Executive Calendar

Floor Speech

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Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, I yield to the Senator from Oklahoma for a unanimous consent request.

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Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, I concur in the remarks of my friend from Michigan. A lot of our constituents have long thought that there has just been an enormous gulf between the conversations that we have in the U.S. Senate and the conversations that are going on at people's kitchen tables, that are going on between friends and neighbors at the supermarket. They think that what we worry about here is guided by lobbyists and K Street and political action committees and that it really doesn't have much to do with what they care about.

I don't know that their perception of that gulf has been any bigger than it is right now because the message that Senator McConnell and the Senate Republicans are sending is that there is no urgency, that there is no need for the Senate to act, that we have done everything that needs to be done for the time being when it comes to the depression levels of unemployment in this country, the lines that go on for blocks for families who can't afford food to pick up groceries and the schools that are scrambling to figure out how the heck they are going to reopen with the revenues for their municipalities and counties and States that are cratering through the floor.

So it just tears people's hair out right now to know that there is a piece of legislation that has been passed in the House of Representatives that will help millions of families who are in meltdown crisis right now as they have lost their jobs, as they, maybe, have sick loved ones, and as they don't know when life will get back to normal, but the Senate is doing nothing.

I understand my Senate Republican friends wouldn't have written the bill that passed in the House. It is understandable in that there is a different party in control of the Senate than is in control of the House of Representatives. Of course, there is going to be a difference in priorities. Yet the decision to not even take up the House bill--to not try to amend it, to not try to draft a version of our own to fill these enormous gaps that families are feeling right now--is maddening to the people whom I represent back home who feel that sense of urgency that is not shared by the folks who haven't lost their salaries or their healthcare benefits in the U.S. Senate.

Earlier today, we tried to take a small step forward to better protect our constituents and try to bring this pandemic to an end. Senator Durbin offered a pretty simple resolution that would have just expressed the sense of the Senate that we should join with nations around the world to try to develop a vaccine for COVID. I don't agree with the President. I don't think that it is all hopeless until we find a vaccine. I think that we can take steps in our communities through State leaders to try to reopen our economy even before we have a vaccine. Obviously, that is the goal for which we all strive, and we are much better off if we work with other countries to develop that vaccine.

As we speak, there are very promising discoveries that are being made in other countries. Many of the countries are allies of the United States. There is, in fact, an international effort underway to help pay for that vaccine development. Probably the most prominent of those efforts is something called CEPI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations. Curiously, though, all of our friends--all of our allies-- and some of our adversaries are members of that coalition, but the United States is not. So, if this coalition were to develop a vaccine and if it were to get there before the United States, then we wouldn't have a seat at the table to be able to decide where that vaccine goes. It is a question as to whether we would be able to get it to the United States if we are not sitting at that table. Why not hedge our bets?

I hope the dollars that we have proposed here in the U.S. Senate lead to the discovery of a vaccine's happening here, but if it doesn't, why would we not also want to be part of a coalition like CEPI so that, if it were to discover the vaccine first, we would get the benefit of it or, at the very least, we would get a say in where it would go. That is all the resolution said. Yet we couldn't get it passed.

This resolution was especially important because there is something extraordinary happening right now. It is not as if the Trump administration has decided that it is not going to go forward with membership in CEPI because it is going to lead a different international coalition. No. In fact, the Trump administration is taking a giant step back from the world and from international organizations just at the moment when it is the most necessary for us to be cooperating with the rest of the world in finding a vaccine or in stamping out this virus.

Remember, how we stopped Ebola from becoming a crisis in the United States is by being present in Africa to make sure that it didn't reach our shores. The Obama administration understood that travel bans and walls couldn't stop a virus from entering one's country, so you have to stamp it out everywhere in order to be protected here. So, just at the moment we need to be more engaged with the world, the Trump administration is withdrawing us from it.

