Lamar Alexander warns 'not enough money' to help everyone
Congress won't be able to appropriate enough money to help all those impacted by the coronavirus pandemic, Sen. Lamar Alexander warned on Sunday.
"There's not enough money to help everybody hurt when you shut down the government," the Tennessee Republican said on NBC's "Meet the Press."
The solution to reopening the economy is to "test, trace isolate, treatments and vaccines," said Alexander, who chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. "We have to let people go back to work and earn a living.
"And I don't see us being able to appropriate much more money to help provide a counter to that," he added.
The U.S. needs a "breakthrough," the senator said, citing the development of a vaccine to fight the virus. The Trump administration has suggested a goal of 100 million vaccine doses by September, but Alexander said he has "no idea if we can reach that."
Another solution would be through treatment — but until an effective treatment method is developed, testing is vital, he said.
"If you take a test and you know that you don't have Covid-19 and you know that everybody around you took a test that same day," he said, "you're going to have enough confidence to go back to work and back to school."
