motivated investigation of american service members and intelligence officers without the united states' consent will suffer serious consequences. the department of justice fully supports these measures and will vigorously enforce the sanctions imposed today under the executive order to the fullest extent of the law. thank you. hear nancy pelosi given an update on democrats reduced police reform. about 10 minutes or so from now. and then 11:30 eastern we'll take you live to house minority

leader kevin mccarthy's briefing. you can watch live coverage of his news briefing also here on c-span 3. >> joining us now on washington journal representative michael burgess. he is a republican of texas, serves on the energy subcommittee on health as the ranking member also serves on the rules committee. representative burgess, thanks for your time today. >> good morning, thanks for having me on. >> you also have the honor of being a medical doctor, so i'll start there. from your view of medicine how would you address people who are concerned not only about in certain areas the united states rises in covid-19 cases but at the same time re-openings and the starting of economies. how would you balance those two? >> well, both are important stories, and people are correct to be concerned about numbers that appear to be going up. people are also concerned about the continuation for everyone

having to stay closed in, shut-in as the economy contracts the way it has. so at this point -- you're going to have to balance both. and i think, you know, people are smarter about this disease than they were just a few months ago. i think we've all seen the benefits and the wisdom of social distancing. certainly i can think of times in the past i didn't feel well but i went to work anyway. you can't do that right now. if you're sick stay home and if you suspect someone is sick don't be around them. when the -- remember back in march the whole purpose of closing everything down was to save the health care system from what appeared to be a coming serve of patients who were very, very ill. icu level ill, ventilator level ill and would overwhelm our

system. and there was real concern kind of seen it happen in wuhan, china, even though they cut off conversations from there. there was concern in this country that could happen. it's not that we're completely past the point of crisis with this virus, but it does appear we're past that part of the crisis with this virus. and, you know, recognize when you open things up it doesn't mean there are going to be no more cases. yeah, there probably will be more cases. the thing with this virus is you really got to keep an eye out for those hot spots. where does it seem to be there is a cluster of infections, and then do the things necessary to stymie the spread in those locations. >> the current debate there on capitol hill is federal assistance financially to those affected by the covid-19, a debate over a third package

that's being currently debated. where have you voted on the other packages? what do you think about another round of money? >> technically it would be a fourth package. >> thank you. >> because there have been three response bills that have occurred so far, actually 3 1/2. the first one everyone forgets about back in early march which primarily was geared at testing. then there was the one in the middle of march which lastly expanded the monies going to agencies that were responsible for responding. and then the cares bill the 27th of march, and this was the one that had the payroll protection plan and many other features. it was a big bill. it was done with both parties, both houses participating in the discussions, so that was a good thing. and that bill passed with overwhelming support. i voted in favor, in fact, of the first three response bills, and then there was a sort of a

3.5, a touch-up bill that happened a couple of weeks after cares to add more money to the protection payroll program which was posht. that bill was constructed entirely differently. it was the exclusion of any, any republican ideas, any republican input, and it was simply a bill on democratic leadership supported by the democrats on their side of the diocese and in the house of representatives. i don't think it is likely to emerge as passed from the house to the senate. we'll see what happens. i think the jobs report last week has probably added another layer of what has to be a consideration of this. does the economy appear to be -- is it showing some signs of life? is it recovering, and if so is it necessary to have a bill that is as big as a $3 trillion bill

on top of the probably $3 trillion bill like dollars and spending that has already gone up urgently in the first 3 1/2 bills, so we'll see. and certainly there are some parts of that that i don't think there's any question of perhaps more money in the payroll protection fund. i'll tell you i spent a lot of my time these days working with the people over at the agency of health and human services on the provider relief fund. really that is one where the idea was to help hospitals, doctors, medical practices that had been so badly hurt economically when we asked them to refrain from any elective procedures. i will just tell you having practiced medicine going five years you cut out elective procedures and that really kills your cash flow, so that's how you pay your overhead many month and many practices, many clinics, many hospitals got into significant financial stress

