Heidi Alexander: “I want to report on an important hearing the Senate HELP Committee just completed. Senator Murray and I organized it. We…”

“I want to report on an important hearing the Senate HELP Committee just completed. Senator Murray and I organized it. We heard from Francis Collins, the distinguished scientist who is head of the National Institutes of Health, about his new program, funded by Congress, to spend $1.5 billion, or $2.5 billion if you include the money we gave to BARDA, to develop a new technology that will produce tens of millions of rapid diagnostic tests for COVID- 19. Mr. President, my opening statement at that hearing can be found online at https://www.alexander.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?p= SpeechesFloor Statements&id=1AF0B54F-A9EC-4007-9146-E8D386531C4F. I would like to refer to a speech made by the former majority leader of the Senate, Bill Frist, in 2005, which reminds us that we have been working on these programs for a long time and which can be found online at https://asecondopinionpodcast.com/frist-predicts-global-pandemic/. On April 13, ``The American Mind'' published Senator Frist's essay, ``A Storm for Which We Were Unprepared,'' which can be found online at https://americanmind.org/essays/a-storm-for-which-we-were-unprepared/. Senator Frist's speech, which was made at a time when we were dealing with 9/11 and before Ebola but SARS and other viruses, he predicted exactly what is happening--we are going to have a virus this year, and we will have another one, and then we will have another one.…”