Thursday, September 11, 2014
Floor Speech: Senator Coons calls for U.S. to do more on Ebola crisis
As Delivered on the Senate Floor
Mr. President, this is an uneasy time in our world. There is no shortage of crises that demand our attention and our action. The President called on us last night to step up to the very real challenge posed by the terrorist group ISIS in Iraq and in Syria. Russian aggression against Ukraine also demands our attention. A fragile cease-fire continues between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. There is the Central American exodus to our southern border that riveted the attention of many this summer, and continuing negotiations to seek an end to Iran's illicit nuclear weapons program.
But behind all of this, there is another and equally important challenge that I wanted to draw this body’s attention to for a few minutes today – the spread of a quiet and vicious virus throughout West Africa.
While the nation's attention today for good reason is on remembering the tragic events of 9/11 and the President's strategy for combating ISIS today, I’d like to speak on another urgent challenge to our country and our world. That's the need for us to dramatically increase our support as communities across West Africa struggle to confront and combat Ebola.
I've met and spoken with Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf – Nobel Prize winner, an impressive leader, a woman who has brought her country back from a terrible civil war and was making huge progress toward the development of Liberia – who I’ve have had the honor of meeting with here and visiting there. In my role as the chairman of the African Affairs Subcommittee, I have met few others that have impressed me as much as President Johnson-Sirleaf. Leaders throughout this region are doing everything they can to staunch the spread of this virus and save lives, but in my most recent communications with President Johnson-Sirleaf, it is clear that Ebola is rapidly getting beyond the capacity, the ability of these communities and countries to contain it and to recover from it.
They need our action. Individuals on the ground from groups like Doctors without Borders and Samaritan’s Purse have done remarkable, heroic, extraordinary work, putting their own lives on the line to help others, and they have borne the overwhelming majority of the risk, and the service, and the sacrifice so far. And news has just been announced that the Gates Foundation will contribute $50 million to this fight – critical, as public funds alone aren't going to be enough to end this crisis.
Mr. President, our own people through the United States government can and must do more. It need not be the role of the United States alone to resolve this problem, but it is our responsibility to stand side by side with those working tirelessly to stop it. It is our responsibility to not just lend a hand, but to help lead in ways that only we can, to use our unique capabilities to address this crisis.
Mr. President, if Ebola’s spread reveals one thing, it's that we are more interconnected today than we have ever been in our human history, and the disease truly knows and respects no borders. We need to continue to act, not only because we are morally compelled to help the tens of thousands who are facing immediate threat, but also because we have a direct stake in the resolution of this crisis. This is a manageable public health crisis that we know how to solve, but doing so requires our focus, our attention, our resolve and our resources, tools that only the United States has.
Let me briefly outline five specific steps I believe we should take now. First, I think it's critical the United States has one leadership point – that the White House designates a coordinator to oversee the U.S. whole of government emergency response.
There are many ways the U.S. is currently helping across many agencies from the Department of Defense, to the Centers for Disease Control, to the State Department and USAID. Those agencies are doing great work as part of the disaster assistance response team on the ground. But at a time when the U.S. government is also facing and addressing crises in Iraq and Ukraine and elsewhere, I think we need one organizer, one coordinator, one responsible figure addressing this crisis who is appointed by the white house to coordinate all of our resources and all of the people necessary from the U.S. government for this growing effort.
President Obama should designate an official to manage our country's response, both overseas and here in the U.S., including preparing us for the remote chance this virus might reach American soil. Our ambassadors on the ground in the three most affected countries are playing the primary role in coordination right now and they are doing remarkable work, but let me remind us in this body that in Sierra Leone, there is no currently confirmed U.S. ambassador.
The nominee, John Hoover, has been waiting almost eight months to be confirmed. Just one painful reminder that the dysfunction of this body has prevented us from confirming nominated ambassadors to dozens of countries around the world. To be effective, we need to coordinate our U.S.-based and our field-based efforts through ambassadors on the ground.
Second, we must begin to deploy U.S. military support to the maximum extent possible. Let me be clear – I don't mean combat capabilities. I mean the unique logistical capabilities of the United States military, their ability to deploy through their logistical capabilities resources that no other country can bring to bear as quickly and as successfully as we can.
I was encouraged to hear an announcement this past week from the Administration that they plan to use our military to establish a new hospital facility in Liberia, to distribute equipment, to provide infrastructure and transportation support, but I will admit I’m concerned it will take weeks to deploy.
