U.S. Sen. Murphy warns nation is not ready for another pandemic

U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy is urging the Trump administration to join the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), an international nonprofit co-founded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to ensure the nation would be prepared to handle another pandemic.

chris murphy pandemic COVID-19
Murphy

Speaking yesterday before a hearing of the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, the Connecticut Democrat argued that the Trump administration”™s failure to have the nation represented in CEPI was “pandemic response malpractice” that isolated the nation from the global efforts to eradicate COVID-19.

“All of our allies, all of our friends are part of this organization,” Murphy said. “And while we hope that it’s our funding and our domestic programs to develop a vaccine, if it’s a CEPI partner that develops the vaccine, we want to be at that table. That’s something we can do right now.”

Murphy also questioned whether the nation could deal with another health crisis on the scale of th coronavirus while the current situation has yet to be mitigated.

“I’ve argued from the beginning that you can’t wait for the next pandemic to hit us in order to get ready,” he said. “But we have not beat this pandemic. On Sunday, there were 183,000 new cases reported globally. That was the highest number cases on any single day since the beginning of this pandemic, and that was Sunday.”

Murphy also faulted his Capitol Hill colleagues for “going to break for a very nice July 4th recess” while failing to pass “any legislation to try to help states, help local public health districts address an epidemic that is still present. We need to be able to do both.”

For his part, Murphy joined Sens. Jim Risch (R-Idaho) and Ben Cardin (D-Maryland) in introducing the Global Health Security and Diplomacy Act, which authorizes $3 billion for strengthening the national pandemic defense system while also investing in global vaccine efforts and providing aid to countries whose weak health systems are ill-equipped to deal with the spread of infectious diseases.