Napolitano testimony transcript and news briefing summary
DHS has released a transcript of the opening statement that Secretary Napolitano made this morning to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. (The transcript of the more formal prepared testimony can be found in a prior post.)
The web-based transcript of the Secretary’s daily news briefing on H1N1 has not been posted as of 8:30 pm (eastern). Today she was joined by the new Secretary of Health and Human Services. Since I cannot point you to the full transcript, following are three excerpted paragraphs:
I know there have been some calls to close the border. I want to address that directly. First of all, it is important to know that we are making all of our decisions based on the science and the epidemiology as recommended to us by the Centers for Disease Control. The CDC, the public health community, and the World Health Organization [WHO] all have said that closing our nation’s borders is not merited here, that the focus, the public health focus, should be on mitigating the impact of this virus. And so we are following those recommendations now…
Many parents across the country are concerned about school closures, and President Obama spoke about this earlier today. The Centers for Disease Control has recommended that schools with confirmed cases of H1N1 virus or schools with suspected cases linked to a confirmed case consider closing on a temporary basis. Some schools have already followed that advice. The best thing parents can do right now is to make sure you have a contingency plan in place so that you’ve made arrangements to care for your child in the event of a school closure
This is also a good reminder for businesses to think about contingency planning as well. As I said, we’re going to be working through this for a while. You have to anticipate what happens if you have employees who are parents. The schools have closed. The employees need to stay home. How do you continue with your business operations? And so all of us should be dusting off our business contingency plans, looking at things such as telecommuting and the like so that operations keep on going.
The web-link to Secretary Napolitano’s comments at the news briefing is now available.
