was, what do you do with the kids? It is both daycare and afterschool funding because these parents get home right away--usually single parents. We need the funding for the afterschool programs. If we want to cut down on teen crime and teen drugs, teen pregnancies, this is the way to do it. Senator Boxer is absolutely right. It is a shame we do not have the money for it. We should have. I thank the Senator for offering this amendment. I hope, with the concurrence of our chairman, we can somehow find the money for this. I don't know where. It is tight. I know we have a tight situation. I cannot think of anything more worthy than this program. I thank the Senator from California.

Mr. HARKIN. I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Mr. HARKIN. Parliamentary inquiry. The amendment is No. 2282 or No. 2280?

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, amendment No. 2259 is an amendment that was offered by Senator Bingaman and Senator Smith. This amendment funds money for the AIDS Drug Assistance Program. It was mentioned earlier. I know that Senator Bingaman and others wanted a rollcall vote on amendment No. 2259. I believe all debate has transpired. I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, if my colleagues will withhold for just a second, I do not seem to have that amendment in front of me.

Mr. HARKIN. I do not have any objection to this amendment.

Mr. HARKIN. Parliamentary inquiry.

Mr. HARKIN. Is that on amendment No. 2262?

Mr. HARKIN. I believe in my conversations with both Senator Bingaman and Senator Hutchison that they agreed to a voice vote on this amendment. So I ask unanimous consent to vitiate the yeas and nays on this amendment.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to bring up amendment No. 2259.

Mr. HARKIN. What does the Senator propose?

Mr. HARKIN. I too will work hard to make this happen since this is an issue important to the Senator and the Nation.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to call up amendment No. 2283.

Mr. HARKIN. Under the able chairmanship of the Senator from Pennsylvania, we have defined, once again, that we are going to meet our obligations in those areas that make us a caring and compassionate and decent people. That is what is in this bill. Again, I thank Senator Specter for his great leadership.

Mr. HARKIN. Yes, I also agree we need to make progress through a study on this issue. It certainly is not going away.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I know the distinguished Senator Byrd wants to speak for a while. I want to take a couple of minutes again to thank the staff, both Senator Specter's staff and my staff. They have worked together. I know Senator Specter mentioned them earlier, but I will mention them by name again because they should be mentioned: Bettilou Taylor, Jim Sourwine, Sudip Parikh, Mark Laiseh, Lisa Bernhardt, Candice Rogers, and Rachel Jones on the minority side. On the majority side: Ellen Murray, Erik Fatemi, and Adrienne Hallett. They do a wonderful job, and they have done so this year, putting this bill together, I know staying up long nights and weekends, working this out. Someone once remarked that Senators were a constitutional impediment to the smooth functioning of staff. Our staffs function very smoothly. They do a great job, and I hope we have not impeded them too much. Last, I want, again, to pay my respects to our chairman, Senator Specter, who has done a magnificent job of putting a lot of competing interests together. This is a big bill. This covers the Department of Labor, the Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Education, and a lot of independent agencies--the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health. By the way, I especially want to thank Senator Specter for bringing us up on the National Institutes of Health by $1 billion more than what was in the President's budget. I think we met our obligations there. I say to my friend and my chairman, it has been an honor and privilege to work with him all these years. We go back, I think, about 15 years now, working together. I could not ask for a better chairman of this committee. I could not ask for a better working relationship. Senator Specter has always been open and aboveboard to make sure we all know what is going on. It has been a real pleasure, a real joy to work with Senator Specter. I thank him for that and look forward to many more fruitful years of working together on issues that really matter. Someone once said the Defense Appropriations Committee is the committee that defends America. The committee that funds Health and Human Services and Education and Labor is the committee that defines America. I happen to believe that this committee does define America, defines who we are, and what we are about as a people.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. We have no objections on this side.

