This view breaks the statement into its steps and names what each one does.
Madam President, Anecdote · 62 wordsover the past few weeks, familiar scenes have been playing out in Colorado and all across the country. Families are buying new books and backpacks, picking up school supplies, and taking their children to the pediatrician for their annual checkup. For decades, back-to-school season did not prompt anxiety or confusion--except for maybe the kids like me that didn’t do their summer reading.Anecdote Claims · 568 wordsParents could rely on the recommendations from their pediatricians, and the questions they did have were answered by professionals. But that peace of mind is being undermined by the current administration--including by the President of the United States and the Secretary of Health and Human Services, who have worked tirelessly to undermine decades of settled science around routine vaccinations that have kept kids safe in this country and around the world for years. The consequences of that broken trust are showing up in our emergency rooms and in our classrooms. Parents are increasingly concerned that their kids will go to school and come back with a serious disease. Right now, our Nation is living through the most severe measles outbreak in over 35 years.1 Measles is not a mild childhood inconvenience; it is one of the most contagious viruses on Earth, capable of causing high fevers, brain swelling, long-term disability, and death. In Colorado, we have already confirmed 25 cases this year, including 7 hospitalizations.2 Of these cases, 22 people were unvaccinated.3 Of the 25 who have measles in Colorado today, 22 were unvaccinated. That is the most we have had in over 30 years. You have to go back to 1995 to find an outbreak in my State that is even close to what we are seeing today.4 We are going backward when it comes to public health in the richest country in the world, and families in Colorado and all across this country are suffering the consequences. But what is taking place in Colorado is especially tragic because Colorado’s experience is one of the reasons that the United States has a two-dose vaccine recommendation today. Back in 1988, an outbreak of 84 measles cases swept through Fort Lewis College in Durango.5 It caught public health officials completely by surprise because nearly every student on that campus had already received a measles shot. Under the guidance at that time, one dose was supposed to be enough, so CDC researchers--not people playing politics--CDC researchers went to Durango to figure out what exactly had gone wrong, to learn from this surprising outcome. There, they discovered something that continues to inform our vaccine policy even today: While the virus infected students who had only received a single shot, not a single student who had had two doses got sick.6 That campus in Durango became the proving ground for today’s recommendation on measles. Based directly on what they saw at Fort Lewis and similar outbreaks at that time, the CDC updated its guidelines in 1989 to establish the two-dose MMR schedule recommended for every schoolchild in America today.7 This updated recommendation paved the way for measles to be officially eliminated across the United States in the year 2000.8 That was a quarter of a century ago, when, following the science, this country eliminated measles; and for 30 years after that, routine vaccine recommendations have kept children safe and in the classroom. Back then, faced with a public health emergency, we did what you would expect: We followed the evidence, updated our practices, and successfully prevented another outbreak of that scale or severity going forward. We learned from each other. Today, we are taking the opposite approach. Instead of defending the settled science that saved millions of lives, President Trump and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., have spent months waging a campaign to promote skepticism, stoke fear, and amplify outright lies. Procedure · 11 wordsLook at what has happened in just the last few weeks.Procedure Claims · 197 wordsIn August, President Trump signed an Executive order on childhood vaccines that overrides decades of settled scientific consensus.9 It encourages States to abandon school entry requirements.10 It recommends reducing the number of routine vaccines protecting our kids. And it calls for breaking up longstanding combination shots like the measles, mumps, 11and rubella-- MMR--vaccine into separate single-disease doses spread over multiple doctor visits. That recommendation ignores the basic, undeniable fact, which is that separate single-disease shots for measles, mumps, and rubella do not even exist in the U.S. market today.12 They are so obsolete, and we were following the science, such that those single shots that the President and the HHS Secretary are calling for don’t even exist today. And it ignores the evidence that we have from countries that have already tried to separate the dose and then reverted back because it didn’t work. In the 1990s, Japan moved away from the combination MMR shot and attempted to separate the vaccines. The result was predictable. It was immediate and disastrous. They saw vaccination rates plummet and measles outbreaks surged. And, earlier this year, Japan officially abandoned the experiment--as we will, undoubtedly--and returned to the combined MMR vaccine.13Unearned certainty Reasoning · 20 wordsWe don’t need to repeat another nation’s mistake when the safety and lives of American children are on the line. Claims · 44 wordsAnd telling parents to ask for shots that don’t exist today only plunges families into further chaos. It forces parents to schedule endless appointments, take time off work, and