Re­tir­ing Re­pub­li­can sen­a­tor lam­basts Biden ap­pointees' re­sponse to mon­key­pox out­break

In like­ly his fi­nal Sen­ate Health, Ed­u­ca­tion, La­bor and Pen­sions com­mit­tee meet­ing, Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) be­gan by call­ing the Biden ad­min­is­tra­tion’s re­sponse to the mon­key­pox out­break a “cat­a­stroph­ic fail­ure,” and end­ed with an en­thu­si­as­tic push to the heads of the CDC, FDA, NI­AID and AS­PR to do more in prepa­ra­tion for any fu­ture out­breaks.

While point­ing to the longer-than-ex­pect­ed time­lines for ramp­ing up test­ing and vac­cines, sim­i­lar to the Covid-19 re­sponse, Burr said he will con­tin­ue to be a re­source to the var­i­ous agency lead­ers “be­cause I on­ly have one goal,” and that’s “for the next one, we have to re­spond a hell of a lot faster than we did for Covid, and we have do much bet­ter than we did for mon­key­pox. Be­cause on the oth­er side of this, there’s po­ten­tial­ly one that gets out of con­trol with mas­sive loss of life.”

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