A resolution prohibiting the imposition of vaccination requirements relating to COVID-19 for Senate Pages.

Mr. President, I rise in opposition to Democrats' mandates that forced our young Senate pages to be vaccinated three times. In a free society, no one should be forced to take an injection; no one should be forced to have a surgery; no one should be forced to submit to a medical procedure--particularly a medical procedure that was approved under emergency-use authorization.

Democrats' support for medical choice when it comes to vaccines appears to be inconsistent and selective. But I fear they won't be persuaded by any arguments towards liberty, so I would like to direct the majority of my remarks to the actual science about whether or not adolescents should have to be forced to have three COVID vaccines.

Initially, there were arguments made saying: We must forcibly vaccinate these kids or they will infect the older folks, the antiquarian Senators. But it turns out that argument fails because the science in the end showed that the vaccine didn't prevent transmission of the disease.

In fact, in August 2021, CDC Director Rachel Walensky admitted for COVID-19 that the vaccine does not stop transmission:

Our vaccines are working exceptionally well . . . But what

they can't do anymore is prevent transmission.

So the government, the proponents, those for the mandates argue: Well, we have to do it; it will stop the disease and we won't have any more spread.

Well, it turns out that wasn't true. The vaccine does not stop transmission. With that, it should have been the end of the arguments for mandates, because you are no longer talking about your health versus someone else's health. The only argument that those who are for the mandates argue now and those who argue for taking the vaccine is that it reduces your health risk--the individual who chooses to get vaccinated. However, when you look at the data, that appears only to be true for targeted populations.

If you are at risk for being hospitalized or dying from COVID, over age 75, immunocompromised, have other health concerns, there is some argument for a vaccine. But for a young, healthy person, there is no logical argument. If you look and ask yourself will taking a booster reduce transmission, the argument is no. Whether you are at risk or not, it does not reduce transmission.

If you are at risk for hospitalization or death, it may well reduce that. But the young pages we are talking about are not at risk for that. In fact, when we look at it, throughout Europe, there was a study of 23 million folks--young folks--and they found the death rate was zero. Israel looked at this: Death rate zero for young, healthy people. Germany looked at this, ages 5 to 17: Death rate for young, healthy people, zero.

And people say, well, what is the big deal? The vaccine is not that big a deal. You know, certainly, it is not going to hurt them. It has to be better than having COVID. Well, it turns out when you weigh the risks versus the benefits for a particular age group, it is actually not true. If you look at the risks of side effects from the vaccine-- and the main worrisome side effect that we are concerned with is an inflammation of the heart called myocarditis or pericarditis--a study by Prasad and Knudsen looked at 29 different studies and found that the incidents, averaged out, was a little over 2 per 15,000.

The Vaccine Safety Datalink looked at this again and found also it was about 2, 2.5 out of 15,000. Even the CDC admits that the risk of myocarditis for young people is about 1 in 15,000. Tracey Beth Hoeg looked at a retrospective study of those who have been injured by vaccines and found the incidence of adverse cardiac events was about 1.62 per 10,000. So it's not like every kid is going to get myocarditis, but you have to weigh the incidence of 1 or 2 or 3 out of 15,000 getting a serious disease that could affect their health or even debilitate them.

The risks and benefits are different for every individual. That is why in a free society, the individual or the individual and their parents make this decision with their doctor; sometimes they get more than one opinion. But we don't mandate--in a free society, we don't just tell them: Do what you are told or else. But that is what is happening.

It is not just happening here in the Senate--although, the Senate is setting a terrible example for the country. Many universities are still doing this. It is actually medical malpractice to require these vaccines for kids. It turns out when you look at the incidence of myocarditis, over 90 percent of the heart inflammation that occurs in young people occurs after the second dose.

You can get rid of 90 percent of--admittedly, not a real common problem--but you can get rid of 90 percent of the risk of this vaccine by not requiring more than one. But we are not talking about just the second dose, where 90 percent of the inflammation comes from the second dose. We are talking about Senate Democrats--because Republicans would like to get rid of this--Senate Democrats are requiring three vaccines. There is absolutely no scientific evidence. In fact, when this went to the committee studying this, the first committee that looked at this was the FDA Vaccine and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, and Dr. Paul Offit sits on this committee.

They voted not to advise giving the booster to anyone unless they are over 65. They said: Let's look at the risks and the benefits. The disease COVID appears to be affecting the older generation. They are more at risk. We can put up with some risk for the vaccine; but for the kids, it is not worth it. The committee voted.

So then it went from the FDA's committee to the CDC's vaccine committee. Guess what? They voted against recommending the booster also. They said, reserve the booster for those who are at risk, for at- risk populations.

So how did we get a booster mandate? How did we get a booster advice from the CDC saying everybody from the age of 2 months should get a booster? How did we get it? The CDC political appointee of the Biden administration overrode the FDA vaccine committee and overrode the CDC committee.

Dr. Paul Offit was and still is on the Vaccine Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, and he voted to reserve the booster for those at risk. He is the director of Vaccine Education Center and professor of pediatrics in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

He is not someone who is opposed to vaccines. He spent his whole life advocating for vaccines. He is on a committee that has approved the COVID vaccine. He just simply said the vaccines should be targeted, and it should be extended and advised--not even mandated but advised--for people over 65 but not for kids. His committee voted no. The FDA committee on vaccines voted no; don't give the vaccine to kids.

The CDC committee on vaccines voted no; don't give it to kids.

What do Senate Democrats want? Put their heads in the sand and make a political decision because they love central authority to mandate that these kids get three vaccines, even though the science goes against all of it.

Paul Offit, when asked whether or not his son who was 24 would get the vaccine, he said:

He shouldn't get the vaccine.

So we are stuck with a situation where there is no evidence and no historical precedent for mandating this kind of treatment. There is no historical precedent for mandating that the Senate and Senate Democrats intervene between the doctor of these children and making their own medical decisions. It is taking away the idea that risk and benefit are debated and discussed based on your risks and benefits. So what we find is that advice that actually probably is good, if you are over 65, to consider getting a booster--although it still should be voluntary--we are going against the best advice to actually promote that these kids get a vaccine that may well be harmful to them.

The CDC has admitted it doesn't stop transmission. But then you want to ask yourself, what are other countries--what are they doing around the world? They looked at 23 million people, ages 12 and up, in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. What did they find? They found that after two doses of the mRNA COVID vaccine, the risk of myocarditis was higher than compared with those who were not vaccinated. This is exactly why much of Europe is now limiting the vaccine and not giving the vaccine to certain age groups.

What they found in these studies is that adolescent males, particularly between the ages of 12 and 26, are at a heightened risk for this. In fact, Tracy Beth Hoeg, in her study, looked at the possibility of adverse cardiac events versus a possibility that someone their age could go to the hospital over a 120-day period. They found that the possibility of an adverse cardiac effect was about five times greater than any of these kids even going to the hospital.

But what we did find is--and this is why several countries have actually limited this--Germany, France, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway now restrict the mRNA vaccine and don't advise giving the vaccine to this age group, particularly don't advise giving them three vaccines.

A study in December in the Journal of Medical Ethics found about 14.7

cases of myocarditis--actually, 1.47 cases per 10,000 in ages 18 to 29. They also found that those who had the heart inflammation, 3 months later were still suffering from the inflammation of the heart.

Dr. Offit, who sits on the committee that voted against recommending this for adolescents and for children, wrote in an op-ed that ``[a]healthy young person with two mRNA vaccine doses is extremely unlikely to be hospitalized with covid, so the case for risking any side effects--such as myocarditis--diminishes substantially.'' That is why they did recommend against the third vaccine, which is exactly the opposite of what the Democrats are doing. They do and want to mandate three vaccines on these kids.

As one editorial put it last year, if being boosted becomes a prerequisite for participation in normal life, the vaccine's diminishing efficacy means the boosting campaign will never end.

Dr. Marty Makary, professor of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, wrote in the Wall Street Journal:

The U.S. government is pushing Covid-19 vaccine boosters

for 16- and 17-year-olds without supporting clinical data. A

large Israeli population study, published in the New England

Journal of Medicine . . . found that the risk of Covid death

in people under 30 with two vaccine shots was zero.

Germany showed zero deaths among healthy kids ages 5 to 17.

There is no scientific rationale for mandating three COVID vaccines for healthy kids. Even World Health Organization Chief Scientist Dr. Soumya Swaminathan said last year that ``there's no evidence'' that suggests healthy children and adolescents need booster shots--no evidence. This is the head of the WHO. These are not opponents of vaccines. These are people saying that there is no evidence and that it might harm these kids to get vaccinated, and yet Democrats will vote today, the lot of them, to say that basically we must force these kids to get three vaccines or they can't be up here.