from this. the purpose of the provider relief fund was to provide a safety valve for that. unfortunately when -- and i voted for that when the congress passed that. there really was not much in the way of direction or guidance or guardrail tuesday the agency. we simply sent a lot of money over there and said fix the health care system. the agency has been a little slow about getting things out, but -- and that's partly understandable. we want to do things correctly, but it has taken some time. just this week there was an additional $25 billion announced for practices that were medicaid heavy. they were kind of left out of the first couple of rounds of funding out of the provider relief fund. but here's the thing, i do think -- i do think to the extent other help is necessary we really need to get back to doing our work, and as a member of an authorizing committee and a health care subcommittee we need to do -- have the hearings and do the investigation, hear from the experts and direct the

appropriations committee as to how this money should be constructed and spent. simply sending another emergency supplemental over to the agency with no guidance, that in itself becomes problematic, and in an odd way may delay getting the dollars to where their needed the most. >> okay, our guest with us until 9:40 and if you want to ask him questions it's -- you can feks us thoughts at 202780003. you are on with representative michael burgess. go ahead. >> hi, congressman. we've seen the damage of covid-19 that it has done to the health of the american people and the american economy, and while i appreciate how you've

been trying to address covid-19 and its effects how are we going to prevent future pandemics? we passed the global act security act introduced in the house could help focus on supporting epidemic and pandemic preparedness in the u.s. since other countries and diseases do not follow borders. >> we are interestingly enough right here at the one year anniversary of the siping of a bill of a pandemic called hazard preparedness act. this was a bill worked on for two congresses. when i was subcommittee chair we did a significant amount of work on that bill, did want quite get past a roadblock in the senate, so it did pass in this session of congress. it passed in the early days of 2019, signed into law by the president of june of 2019.

i have thought one of our failings in the house of representatives why if we had just passed this big bill to protect us from pandemics and again all hazards just like the title says when we are faced with such as a crisis as we were in january and february and early march where was our curiosity as a committee about looking into, hey, did we do the right thing? did we give the agency the right tools? we talked about the assistant secretary for planning and response, so-called asper being the sort of lead on these responses, and it didn't turn out to look like that when we got into battling the pandemic. so it would have been very useful i think to have done some realtime oversight or implementation questions about the bill that, again, at that point was just a mere six months

old. at some point in the aftermath of this, yeah, i assure you there will be looks back and how do we better fortify things for the future, but we actually have a chance to do that sort of in realtime. the month of february would have been a great time for us to have had some congressional hearings on how did we do with the construction and the funding of the pandemic hazard preparedness act. we've learned a lot since then. we've heard from experts even with congress basically out of town in the virtual fashion like we're doing this morning. we're heard from a number of people on things like the strategic national stockpile. i think all of those are components that are going to have to be looked at. and did they work as intended, were they as sufficient as possible and did congress fund them to a level where they actually could respond when challenged? >> from montreal, canada, this

is richard calling on a republican line. go ahead. >> good morning, congressman. >> good morning, richard. montreal is where my father was born. >> oh, great. many doctors in the united states like dr. steven smith and dr. william o'neil are having tremendous success using hydroxychloroquine and they say it's totally safe. and even in greece they've been using it since the start and you only have 182 deaths there. so how come the republicans are not calling the media for lying about this and asking the president to bring those doctors into the briefing room and brief the american people about it and show it would actually save lives because people are dying needlessly congressman. >> okay, let him answer. >> in fact when we had the hearings dr. bright was reassigned from barta and sort of a whistle-blower hearing i

heard from doctors all over the country who were using hydroxychloroquine and zinc as the first line of defense if a patient developed coronavirus. there's been conflicting reports in the literature, and this is one of those places where you can construct your own narrative depending upon which stories you choose to read, but i do agree with the caller. there is some very significant evidence that has been put forward. the reply is always, well, we need -- it was a randomized double blind placebo controlled clinical studies before being able to make a decision about this, but there are some observational studies and he references those, and i do think it is important to pay attention to those. food and drug administration did give an emergency use authorization for