On my visit to Liberia last August, I was struck at just how desperately poor and underdeveloped this nation of brave and inspiring people currently is, how paved roads and the ability to move at any speed rapidly ends just a few miles from the capital, and how strained the infrastructure and the public health systems are by this rapidly growing crisis.
This is not everything we can and should be doing. We need to build more field hospitals for civilians in Liberia and beyond so there are facilities for health workers and civilians fighting the disease. We also can and should provide airlift of supplies from private donors. I’ve heard from organizations that have worked to transport donated supplies and can fill cargo plane after cargo plane but are having difficulty getting it from here to West Africa.
We need to deepen our coordination with foreign militaries. Other nations possess similar advanced capabilities as we do and we will be able to combat this crisis more effectively if we all work together. I very much appreciate, for example, Ghana’s efforts and partnership is that it allows us to use some of their facilities as an air bridge for logistics. As more air resources are poured into this fight against Ebola, we need other countries in the region t to lend a similarly open hand.
My third point is directed to our private sector, to international organizations, to the American people and to citizens of other developed nations. We need your support and your generosity and we need it now. This is a letter that Liberia’s President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf sent to president Obama this week. I want to read from it briefly.
"Mr. President, as you know, the outbreak has overwhelmed the containment and treatment measures we have attempted thus far. Our already limited resources have been stretched to the breaking point, and up to now, only private charity has responded robustly in all the affected countries, but they, too, have finally reached their limit.”
My friend President Sirleaf is right. It is time for the rest of us to step up. The World Health Organization has issued an Ebola response road map that calls for 10,000 additional health workers and $490 million, and we are far short of reaching these goals today. The U.S. government has contributed so far more than $100 million and has announced a commitment of another $88 million that we in this body will hopefully approve before we end this session.
The Gates Foundation, as I mentioned, has also made an impressive and incredibly generous addition of another $50 million, but the fact remains we need more. I have heard from many in my state and elsewhere across this country eager to offer support. If you have the means, I would urge you to go to usaid.gov/Ebola for links to some of the impressive nongovernmental organizations that are doing what they can on the ground to stem this humanitarian crisis.
As much as this crisis needs money and equipment and supplies, it most importantly needs nurses and doctors and paramedics and other medical professionals, thousands of them literally. The health systems of these countries – which were already among the weakest of the world – are overwhelmed, and so I’m asking today for your help. We’re asking for you to save lives. If you are a trained medical professional and you're willing to help, I urge you to please go to usaid.gov/Ebola and consider how you might serve to help in this crisis.
Fourth, we need to develop and deploy a treatment and vaccine as rapidly as possible. Here’s where, in some way, America’s talents and strengths in terms of the development and discovery of new treatments and of a new vaccine is a unique contribution we can make. American scientists are making progress on both fronts, but the reality is it will be hard to confront and end this disease in the long term without either. Much of the $88 million President Obama has requested from Congress will go towards this most important goal. It’s critical we support that funding in this chamber on a bipartisan basis and prepare for the reality that this is only the first investment we will need to make to quickly develop and deploy these life saving drugs and these critically preventive vaccines.
Lastly, Mr. President, we need to invest in the governing and economic institutions in the countries that have been so devastated by this disease. It’s not a coincidence that this outbreak has emerged in countries with some of the weakest health systems on earth. Countries that face severe shortages of health care workers, labs essential for testing and diagnosis, clinics and hospitals required for treatment, and the medical supplies and protective gear, such as latex gloves and face masks, that are commonly available in the United States, but are now completely exhausted in the countries of Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia.
We know how to combat this disease with isolation, good public health and burial practices, case investigation, and contact training. But all these things, all these things require trained personnel and many more resources than are currently available.
In the short term, we absolutely can fill many gaps with the additional resources I’ve outlined, but we need to act quickly and in the long term think more deeply about why investing in local health systems and institutions in the developing world is so critical. Why a little preventive investment can go a long way to making a country more resilient in the face of a crisis like this.
As we do now to stop Ebola, we need to consider the actions we can and should take together to prevent the next public health crisis. To that end, yesterday, I introduced a resolution here in the Senate with my colleagues Senators Menendez and Flake, Durbin and Corker outlining some of these very steps and recognizing the severe and real threat that the Ebola outbreak poses to West Africa – and if not properly contained – to other regions across the globe.
Mr. President, here is the bottom line – we have what it takes to halt the spread of Ebola in West Africa and to save tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives in the process. Unlike other foreign interventions, doing so will take neither bullets nor bombs, but rather, our willingness, our compassion, our generosity and our determination to act. The lives of thousands and the stability of entire countries is at stake. It is my hope and prayer that we will rise to this occasion with everything we have.