President Joe Biden commented Friday on the state of the coronavirus pandemic and the threat of future viruses while visiting to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia.
A video posted to Twitter by Breaking911 shows Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were at the CDC facility in Atlanta, Georgia and discussing the health officials’ efforts to fight the pandemic.
Biden described his “gigantic debt of gratitude” towards the health experts and medical professionals at the CDC for their efforts that enable people to stop worrying about the virus, which he said will “come again and again and again and again.”
“We owe you a gigantic debt of gratitude,” the president said to the audience at the CDC. “And we will for a long, long, long time because I hope this is the beginning of the end of not paying attention to what’s going to come again and again and again and again.”
PRES. BIDEN: “Science is back.”pic.twitter.com/KvtDNuntAZ
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) March 19, 2021
Biden went on to explain that the types of measures taken to combat other threats to national security — such as building walls to fight illegal immigration and organized military strength to combat the threat of terrorism — are entirely different from the kinds of measures that officials must take in order to combat viruses and public health crises.
“We can build all the walls we want, we can have the most powerful armies in the world, but we cannot stop, we cannot stop these viruses other than be aware of where they are and move quickly on them when we find them,” Biden said.
Biden also noted how under his administration, “science is back,” not just as an “appendage” to other initiatives, but as something in and of itself that his administration is prioritizing.
“For the longest time, not just as it relates to the CDC, but science — science was viewed as an appendage to anything else that we were talking about, but it’s back.” (RELATED: Alaska Meeting Reveals Just How High Tensions Are Between US And China)