Senator Marshall: We Have the Tools to Eradicate the New World Screwworm

Senator Marshall Joins Newsmax Washington – U.S. Senator Roger Marshall, M.D. (R-Kansas), joined Newsmax’s Wake Up America with Sharla McBride and Marc Lotterto discuss eradicating the New World Screwworm, funding DHS and Border Patrol, and the work being done to support Kansas agriculture and lower input costs. Click here to download the full video. On passing funding for DHS and Border Patrol: “Well, Marc, we don’t have a choice — we need to fund Homeland Security, as well as ICE. I mean, we’re still having the repercussions of millions of people coming across that border illegally under Joe Biden. Not only does this stop the humans from coming across, but it funds border patrol, and that’s how we stop the fentanyl and all the illegal goods coming in. So, we don’t have a choice, they are getting really short on money, and I got confidence in the Speaker over there. He’ll get this across the finish line.” On containing the New World Screwworm: “Yeah, Sharla, well we got this. We’ve been through this before — we eradicated the screwworm in 1966 and we’ll talk about this. But this is another thing we can thank Joe Biden for — that when millions of people came out of Central America, they brought this screwworm with them. It was on their pets, maybe on their flesh as well, but we had it contained to Central America. So, the good news is we got great treatments for this — ivermectin works on it, we’ve been through this before. But ultimately, what we have to do is raise more of these worms: sterile screwworm flies is what it amounts to. A female screwworm fly can only mate one time — this is kind of deep here — but they only mate one time and they die. So, what you do is you fill the environment with sterile males to do that, if that makes sense. So, we’ve known this for over a year, that it was headed this way. We’re making these flies in Central America now, and we have new labs going up in Texas and Mexico as well.” On the screwworm’s impact on beef supply: “So, here’s the challenge before us — you’re right, the lowest cattle herd we’ve ever had in my lifetime, anyway, mainly due to the drought. But usually we import about a million live cattle from Mexico every year, so we shut down the borders because we saw this screwworm creeping this way. So, we harvest maybe 13 million — so maybe 1/13 of our beef supply comes from Mexico and fills our feedlots, and we’ve always inspected it. There’s no possibility that this screwworm can hurt humans, it requires live flesh to survive; I want to reemphasize that as well. So, what we have to do is get the screwworm under control, and then be able to let those cattle come across the border, because right now we’re missing about 1/13 of our supply of cattle.” On Senator Marshall’s work to support Kansas agriculture: “Well, I think that the biggest challenge right now in farmland and rural America are the input costs — it’s fertilizers, and it’s also the price of diesel as well. But I just want to emphasize that we’re trying to do things to bring down the price of fertilizer, the White House is doing that, we could go through that list if you would like to. The diesel prices, we know is all tied to Iran, and the President is, you know, stuck between a rock and a hard place. But this president has done more for American agricultural, rural America than any president I’ve ever seen it — and with Republican-only votes. You think what we accomplished in the Working Family Tax Cuts bill — we added $65 billion to crop insurance and crop protection as well, we added $50 billion to a rural health transformation fund, we gave the farmers permanency on protection on a 199 tax deduction, as well as being able to write off interest and capital depreciation, as well — bonus depreciation. So, we’ve done a lot for the farmer, they’re still in need; we’ve given them $43 billion of farm aid so far, and we’re going to have to look at some more money to help them get through this trial because of the fertilizer prices. And by the way, one simple thing we could do is pass E15 year-round. It wouldn’t cost the federal government anything, and it would consume an extra 2 billion bushels of corn.” ### Contact: Payton Fuller