00:00Mr. Secretary, I appreciate that NIH wants to recalibrate its research portfolio to address conditions not previously attended to sufficiently,
00:13nutrition, conditions such as arise after viral infection like myologic encephalomyelitis or chronic fatigue syndrome,
00:20but this is happening in tandem with reports that HHS is closing the Office for Long COVID Research and Practice.
00:28And I talk to people for whom Long COVID is seriously impacting their life.
00:35So to what extent will HHS continue to support research, data collection, and other programs focused on understanding ongoing health impacts of Long COVID?
00:46Senator, I am 100% committed to finding treatments for Long COVID.
00:54I'm deeply involved in that personally.
00:56I have a son who is really dramatically affected by Long COVID.
01:01I have many, many friends who are affected by that and by Lyme disease, incidentally, which is also a priority.
01:11The COVID office was cut by an executive order from the White House.
01:15But we have, where everybody at NIH and at CDC is committed to these kind of studies.
01:25And I can tell you personally, I will make sure that they happen.
01:31The NIH is the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world, giving us an edge over countries like China, with whom we are obviously a geopolitical rival.
01:39But it takes a long time to develop this.
01:43And the rising prevalence of neurodegenerative disease is one area in which we have an impending crisis if we don't support the research and advanced cures.
01:52And my concern, and now I'll speak as a guy from Louisiana, if NIH funding is substantially reduced, they have folks at my universities, at Tulane and LSU, who are doing work on these sorts of things.
02:06So, knowing that the NIH budget is getting squeezed and the indirect costs likewise, how will the NIH successfully do more with less?
02:16How will we build those new scientists to find these cures and to compete with geopolitical rivals?
02:22Well, for one thing, Senator Cassie, you're talking about neurodegenerative disease now.
02:29For example, ALS or Alzheimer's.
02:30ALS, right.
02:31The Chinese are not spending a lot of money on DEI.
02:39And we are cutting those studies.
02:44We're cutting studies on gain-of-function studies.
02:49And we're cutting grants to foreign scientists from adversarial countries, and particularly the Chinese,
02:57which have the 1,000 Talents Program, which is openly trying to exploit U.S. research and take our IP.
03:07We spend more than any country in the world on biomedical research.
03:11We spend, NIH controls about 70% of the global funding for biomedical research.
03:19The cuts we have made to date, our cuts, our administrative cuts, as far as I know, we have not fired any working scientists.
03:29Of the working scientists, the people who are actually doing scientists, there are some people who are scientists that were doing IT or administration,
03:38but in terms of who did lose their jobs, and in terms of working scientists, our policy was to make sure none of them were lost and that that research continues.
03:51Let me, thank you.
03:52Let me ask you, the budget proposes to eliminate several large block grants for hospital and health department emergency preparedness
03:59and other core public health capabilities, explaining that states are better equipped to fund these activities.
04:07Now, I agree that frontline public health happens at the local level, but what works well in, say, Louisiana may not work well in a state like New York.
04:17But rural under-resourced states especially rely upon federal funding to support public health.
04:24How do you propose we balance competing interests, returning power to states, because there is a difference in how different states do it,
04:31but replace the funding necessary to combat these public health problems?
04:39Well, I think it's a balance, Mr. Chairman, and we have a legal obligation.
04:47CDC has a legal obligation to do national pandemic response.
04:54And we will meet that obligation, and in fact, we are going to improve it, and particularly if we can get support from this body
05:01to refund, reappropriate the pop-up, which is critical for our pandemic response.
05:08But there are some functions that are local in nature, and in those cases, we will be supporting local infrastructure to respond.
05:19They know better than we know, and we saw this during some of the hurricane response with, you know,
05:27Governor DeSantis' response, which was really Florida localized.
05:31There was no deaths and very little destruction to a hurricane that was as bad as the one that followed that relied on federal response
05:41and was really a catastrophe for the state.
05:45So I think experience shows that the locality is going to often do better with some functions, particularly with the hospitals and infrastructure.
05:56But we are not relinquishing our responsibility at CDC to manage national emergencies.