hydroxychloroquine, rigerythromn and zinc i think in the month of february. as the gentleman knows there's been some controversy about this. and the president who is if nothing else he is very honest with you. he related that he'd been using the medicine himself. look, i've taken hydroxychloroquine myself in the past not for coronavirus but when i was traveling to a malaria endemic area. i didn't particularly care for it. i thought it had some side effects particularly left me feeling depressed. i don't recall anyone being concerned about my q2 electrocardiogram. hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine have been used for some time in patients going to malaria areas. there are other anti-rumatic

agents that have shown some promise. and i think part of the answer enall of this may be the suppression of the intense inflammatory response that appears to occur with coronavirus, which is one of the mediators of disease. but, look, this is novel virus. we're learning a lot and have learned a lot over the last five months that we've been acquainted with it. i think there's no question there will be much more learned going forward, but the caller does point out an important fact. there are folks around the globe -- there are people in my own state who have contacted me the night before that hearing that was going to occur on dr. bright to relate to me their experience that they've had with hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, and i think it is something that on the scientific side people do need to be paying attention to. >> dr. burgess, there is a story this morning in "the wall street

journal" taking a look at the possibility of advanced trials of a vaccine even by summer by some. are you comfortable with the rate this is going? is this an appropriate rate when it comes to >> let me cite the cautionary tale first, and then i'll address your question, if i may. when i was in medical school back in the 1970s, we had a bad bout of swine flu in this country. and there was a rapid development of a swine flu vaccine. gerald ford, who was then president, mandated everyone receive that vaccine, and unfortunately, there were some very serious side effects and it really was not helpful, and in fact, was more hurtful than helpful. but vaccine development has come a long way since the 1970s. and it got several candidate vaccines that are actually coming down the track with very different methods of production. and i think every one of them is

intriguing. those that are focused just purely on the rna part of the virus, those that are more conventional, like in the old days, you would make a vaccine by using part of the virus to invoke the antibody response, but i also will tell you this. i have never seen, and i was here through ebola, i was here through zika, i have never seen this kind of energy coming through the federal agencies, nih, fda, hhs, to work on this problem, collaborate, private sector and public sector, to get this to the finish line. and here's the other thing. i think there will be more than one vaccine that is ultimately available. and that's not necessarily a bad thing. but i also know this, the appearance of the day that the vaccine -- i'm almost old enough to remember the polio vaccine and how it was transformative in

this country, how parents who worried about their child fflic illness suddenly had that burden lifted, and that will be a big day. they talk about how the bells rang in the churches when that news was brought forth. i think it will be an event of similar significance when this vaccine, whichever one makes it across the finish line, when this vaccine arrives. >> this is will. democrats line. >> thanks for having me. so as i'm sure you may know, the covid-19 pandemic and lockdowns are causing spikes in tuberculosis cases in many places around the world. this has set back the fight against tb by decades in some cases. there's legislation in the senate to recommit the u.s. to tuberculosis research, as well by authorizing increased asyance

to world health organization. if such legislation were brought to the house, would you insure the u.s. is doing everything possible to fight tuberculosis? >> i think the answer is, i certainly would take a look at it. the fight against tuberculosis is probably what has defined the public health response that we today now sort of accept as what the normal business of public health is. but the public health response for tuberculosis and the turn from the 1800s to 1900s, this illness was devastating in this country, and of course, at that time, there were no chemical agents to fight the disease. it simply was a method of identifying and then quarantining and contact tracing, so many of the same things that you're hearing about today were actually based on

this country's fight against tuberculosis. i don't know that i have heard exactly to what the caller is referring, but certainly, it makes sense that if you have people in closed and restrained environments, if there is tuberculosis in the community, yes, that is the type of environment in which it can and does spread, so particularly attention needs to be paid to that. he referenced the world health organization. obviously, that group has been in the news for a number of reasons in the past couple weeks. so i think there are some questions the world health organization needs to answer as far as our knowledge and response to the coronavirus. but i will also say, as someone who has been to geneva and been to the headquarters of the world health organization during the first bird flu back in the middle part of the last decade, i do know that they have a

significant contribution to make to the health of the globe, and as an earlier caller pointed out, many of these diseases will not recognize borders between countries, so what goes on in one country can become important in another. in this country as far as tuberculosis, the big issue has been the appearance of multiple drug resistant tuberculosis, and that's the form that really requires our intense scrutiny and attention because that is obviously becoming very difficult to treat if you have a tb blood that is resistant to therapeutic agents. >> quick follow-up on the world health organization. we heard the president threaten to pull funding for that. would you approve of that? >> there would be questions about how the world health organization handled the information as it came out of china or as it didn't come out of china.