pay multiple copays for vaccines that used to be delivered safely in a single visit. Anecdote · 102 wordsAs everybody in this place knows, before I came to the Senate, I was the superintendent of schools in Denver. This was such a happy time every year, when people were coming back, bringing their kids back to school. And the last thing that they wanted to worry about was getting a free vaccine for their children or whether they should have that vaccine at all. In those days, not that long ago, there was nobody worrying about a President or an HHS Secretary peddling misinformation that would lead to the biggest outbreak in measles that we have had in 30 years.Anecdote Claims · 50 wordsThings are hard enough as it is for families in Colorado and all across this country right now. We don’t need to make matters worse by intentionally misleading them about what is safe and making it harder for them to get a free vaccine at the pharmacy down the street. Aside · 21 wordsAnd, by the way, I know my colleagues here well enough to understand something that I don’t think the administration understands.Aside Claims · 242 wordsIt is not good enough just to get your kid vaccinated. The other kids in the school need to be vaccinated. The other kids in the classroom need to be vaccinated for vaccines to work. And, until this administration, that wasn’t controversial because we could see what the science told us. And for families in rural Colorado, where healthcare access is already stretched thin and local hospitals are already in danger of going bankrupt because of the razor-thin margins, this burden that they are creating is almost unbearable. And to make matters worse, the other week, the President told the American people that the MMR vaccine--a safe, lifesaving shot given to hundreds of millions of children over four decades--the President called it ``quite lethal’’--``quite lethal.’’14 They had to send out Dr. Oz to clean up the record after that--the Director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid.15 They had to send him out on live television to contradict the President of the United States, who said that this routine vaccine that we have relied upon to save millions of lives was ``quite lethal.’’ Meanwhile, Secretary Kennedy spent last week serving as the keynote speaker for an anti-vax convention.16 In the middle of the worst measles surge our country has seen in 35 years, the Nation’s top health official stood in front of a crowd of anti-science activists and reassured them that they have ``a strong and steadfast friend in the White House.’’17 Positioning · 49 wordsI wish I could tell families trying to get their kids back to school that they have a steadfast friend in the White House, that they have somebody who is trying to make their life easier, not harder; to make it easier to bring up a kid, not harder.Positioning Claims · 94 wordsWhen the leadership of HHS spends its time amplifying conspiracy theories, they are not making communities safer; they are driving down immunization rates, leaving our schools vulnerable, and putting the lives of Colorado’s children directly in harm’s way. Today, Colorado has the sixth lowest measles vaccination rate in the nation for kindergartners.18 Only 87.7 percent of Colorado kindergartners have received both doses of their MMR vaccine, 19and that is well below the 95 percent threshold for herd immunity. In fact, 57 out of Colorado’s 64 counties now fail to meet that basic safety line.20 Procedure · 11 wordsMy message to Colorado parents from this floor tonight is simple: ProcedureClaims · 16 wordsVaccines are safe, they are effective, and they remain our strongest defense against diseases like measles. Positioning · 122 wordsAnd when we allow misinformation to drive down vaccination rates, we aren’t just failing to meet an important public health indicator; we are failing moms in Aurora and in Pueblo and in Durango. We are failing pediatricians like Dr. Stinar in Grand Junction, who are fighting on the frontlines of this disease; and we are failing vulnerable children across Colorado who have no choice in the matter. Parents, pediatricians, and families across Colorado should be able to expect more from their government. They deserve certainty. They deserve clear communication. They deserve to know that their public health system is designed to keep them safe, rather than to pursue another political agenda that has nothing to do with their education or their health.Positioning Reasoning · 99 wordsI think we should be having a debate in this country about the state of healthcare in the United States of America and about the ways in which we failed this generation and the next generation in providing a system that actually delivers better healthcare at a reasonable price and mental health care at a reasonable price, instead of plunging people into further misery or into bankruptcy. I wish we were having that debate on the Senate floor, but we can’t begin to have that until the basic facts about science and medicine are taken seriously by this administration. The ask · 24 wordsThe President should start by rescinding his Executive order today on childhood vaccines. He should fire Secretary Kennedy, as I have long called for. Reasoning · 37 wordsBut until that happens--and I don’t think it is going to happen in the foreseeable future. Until that happens, we are going to be stuck fighting battles against a disease that we functionally eliminated 30 years ago. Positioning · 16 wordsKids and families in Colorado and all across this country deserve so much better than that.PositioningOff point Procedure · 11 wordsI yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.Procedure
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