Witness the President's unprecedented attacks on the WHO. Now, there is a stipulation. The WHO is not unlike any other major, multinational, international organization. It has flaws, and it has inefficiencies, but there is no way you can stand up an international coalition to manage the coronavirus or prevent the next pandemic without the World Health Organization. Color me skeptical that the President is sincerely interested in reforming the WHO. It seems as if it has been a fairly recent interest of the White House. One of the ways I can tell that is that we have a seat on the governing board of the WHO. If we have legitimate grievances over how the WHO is run--and I am amongst those who has a laundry list of reforms I would like to see at the WHO--then the proper way to express those grievances would be through our seat on the board of the WHO. But do you know what? It has been vacant for 3 years. The Trump administration hasn't put anybody on the board. It nominated somebody, but then Senator McConnell didn't bring him up for a vote. Then his name had to be withdrawn, and it took another 10 months for the Senate to finally put somebody on it in the middle of this crisis. So we have been absent from the WHO for 3 years.

Now the Trump administration is leveling some pretty serious criticisms at that organization. Many of them are crystallized in a letter that the President released to the world last night. What is extraordinary about this letter is that it is almost as if the President took a letter that detailed his administration's failings with respect to how it addressed the early moments of coronavirus and just substituted in the WHO for the Trump administration, because in this letter to the WHO, it reads: ``The World Health Organization has repeatedly made claims about the coronavirus that were either grossly inaccurate or misleading.''

Here is President Trump on January 22:

Question: Are there worries about a pandemic at this point?

No, not at all. . . . We have it totally under control. It's one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It's going to be just fine.

If you want to talk about the leading world figure making misstatements about the seriousness of the coronavirus, it is President Donald Trump, especially in January and February, when we could have been getting a head start.

Further in this letter, it reads: ``[T]he World Health Organization has been curiously insistent on praising China for its alleged `transparency.' ''

Here is President Donald J. Trump on January 24. This isn't in answer to a question. This is just an unsolicited remark about China on his Twitter account.

He writes:

China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!

There was no more enthusiastic cheerleader for China and its response to the coronavirus in January, February, and March than our own President.

If President Trump wants to level criticisms at the WHO for being too soft on China, he has to look himself in the mirror and understand that it frankly would have been hard for the WHO to stand up and contradict its most important donor and patron, the United States of America.

On February 7, the President was given this question:

Are you concerned that China is covering up the full extent of coronavirus?

President Trump's answer:

No. China is working very hard. . . . They're working really hard, and I think they are doing a very professional job.

On February 18:

Mr. President, are you still satisfied with how President Xi is handling the coronavirus?

Answer: I think President Xi is working very hard.

Question: Some people don't seem to trust the data coming from China. Are you worried about that?

Trump: Look, I know this: President Xi loves the people of China. He loves his country, and he's doing a very good job.

February 26, the question is:

How can you legitimately trust President Xi and the Chinese?

Well, I can tell you this: I speak to him; I had a talk with him recently. And he is working so hard on this problem. . . . And they're tough and very smart.

There is no one who was defending China more vociferously in January and February than President Trump. It came on the heels of his decision to pull two-thirds of the CDC scientists out of that country, to shutter a program that was tracking viruses around the world, including China, and now the President has compounded that error by pulling the United States out of the WHO, an imperfect but absolutely necessary body that can be the only natural source of convening for a fight to stop coronavirus over the course of this summer and this fall and to prevent the next pandemic.

This is a moment when we should be putting a foot forward into the world and leading--and leading. There is no wall; there is no travel restriction that can stop this virus. Why do we know that? Because the President crowed about his travel restriction on China, and we found out that 400,000 people got here from countries subject to the ban before and after it was put into effect.

He sends out pictures on a regular basis of a wall going up with Mexico. That didn't stop this virus from getting here. We need to be present on the world stage right now.

Finally, if the President's complaint is that China and the WHO are too close, then by withdrawing from the WHO, we are effectively exacerbating the problem that the President identifies as one that needs to be solved. Why? Because yesterday President Xi accepted an invitation to speak before the WHO--an invitation that President Trump turned down--and he pledged to lead the world's response to the humanitarian suffering caused by coronavirus.

Now, color me skeptical about China's intentions, but the fact is, they were on that world stage putting $2 billion into that effort yesterday, and we were nowhere to be found. The greatest beneficiary that comes from the United States' stepping back at this moment and walking away from the WHO is the Chinese Government. I believe that our security will be defined by our ability to contest efforts by China to grow its power around the world. We are gifting them--gifting them--an advancement of their power and influence through our refusal to take part in WHO, our refusal to lead the effort to reform it, and our refusal as called upon in this resolution that was objected to earlier today offered by Senator Durbin to be part of the global effort to try to find a vaccine.

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