America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. I am, therefore, going to oppose the increase in the debt limit.

Number two, we've got to have a stockpile of antiviral drugs that cut down the fatalities so that even if you contract the disease, you don't die from it.

There are a couple of things we've got to do. Number one, we have got to have good surveillance mechanisms set up not just in this country but internationally. And I already allocated about $35 million to start cooperating with other countries on that process.

We are not ready for it. If you look at the last pandemic we had on U.S. soil, that was the Spanish flu that took place in 1918, 1919, you had literally millions of deaths. And unfortunately this is one of these situations where if you had a flu that mutated that was brand new, had human to human transmission, you could see a million deaths. You could see 10 million people hospitalized. We don't have the infrastructure or the capacity to deal with that.

We know that there's going to be some sort of pandemic in our lifetimes. We don't know whether this will be the big one. And I hope that people realize that if we have a sense of urgency about this, and this particular bird flu doesn't end up being a pandemic, our money's not wasted.

We know that every several decades you get these kinds of pandemics that sweep through the populations. We don't know that this particular bird flu will show up next year and we won't be ready. But we know that some time in the next decade or two there is going to be a pandemic, and we've got to put the infrastructure now to be prepared for it.

Well what I can say is is that local, state, federal officials working together did not seem to have a good plan to get those folks out.

What we're doing is we're putting a CFO, a comptroller in the White House that is overseeing how this money gets spent.

I introduced legislation this week to say that every state, local official working with the federal government has to have a plan to get out folks who are disabled, folks who are poor, folks who don't have access to automobiles and typically use public transportation.

How could local, state and federal authorities let this debacle happen? Who should ultimately get the blame?

I am interested in fixing the system. And I think that's what all Americans, African-Americans, as well as whites, as well as Hispanics, want to see happen is making sure we're prepared for the next time out.