The coronavirus has been a disruption to our lives and threatens the health of many. 
As a nation we are taking this issue very seriously, and I am confident that we will overcome this.
The best way for most of us to contribute is to;
stay home, stay calm and stay informed.

The CDC has guidelines and recommendations to help us fight the spread and more information can be found at https://coronavirus.idaho.gov/

I will keep you updated with information on my website or you can follow me on Twitter and Facebook. You can best reach me with questions or comments HERE.

My staff and I remain committed to assisting constituents as needs arise.
Thank you for what you are doing help fight the spread of this terrible virus.

Supporting Legislation in Response to Coronavirus

You may be interested to know that I voted in favor of H.R. 6074 on March 4, 2020, which is an emergency supplemental appropriation of $8.3 billion to support state and local health agencies, vaccine and treatment development, and loans for affected small businesses to lessen the impacts of this public health emergency. The bill also allows certain Medicare telehealth restrictions to be waived during the coronavirus outbreak. It was signed into law by the President shortly after its passage.

Congress also passed the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, which I supported. The bill is another important step to combatting coronavirus and its impacts by guaranteeing free testing, establishing paid family leave, enhancing unemployment insurance, and expanding food security initiatives to ensure Americans have access to food. President Trump urged support for the package and signed the bill into law. The President is now engaged with Congress on a third package that will be substantial in responding to the health of our citizens and the state of our economy.

Ensuring Idaho Agriculture Has Access to Labor

Agriculture is the backbone of Idaho’s economy. However, it is so much more than that in a time of crisis. Ensuring the supply chain of food is essential to food security in our country. That is why I sent two letters (HERE & HERE) to the State Department and coordinated with Idaho Senator Jim Risch, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to ensure the U.S. consulates treat applications for H2A workers as essential. Thankfully, the State Department listened to these concerns and will process H2A applications accordingly.

Engagement with State and Local Officials

I am in constant contact with the Governor’s office and the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare to ensure they have the resources they need to respond to coronavirus. Alongside the entire Idaho delegation, we continue communicate the messages from Idahoans to the federal agencies.

Vaccine – A Reason for Hope

While there is no silver bullet for coronavirus, there is reason for hope. Several companies are on the edge of a vaccine. I believe we need to look at all vaccine technologies to ensure we are responding as responsibly as possible to Coronavirus. The below article highlights one possibility.

We’ve Got The Vaccine, Says Pentagon-Funded Company

By Patrick Tucker

March 12, 2020

A Canadian company says that it has produced a COVID-19 vaccine just 20 days after receiving the coronavirus’s genetic sequence, using a unique technology that they soon hope to submit for FDA approval.

Medicago CEO Bruce Clark said his company could produce as many as 10 million doses a month. If regulatory hurdles can be cleared, he said in a Thursday interview, the vaccine could start to become available in November 2021. 

An Israeli research lab has also claimed to have created a vaccine. But Clark says his company’s technique, which has already been proven effective in producing vaccines for seasonal flu, is more reliable and easier to scale.

“There are a couple of others who are claiming that they have — well, we will call them vaccine[s]” for COVID-19, he said. “But they’re different technologies. Some are RNA- or DNA-based vaccines that have not yet been proven in any indication yet, let alone this one. Hopefully, they’ll be successful.” 

How did Clark’s team create one so quickly,? They use plants, not chicken eggs, as a bioreactor for growing vaccine proteins.

Traditional vaccine production requires eggs, a lot of them. Vaccine manufacturers inject the virus into the eggs, where it propagates. But using eggs is expensive, takes a long time, and is far from perfect. Mutations can yield vaccines that don’t match up to the virus they aim to shut down, Clark said.

So Medicago doesn’t work with a live virus. Instead, it uses plants, a relatively new approach that has seen much advancement in the past decade. It inserts a genetic sequence into agrobacterium, a soil bacteria, which is taken up by plants — in this case, a close cousin to tobacco. The plant begins to produce the protein that can then be used as a vaccine. If the virus begins to mutate, as is expected for COVID-19, they can just update the production using new plants.

“That’s the difference between us" and egg-based methods, he said, "we go directly to producing the vaccine or the antibody without having to propagate the virus."

Using plants and genetically engineered agrobacteria works faster than eggs also makes the vaccine much easier to produce at scale, which, in part, is why the U.S. military has invested in the company. 

In 2010, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, put together a $100 million program dubbed Blue Angel to look into new forms of vaccine discovery and production. A big chunk of that money went to Medicago to build a facility in North Carolina, where they showed that they could find a vaccine in just 20 days, then rapidly scale up production. 

Clark says that once they get the green light, they will be able to produce 10 million vaccine doses a month. 

He said the only obstacles at this point are regulatory. The company’s technique isn’t yet FDA-approved and would need to go through clinical trials.

“Our basic plan is to be in human studies, phase one, by the July time frame; and then, it would depend, quite extensively, on the decisions the regulators make in terms of the hurdles they want us to have in the normal course of development,” he said.

Clark says that he understands that cutting corners in drug development invites risk. But, he says, “There’s a lot of room for negotiation with the regulators. I won’t put words in their mouths…I will say our intention, taking a very standard approach, is that by November [of 2021] we will have completed phase III,” in clinical trials — allowing the vaccine to be made widely available to the public. 

Also on Thursday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease at the National Institutes of Health, told the U.S. House Oversight and Reform Committee that human trials for a vaccine (he did not specify the manufacturer) would be possible "within a few weeks." However, he said that a vaccine would not be available to the broader public for another 12 to 18 months.

By Patrick Tucker // Patrick Tucker is technology editor for Defense One. He’s also the author of The Naked Future: What Happens in a World That Anticipates Your Every Move? (Current, 2014). Previously, Tucker was deputy editor for The Futurist for nine years. Tucker has written about emerging technology in Slate, The Sun, MIT Technology Review, Wilson Quarterly, The American Legion Magazine, BBC News Magazine, Utne Reader, and elsewhere.

March 12, 2020

https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2020/03/breaking-weve-got-vaccine-says-pentagon-funded-company/163739/