Mr. HARKIN. We have to ask some very tough questions now. Where do our preparedness efforts stand? What can we do better? We are facing a threat, a huge threat. We are doing nothing. We can do better. We must do better for the American people to prepare for an avian flu pandemic. First, let's look at the issue of global surveillance, which is No. 1 in terms of the first part of our amendment that we have addressed. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is doing a great job working in cooperation with the World Health Organization and governments in affected regions to detect the disease and to help stop its spread. Dr. Gerberding, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta--I don't know if she is getting any sleep now because this is topmost on their agenda. They are on the case. Surveillance can alert us to an outbreak, and governments can then take measures to isolate the disease. This is our first line of defense. The sooner we identify and contain an outbreak of human-to- human transmitted avian flu virus, the better off we will be. To coin a well-worn phrase: It is better to fight them over there than to fight them here. It is better to stop H5N1, isolate it, contain it where it might break out, rather than having it transmitted and brought to other countries and brought to America. Again, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention know how to do this. We had success with surveillance during the SARS outbreak a couple years ago. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention managed to control its spread. It never got to America. I think the closest it got, if I am not mistaken, was Toronto. But we also learned some invaluable lessons from the SARS episode. We learned we have to be prepared, that our surveillance efforts have to be more than they have been in the past. Secretary Leavitt, who I know has also been on top of this, recently took a tour of Southeast Asia. He took Dr. Fauci, the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Gerberding, and others. I know they met with people in various parts of the governments of several countries in Southeast Asia. What I heard back from that is, while the governments are willing to work with us, and to report and survey, a lot of times they do not have the capacity, they do not have the knowledge, they do not have the wherewithal of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They could use our help. Many of these outbreaks of avian flu in those countries are in remote locations, and the central government may not have a lot of control over that. If you take a small village where they have a lot of poultry, and maybe that is one of their major sources of livelihood, and where they do not understand the dimensions of avian flu and what it means, well, maybe they do not report it, or it may be reported in a minor way. We need people there on the ground who can move rapidly to the sites to see whether a case of avian flu has broken out. As I understand it, the governments of these countries are willing to work with us to allow us to do that, but we do not have the resources to do that right now because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention simply does not have the money. That is what is in our amendment: to give the Secretary of Health and Human Services the money to be able to respond and get CDCP action prone, right now, in those countries. Secondly, what is the status of our capacity to produce vaccines here in the United States? Unfortunately, the news is almost all bad. It is astonishing that the United States has one plant--one plant--capable of manufacturing flu vaccines. That plant happens to be in the State of our distinguished chairman, Pennsylvania. It is a great company. They do great work. I have met with them. They use one technology. It is egg-based technology. That is basically the technology we have been using for a long time in which to grow vaccines from a virus strain. So since we only have that one plant right now, in the event of a worldwide pandemic, the U.S. would have to rely on imported vaccines, vaccines other countries may not be willing to ship to us. In other words, the first responsibility of any government is to protect its own people. If this pandemic ever breaks out, I doubt any other government is going to be willing to ship us vaccines. They are going to want it for their own people. We are very vulnerable. We need to play some catch-up ball. The Federal Government needs to help private industry develop more vaccine manufacturing capacity. These should be next-generation cell-based facilities, which would then be capable of producing vaccines at twice the rate of egg-based facilities. This is the only way we are going to be able to produce enough vaccine rapidly enough to deal with a major outbreak. Right now it is all egg-based. As I understand it, the manufacturing plant I mentioned is in the process of enlarging its capacity for egg-based vaccines. That is all well and good, but that still will not be enough to protect us in the future. It will not be sufficient to take a strain of the virus and develop a vaccine specifically for that virus in a short period of time. Some say it would take 2 to 3 years to produce a nonegg-based production capacity. I don't accept that. This is a matter of incredible urgency. We have already given one grant to a company--it is public, I can mention it--Sanofi Pasteur, which is the company based in Pennsylvania that already has a cell-based vaccine manufacturing plant which they are increasing. The Government has already given them a grant--it was under a competitive bid situation--to build a cell- based plant. That is all well and good. But we have to do a lot more than that. We need two or three on line being built now, not just one. Our goal should be to have the research and production capacity to isolate a virus, convert it to a vaccine, produce enough vaccine for the American populace, all within a timeframe of 3 to 6, maybe 9 months at the most. We can do that. That can be done. We don't have the capacity to do it right now, and we are a long way from reaching that goal. Again, keep in mind that H5N1, the strain of the virus that is there now, we have a vaccine for that. The National Institutes of Health, under the great leadership of Dr. Zerhouni and Dr. Fauci at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases--Dr. Fauci got a strain of the virus earlier this year. They then began a crash program to develop a vaccine. They have. That vaccine is now in clinical trials. It looks as though it is going to be pretty good against H5N1. But we have been warned by experts that H5N1 may not be the strain that comes here. It could be H5N2, N3, N4, N5, something else just as virulent. Experts believe the vaccine being developed will have some effect, perhaps, on different strains, but they can't be sure. What we need is a vaccine manufacturing capacity, cell-based, so you can manufacture a vaccine in a hurry, so if a different strain were to hit here, we could again isolate the virus, develop the vaccine, and have a vaccine within 6 to 9 months, not just developed but also manufactured in sufficient capacity to vaccinate our people. That is also in our amendment. I hasten to add that in our amendment, we don't specify exactly how this is to be done. We will leave that up to the Secretary--hopefully, working with us in a collaborative effort--to figure out the best way of doing it. The point is to get the money out there now, to know it is there, that we can move ahead with contractual relationships, cost- share agreements, guaranteed purchases, whatever it takes to get these facilities constructed in the shortest possible timeframe. The third part of our amendment, we need an aggressive program of purchasing and stockpiling vaccines and antivirals. I just talked about vaccines. Vaccines are what you take to prevent getting the illness. Antivirals are what would you take if you get the illness so you don't get very sick. The World Health Organization a few years ago recommended that nations stockpile enough antiviral medication to cover at least 25 percent of the population. Guess where we are right now. One percent. We have enough antiviral medication to cover 1 percent of our people. Again, we have to play catch-up ball. Antivirals are the medications one would take if they get sick. It will prevent a lot of people from dying, help them get through the illness. I had Senator Kennedy prepare this chart, which