Now, you might say: Well, gosh, we are just so worried and we don't know everything and so what do we do?

Well, how about all the other people who work up here? At any point in time, the other 10 or 15 people in this room, are they required to get vaccines? No. We are only requiring one group subset to do it. These kids have to get three vaccines. They are the least likely to get sick from COVID. They get COVID, and they don't even know it. The vaccine doesn't stop them from getting COVID. They have naturally acquired immunity as well. If you don't ask yourself what that means, you are not paying attention to any science.

Wouldn't you want to know whether they have had it? Even if you really thought a vaccine mandate was great, what if I have already had COVID? Do I need three more vaccines? Because I have already had COVID, I developed natural immunity.

Dr. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard Medical School says that mandating people who have already had COVID that they still get vaccinated makes zero sense from a scientific point of view, and it makes zero sense from a public health point of view. A study in Lancet supported this view, stating that current evidence does not appear to show a need for boosting in the general population.

That is why the FDA committee and the CDC committee both voted against advising it. It is not only bad advice; it is a horrific mandate. It would be one thing if you want to give advice to tell people that we think it is a good idea, but it is another to tell them they have got no choice. Do you want to participate in the elite program here in the Nation's Senate? You can't come unless you do what Democrats want, submit to three vaccines, even though it may increase your risk of heart inflammation. They don't care. Mandates are fine.

A study at Lancet looked at this and said that it was a bad idea. It says: Currently available evidence does not show the need for widespread use of booster vaccination in populations that have received an effective primary vaccine or who have already been infected with the disease.

When we consider the rules for the pages, we ought to ask: Will these policies be expected to continue indefinitely? The virus mutates about every 3 or 4 months. You have got a brandnew virus. You have got a virus now you didn't have 3 or 4 months ago. The vaccines also lose their potency. Are you going to mandate until the end of time? It is also not the same.

Are you going to stick your head in the sand and say this is 2020? No, the virus in 2020 actually was more lethal.

One of the good things about viral evolution is they typically evolve to become less dangerous and more transmissible. You can catch COVID by looking at somebody wrong, but fortunately it is not as deadly as it once was.

Are there still some people dying from COVID? Yes, people who are at high risk. If you go to a doctor and you have chest pain and you are 12 years old, he doesn't or she doesn't treat you the same way as if you would go in and you are 60 years old.

If you walk into an emergency room and you are 15 years old with chest pain, they usually might think of asthma or other problems but typically not a heart attack. People are treated differently based on their age. Doctors think of what is common in that age group.

If I go in with chest pain, they are going to do heart enzymes. They are going look for a heart attack. That is the first thing they are going to look for. But they don't treat everyone the same.

This is blindly what we are being told by the Democrats; that everybody is the same, submit or else. But it is not just the pages whom they are hurting here. It is not just the pages that they are increasing their risk for this heart inflammation. They are setting an example and other universities are doing it. Still, tens of thousands of young American kids are being forced to take three vaccines.

You say: Well, they are not being forced. They can choose not to go to Yale or Harvard. What if your dream had always been to go to one of these schools? You have to give up your medical freedom and your good judgment just simply so you can do exactly what Democrats tell you to do?

Multiple scientific studies have shown a heightened risk of this heart inflammation or myocarditis for children and teenagers after taking the vaccine. Ninety percent of the myocarditis comes after the second or the third vaccine. If you simply went to one vaccine, you would get rid of 90 percent of the problem. And yet, they are still insisting that we do something that is actually medical malpractice, that these kids be forced to take three.

Multiple countries have begun restricting the vaccine for certain age groups. Germany, France, Denmark, Finland, and Sweden all have restricted Moderna's vaccine for young people. Norway, South America, and the UK all chose to recommend only one dose of Pfizer due to the risk of cardiovascular side effects for boosters in children. And yet what we would get today is not a discussion, not we are open to compromise, no maybe the science has changed and we will reevaluate it; you will get from the Democrats: No, get three boosters or you can't come to the Senate.

Why is the U.S. Senate choosing to ignore the risk other countries have acknowledged when mandating these vaccines for young people who are in peak physical condition? What happened to a belief in medical choice? What happened to a belief in medical freedom?

Public health measures should be backed up with proof that the benefits outweigh the burdens, and if you want to treat everyone the same--you want to say that teenagers are the same as 75-year-olds--that is not good medicine; that is not good science.

There is no evidence that when it comes to vaccination and booster mandates, especially for teenagers who as a group are less vulnerable to the virus than any Senator, that is why I am asking unanimous consent today that we pass my resolution to get rid of this ridiculous and unscientific mandate.

So, therefore, Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 336, which is at the desk; further, that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and that the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. President, in no way, shape, or form have I opposed vaccines for those who are at risk. Back when my in-laws, who are 92 and 86, first became eligible for the vaccine, the first thing we did was call the health department to see if we could get them a vaccine. Unfortunately, the health department wouldn't answer the phone, but they did have a useful message. They said, if we knew anybody who was not wearing a mask, we could report them to the police, but they didn't do anything about vaccines.

But I have never been opposed to vaccines. In fact, a lot of the vaccine hesitancy that we have in our country comes from the unscientific, unfounded, and half-baked ideas of the Democrats on this. When Democrats tell you that we should force 15-year-olds to be vaccinated--because that makes no sense and because their parents know it makes no sense and they know it makes no sense--that leads to the distrust of the government on other fronts.

So I mentioned earlier--and this, apparently, was lost and not necessarily received by the other side--that the FDA committee, in looking at boosters, advised not to give boosters to teenagers. Now, they hide behind that by saying: Oh, there is no mandate. Ask these kids if there is a mandate. Ask their parents. Ask the media. Call them up. Ask them: Is there a mandate? No, they can't be here unless they have three vaccines. There is a mandate. We have the chance to undo the mandate, and that is what the vote would be about.

The FDA didn't even advise giving it. The FDA didn't even advise giving it to them, but they definitely didn't advise mandating it. The CDC said the same thing. The only reason we got any kind of approval for this booster is that the political appointee of the Biden administration overrode both of the vaccine committees in order to approve it.

Normally, you would have to prove efficacy--a reduction in hospitalization. Well, transmission would be one. The Senator came to the floor and said this is a vaccine-preventable disease. Well, this isn't a vaccine-preventable disease because it doesn't stop transmission; it doesn't stop you from getting it.

But here is the thing: If you look at kids and boosters and you want to prove whether they are good for kids--and this is all we are talking about. We are not talking about the elderly or the infirm or people who have risk factors. We are talking about these kids. If you look at these kids and you ask, ``Do they have any risk factors or are any of them dying?'' we will refer to some statistics here. Well, the statistics aren't accurate. If you look at healthy kids--there was not one healthy kid. The answer wasn't a few. It was zero. In Germany, zero healthy kids died. In Israel, zero healthy kids died. A handful of unfortunate cases of children in our country did die. I think it was a little over 100 kids in a country of 330 million, and, sadly, every one of those cases had a severe medical illness and a problem.

I think it is an abomination that they want to say, ``Oh, we are the only ones who care about the million people who died,'' when we are the only ones who have been trying to figure out where this virus came from. For the last 3 years, I have been asking every day: Did this virus escape from a lab?

And not one Democrat will stand up and say: I will help you find out. We will look at it together.

Every Democrat has said: We don't care. We don't know, and we don't want to know where the virus came from.

But if it came from a lab, maybe we should quit funding this research. Should we quit sending our money to China, to a lab that operates in an unsafe manner? That would be a way to show you care about a million people.

But this is, make no mistake, a mandate on these young pages. It is wrong. It is malpractice. It shouldn't happen. There is no scientific evidence, and the government's own vaccine committees don't advise it. Yet Democrats, today, have said they don't care about the pages. They don't care about their parents. They don't care about their medical privacy. They don't care about their ability to discern the risks and benefits of having a medical procedure. So medical choice be damned. Democrats are going to tell you what to do, and just remember that. Just remember that they don't care at all about your own choice about your own body.

Mr. President, the Senate still mandates a COVID booster vaccine for pages. The Senate COVID vaccine mandate for pages continues despite the fact that the Senate voted 83 to 11 to repeal the military COVID vaccine mandate. So why in the world would we continue a mandate on pages that we have repealed for our soldiers? Is there any science to support continuing this mandate? The answer is an emphatic no.

The science has been clear since the early spring of 2020. Healthy children are not seriously affected by COVID. In fact, several large studies show that healthy children are rarely hospitalized and that deaths from COVID in healthy children are virtually nonexistent.

