Four days ago, I published a piece counting eleven letters from members of Congress about the Cyclospora outbreak and said that not one of them had been answered. The second half of that sentence still holds. The first half was wrong. It is twelve. The letter I missed came from Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York on July 28, and it is one of the more useful documents any member has produced on this outbreak. Today is August 13, which is the day both of Senator Blumenthal’s deadlines come due, so this is the right morning to set the list straight.

Gillibrand wrote to the acting director of CDC and the acting commissioner of FDA with six questions and asked for answers by July 31. Her office published the full text the day it went out, and the signed letter is posted as well. A three-day fuse is the shortest deadline of any letter in this outbreak except Senator Ossoff’s seventy-two hours. It expired thirteen days ago.

What makes her letter worth more than a line in a table is that it carries figures that appear in none of the other eleven. She writes that the number of active food safety laboratories in the Food Emergency Response Network has fallen from forty-one to fifteen. She writes that the Laboratory Flexible Funding Model was cut by twenty-five percent, which has forced laboratories across the country to freeze hiring, reduce scientific staff and delay replacing diagnostic equipment. She writes that CDC can currently fund only forty percent of state requests for foodborne disease surveillance and response. And she writes that federal staffing cuts forced the suspension of quality checks across FDA’s national network of laboratories that test food for pathogens, this parasite included.

Take those four sentences together and you have the most specific public inventory anybody has published of what happened to the laboratory layer underneath this outbreak. Senator Klobuchar named the Food Emergency Response Network in the first letter of the series on July 14 and gave no numbers. Forty-one to fifteen is a number. It says that when fifteen states are reporting illnesses tied to one supplier and the country needs samples run, there are fifteen laboratories in the network instead of forty-one. Her phrase for what all of this produced is dangerous blind spots, and on the evidence of the last four weeks that is not rhetoric.

Her letter also quietly settles a small dispute inside the record. She describes Cyclospora coming off the mandatory FoodNet list along with five other pathogens, which is six removed from eight and leaves two. That matches what Representative Stanton and Senator Blumenthal both wrote. Senator Klobuchar’s letter says the list went from ten pathogens to two, and hers is now the only version of that figure in the file.

Start with the credit, because it is still owed. A letter from a member of Congress is not a subpoena and it is not a rule. I have spent thirty-three years watching letters like these go into a drawer. But a letter puts a specific question in writing with a name underneath it, and it creates a date on which somebody either answered or did not. Foodborne illness does not usually get twelve letters in seventeen days. Every one of these members spent staff time and political attention on a parasite most of the country had never heard of in May, and the people I represent are better off for it than they would be if nobody had bothered.

Five deadlines have now come and gone. Senator Ossoff’s seventy-two hours expired July 19, and he wrote a second letter on July 24 saying so, which is the single cleanest proof in this whole file that a deadline without a mechanism behind it is a suggestion. The four Michigan House members asked for answers by July 24. Gillibrand asked by July 31. Representative Stanton asked by August 3. And Representative Garcia asked Bruce Taylor for five categories of documents, five written answers and a briefing by August 10, which was Monday. As of this morning I cannot find a published answer, a published production, or a statement from any office involved saying one arrived.

Two more come due today. Writing as ranking member of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Senator Blumenthal sent one letter to the acting FDA commissioner and a second to Bruce Taylor, both dated July 30, both due August 13, both copied to Chairman Ron Johnson. Both demand every communication with the White House, expressly including the Executive Office of the President and the Domestic Policy Council, and every communication between the agency and the company. The records definition names Signal and WhatsApp, which tells you the subcommittee has done this before. It is the Senate’s standing investigative body, it has subpoena capacity, and it is the same subcommittee that held a hearing on Cyclospora in imported raspberries in July 1998. Twenty-eight years, same subcommittee, same parasite.

Here is the whole list, corrected.

