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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The military is way ahead, in our opinion, of what the Department of Homeland Security has in the BioWatch program.

This is really an appeal to the President to designate the Vice President to do this.

I had the same impression that you did, that the WHO did not respond as well or as quickly as we would have liked.

There is no one global cop on the beat.

Terrorist groups like the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) are devastating the Middle East, setting new horrific standards for inhumanity and brutality, and have specifically endorsed--ISIL has specifically endorsed--the use of…

Well, we understand that there is a vaccine coming along, but I am actually thinking more about---yes, OK. So the vaccine is coming along, but it has not been approved yet. And the sooner the better.

So I mentioned before that if you had to choose one department, it would be the Department of Homeland Security because this is a homeland security threat.

So, to a certain extent, probably the wrong way to describe it, we backed into the recommendation that the Vice President be the leader of this effort.

We think that we are wasting money on BioWatch, to put it bluntly.

It would be irresponsible of us to leave the field, drop the report and go back to whatever we are doing.

But we are not--I mean, one of the major recommendations that comes out of this is that we still have not figured out how to leverage the ingenuity and innovation of the pharmaceutical sector of our economy to get involved in developing…

And we were talking about the problem that there were not medical--pharmaceutical countermeasures and how do we create a market incentive where there is no natural market incentive for pharmaceutical companies to devote research to this.

I think that Vice President Biden might be challenged and intrigued by this possibility and want to see if in his last year in office he can bring this together to work better.

So what happened was that this brilliant idea of ours did not seem so brilliant to the generic drug industry which did not want the patent life extended.

So I am going to give a legislator's response and then yield to the former Cabinet member.

I am really grateful that this Senate Committee is the first to hold a hearing on our report.

Our judgment is that it is an old system, it is using old technology, and, frankly, it is not up to the challenge.

So a few months after 9/11, and the anthrax attacks really after 9/11, I do not know if Chuck Ludlum is here.

the divisions between human health and animal health or human disease and animal disease are artificial.

Mr. Chairman, I do want to mention--it is not directly responsive, but it is related--that it happens that Senator Ayotte and Senator Booker have introduced a bill for the Department of Homeland Security to reach into its stockpile of…