Dr. Martin Makary of Johns Hopkins describes a large, nationwide study in Israel that found that the risk of COVID death in people under 30 with two vaccines was essentially zero. A nationwide study from Germany showed zero COVID deaths among children over 5 who had no comorbidities. Even the head of the WHO, Soumya Swaminathan, concluded that there is no evidence right now that suggests healthy children and adolescents need boosters. Yet here we are, with Democrats desperately clinging to COVID vaccine mandates for young people who have essentially zero risk of dying from COVID.

Common sense should prevail, and the Senate should repeal this mandate, just as we did for our young soldiers. We shouldn't allow politics to infect and cloud commonsense judgment.

The vaccine committees that make recommendations for vaccines actually don't recommend COVID boosters for young, healthy individuals. The FDA's Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee voted to limit COVID vaccines to adults over 65. They wanted, because of the risk profile of the COVID vaccine, to limit it to people who were at risk for dying from COVID. A CDC vaccine panel also voted against recommending boosters for young, healthy individuals. But these committees that have lifelong scientists on them who voted not to advise the booster vaccine for adolescents were overruled by a political appointee, Biden appointee Rochelle Walensky.

Dr. Paul Offit, who is the director of the Vaccine Education Center and professor of pediatrics and infectious disease at Children's Hospital in Philadelphia, wrote that ``a healthy young person with [two COVID vaccines] is extremely unlikely to be hospitalized with covid, so the case for risking any side effects--such as myocarditis--diminishes substantially.'' Dr. Offit, a lifelong proponent of vaccines, even advised his own son not to get the COVID booster.

The argument against mandating COVID boosters on young, healthy people is not just that they are unnecessary but that the COVID boosters may actually harm young individuals. Reports of heart inflammation or myocarditis after COVID vaccines have been consistent and worldwide.

A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association Cardiology examined 23 million people across Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden and found that the risk of myocarditis increased with COVID vaccination, particularly after the second dose. This is exactly why several European countries, including Germany, France, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, restrict the use of COVID vaccines among young, healthy people. Some countries, such as South Africa and England, recommend only one COVID vaccine to avoid the risk of myocarditis.

A study in the Journal of Medical Ethics similarly found about 1.5 cases of myocarditis per 10,000 COVID vaccines but with 80 percent of the kids who suffer from a heart inflammation still having symptoms 3 months later.

Drs. Prasad and Knudsen looked at 29 studies across 3 continents and also found an increase in myocarditis after COVID vaccines. The studies reviewed by Prasad and Knudsen showed a little more than 2 cases of myocarditis per 15,000 vaccines.

Even the CDC admits that myocarditis occurs about once per 15,000 vaccines.

Dr. Tracey Beth Hoeg looked at the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System and found 1.62 adverse cardiac events per 10,000 vaccines. Now, that doesn't sound like a high number, but we are talking about a perfectly healthy kid. How would you feel if your perfectly healthy young football player or band member is given the vaccine and comes home with a heart inflammation? It is actually diagnosed with rising heart enzymes the same way that a heart attack is diagnosed. Hoeg found that the risk of myocarditis was five times greater than the risk of hospitalization from COVID.

So you are asking yourself, well, could my kid go to the hospital or could he get a heart inflammation? Both are rare, but the chance of your kid getting a heart inflammation from the vaccine is five times greater than your kid being hospitalized from COVID.

The Vaccine Safety Datalink similarly found a little over 2 cases of myocarditis per 15,000 vaccines.

This is across the scientific literature, across all the continents, across the world, and is a consistent finding that even our government admits to. But the Democrats want submission. They don't want you to have the choice to keep your kid safe and make a decision whether or not your kid, who may well have already had COVID, needs yet another vaccine.

Why are we forcing these kids to do something that I would say is against medical advice to be a page in our program here? The Senate continues to look away from all the evidence of myocarditis. In each of these studies, the risk of myocarditis increases with each vaccine. About 90 percent of the myocarditis or heart inflammation occurs after the second vaccine. Yet, inexplicably, the Senate pages are being mandated to take three vaccines. There are all kinds of compromises. You could say one; you could say two; but three--you are increasing the risk with each successive vaccine. Not only are three COVID vaccines unwarranted for young, healthy individuals, this mandate actually risks their health.

It is the height of malpractice to subject young, healthy kids to three COVID vaccines. In fact, nowhere in the examination or discussion of whether they should have the vaccine is there any discussion of whether they have had COVID.

So what is a vaccine? It is meant to simulate having had the infection. Shouldn't they tell us the data on children or adults? If you have had the infection, what is your chance of getting it again? What is your chance of going to the hospital? What is your chance of dying from COVID if you have already had it? They won't tell us for adolescents because the answer is zero.

Originally, the logic of advocates for the COVID vaccine mandates argue that the vaccines were not necessarily for the children but to protect their parents and grandparents. This argument now holds no water, as even the zealous advocates of mandates, such as Biden's CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, admit that COVID vaccines do not anymore prevent transmission. So the side of the people promoting these mandates admits they don't stop transmission. Now, they may well still reduce hospitalization and death if you are in the target category--the elderly or those with health disease--but for young, healthy kids, there is no effect other than to increase their risk of a heart inflammation.

A Danish study confirms that by December 2021, the COVID vaccine's effectiveness was less than 10 percent. The virus had mutated on, and the vaccine had not been changed.

A study from January 2022 of over 1.2 million children in New York shows that the vaccine effectiveness was 10 percent. It wasn't stopping transmission, it wasn't stopping them from getting the disease, and it wasn't protecting their health.

No serious scientist now argues that COVID vaccines stop transmission--no one. Yet here we are, with Democrats saying: You are not smart enough to make your own decisions. We will make these medical choices for you.

When we look at the effectiveness of the COVID booster, we ask, what is the science toward whether or not a booster is effective? Isn't this booster now formulated against the newer variants? Yes, the booster is directed against newer variants, but about every 3 months or so, the virus changes enough that the latest vaccine is no longer effective.

In fact, the CDC has largely given up testing the boosters and the new vaccines for effectiveness. Instead, in pushing for all children to get COVID booster vaccines, the CDC doesn't argue that the booster stops transmission; it doesn't argue that it prevents hospitalization or death. So what argument does the CDC have for continuing to promote boosters on our children? The CDC readily admits the vaccines don't stop transmission in any group.

As to hospitalization and death, the CDC can't show any evidence that the booster lessens hospitalization or death among young people. Why? Because the rate is already virtually zero. It is hard to prove that the booster is helping anything when no healthy kids are dying from

Mr. President, the accusation has been made that my purpose is somehow to undermine vaccines and have people question vaccines. But, obviously, the arguments were not listened to because in no part of my arguments or any of my public statements have I ever said anything in general that vaccines are bad. In fact, as a physician, I am most fascinated by the development of vaccines. The stories of the development of the smallpox vaccine and the polio vaccine were all tremendous scientific successes, and there continue to be. My argument is simply for medical freedom.

Now, there has been a disingenuous argument made by the other side. They say that I am proposing a mandate, that this will be a legal mandate and that there is no mandate.

If you want to be a page, there is a mandate. Now, they say you can just choose not to be a page, but this affects the rest of our society.

So if your kid gets into Yale or Princeton or Harvard or the University of Chicago, many of those schools follow the lead of the Senate, follow the lead of the Senate doctors, and say your kid has to have three vaccines. But if you look at the evidence carefully that I have laid out, you will find that the scientific studies across all continents, across the world, across the United States--studies of millions of people--show that the vaccines have some downside and danger, particularly for children.

Not once have I said that the elderly shouldn't be vaccinated. In fact, for my 92-year-old and 86-year-old in-laws, we suggested and tried to get them the vaccine as soon as we could. My wife was vaccinated. Now, I chose not to be vaccinated because I had the disease in the first couple weeks of COVID and had immunity.

And the studies turned out--and these are studies of over a million people in California and New York. The studies turned out to show that actually having had the disease does give you immunity, and it is actually twice as potent as the vaccine.

When I say that, the left gets apoplectic, and they say: Oh, my goodness, you are saying people should just get sick to get immunity.

I am not saying that at all. But I am saying that, if you have gotten sick, you have immunity. And we should be honest with people because some people have had two vaccines and they want to know: Do I need a third one?

Well, let's release the data on people who have had two vaccines plus COVID, and tell us how many people are subsequently getting it again, going to the hospital, or dying. Wouldn't you want to know that before you take your third, fourth, fifth, six, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth vaccine? Release the data. But, in a free country, we make these decisions.

The other side argued that, well, what if one of the pages has health conditions. No part of our resolution says anything about them not getting a vaccine. Anybody in this country can freely get a vaccine. If their parents and they decide to get a vaccine, by all means, do it. Nothing in my resolution would prevent pages or anyone else from getting a vaccine. What I am arguing for is freedom.