illustrates how unprepared we are. These are the stockpiles of antiviral medicine. Australia has enough for 20 percent of the population; Great Britain has enough for 25 percent, the World Health Organization recommendation; France has 25 percent; Japan is rapidly building up, they are at 17 percent. The U.S.A. is at 1 percent stockpile of medications. Again, if the pandemic hits here, are we going to go to Britain and say: Send us some of yours, or Japan or France or some other place? No. They are going to keep their antivirals for their own people. That is why we need to put the money out right now to begin the purchase of antivirals and to stockpile them. It has a long shelf life so we don't have to worry about it. That is the antivirals. As for vaccines, we are facing a catch-22 situation. We won't be able to produce a vaccine until we actually see what the variant is, H5N1, H5N3, whatever it might be that causes the outbreak. Scientists at NIH have developed a vaccine for H5N1. They believe it will be effective against some of the future variants, but we don't know exactly how effective. It is the best we have. It will at least provide some protection. We should be stockpiling it now. The fourth part of our amendment is the public health infrastructure. Right now our public health infrastructure is simply not capable of dealing either with an avian flu pandemic or even a major act of bioterrorism. Let's assume we build up adequate stocks of the vaccine. Let's say we are able to get a crash course and we can get up to 25 percent, like Great Britain, in our antivirals. Let's say we can do that in a short period of time. I believe we can, if we put the funds out there. Let's say we have all that. It is going to go for naught if we don't have a public health infrastructure to deliver it, to identify the people who need it, to make sure these drugs and antivirals and vaccines get out there. One thing I am upset about--the President's budget for fiscal year 2006 proposed to cut $120 million from State public health agencies. That is the wrong way to go. Our amendment doesn't just restore that; it goes a lot further. It is not enough just to restore the funding. That funding would basically take care of ``normal'' illnesses people get around the country. It wouldn't even come close if we had an outbreak of avian flu. We need to hire more public health professionals, epidemiologists, physicians, lab technicians, others. We need people who are trained and educated to recognize, to know how to isolate, to know how to put the rings around populations if avian flu breaks out, and how to distribute it, who gets these, who is the first line of individuals. Someone is detected having avian flu; let's say they do get H5N1. How do we find out who that person came in contact with in the last 48 hours, track them down, get them the vaccines immediately, or the antivirals? Did the person work in a building that had central air- conditioning that could have taken the virus and spread it around? Who works there? Get them the antivirals and the vaccines immediately. This takes expertise. This takes people. This takes a knowledge base and education. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention know how to do it. They can do it for minor outbreaks now. But something this big, we need to do more to build up that public health infrastructure. In consonance with the public health infrastructure, we need to dramatically increase the surge capacity of hospitals all across the country. Most hospitals right now have trouble coping if we have a bad flu season with what we call ordinary flu. They would be overwhelmed by an avian flu pandemic. Dr. Rick Blum, president of the American College of Emergency Room Physicians, recently said: We have pumped billions of dollars into preparedness since 9/11, but virtually none of that has gone to the one place where we know 80 percent of patients go first, [the emergency room]. For example, most victims of avian flu would need ventilators to help them breathe. Right now there are only 105,000 ventilators in the entire United States, three-quarters of them in use on any given typical day. So we have to prepare for surge capacity. Where do the tens of millions of Americans go? Don't take my word. Ask the experts. That is what they are saying: a million to as high as maybe 10 million hospitalizations. We have our work cut out for us. We face enormous technical and logistical challenges. We have no time to waste. This amendment would provide for nearly $8 billion for a comprehensive national effort to prepare in the ways I have outlined. More specifically, the total is divided up as follows: $3.080 billion would be allocated for stockpiling antivirals and the necessary medical supplies to deal with a pandemic once it has broken out; $3.3 billion would go to stockpiling flu vaccines, expanding the U.S. flu vaccine manufacturing capacity and for vaccine-related research; $600 million in additional grants to State and public health agencies for their own emergency preparedness; $750 million to improve hospital preparedness and surge capacity--where is the overflow going to go--and for health technology information networks; $60 million for stepped-up global surveillance--this would quadruple the current level of surveillance we have right now, our first line of defense--$75 million allocated for communication and outreach to the public in case of an avian flu pandemic. Again, this is where you have to tread lightly. You want to get people informed. People should be understanding of this. If a case of avian flu were to break out in this country, we don't want panic to ensue. People need to be adequately informed and advised. This has to do with communications and outreach. Lastly, $100 million will be channeled into research and CDC lab capacity related to an avian flu pandemic. Now, this is about double what we had in the Defense appropriations bill almost a month ago. And the reason for that is simply because in the meetings we have had with Government officials, with drug companies, and others, it has become clear that the big gap in the amendment we offered earlier was the $3.3 billion in stockpiling flu vaccine and getting money out there to rapidly build cell-based technology through vaccine-manufacturing plants. We have to do that right away. I know the analogy may not be correct, but when people say you can't do that in a big hurry, I say just think about the Pentagon over here, how big it is. Have you ever seen the Pentagon? We built the Pentagon in 9 months during World War II, by the way. Now, I know that vaccine manufacturing is not the same but, come on, we can do it. We can build the facilities. A lot of it is in equipment. But if the money is there, we know we can get the equipment built. Maybe we can't do it in 9 months, but don't tell me we can't do it within a year and a half, or at least have a couple on line within a year. That is really the big difference between this amendment and the one that was offered a month ago on the Defense appropriations bill. Let me again sum up by saying this is the proper bill for it to be on. If we had had Labor-HHS earlier, we would have offered the amendment to that. This is the proper place for it. We do have the jurisdiction. It ought to be here. And, again, we are not tying the hands of the Secretary or anyone else. We are not being absolutely specific on how you do things in the amendment. We want the money to be there. When the administration comes up with their plan and they want to move ahead, it is there. We have 3 more weeks--I don't know how many weeks. Everybody tells us 3 more weeks. Let's face it, there are a lot of things happening in the administration--Supreme Court Justices, other things that are bouncing around here that divert attention. We cannot divert our attention. We cannot. We have to get this money out there and get it appropriated. I will have more to say perhaps later on. I know there are other Senators who wish to speak on this amendment and about the threat of an avian flu pandemic. So I will yield the floor at this time and just say I hope we can have a strong vote or have this amendment accepted as we did under the Defense appropriations bill that was taken up earlier. And, again, this is emergency funding--emergency funding. It ought to be emergency funding. It is something we have to do. We just cannot wait any longer. So I will yield the floor and ask any Senators who want to speak on this amendment to come over and speak.

