If you’re like me, you might find yourself wondering what day it is lately. I can’t believe it is already mid-April and that this is our seventh weekly update since the pandemic began.
It’s easy to lose track of time when you’re spending a lot of it at home, but this week I want to use my letter to say thank you to every one of you who is showing up to work because you are doing an essential job.
Whether you’re a front line health care worker fighting this virus and saving lives, or you’re keeping the trains on time, or you’re manning the check out line, or the flightline, or the bus line, you’re a hero who is literally putting your life on the line to serve the country and your neighbors. On behalf of them, as their representative and yours, I just want to say thank you.
I also want you to know that I have your back. Over the last week, we got the sad news that Vitalina Williams, who worked at the Market Basket in Salem and Walmart in Lynn, died after contracting COVID-19. I didn’t know Vitalina or her husband, David, but was moved by the emotional message David shared with the public about her passing.
He was asked if she should have had a mask to protect herself. And he answered: “Nobody’s to blame, and everybody’s to blame. How can you give something you can’t get?”
In the richest country in the world, everyone serving our community ought to be able to get the basic protective equipment to stay safe on the job. And we need to provide testing to everyone.
When I learned the news, I wrote Governor Baker a letter urging him to designate grocery store workers as emergency personnel so that they are eligible for protective equipment when it arrives, and priority testing, when there’s enough.
He listened, and the day after receiving the letter, he expanded priority testing to grocery store workers and others on the front line like tow truck drivers.
The truth is this: there aren’t enough tests. And there isn’t enough personal protective equipment. And there is someone to blame. It’s the federal government, specifically the president, who we learned in the last week was warned about the potential for a pandemic in November when the intelligence community started putting it in the President’s Daily Brief. Instead of stockpiling protective equipment, building more ventilators, and developing a test kit that works, the president downplayed the virus. He and his son called it Trump Derangement Syndrome and said it would miraculously disappear. Even today, he’s failed to fully and effectively use the Defense Production Act, a bill that would let him order the private sector to make protective equipment en masse.
I don’t say this to get political; I’m saying it because there’s a lot more Congress and the president must do to fight the virus, and I committed at the start of this to communicate honestly. We need more honest leadership.
We need to protect people working on the front lines; we need to step up for people who are out of work; we need to help businesses and nonprofits recover; and eventually, once the virus is under control and we’re not at risk of a resurgence because we have enough test kits to go around to trace the virus, we can get on with life.
That’s what I’m focused on right now. If you need help from my team or me, give us a call or send us an email. Our contact information is at the bottom of this message. We’re here for you, and we’re ready to rock.
Hang in there.
U.S. Rep. Seth W. Moulton represents the Massachusetts Sixth Congressional District, including Lynn, Lynnfield, Marblehead, Nahant, Peabody, Saugus and Swampscott.
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