As far as the idea that this will be permanent and unwavering and won't be able to recognize what new diseases come upon us, every new disease requires reevaluation--every new disease. It doesn't mean the concept of freedom changes. What would happen is everyone will still evaluate this.

The evaluation of this vaccine when it first came out at the end of 2020, early 2021, was different than it is now, frankly. It is also different if you have had it. People should just be honest with you.

I am not saying don't take a booster or that you can't take a booster. Go take all you want. I am saying the government's job should be to give you information, and I am saying the opposite of what he actually made a point of.

Vaccine hesitancy or people undermining the belief that vaccines work comes from people who tell you things that are dishonest and untrue. There is no science--and I am adamant about what I am saying here. There is no science that the booster for your children reduces the transmission of the disease. There is no reduction in your child's ability to get COVID if they take a COVID booster--zero. The other side accepts this. Rochelle Walensky, Biden's nominee, accepts this--no change in transmission with the vaccine.

How about hospitalization and death? There is still some data that people at risk for this can have reduced hospitalization, not transmission. They can still catch it, but maybe reduced hospitalization and death.

Most of this data came in the previous iterations, when we had the wild variety in 2020. Then we got Delta. Then we got Omicron. But we have now advanced two or three iterations out. And the one thing we are lucky about that the government should be honest with you is that with each successive iteration, with each successive mutation and variant, the good news is this: It has become less deadly. It has become less deadly because the virus is now less deadly but also because the community has more immunity. So immunity has developed; the virus has evolved to become less deadly, and we are in a much better situation.

But government medicine and government health policy shouldn't be about telling Americans what to do. It should be about giving information. The government should never be in the business of mandating, whether it is masks or vaccines or any of this other stuff. You wear it. You do it if you want--your body, your choice.

But there is a lot of conflicting data here, and you really need to be informed to make an informed choice. There is some data the government is still preventing from being released so you can't tell.

With regard to the masks, we now know that there was a meta-analysis of 78 different randomized controlled studies called the Cochrane analysis, and they found that masks did not prevent the transmission in public. In fact, what they found was there was no evidence that more significant mandates or more significant use changed the transmission at all.

This had been the accepted conclusion by all of the medical world before 2020. We had never advised masks in public for influenza because with influenza, the size of the virus--the same as the size of COVID-- is much smaller than the pores of the mask. We found people really cannot wear the masks without touching them. We found that air goes around the mask. But, ultimately, we looked at public, large populations, and we found that they just didn't prevent the disease.

Does that mean you can't wear a mask? No. Wear a mask if you think it makes you more healthy. In the hospital, they said: Well, doctors wear them.

Of course we do. If you go into a COVID patient's room--and I volunteered in the hospital after I got COVID. I got it very early, and I felt comfortable going in there because I had already had the disease. But wearing a mask made sense to go into the room of someone with COVID. We wore the N95 mask because it actually, if worn properly, will protect from the particles. We also washed our hands, wore gloves, and wore gowns. And as we came out, we took off the gloves, the gowns, and the masks and threw them away immediately. And we did it again into the next patient's room.

Done properly, there can be some--it still doesn't work completely because, still, a lot of doctors and nurses got COVID, but it is probably worth a try.

In the public setting, it just doesn't work, frankly. Nobody can do that. A lot of people don't know this, but the N95 mask--in which, actually, the pores are small enough--works with something called an electrostatic charge. And after you breathe into it for about 4 hours, the moisture from your exhaled breath actually changes the electrostatic charge, and it is not as effective in preventing the ingress or egress of the COVID virus.

But, really, what we are arguing here--there can be two sides to every argument. What we are arguing about, what we are discussing is who should make the choice. The Democratic majority believes that they should make the choices for your healthcare and that kids belong to them.

This is the same argument we had in education in Virginia, when you had the parents in Northern Virginia saying, ``We want to be involved in our children's education,'' and you had the Democratic nominee for Governor in Virginia come out in a debate and say that kids don't belong to their parents; the school will make these decisions; it is none of your business; stay out of it.

That is what they are telling the pages and their parents--that it is none of their business, their healthcare.

And it could be different for any of them. If a page had a kidney transplant or has leukemia and their parents want them to have the vaccine, it is probably a reasonable thing to do. But if they are young and healthy and have no medical problems, it turns out, if you look objectively at the data, that they have five times greater risk of getting a heart inflammation than they do of being hospitalized for COVID. These are the statistics. People should just be aware of that.

And good, honest people could still disagree on this. But what happens in a free country is you make your decision. You make your decision of which doctor you take them to. If you don't appreciate the opinion of that doctor and you don't trust that doctor, you go to another. And sometimes, it is complicated. Sometimes, mothers and fathers don't agree.

But who wants to give a political party the power to make these decisions for your children? How would you feel if your young, healthy football player or band member or choir member got the COVID vaccine and then has a heart problem that permanently impairs them for the rest of their life, when they had zero chance of dying from COVID and virtually no chance of being hospitalized?

Wouldn't you want your government to release the data on what it means if your kid has already had COVID? Let's say your kid has already had one or two vaccines and they have already had COVID. What does that mean? Don't you think having COVID might replace the need for more vaccines?

Your immunity is also broader. The vaccine gives immunity to one protein on the surface, the S protein on the surface of the cell. When you actually get infected, your body destroys the cells that have the virus in, and, as the virus empties out its inner contents, nucleic capsids and nuclear proteins, you actually get a broader immunity.

Now, the left misinterprets this. The left says: You want everybody to get sick, and people are going to die.

I don't want anybody to get sick. All I am telling you is people should be given the information. Most of us have had COVID. What does it mean? What does it mean if you have had two vaccines and COVID? What does that mean toward your future? What does it mean toward your need for more vaccines?

But, ultimately, what we are talking about here is freedom. What we are talking about is who should make the medical choices: the government, the Democratic Party, or whether or not we should leave this to parents and their kids. And I, for one, say that we ought to have medical freedom. In a free country, every individual should be free to make those decisions.

Madam President, most of Europe--indeed, most of the civilized world--does not require three COVID vaccines for adolescents.

We are admonished by those on the left to follow the science. The science is pretty clear on this as well. The FDA committee on vaccines, as well as the CDC committee on vaccines, voted, and they said that it would be advisable--not a mandate, but that it would be advisable--to give a booster vaccine to those 65 and older. Adolescents were never addressed in this.

In fact, one of the members of the committee, Paul Offit, is a renowned scientist--infectious disease, Philadelphia Children's Hospital. He is pro all vaccines. He is pro the COVID vaccine. I think he probably doesn't even have trouble with the mandate, and yet he said the risks to the vaccine for adolescents are greater than the risk of the disease.

We address diseases based on the individual and who they are and what their risks are. You base the risks and benefits of treatment versus the disease.

The risks of COVID, particularly in 2021, for a 70-year-old, were maybe a thousand times more than for a teenager. In fact, when we have looked at some countries' statistics, the entire country of Germany had no deaths among healthy children between the ages of 5 and 17.

If you take out children who are very, very ill in our country and look at only healthy children, there is no measurable risk of dying from COVID in our country for the youth. Yet we still have a policy here, and this policy originated not with scientists nor with the scientific committee. The policy that they are adhering to here to force our Senate pages to have three vaccines actually comes from political appointees in the Biden administration.

It is not just a fact or a matter of whether or not the vaccine is of benefit to them. It is also a question of whether or not the vaccine is actually potentially harmful to them. We do know that there is a side effect to the vaccine, particularly in young people--particularly boys, but it can happen in girls--primarily between the ages of 14 and 24. We know that that risk increases with each successive vaccine because kids have a stronger immune response. We know this because even the CDC recommended that if you just had COVID recently, you shouldn't get a COVID vaccine because you have already gotten a heightened immune response from the disease itself.

But we know with certainty that none of the vaccine committees recommended that Senate pages have three vaccines. Yet that is still the policy.

We finally have come to the realization that almost everybody has either been vaccinated or had COVID and that, actually, natural immunity is about five times more potent than the vaccine.

We finally have come to a sensible policy with regard to our military. We are no longer mandating the COVID vaccine in the military. Yet one of the few places left on the planet where we are mandating it is in the Senate.

Now, admittedly, there are not that many Senate pages. But should we be lacking in science and ignoring the science to force them to do something that is actually potentially deleterious to their health.

Even the council for the District of Columbia recently voted unanimously to repeal the requirement that students receive a COVID-19 shot to attend public school.

Some on the other side will say: Well, we need to force the Senate pages to take these three vaccines because that is what the DC schools are doing.

The DC schools are no longer doing this.

The entire world admits that the vaccine does not stop transmission. So you can't make this indirect argument: We need to vaccinate them to save the old Senators. That is not true. It doesn't stop transmission.

