Political Quotes

“last week, I was home, as most Members of the Senate were, but I was asked to participate in a Zoom call with two people I highly respect, Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Collins, with the National Institutes of Health. While sitting at my dining room table in Springfield, IL, there were about a dozen Senators who had access to Zoom to be a part of that conversation. I felt like I was privileged to really hear some information which most Americans wanted to hear, and I knew it had to be important for them to ask for a briefing in the middle of the week. What they were talking about during the course of that hour were variants, what is happening to this coronavirus as it replicates over and over and over again millions of times. What they told us--and I am a liberal arts lawyer, so I don't profess any sort of medical expertise here--was that there were dominant variants that were starting to emerge, and they told us the shorthand description that they used in the laboratories. I just remember that the first one was the UK, United Kingdom, variant. They said, by the end of March, which is not that far away--4 weeks plus--it will be the dominant strain of coronavirus in the United States. I was taken aback by that to think that a variant could become that dominant that quickly, but it was fair warning that it was about to occur. Then they talked about the South African variant, which is just starting to appear.…”