Joe Lieberman

The threat is real. We had better act before the crisis occurs.

I am very proud of the report.

We hope, as this hearing goes on, you will feel strongly enough about at least some of the recommendations we make here that you will become champions for them.

I want to thank you specifically for convening this hearing on our report less than a week after we issued it.

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

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…

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

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

We are both wasting resources, but we are also not preparing ourselves adequately to deal with threats to animals and humans.

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.

I think it is critically important that this work not stop at this point where we are just looking at what is happening within our borders.

The threat of a bioterrorist attack is greater than it has been

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

We should give this responsibility to the Vice President of the United States

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

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

There is no one global cop on the beat.

You want to know if there is an infectious disease epidemic beginning to spread in the country.

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

As a choice between creating a new czar and making the Vice President of the United States now and in the future responsible for some critical areas, coordinating them, I would choose the Vice President.

Plan B would be somebody like the czar, I mean, somebody in the White House so that they had the implicit authority of the Presidency to coordinate.

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

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.

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, 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.