We do believe that still, for vulnerable crowds, vulnerable age groups--over 65--there may be some reduction in hospitalization and death. There is no measurable benefit for adolescents, and there actually is a greater risk of myocarditis from the vaccine--admittedly still not a high risk but about between 4 and 6 out of 15,000--of an inflammation of the heart. But we do know the risk for a child or for an adolescent--a Senate page--dying is zero. If they have particular health problems and they want to take a vaccine, nobody is stopping them, but we shouldn't be mandating something that the science doesn't support.

So just before Thanksgiving, the Mayor of DC actually signed the legislation that gets rid of DC's mandate. There is no more excuse that the DC schools are requiring this. The council and Mayor of one of the most liberal cities in the United States are all of one mind: We have had enough of COVID vaccine mandates. We have had enough of students missing school for noncompliance. We have had enough of kids falling behind in their studies for the sake of a misguided mandate. Yet, to become a Senate page, you still to this day must get a COVID-19 booster shot. This requirement in the Senate persists despite the fact that study after study demonstrates that the risks posed by the vaccine for young and healthy people are greater than the risks posed by COVID. In addition, all sides acknowledge that the vaccines do not prevent transmission.

Study after study shows that it makes no sense to mandate COVID vaccinations for teenagers who are healthy and that such a mandate could be dangerous.

A myocarditis study published last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association Cardiology examined 23 million people ages 12 and up across Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. This study of 23 million people found that after 2 doses of an mRNA vaccine, the risk of myocarditis was higher compared with being unvaccinated and higher after the second dose of the vaccine.

Almost all of the myocarditis came after the second vaccine. With each vaccine, it increases the risk because the kids, or younger people, make an amazingly strong immune reaction to the vaccine. The risk was highest among males ages 16 to 24.

That is why many of us argued until we were blue in the face that mandating it for our young soldiers was wrong and actually malpractice. We finally did succeed in removing that mandate, and that was actually passed by both Houses of Congress and signed by the President. Yet the same risk exists for the Senate pages, and the mandate continues.

This is exactly why several European countries--including Germany, France, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway--all restrict the use of mRNA vaccines for COVID for young people. Yet the policy for Senate pages blindly commands vaccines for young, healthy people.

A study published in December 2022 in the Journal of Medical Ethics found that per 100,000 third doses of mRNA vaccine, up to 14.7 cases of myocarditis may be caused in males ages 18 to 29. Up to 80 percent of those diagnosed with vaccine-induced myocarditis or pericarditis continued to struggle with cardiac inflammation more than 3 months after receiving a second dose.

Also in December 2022, Dr. Vinay Prasad and Dr. Benjamin Knudsen published a review in the European Journal of Clinical Investigation that examined 29 studies across 3 continents. Madam President, 6 of the 29 studies showed that after 2 doses of an mRNA vaccine, more than 1 in 10,000 males between the ages of 12 and 24 would experience myocarditis.

A study published the same month in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that, regardless of sex, among those ages 5 to 39, myocarditis or pericarditis occurred in 1 in every 50,000 after a first booster.

With statistics like that, why would anyone think that it is a good idea to insist upon boosters for our young pages, who are in their early teenage years?

It is the height of malpractice to subject young people to the greater risk of vaccination simply to satisfy the hunger for mandates. But even the bureaucrats are finding that they can no longer credibly impose COVID mandates. There is a growing movement among scientists and doctors across the country to think more rationally about this.

We have always had this. For example, the flu vaccine was never mandated on children. Children survived the flu and developed immunity. How long does your immunity last? Curiously, they found a woman who had survived the Spanish flu who was still alive just a couple of years ago. She actually still had antibodies to the Spanish flu although it had been nearly 100 years since she was infected. We know that people who had the first SARS in 2002 and 2003 still have antibodies nearly 20 years later.

People have learned to live with COVID. Even the DC Council, which governs one of the most liberal, mandate-happy cities in the country, knows that their constituents will no longer tolerate mandates, particularly those imposed on children, but the Senate COVID vaccine mandate remains.

Will this mandate continue indefinitely, and if so, based on what data? What if someone can come let's say 5 years from now and say: I have had COVID 15 times, and the last 8 times, it was minor cold symptoms. Yet you are still mandating I take a vaccine that doesn't stop transmission and has no benefit to hospitalization or death for young people?

You know, when they approved the booster for kids--it was never recommended, but they approved it for kids--they could not come up with data showing reduced hospitalization or death. Why? Because young people aren't going to the hospital or dying from COVID. They simply have it from the beginning, and they don't now.

The only way they could actually try to prove efficacy--and not really efficacy but to prove some kind of effect from giving a booster--is they said: If you give these kids a vaccine, they will make antibodies.

Well, my response to that is, you can give them 100 vaccines, you can give them 1,000 vaccines, and they will make antibodies every time. That is proof of the concept of the way vaccines work, but it doesn't mean you have to or need a vaccine.

Public health measures should be backed up with proof that the benefits outweigh the burdens. There is no evidence of that when it comes to vaccination and booster mandates, especially for teenagers, who, as a group, are less vulnerable to this virus than any Senator. In fact, it is a little-known fact but absolutely true that the seasonal flu, or influenza, is more deadly than COVID for people in the ``young'' category. In the category for the age of the Senate pages, the seasonal flu is more deadly than COVID.

Now, this isn't to downplay COVID; it is just to say that COVID had a very targeted mortality and lethality. Its target was generally over 65. It was also those who are obese at almost any age. But it specifically was not fatal for young, healthy people.

I merely ask that the Senate open its eyes to what several other countries are doing, what the rest of the country sees: that COVID vaccine mandates on children are harmful, counterproductive, and must be put to an end. That is why I ask unanimous consent that the Senate pass my resolution to end all COVID-related vaccination mandates for pages who serve in the Chamber.

So therefore I ask, Madam President, unanimous consent that the Committee on Rules and Administration be discharged from consideration and the Senate now proceed to S. Res. 336; further, that the resolution be agreed to and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Nothing in our proposal bans future vaccines. So it is a spurious argument to say that somehow, this would prevent a future vaccine. Ten years from now Ebola erupts, and everybody is getting Ebola, and we have a great vaccine--nothing prevents that.

Now, he mentioned whether or not the children, the kids, the teenagers, might have a preexisting condition. We don't know that; you are right. So the people who take care of minors are their parents, and they would make a decision.

Nothing in this resolution prevents anybody from getting a vaccine. In fact, I would recommend you ask your doctor. That is the way you are supposed to do it: Ask your doctor and your parents and decide whether you need a vaccine. So, really, there are no real arguments here being made.

It is important to know that no one would be prevented from getting a vaccine, and no one would be prevented from having a new vaccine policy later on.

The question of who is dying from this is an important one because the question is whether for healthy kids, whether the risks of the vaccine are greater than the risks of the disease.

This is something people are going to have different conclusions on. But the science shows at this point that the risks of the vaccine are greater than the risks of the disease for healthy kids.

Now, if your kid is not healthy or had a kidney transplant and you want to talk it over with their doctor, by all means they can get a vaccine if they want. But realize that the other kids getting vaccines is not protecting your child because the vaccines don't stop transmission.

And this is admitted by everyone. Even the Biden administration admits this. Everyone admits they don't stop transmission.

So what we are doing here is going against all science. We are going against all freedom. We are taking the freedom away from our Senate pages and their parents to make this decision. And we are actually using faulty science. The two main vaccine committees that have looked at this voted to recommend this for only people over 65, where the evidence was that in that age group the risks of the disease were greater than the risks of the vaccine. I acknowledge that.

For children, teenagers, for adolescents, it is the opposite. The risks of the vaccine, while small, actually exceed the risk of the disease, which are virtually zero, if not zero, for healthy kids.

And so I find it elitist. I find it the height of arrogance that some people will want to make those decisions for others. In a free country, each individual should be allowed to make these decisions. You shouldn't have some nonscientist Senator coming forward and saying: You must do as I tell you, particularly when all of the science actually goes against that at this point.

But even if you disagreed with my point of view, I am not here to tell you that you have to take my point of view. Go get a vaccine for your kids if you want.

But the interesting thing is, people are smarter than you think they are. If you look at the statistics on vaccines, there will be people lamenting: Oh, if we only had more people vaccinated, we would have done so much better.

It is, actually, really not true. Over age 65, it is somewhere between 97 and 98 percent of people over 65 who chose to get vaccinated. People read the news. People are smarter than you think. People see someone their age dying, and they are like, I think I might get vaccinated.

But do you know how many people are vaccinating their teenagers? It is about 3 percent because people are reading the news that teenagers don't die from this disease. They also know that kids probably had COVID-19 already. They may have already had the test.

