Coronavirus

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, our Nation stands at a crossroads in our months-long battle with the new coronavirus. Tracking recent developments lately has felt like watching a split-screen television. On the one hand, Operation Warp Speed has fostered a modern medical miracle. The genius of science has brought forward safe and effective vaccines at a pace which, just months ago, many claimed would be impossible. For about 9 months now, our Nation has been treading water altogether. Now the road to victory is in sight.

But at the same time, even as we see this hopeful sunrise on the horizon, in the here and now, we are still facing an ongoing five-alarm national crisis. The virus is surging across our country. Two days ago, my home State of Kentucky set another bleak new record--the most Kentuckians lost in a single day of this pandemic so far. Nationwide, since the start of December, we have lost around 3,000 of our fellow Americans to this disease every single day.

Meanwhile, although the American people have built our economic recovery with more speed and resilience than anyone had anticipated, we have known all along that recovering prosperity would come hand-in-hand with defeating the virus. Thus, millions of working families across the Nation are still under terrible strain.

Last week, economists thought we would see a slight downward tick in new unemployment claims. Instead, the numbers shot up, logging 885,000 new claims in just 1 week--almost 900,000 newly laid-off Americans in 1 week alone.

Senators on both sides know what we need to do. In the springtime, when the country needed a bridge, we passed the largest rescue package in American history on a unanimous, bipartisan basis. Now what Americans need is another bridge. Fortunately, this time we do not need a bridge over an unknown and frightening future but a bridge through the next several months, while the lifesaving vaccines can flow throughout our country.

Frontline healthcare workers are receiving the vaccine as we speak. Yesterday, Vice President Pence, Speaker Pelosi, and I all received first doses of vaccines pursuant to preexisting plans for the continuity of our government.

These vaccines are safe. They are effective. They are our Nation's path out of this hellish chapter. So the first lines of the cavalry are already arriving. We just need to help American families hold on while reinforcements continue to pour in: more paycheck protection loans for the hardest hit businesses, more additional Federal unemployment aid, more direct assistance for families, a lot more funding for K-12 schools to reopen safely and get our kids' educations back on track, and, perhaps most important of all, a huge amount of funding for vaccine distribution so that we aren't just helping Americans endure this battle, but we are helping them win the battle as fast as possible

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