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Floor Speech
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Mr. TUBERVILLE. Madam President, it is great to be back with my Senate colleagues this week. It has been a while. But we need to get a lot done in this year's new Congress.
As a new Congress is getting underway, our country faces many problems, many problems that we need to address. However, as we look ahead to what we can accomplish this Congress, we also need to look back and learn from the past. Having the courage to recognize and address problems prevents us from making problems and continuing the same thing in the future.
It is high time we take a look back at the devastating impacts of some of the Federal and State government policies in response to COVID- 19 and the pandemic. Most importantly, we have to focus on education. We have to look at the toll the lockdowns have taken on our country's youngest citizens.
Unfortunately, like many issues in DC, the COVID crisis was weaponized for some political gain. The government misused emergency measures to grow its control over Americans' daily lives. Hopefully, those days are over.
This time 3 years ago, COVID was making its way around our country, through the States and through the communities. Of course, in the early days, we knew very little about the virus and how to respond to it, so leaders in both parties, leaders across our States and our communities, called for a pause in daily activities to get control of the spread of COVID-19. But what we didn't know then was how long that pause would last, not just in some areas but all over our country. And we certainly didn't know that our response could end up being worse--the response that we had being worse than the actual COVID that was running across our country.
We are just now starting to understand the impact of COVID-related lockdowns. They weren't just extreme, they were deadly in some areas.
Research led by a professor at the University of Chicago exposed the deadly impact of lockdowns by analyzing the excess death rate in our country during the use of these lockdowns. The ``excess rate'' is a term used to describe the number of deaths above historical norms--or how many more Americans died than we would typically expect to pass away during any given year. So those were balanced up and looked at from the years of COVID to the years past.
According to the data from the CDC, the number of non-COVID excess deaths reached almost 100,000 people in 2020 and in 2021. The hundreds of thousands of non-COVID excess deaths during the pandemic can be mainly attributed to shocking increases in accidents, overdoses, and death from alcoholism and homicide. Those causes disproportionately impacted minorities and low-income Americans--the same groups lockdowns were often billed and made to protect.
The number of deaths from hypertension and heart disease and diabetes also skyrocketed during the pandemic. This was especially true for America's young people. In total, excess deaths among young adults throughout the pandemic were 27 percent higher than they should be, according to historical records of years past.
It does not take a scientist to draw the connection between lockdowns and all the excess deaths that we have had the last 3 years. Not only were Americans kept out of gyms, parks, churches, social settings, and family gatherings, they were forced to skip routine doctor visits, surgeries, and in-person medical treatments out of fear. And fear was the main weapon used against the American people. As a result, mental and physical health plummeted.
While lockdowns across the country slowly ended, the deadly repercussions did not. For example, through the middle of last year, overdose deaths per year outnumbered the total number of military deaths in the past 60 years.
The truth is, the physical and mental health consequences of overreaching lockdowns will be measured for years and years to come.
Locking Americans out of school, work, church, and social contact had disastrous impacts on our economy, our education system, and our society as a whole.
We all saw businesses across the country go under as customers were kept away and the daily hum of our economy was silenced.
As kids were forced into virtual schooling, an entire generation of Americans lost months and even years of valuable educational opportunities. Research conducted by the global consulting firm McKinsey found that COVID-related school disruption left students 5 months behind in math and 4 months behind in reading. Students who were already underserved were hit even harder by school closures. High schoolers were left more likely to drop out and less likely to pursue further education after the lockdowns. And more than 35 percent of American parents were left ``very or extremely concerned about their children's mental health.''
Today, our schools are facing a shortage of teachers, months of instruction still missing, and a mental health and behavioral crisis among our country's students. It is a pandemic.
As someone who spent decades myself as an educator and a coach, who fostered the potential of young adults, I am committed to ensuring we never inflict the damage on our school-age kids again, no matter what.
I bring up these sobering facts on health and education to call on this body to join me in this commitment in this Congress to do away with what we just did. We have to evaluate it. We cannot keep going forward this way.
This is especially important as some influential people in our government, media, and public health circles continue today to call for measures that disrupt our society in ways we know have terrible consequences.
The Biden administration is hellbent on keeping the COVID-19 public health emergency that is still in place. We still have it today.
Just last week, President Biden extended the emergency declaration because of the extra power it gives to the Federal Government, and he does that for another 90 days.
Attorneys for the Federal Government were in court asking an unelected judge to reinstate the national mask mandate for air travel just in the last few weeks.
Keep in mind, this body, in a bipartisan manner, voted to end the emergency declaration just this last year-- something we should do again in this Congress.
But even though the President himself has deemed the pandemic over, bureaucrats are obsessed with keeping this charade going.
Enough is enough. We must be the barrier between the American people and tyranny because tyrannical orders, like the COVID lockdowns, are dangerous to every citizen in this country.
As we get to work this Congress, I hope all my colleagues will join me in recognizing the tough realities I have just laid out. We cannot continue to do this, and we can't do it again. We have to commit to defending freedom in every circumstance. We have to learn from our past mistakes.
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