And what we do know from looking at millions of people in large studies, that if you have had COVID, your protection from getting it again or getting seriously ill is about 5 times better than the vaccine.

Now, that is not an argument for not getting the vaccine if you are in an elderly category or if you are in a high-risk category. But it is certainly an argument against getting it if you are a young person and you have already had COVID and now you are being forced to get this.

The other thing is, is the current Senate policy and page policy isn't taking into account the fact that if one of the pages had COVID 2 weeks ago and now they want to be a page and we won't let them come up, are they advising getting a vaccine if they only had COVID 2 weeks ago? I don't think there is any allowance for that. That is actually against medical advice to take a vaccine very quickly after you have already had COVID, because their immune response is so extraordinary, they get a heightened response. And that is when you get this overlap or overlay, which causes an inflammation of the heart.

So what I would find today is that the Flat Earth Society still just wants you to do as you are told. The Flat Earth Society doesn't believe in your medical freedom. And, yes, we will come back--and I will continue to come back--until some sense is finally jogged into the minds of those who want you to blindly just do as they are told--do as you are told, don't think about it, don't make your own decisions, do as you are told.

I think that form of elitism and arrogance will eventually backfire because there are a lot of people out there who made the decision that, you know what, I am not vaccinating my child because it is still under emergency use; it has some unknowns; and I know my kids have already had COVID. And I don't see any kids dying from COVID unless they are extraordinarily ill.

When the Senator says: Oh, they are the leading cause of death among children, they all have significant other terminal illnesses. None of them are healthy children dying from COVID.

Entire countries have released their statistics. There is even more that the government is hiding from us, frankly. The vast majority of people over 65 who took at least two vaccines: 97, 98 percent. So if you have taken two vaccines and you have gotten COVID twice--which is the average person over 65 because it doesn't stop transmission--you have had two vaccines and COVID twice, what are your risks of going to the hospital or dying?

That is what you want to know. Do you need to take a vaccine every 3

months? Do I want to keep being vaccinated? Tell me what the statistics show, and I will make a rational decision based on that.

The CDC won't release this because the CDC, essentially, have become salesmen for Big Pharma. They want you to get vaccinated.

Big Pharma is complaining they are not making enough money on the vaccine because you are not rushing out to get another vaccine.

Wouldn't you want to know: Am I going to get sick and die if I already had COVID twice and I have already had two vaccines?

They have the statistics. So all I ask for is there ought to be a little more consideration for freedom. And I bring this up for the Senate pages because I do care about their medical freedom. And I care about their right to be left alone. And this is not the end of this debate.

Mr. President, at the start of the year, when Vice Chair Collins and I took over as leaders of the Senate Appropriations Committee, we announced something ambitious: We were going to return the committee to regular order.

The first thing everyone told us was: That is great. We all want to return to regular order. We all want to show the American people that Congress can actually function; that we can work together and solve problems and pass bills to make their lives better.

But the second thing they told us was essentially: Good luck. You are going to need it.

Well, Vice Chair Collins and I went to work. We said: Look, if this is going to happen, we have to show we are serious about writing these bills that can actually be signed into law. That meant a few things.

First of all, it meant we had to work with the funding levels in the debt ceiling deal struck by President Biden and Speaker McCarthy, a deal that I had--and I still have--concerns about and which required tough funding decisions across each of our 12 bills. But the President and Speaker shook hands, and that is the agreement that Congress passed into law. We can't produce serious bills if we start by throwing that framework out the window.

Secondly, it meant we had to work together to find common ground, including on tough and thorny issues, and compromise where necessary to produce spending bills that could make it through both Chambers and to the President's desk. That meant avoiding poison pills that could sink these bills.

And, third, we wanted to make sure that we had an open, bipartisan process. We wanted to give each and every one of our colleagues the chance to weigh in on these bills and the American public the chance to see our work on them. So we held over 40 hearings this spring to assess our Nation's needs for the year ahead. We sought input from all of our colleagues. We wrote these bills together, and then we held markups for the first time in 2 years. We televised the markups--the first time ever--so people could follow this debate from home. And at those markups, we discussed the draft legislation, considered amendments, and voted on our bills.

The result: For the first time in 5 years, we passed all 12 of our funding bills out of our committee, and we did it with overwhelming bipartisan support. Nine of the twelve bills passed unanimously or had just a single ``no'' vote. In total, 97 percent of the votes on our bills in committee were ``yes'' votes.

These are not the bills I would have written on my own. They are not what Vice Chair Collins would have written on her own. They are the bills we wrote together, along with our colleagues on the committee and with input from nearly every Senator on both sides of the aisle.

They are serious bills that can be signed into law, which is how this process should work. We should come together, look for common ground, and build on it to write bills that solve problems and make people's lives better and give our Nation and communities the resources they need to stay safe and competitive, to grow and thrive. That is exactly what the three bills in this package do.

As chair of the Subcommittee on Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, and Related Agencies, I am

pleased to say I was able to work with Senator Boozman to put together a bill that gets our military and our veterans the support we owe them, the support that they need.

This is essential to keeping our Nation safe because our ships and submarines and aircraft are only as good as the infrastructure they rely on and the troops who operate them. So this bill provides DOD with $19.1 billion for military construction. That is an increase over fiscal year 2023 levels.

This funding will help with construction needs across our country at base installations for projects like childcare development centers to make sure our servicemembers and their spouses can go to work knowing that their children are safe and housing like the barracks project at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in my home State and other facilities across the country to support our troops.

It will help make sure that our shipyards, like the naval base in Kitsap and the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, are up-to-date and up to the challenges of this moment.

These investments will build our presence around the world, especially in the Indo-Pacific regions, and strengthen our military infrastructure to keep it resilient in the face of threats like severe weather and earthquakes.

And I am really glad we included funds to address harmful PFAS chemicals and other toxins at former installations that could put our communities in harm's way.

I am also very proud of the work we have done in this bill to support veterans and their families. As the daughter of a World War II veteran, I take the promises we made to those who fought for our country very seriously, and this bill ensures that we keep those promises by fully funding VA's budget request. We are talking about increased funding for mental health, suicide prevention programs, the caregivers program, expanding the childcare pilot program--that continues to be a huge priority for me across all of our appropriations bills--funding for homelessness prevention programs for our veterans, rural health programs, and, of course, women veterans' healthcare.

By the way, women are the fastest growing demographic of veterans overall. Our MILCON-VA funding bill also increases VA infrastructure funding so we can begin to address the challenges related to VA's aging medical facilities, and it reflects the much-needed pause and reset happening with the electronic health record modernization program.

I was raising the alarm from day one about how the unacceptable botched rollout of that program hurt veterans in my home State, and I am watching closely to make sure we see changes that provide real results for our veterans and our VA providers because, at the end of the day, these investments are not just about programs and contracts. This is about our promise to get veterans the benefits they earned and need to stay healthy, like prescriptions, mental health care, cancer screenings, and more.

So the stakes could not be higher for those families, and we owe them that much, which is why I am proud this bill sends a clear, bipartisan message: We are not going to shortchange our veterans and servicemembers, and we will live up to our obligation to provide them with the resources that they need.

The next bill in this package--from the Subcommittee on Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies-- makes sure we are living up to another crucial obligation, and that is to keep our food supply safe and secure, and support rural communities across our country, because, at the most basic level, we can't have strong communities if people can't put food on the table. That means making sure that the food that is sold in our country is safe. It means protecting families from shortages--so avoiding and mitigating supply chain disruptions, addressing climate crises, like droughts, which can threaten crops we all rely on. It means addressing food insecurity so people can afford--and access--the food they need to keep their families healthy and fed. And it means supporting our Nation's farmers, who are such a huge part of our economy. For example, every day in my home State of Washington, we ship apples, cherries, wheat, potatoes, pulse crops, and so many other commodities across the country and across the world.

So I want to thank Senator Heinrich and Senator Hoeven for their very hard work to help put together a bipartisan bill that delivers on those crucial issues. This bill will make sure the FDA has the resources it needs to keep grocery stores and dinner tables safe and to implement the bipartisan cosmetics legislation that we negotiated last year and that many of us worked on very hard to pass.

It also includes crucial funding to support our farmers, for example, increased investments in agricultural research. Just last month, I was home and visited my alma mater, Washington State University, which is home to world class agricultural research programs. This funding will help universities like WSU to tackle problems that our farmers are facing, like, in my State, smoke exposure to wine grapes, herbicide resistance, and little cherry disease; not to mention efforts that we need to make to address water shortages, improve our yields, use inputs, and more.

