Roy Blunt: “I want to talk about the portion of the bill that we have made available to our colleagues and the country this week…”

“I want to talk about the portion of the bill that we have made available to our colleagues and the country this week after lots of input from our colleagues on the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education part of the bill. It is about 25 percent of the bill, almost $250 billion. That money would be used to get us back on track toward vaccines that work, toward treatments that work, to provide additional resources for testing, for treatment, for care, to get us back to school, to get us back to work, and to get us back to childcare. These are all things that are critical for our economy and families to return in the way they want to. For those things to work the way we would want them to work, our colleague Senator Alexander put it very succinctly: All things run through testing. If you are going to go back to school, if you are going to go back to work, if you are going to go back to childcare, if you are going to be in a nursing home between now and the time we have a vaccine, we need tests that are easy to take and quick to respond. A test that you can take and have the answer in 10, 12, or 15 minutes will make all the difference, and we continue to push for that in this bill. In fact, there is about $9 billion in a fund that maybe should have been designated a little more specifically, but it hasn't been spent. It was designed to be a testing fund.…”