the statements that didn't seem to be human-to-human early in the month of january were misleading and probably delayed our response. i think the day that i heard that human-to-human transmission was now recognized and happening, it was probably, what, about the 17th, 18th, 19th of january. that's the point i became very concerned about coronavirus, and the fact that the chinese had shut down a city of 10 million people, i had never heard of that happening before. that they shut down a city of 10 million people, told me it was a pretty serious problem that they were having. now, the downside is that that meant they also shut down any information coming out of wuhan, and i do think the cdc perhaps could have been helpful to us because if the cdc was our cdc was not allowed on the ground in china, but the world health organization was. so to the extent they had or

could have shared information with us and didn't, look, if the president is correct, we're paying, what, 90% of the bill, and not getting the correct return on investment. i don't think it's inappropriate to look at that investment, to perhaps ask some questions of the world health organization as far as its governance and how things are administered. do they have an important role to play in world health? yes, of course they do. but also, world health organization significantly benefits from the centers for disease control and prevention in the united states. when i did that visit over to geneva in 2005, it became very apparent to me during that visit that without the cdc in atlanta, the world health organization really didn't have the resources it needed to mount the type of response that might be required to then what we thought could be a pandemic. >> michael burgess, republican

of texas, joining us. brooklyn, new york, republican line. you're next up. >> caller: yes, hi. >> good morning. >> caller: yeah, good morning, congressman. i just want to follow a previous caller. i know personally, i'm a jewish man, i'm orthodox. i know my grandfather had personally taken the hydroxychloroquine, and i know personally it is very, very good. so just want to make my thought on that. thank you. >> thank you. and of course, you know, many people will point to a study in the journal of the american medical association that said it's of no benefit. as i read that study, the patients that were selected for receiving the hydroxychloroquine were those that were sort of at the end of their rope. they had been sick for a while. everything else had been tried. nothing else was working. okay, let's give

hydroxychloroquine. and surprise, surprise, the results were not that great because they were dealing with a patient population that was already perhaps to a point where nothing would aid in their recovery. same story to some degree got told with remdesivir. it is more effective if it is used in people who are moderately ill, not seriously ill or just on the way out. i don't want to see hydroxychloroquine only used in that environment. some of the stories or the reports that have come back to me from doctors in texas is that it seems to be of most value used as an outpatient, someone who has tested positive, beginning to show symptoms, and then as a rescue in that setting, and of course, the advantage of hydroxychloroquine over remdesivir is hydroxychloroquine can be administered in a pill,

administered orally. remdesivir is going to require iv access. there's the availability of the treatment done entirely as on outpatient basis, and that's intriguing. that is certainly something that is going to be necessary in the fight against this disease, so look, i know there are a number of studies going on right now. i want those studies to be done. i want people to have the data. i want them to have accurate data in front of them. right now, we seem to be working with people who have delivered bundles of anecdotal evidence, which is intriguing, but it doesn't prove the point. the studies are under way, and i think there's been significant effort to try to get those studies done quickly, and that's going to be an important part of this. >> representative, we saw house democrats unveil their proposals for a police reform bill. is there anything on its face that you can sign onto? >> well, again, and similar to

the last bill to the coronavirus, here's something that's constructed behind closed doors, only input from their side of the dais, and this really should require or it should be important enough that, look, let's listen to -- let's listen to multiple voices on this. there are -- i have yet to see the actual language of the bill. i think it may now be available, but originally, it was a speech, talking points that we had to evaluate. sure, there are things that people could talk to me about. no-knock laws back in the clinton administration, we didn't really understand why that was necessary. is it perhaps time to relook at that? the president, of course, made some great strides with criminal justice reform. congress passed a bill. the president signed it. the president has done some