The bill also funds absolutely critical nutrition programs like WIC, which is a lifeline that keeps so many families from going under. This bill fully funds WIC at the level included in the President's budget request, and we know that participation and costs for the program are changing. So as we work to get final appropriations bills signed into law, I will keep working around the clock to make sure that no one loses their WIC benefits and no one is forced to be on a wait list. We have got to maintain the strong bipartisan support for that program going forward and continue to fully fund it, and that is a top priority for me.

My family had to rely on food stamps for a short time, and thanks to that help that we got when I was young, every one of my six brothers and sisters and I have been able to now grow up and give back to our communities because our country had our back when we needed it.

So make no mistake, our investments in WIC are not just the right thing, the moral thing; it is an investment in the future of America.

So if I haven't painted a picture yet, investments like this, which maintain our nutrition programs, support our farmers, and keep our food supplies safe and secure are truly mission critical to our Nation's future, but they are also bipartisan. There are things that we can all agree on that are important for America.

Finally, this package includes the funding bill from the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Subcommittee. I previously led this subcommittee alongside Vice Chair Collins, as the chair and ranking member, and, I can tell you, investments here are critical to help prevent people from living on the streets or being out in the cold and to get people and goods where they need to go in a safe and timely way.

Washington State, like so many other States in our country, has really been grappling with our Nation's housing and homelessness crisis for years. So I am glad that we are able to maintain and build on some key investments in this bill that provide rental assistance to families in need, increase our housing supply, support maintenance for distressed properties, and connect people with healthcare, education, unemployment programs, and other support services.

And I hope we can come together in a bipartisan way to do more to tackle those challenges in a serious way in the future, because while this bill does take important steps and includes necessary investments, our housing and homelessness crisis is going to take a lot more than flat funding in most areas and modest funding increases in some programs, which is what was possible to negotiate under the tough budget caps in this debt ceiling deal.

When it comes to our Nation's transportation infrastructure, the investments in this bill are especially important in light of some of the derailments and disasters and disturbing close calls we saw this year. I am very pleased that we were able to increase funding for the Federal Aviation Administration so it can address the shortage of air traffic controllers, reduce flight

delays, increase efficiency, modernize technology, and critically improve safety, which is so important given the concerning number of near misses we have seen recently.

This bill also increases the Federal Railroad Administration's funding for its safety work to make sure we have enough inspectors to keep our rails safe and that we can research important questions to improve rail safety and efficiency.

So I really want to thank Senator Schatz and Senator Hyde-Smith for their excellent work putting that bill together.

Each and every one of the appropriations bills in the package before us today is the result of an open, bipartisan process that invited input from every single Senator. In fact, that is true for all 12 of the bills our committee passed--all in overwhelming, bipartisan votes.

And, as my colleagues know, the Senate Appropriations Committee has plenty of Members on opposite ends of the political spectrum--strongly progressive Democrats and deeply conservative Republicans. In other words, getting here took a lot of hard work, late nights, and early mornings. And we had to really set politics aside, listen to each other, focus on the problems, and find common ground.

I think I speak for everyone when I say this work has not been easy. And, of course, I know as well as anyone that our work is not done. I think we all understand a CR will be necessary to see this process through. And we all understand supplemental funding is absolutely essential to respond to some of the urgent challenges our States are facing, like delivering disaster relief that communities desperately need today, paying our wildland firefighters, continuing to have our Ukrainian allies' back, and addressing the fentanyl crisis, not to mention the need, as I have spoken, of addressing the childcare funding cliff that threatens to put childcare further out of reach for too many families.

And, of course, even after we pass this funding package before us today, we need to get all the rest of our appropriations bills across the finish line. But by passing this package and the rest of our appropriations bills, we are showing the American people that there is a clear, bipartisan path for us to do our jobs and fund the government.

There is absolutely no reason for chaos or a shutdown, and I will continue working nonstop with my colleagues to make sure we get that job done. This was never going to be easy, but none of us came here because we thought it was easy. We came here because we wanted to make life better for folks back home, helping people and solving problems. I have said that a lot during my time here in the Senate, and I have brokered a lot of bipartisan deals, always in service to the people I represent back home, the friends and neighbors that I grew up with. Helping people and solving problems, that is our job, and I would like to see us do more of that together--Democrats and Republicans.

So I urge all of our colleagues: Let's keep this momentum going. Let's show the American people that Congress can work for them. There doesn't have to be a calamity over funding the government. Let's show that there can and will be major policy disagreements on any number of issues, but their elected leaders can come together on what we agree on, and we will fund the government responsibly so they don't have to worry about chaos or shutdowns.

And on that note, I would like to encourage my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to come to the floor and talk about these bills-- what they mean for your State, what they mean for your constituents, what your priorities are here--and to talk to me and to talk to Senator Collins if you have amendments and ideas for how we can make these bills better, because Senator Collins and I are working now to clear a managers' package and set up votes. Our staffs are still working too, and we are happy to work with your team so we can pass the strongest bills possible.

We have been working closely from day one to run an open, bipartisan process and to get input from all of our colleagues and to make sure everyone can make their constituents' voices heard.

One issue Vice Chair Collins and I heard about from many of our colleagues is the need to support communities rebuilding after recent disasters. I will have more to say on that in the days ahead, but it is front of mind for both of us and the Appropriations Committee as a whole to take care of our communities that are working so hard to rebuild after the recent horrible disasters, which include, as we know, the wildfires in Hawaii and in areas in Washington State, flooding in Vermont and California, as well as the damage caused by Hurricane Idalia.

So, as we get started on this bill, I say to all of my colleagues: Come to the floor. Talk to us. Work with us so we can get this funding package passed, help people, and solve problems.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I remember when title 42 went away--the COVID public health order that the Border Patrol used to expel people from the border region in the interest of public health. There were many people who expected a surge of migration recognizing what a moneymaking opportunity that human smuggling and drug smuggling is for the cartels that control much of the U.S.-Mexican border.

And for a while it looked like maybe--just maybe--that surge would not happen. But despite the administration's best efforts to downplay or distract from the situation at the southern border, we now see the Biden border crisis in full flower.

Preliminary data secured by the Washington Post shows that last month--last month--a record number of migrant families illegally crossed the southern border.

In August, the Border Patrol arrested more than 91,000 migrants--in August--people who entered the United States as part of a family unit, the highest number we have seen in a single month. But it is not just the families; apprehension numbers have increased dramatically over the past couple of months in all categories.

We have gone from just under 100,000 detentions in June to 132,000 in July, to more than 177,000 in August. I would point out that much of the migration we have seen into Texas has been seasonal because it has been very hot, and it is dangerous for migrants to make the dangerous trip from their home to our border. But that hasn't happened this year. It got worse and worse the hotter the summer months got.

So when you include migrants processed through the ports of entry, the Washington Post is estimating roughly 230,000 migrant encounters in August--230,000.

This would make it the busiest month for border crossings this calendar year. As I said, since title 42 ended in May, the Biden administration has tried to spike the ball and declare victory. They pointed to a temporary drop in border crossings and said this is the proof that their situation was under their control, but that is obviously not the case.

We have just experienced the busiest month in family crossings on record and likely the busiest month for overall crossings this calendar year. As the New York Times reported, in August alone, nearly 82,000 migrants passed through the Darien Gap, the sole land route to the United States from South America, describing it as ``by far the largest single-month total on record.''

And the border crisis isn't getting any better. If anything, it is getting worse, and communities in Texas and those across the Nation are beginning to feel the strain. El Paso, for example, right across the border from Juarez, in West Texas, is in the midst of a surge in border crossings. It is seeing an average of 1,200 encounters per day.

The leader of Rescue Mission El Paso, which provides migrants with food, clothing, and shelter, said:

We've lost track of what capacity means. We are beyond

full.

Further down the Texas-Mexico border is Eagle Pass, which experienced a mass crossing earlier this week. Between midnight on Sunday and Monday morning, more than 2,200 migrants crossed illegally. That is 2,200 in 1 night. The migration surge is happening along the entire U.S.-Mexico border, but two areas in particular are under tremendous strain. One is the Tucson Sector, which covers most of the Arizona- Mexico border. Border crossings in this sector have been on the rise, with agents apprehending as many as 2,000 migrants a day. This includes migrants from all over the world, even those from Senegal.

It reminds me of, when I was in Yuma, AZ, with four Democratic Senators and four Republican Senators, we were welcomed by the Acting Border Patrol Chief, who said: Welcome to the Yuma Sector. Last year, we encountered people from 174 countries, speaking more than 200 languages.

Senator Kelly, the Senator from Arizona, was there and noted that Mexicali is a city in Northern Mexico with an airport. And so it was explained to us that what likely was happening is that human smugglers were facilitating the travel of migrants to Mexicali, where they could simply Uber over to the Border Patrol and claim asylum, and the Biden administration would make sure they were successfully deposited in the United States of America, perhaps to await an asylum hearing that may never occur.