Mr. HARKIN. Will the Senator just yield for a minute?

Mr. HARKIN. I ask unanimous consent to set the pending amendment aside and return to amendment No. 2283.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, what is the pending amendment or business before the Senate?

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, before I talk about this amendment that has to do with avian flu, I add my congratulations to the Chicago White Sox for a sterling performance--four straight games in the World Series--to congratulate the team, and to congratulate their owner, Jerry Reinsdorf. The last time the Chicago White Sox won the World Series was 1917. Of course, they were the Black Sox at that time. And the outstanding performer during that 1917 classic was a guy by the name of Joseph Jefferson Jackson from Greenville, SC. Baseball fans and aficionados perhaps may not recognize his real name, but they will recognize the name Shoeless Joe Jackson. In 1999, along with Senator Thurmond and Senator Hollings, we introduced a sense-of-the-Senate resolution. It was accepted by the Senate. Commissioner Selig agreed to review the Shoeless Joe Jackson case to reinstate him to baseball. However, 6 years have passed and Mr. Selig has done nothing. With the winning of the World Series by the Chicago White Sox, it is time to revisit this issue. In that regard, Senator DeMint from South Carolina and I have submitted a resolution. We will be talking about it later today at an appropriate time when Senator DeMint and I can both be on the Senate floor. I want Senators to know we have a sense-of-the- Senate resolution that Senator DeMint and I will be submitting similar to the one we offered in 1999 once again trying to honor one of baseball's all-time great players who suffered a great injustice at the hands of the then Commissioner Landis, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who was a commissioner of baseball for almost 40 years. It was Commissioner Landis who banned Shoeless Joe Jackson from baseball, and robbed him of his rightful place in the Baseball Hall of Fame. We will have more to say about that later today. I congratulate the Chicago White Sox on a great victory and thank my colleague and my friend from South Carolina for working to get this new resolution. Hopefully, we will take it up in the Senate this afternoon and pass it sometime this afternoon. Mr. President, we have an amendment before the Senate that is crucial to maybe even our most basic survival as a nation, perhaps crucial to the survival of our economy and the future. I know that sounds like overblown rhetoric, but everyone has probably been reading lately about the threat of an avian flu pandemic. It has been on all the news magazines and all the news shows. Newsweek magazine last week had a very comprehensive expose or at least a delineation of the flu, how it is spread, how virulent it is, and what it can do to us. So I don't think it is overblown to say this perhaps could be the biggest threat our country has faced in the last 100 years. As has been pointed out in numerous articles and I think elsewhere in the Newsweek article I referred to earlier, what this pandemic could do to us as a people is even more threatening than what a few terrorists could do and, as they point out, even a few terrorists with a nuclear- type device. This pandemic could literally--estimated by the experts, not by me--cause the death of anywhere from 200,000 to 2 million Americans, with tens of millions of Americans hospitalized without any capacity to take care of them. This would cause a disruption in our economy the likes of which we have probably never seen. I have been involved in looking at avian flu for the last several years, tracking it and keeping in close contact with the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. I always try to be careful we do not unduly alarm people. I don't want to put myself nor do I think we should put ourselves in the position of unduly alarming or generating a phobia that paralyzes our country, but alarm bells must be rung. The warning signs are there. We have to start preparing. The time for planning and thinking about it has passed. We have to do something immediately. The amendment we are debating allows the United States to dramatically step up emergency preparations for an avian flu pandemic. Last month, I offered on the Defense appropriations bill a similar amendment that provided $3.9 billion to prepare for such a pandemic. At that time, we did not know when or if the Labor-HHS bill would ever come to the Senate. Obviously, this is the appropriate place for it since this appropriations subcommittee under the leadership of Senator Specter has jurisdiction over both the Department of Health and Human Services and also the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and also the National Institutes of Health. Between last month when this amendment was adopted on the Defense appropriations bill and now, I have gone back to NIH, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and a number of drug companies involved in either vaccine production or the production of antivirals to get a better handle on what it is we need to do. Just what is it? I will admit that in the first amendment, which I offered on the Defense appropriations bill, we were missing some information. But now we have that information. So the amendment we have before us today is a more robust version of that earlier amendment we had on the Defense appropriations bill which was adopted by the Senate. This version is based on more and better information. There is a broad consensus in the scientific community