Untitled episode

now recognize the gentle lady from Colorado M get for her 5 minutes of questioning thank you Mr chairman thank you for holding this hearing um most members of this committee know every year about this time I always say we should have a hearing on flu preparedness but like everything else in our lives now it's become much more complex because now we have three things we're trying

to try to uh be prepared to respond better the next time instead of just whining about it um at that hearing uh your predecessor Dr wilinsky urged this committee to provide CDC with new statutory authorities so that it could fulfill its public mission and some of those priorities were priorities you discussed in your uh testimony today you need to turn off your mic thanks um uh

so some of these priorities are ones that that um you provided in your testimony today and we were talking about it nine months ago so I'm kind of disappointed that we haven't made more progress as a congress in giving CDC more data authorities because that's what we really need to be able to identify the issue and then and then to um alert the public so you

you can't respond to a crisis if you can't measure that crisis or if you're seeing it in the rearview mirror and CDC doesn't have the authority to do that without Congress so um you know um there's this um effort to transform the agency that started again with your predecessor CDC moving forward and I know you're trying to move this forward and modernize the data and communication

infrastructure can you give us an update as to your efforts and um let us know what you still need so we can work in a bipartisan way to give it to you thank you representative DEET yes um our data infrastructure is critical to making sure that CDC is the National Security asset that we need and a lot of work has been done and I think there's

a lot of success stories um you know at the beginning of the pandemic um we we transmit um information you know electronically and only about 200 um hospitals were able to transmit that data electronically to that now we're close to 30,000 right so we are making significant progress um you know as a state official from North Carolina um that that data was incredibly important to us

and again wanted both that information to be at the state level and the national level because I know that our borders were really important I needed to know what was happening in South Carolina in order because Charlotte is right on the border there right so having um information and visibility across borders is really important and so we need to make sure that we have a a

national picture of what is going on and that is the importance of these data authorities um and we're working closely with our states to do what we can um um and make sure that we can put all the authorities in place but we but having that infrastructure and the authorities and importantly the resources are what what author ities do you need us to give you still

well I want to touch on resources because I will say in the um in our current budget and the way it looks in the house they they zeroed out um investments in data infrastructure that is just not going to to be compatible with a successful CDC um but there's also authorities that um allow for us to collect data um in a way from both our HealthCare

Partners and our state and local Partners in a way that allows us to have that visibility so we we are also happy to work um with your teams on how to structure that we're always talking about data in this case that is deidentified we're very focused on making sure we're protecting privacy as we make sure to collect this data um but it is really important so

so if you and your team can get back to us specifically with the legislative langu I first of all I agree with you about the resources if if we're going to sit here and collectively say we need to do a better job if there's a new pandemic we can't zero out your budget for for data collection that's insane and I don't think that'll happen in the

end but in terms of the of the legal authorities that you need if your team can work with us on specific legislative language then we will try to work in a bipartisan way to make that happen and I yeld back thank you thank the G lady for yielding back