WASHINGTON - U.S. Senator Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) issued the following statement urging the Trump administration to do everything possible to engage the researchers and scientists at New Mexico's national laboratories to find solutions to the coronavirus pandemic.
"Our national labs employ some of the best and brightest minds on Earth, and they have played a leading role in finding solutions to past public health crises. Sandia National Labs trained their high-powered electron microscopes on anthrax spores after the post-9/11 mail attacks and helped map the data from the Ebola outbreak in West Africa to help public health workers respond more quickly to patients. Los Alamos researchers ran successful disease models to predict the spread of the SARS outbreak in 2003 and are already helping to map the spread of COVID-19. I urge President Trump to put our national labs to work once again in helping us better understand the challenges we are facing and engineering lifesaving solutions."