Joe Lieberman

One of the really important things you mentioned we haven't talked about enough here is the importance of clear and consistent communications, which we didn't have in response to the Ebola crisis.

It is startling when you think about it: 50 political appointees, Presidential appointees. This has accumulated over a long time.

If I may, Dr. Cole's recommendation earlier about better training of health personnel around the country is critically important.

There is not enough Federal-State-local coordination on the specific threat of bioterrorism.

New York has set the standard post-9/11, for obvious reasons, and continues, I think, to do that.

Local police departments need not only intelligence--they really do that--but they need the ability to analyze a potential biological attack as it is happening.

There is a failure of imagination to suggest it can't happen. It is a failure of leadership to prepare people with the information needed to protect their constituencies and their communities if it does.

We had the technological ability. Why didn't we have it in place to warn us that this was happening?

The greatest threats we have here are, it has been told to us over the past few years, home-grown violence extremists as well as domestic terrorists.

Unless there is somebody to coordinate this and put together a biodefense strategy, then all the specific recommendations... are not going to work.

It seems to me we have a Department of Homeland Security. The bioterrorist threat is a homeland security threat.

The biological threat is already out there. It is too late to get ahead of it, but we can still reduce our vulnerabilities and get ahead of its impact.

The answer has got to be: No, they are not ready.

We really need to assume an international leadership role, perhaps through the World Health Organization but, really, probably on our own, to coordinate with other nations around the world.

The time has passed.

It is a real shortcoming to create, through some Government involvement, incentives for the great pharmaceutical sector of our economy

We certainly have ways that we could apply pressure, fencing off funds and such, to really push this harder.

We should do everything we can to eliminate this nascent state that they have created in parts of Iraq and Syria.

I worry that ISIS has so rapidly built this state that it has created by going beyond what previous terrorist groups did.

I would say, from what I know of the proposal the committee is making, that it is a step in the right direction, because it is a step to coordination.

This is not a threat that we are creating. This is real.

Because the danger is clear, and it is present.

So I look forward to working with you the next year, as we go forward into the next Congress, to remedy this problem that, quite frankly, should have been fixed from Day 1.

We owe it to them to have access to the vaccine.

I think maybe when you were out of the room briefly, I said, in some sense, we backed into the proposal about the Vice President being the lead for the Federal Government, because all the alternatives that we considered didn't seem strong…