Well, given the spike in border crossings, the Border Patrol--it is no surprise--is struggling. The Agency doesn't have the facilities, the resources, or the personnel to manage an influx this large, and, actually, that is part of the plan.

If you are a transnational criminal organization that profits from smuggling migrants and drugs across the border, what a tremendous idea: Let's flood the zone with migrants, and then when the Border Patrol is distracted or diverted elsewhere, then here come the drugs. And we saw last year alone 108,000 Americans died of drug overdoses, 71,000 from synthetic opioids like fentanyl.

We know where it is coming from. The precursors come from China. It goes to Mexico. It is manufactured there, largely, to look like traditional pharmaceuticals, but they are contaminated with fentanyl. I was in Houston just last week, meeting with some parents who lost their children to fentanyl poisoning. I wear on my wrist--I typically don't wear things like this, but I have for the last 9 months. A father in Carrollton-Farmers Branch asked me to wear this band around my wrist in memory of his daughter who lost her life to fentanyl poisoning. It says, among other things, ``One pill can kill.''

Now, the children who die of fentanyl poisoning, they don't know they are taking fentanyl. They think it is maybe something more innocuous, and that is part of the insidiousness of what the cartels are doing. They are using industrial-sized pill presses to make it look like things that certainly wouldn't kill you. Maybe it is not optimal, things like Xanax or Percocet or some other pharmaceutical drug, but, in fact, it is counterfeit and contaminated with fentanyl. And as I said, 71,000 Americans died last year alone as a result of synthetic opioid poisoning.

So the Border Patrol can't keep up with the flooding of the zone, and here come the drugs, only to be distributed across the country in each of our communities by various criminal gangs. Well, because the Border Patrol can't keep up with the influx of people, they simply are now releasing them. That is right. Instead of returning them across the border, they are releasing them onto U.S. streets every day.

And it is unclear, really, who these individuals are or how they are being released. How many of these migrants are asylum seekers who have completed a credible fear screening? How many are simply being paroled into the country with flimsy instructions and told to appear at an ICE office, Immigrations and Customs office, in the interior at their destination.

How many are given a date to appear before an immigration judge, and how far away is that court date? I read recently in New York, an immigration court date could be as far as 10 years off. We don't have answers to these questions because the Biden administration has not been candid about exactly what is happening.

They basically have hoped nobody is noticing what is going on, but we are noticing. And, oh, by the way, people like the Governor in Massachusetts, the mayors of New York City, of Chicago, and Washington, DC, they are noticing because these migrants, once they pass the border region, they go somewhere, and what we are seeing is the impact on cities very far away from the southern border.

Well, the Biden administration keeps sweeping the problem under the rug and expecting us not to ask questions and conduct appropriate oversight. Last week alone, agents released 100 to

200 migrants a day near Nogales, AZ. The Tucson Sector is not alone. San Diego is also seeing a spike in border crossings. Last week, Customs and Border Protection closed one of two pedestrian crossings at the San Ysidro Port of Entry so personnel could help with the migration surge.

Again, the Border Patrol doesn't have the space or the personnel to accommodate the flood of humanity coming across. Videos show hundreds of migrants are being released into the streets and sidewalks of San Diego, including migrants from as far away as Pakistan and China.

Now, one of the things that amazes me, when President Biden appointed Vice President Kamala Harris as the border czar, she claimed that all of the flow of illegal immigration was as a result of local circumstances in Mexico or South America and as if we couldn't fix our border problems without basically nation building in one of those states. But either she does not understand or is unwilling to acknowledge that this is a global phenomenon. And who can blame some of these people coming across? If you think, Well, for a few thousand bucks, maybe I can make my way into the United States and stay there-- well, maybe it is a good bet.

But it is a disaster when our immigration system is basically handed over to transnational criminal organizations that care nothing about the people and that care nothing about the drugs that are coming across; all they care about is the money. And they are getting richer by the day as a result of Biden border policies.

Well, if there was any question about whether the Biden administration understands what is going on, recently, a migrant asked an agent if he could travel to Chicago, and the agent replied:

You can do whatever you want. You're free.

That is the Biden administration's border enforcement policies.

You can do whatever you want. You're free.

If there was any confusion about the Biden administration's catch- and-release policies, well, that statement cleared it up.

You can do whatever you want. You're free.

This interaction happened to be captured on video, and it has made the rounds on social media and national news. And it has been viewed by people around the world. And, you know, when other people see that, do you think they are discouraged or deterred from coming to the United States through this illegal route? No. They are encouraged. It is like a magnet, which is why we are seeing the huge numbers that we continue to see.

Again, it makes me think the Biden administration simply does not understand the dynamics at the border or, which is more likely the case, they simply don't care. You have to imagine there are people out there who are debating whether or not to make this dangerous journey.

If they had any doubts about whether or not their journey would be successful, well, this video statement pretty much cleared that up. The secret is out.

You know, it is ironic when I hear Secretary Mayorkas of the Department of Homeland Security or the President or the Vice President say: ``Don't come. Don't come,'' when almost every other message that people around the world are receiving is ``Come. You can make it. Just pay the money; take the dangerous journey; take the risk; pay these criminal organizations the cash they demand; and you can make it into the United States.''

And, boy, have they come. People around the world see that America's borders are open. They see videos of migrants from all over the world being released in the United States and told ``you're free.''

The Biden administration continues to create new incentives for migrants to make the dangerous journey to the border. President Biden has proven he is not only incapable of addressing this crisis, he is completely uninterested. He doesn't care. He apparently has no desire to enforce the law and secure the border. And the reason I conclude that is because if he did care, if he were willing to work with us to solve that problem, we are here ready to meet him halfway, but all we hear are crickets.

He would rather appease the open borders base in his political party than take the steps needed to protect the American people.

Border communities have endured the Biden border crisis for more than 2\1/2\ years now, and they are bracing for yet another migration surge.

Given the administration's complete and utter failure to address the crisis, it is time for Congress to step up. I am proud to cosponsor the Secure the Border Act, which was introduced by my friend and fellow Texan, Senator Cruz. This legislation would give the Border Patrol the tools they need in order to secure the border and safeguard the American people. It includes more agents to enforce the law to stop anyone or anything that doesn't legally enter the United States.

It restricts the Biden administration's ability to release thousands of migrants into the United States under the weak guise of parole. This is not parole in the criminal law sense where somebody is released from jail. This is a mechanism under our immigration laws where people are simply released and told: You have 2 years in the United States, and come back and check with us later on about staying longer. There is no such thing as a temporary program. All of this becomes permanent.

But this legislation tightens asylum standards that prevent migrants with frivolous asylum claims from gaming the system. This legislation implements a range of reforms that address the humanitarian and security crisis at the border. It passed the House in May and has been cosponsored by more than half of the Republican conference in the Senate.

My hope was that this would serve as a starting point for the Senate to begin discussing ways to secure the border and protect the American people. It would also be nice--and I have had this conversation with the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, on which I serve, the Senator from Illinois, who so far has declined to consider a markup of any immigration bills or border security bills. In the Senate, that is the committee of jurisdiction on which I sit, and I happen to be the ranking member of the Immigration and Border Security Subcommittee.

Well, it is clear that President Biden's approach to the border is not sustainable. His administration has rolled out one incentive after another to encourage--not discourage, not deter, but to encourage-- people from around the world to come to our borders and enter our country.

That is the reason we are experiencing a humanitarian and security crisis. The record migration levels of the last year have tested law enforcement, tested our cities and nonprofits in ways that I have never seen before--a record number of migrants, soaring demands for resources, dwindling budgets, overworked personnel--and we haven't even talked about the impact of this uncontrolled migration on our local hospitals and our education systems and the like. All of them have been operating under incredible strain for more than 2 years. So it is past time to adopt policies that impose consequences. That is what the Border Patrol said we need, is we need consequences to illegal immigration.

Look, I think that legal immigration--orderly, humane legal immigration--has been one of the greatest things that America has ever embraced. It has made us the country we are today, the most prosperous in the world, the most diverse. But surrendering our legal immigration system to drug cartels and human smuggling organizations is a recipe for disaster--what we are seeing right now.

Well, any time the Biden administration would like to engage on this topic, I am standing ready, willing, and able to do that, but so far, even when we have bipartisan legislation like the Bipartisan Border Solutions Act that Senator Sinema and I and Congressman Cuellar and Congressman Tony Gonzales introduced a couple of years ago, there has been zero interest by the Biden administration and no markups in the Judiciary Committee simply to consider that and come up with some consensus on how to deal with this disaster.

I yield the floor.