as to the steps we need to take to get ready for a potential pandemic. Reflecting that scientific consensus, this amendment will do four broad things. One, as our first line of defense, it will dramatically step up international surveillance of avian flu outbreaks overseas. Two, it will ramp up our vaccine production infrastructure here in the United States. Three, it will give us resources to build up both stockpiles of vaccines currently believed to be effective against avian flu as well as stockpiling antiviral medications that you take if, in fact, you get infected. Fourth, this amendment will strengthen our public health infrastructure at the Federal, State, and local levels, which today is simply not equipped to cope with a major pandemic. Some have suggested that we be patient and we wait for the administration to put forward a plan to fight avian flu. We have already waited too long. I am not saying we don't need a plan. We do need an action plan. But we have been warned for years. The first warning came in 1997 that an avian flu pandemic was not just possible but likely, just as we were warned for years that the levees in New Orleans would fail in the case of a major hurricane. Yet the Federal Government did not come forward with any plan of action. I am not saying this Government under President Bush. It was previous Federal Governments. We did not heed the warnings. As I might even say, we were warned in 1997 about a coming avian flu pandemic. Well, nothing was done then either. There is a lot of blame to go around. I am not blaming anyone. I am saying, look, we have turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to our warnings. Now we have to take action. Within the last year, the threat of a pandemic has become even more urgent and immediate. The alarm bells are ringing at full volume, and we in Congress cannot in good conscience wait any longer. We need to act. If the administration offers a plan at a later date, that is fine. It will almost certainly have to include the elements we have in our amendment. We are all talking to the same people, after all. But here is the thing. I do not know when they are going to come up with their plan. I do know at least there is talk around here that we are going to adjourn by Thanksgiving, finish our business, be out of here by Thanksgiving. Well, if the administration comes up with a plan next week, or the week after, and we are out of here, what happens in terms of needing the resources, the money? That is what we have. Our responsibility as appropriators is to come up with the money. That is what this amendment does, so that if the administration does come up with a good action plan, we will not have lost any time. The money will be there, and we can move ahead as rapidly as possible. There is no question the United States is woefully unprepared for a major outbreak of human-to-human transmitted avian flu. We have had clear warnings, as we did prior to 9/11, prior to Katrina, but, again, the Federal Government did not do anything. Now we have been warned in no uncertain terms about avian flu, but, again, under two administrations, nothing has happened. As many of my colleagues know, avian flu--or H5N1, as it is called in the scientific community--has passed from bird to bird and from birds to humans. We know of one specific case--we know of one specific case--where it went from human to human. Now, there may be others, but we do know of them. And we do know that 50 percent of the humans who have been infected with avian flu have died-- 50 percent. It has a 50-percent mortality rate. We also know another thing: Every chicken, every member of the poultry family that has been infected with avian flu dies--100 percent. This is a very virulent strain. Experts in virology at the Department of Health and Human Services say it is only a matter of time before the virus mutates and human-to- human transmission becomes both widespread and sustained. That has not happened yet. We have had some cases of the avian flu jumping from a bird to a human. As I said, we have had one known case of it going from one human to another; and, I might add, both died. We have had no cases where the transmission is both sustained and pervasive, widespread, but the virologists say it is only a matter of time before that happens. An outbreak in China, Vietnam, Cambodia, or anywhere such as that, could trigger within weeks a worldwide outbreak, facilitated by air travel, the mass movement of people across borders. As I said, 50 percent of the individuals who have been infected have died. You can envision a nightmare scenario, a kind of 21st century ``Black Death'' that is not difficult to picture. Indeed, most experts say it is not a matter of if but when. Let me quote from an article that was in the recent Newsweek magazine of October 31, an article by Fareed Zakaria, entitled ``A Threat Worse Than Terror": ``A flu pandemic is the most dangerous threat the United States faces today,'' says Richard Falkenrath, who until recently served in the Bush administration as deputy Homeland Security adviser. ``It's a bigger threat than terrorism. In fact it's bigger than anything I dealt with when I was in government.'' One makes a threat assessment on the basis of two factors: the probability of the event, and the loss of life if it happened. On both counts, a pandemic ranks higher than a major terror attack, even one involving weapons of mass destruction. A crude nuclear device would probably kill hundreds of thousands. A flu pandemic could easily kill millions. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Newsweek article be printed in the Record.