Two cautions about that table, and I would rather say them myself than have somebody find them. The first is that I believe it is every letter and I am not certain it is. This one is built from press releases, from posted PDFs and from reporting where an office posted nothing, and a letter sent quietly without a release is exactly the kind I would not see. That is not a hypothetical worry. The count in this file has gone from seven to nine to ten to eleven and now to twelve, and four separate times the correction came after publication. The second caution is that the last column says no answer found, and it means that and nothing more. An agency can answer a member privately and often does, and neither side has any obligation to publish it. If an answer exists, send it to me. I will correct the post and say plainly that I had it wrong, the way I am doing here. The list of answers is the column I would most like to see grow.

One pattern runs through nearly all twelve, and it is not a criticism of any member. Gillibrand’s release describes more than four thousand confirmed cases nationwide. That was CDC’s July 21 figure, published a week before her letter. Representative Gottheimer’s announcement put the outbreak at about seven thousand cases in thirty-four states. The Michigan delegation’s letter said more than three thousand seven hundred cases in Michigan while its own press release that same day said more than five thousand. The fifty-three-member Veasey letter described more than four thousand Americans across forty-one states on a day when the states themselves were reporting over twenty-one thousand. And yesterday’s letter from eleven consumer, public health and labor groups says nearly thirty thousand illnesses on page one and 22,683 on page two. Five letters to Congress, or from advocates to Congress, carrying numbers that were already out of date when they were signed. That is not carelessness on anybody’s part. It is what happens when the federal count runs six weeks behind the states and there is no central place to compare the two, which is the exact problem Senator Klobuchar identified in the first letter of the series.

All twelve were written by Democrats. I said that four days ago and it has not changed. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut put out a video on Tuesday calling this a corruption story rather than a public health one, which is not a letter and does not go on the list, but it is the first time a member has taken the donation-and-delay sequence straight to camera. Ron Johnson has been copied on two Senate letters as subcommittee chairman and has not joined either. I have said before that foodborne illness was historically the least partisan subject in Washington and I will keep saying it. Rosa DeLauro wrote FDA and CDC in August 2013 asking whether it is acceptable to identify the source of an outbreak and withhold it from the public, in the outbreak traced to this same Mexican facility, and she wrote FDA again in August 2018on the Fresh Express outbreak. Same questions, thirteen and eight years earlier, and nobody thought of them as a party position.

Ten of the twelve aim primarily at FoodNet, and FoodNet is not the instrument that would have caught this. It measures trends in ten sites; the systems that detect an outbreak and connect cases across state lines are the notifiable disease system and the laboratory networks. Restoring Cyclospora to the mandatory list is worth doing and it would not have found this lettuce three weeks sooner. Two asks would have. One is the traceability rule, delayed thirty months by FDA and then frozen by Congress until July 2028 in a rider that also tells FDA to go back and find flexibilities around lot-level tracking. The other is the laboratory capacity Gillibrand actually counted. Garcia’s letter is the only one of the twelve that names the traceability delay, and he names it next to a million-dollar donation that landed less than a week after the administration agreed to it.

What I would ask of the members who wrote is simply the next step. The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has subpoena power and a Republican chairman who has been copied on both letters, and if today passes without a production that is the tool that exists. The Oversight Committee’s majority can adopt Garcia’s document request and make it the committee’s rather than the minority’s. Any of the four committees with jurisdiction can hold a hearing, put the acting commissioner under oath and ask him the six questions Gillibrand asked in writing. Twelve letters have established that this administration does not answer letters. That finding is now made. The next move has to be a mechanism.

A disclosure. My firm represents people sickened in this outbreak and has filed cases naming Taylor Farms entities as defendants. Everything above is on the public record either way.

The reason to keep the list is the arithmetic underneath it. CDC now reports 13,895 laboratory-confirmed cases since May 1 with another 10,455 awaiting analysis, 740 hospitalizations and two deaths, across forty-seven states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. FDA’s outbreak page still says 6,358 across fifteen states and is stamped August 5, eight days ago, and Maine declared itself into this outbreak six days ago and is still not on it. My own fifty-state floor, built by hand from what the states themselves publish, stood at 29,798 this morning. There are eighteen days left in the season these letters were written about. I am watching, and so are twenty-nine thousand seven hundred and ninety-eight other people, and not one of us chose to be part of this.