Team,

I know right now a lot of us are feeling fear and uncertainty about what COVID-19 means for ourselves and our families as we face down the unexpected. As a mother, I'm feeling a lot of that with you.

As a combat veteran, I have my eye on our mission: protecting folks from the spread of this disease and the economic fallout. When the unexpected hits, I've always found it critical to stay focused on solutions, so I want to bring you in on what we know, what we're doing and what we need to complete the mission.

What we know:

- You can keep yourself and your community safer by washing your hands often with soap and water for at least 20 seconds, staying home as much as you can right now, and contacting your health care provider immediately if you have symptoms like fever, cough, or shortness of breath.
- Grocery stores remain open and stocked, and you can help your neighbors by only buying what you need.
- The House passed a COVID-19 relief bill, the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, which provides free testing, takes steps to enact emergency paid sick leave, and expands food assistance and unemployment insurance. Unfortunately, the Senate took a weekend recess, but now that they are back I am urging our Texas senators to quickly move this legislation.

What we're doing as a campaign:

- To help flatten the curve on the spread of COVID-19, we have suspended all in-person campaigning.
- We're adapting to the new landscape: we'll continue to get our message out to Texans through phone calls, texting, and more. Because now more than ever, we need to keep fighting for a Senate that prioritizes our health care.
- We're rolling out an online Organizing Bootcamp starting this Sunday (sign up here), and we'll be back in touch soon with more ways we're connecting with Texans.

What we need:

- Elected leaders should put public health over politics and work to pass and implement immediate solutions to increase health care capacity to take care of the sick, including setting up mobile hospitals, ramping up production of life-saving ventilators, and ensuring our front-line health care workers have every health and safety protection we can provide -- especially adequate testing.
- We must take urgent steps to reduce the economic fallout and its impact on Texans -- and prioritize making working families and small businesses whole over big corporations' bottom lines.
- Five million Texans are uninsured, which puts them and all Texans at greater risk during this pandemic. We need a public health insurance option to ensure all Americans can receive health care without facing impossible financial choices.


We're all in this together, and if we all do our part, we can get through this mission, slow further spread of COVID-19, and help our communities recover physically and financially from the effects. Above all else, we need to put the health of Americans above political interests.

We know what our mission is, now let's come together and get it done.

-- MJ





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MJ Hegar was a member of the US Air Force and the Air National Guard. Use of her military rank, job, titles, and photographs in uniform does not imply endorsement from the Department of Defense, Air Force, or Air National Guard.

Contributions or gifts to MJ for Texas are not tax-deductible.

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