Mr. HARKIN. I want to respond by thanking the chairman and my good friend from Pennsylvania for his great leadership on this issue. You said it about me, but you have been the chairman. You have led this subcommittee. You know what is needed. You have been first and foremost in insisting that we get the funds necessary for both CDC and for NIH for this research. I might just say again for public knowledge, obviously our chairman, the Senator from Pennsylvania, has to wear other hats. As chairman of the Judiciary Committee he has been tied up a lot on Supreme Court nominees, and I recognize he has had to deal with that on his side, in chairing that committee. It is an awesome responsibility, and I commend him for the work he has done, by the way. I thought the hearings on Judge Roberts were superb, and I commend my friend for his leadership in chairing that committee. So we find ourselves in the situation now where we have asked for information in the past, but things happen around here and we move on and our focus gets diverted a little bit on this and that. That is human nature. I understand that. I hope we can hear back from the administration. I say to my friend from Pennsylvania that I have no problem in modifying the amendment or whatever it might be that would say that the money is there. In fact, the amendment does not say how they would spend it. It would be there for them. If there is any way we can modify that, if they have some other ways on what to do, that is fine with me. I do not mind that at all. I am just concerned that we have it there so that we don't have to come back at some point and they can't say, well, we would do it, but Congress didn't appropriate the money. I sure do not want to have that sitting on our plate, I say to chairman.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Parliamentary inquiry: How much time remains?