Last month, when Senator Tillis released a “complete response timeline” of his actions around coronavirus, his campaign accidentally admitted that he didn’t take public action for a month after receiving a briefing on January 24, three days after the first U.S. COVID-19 case was confirmed. 

What was Thom Tillis up to during that month rather than preparing our state for the coronavirus?

After introducing a meaningless Senate resolution and appearing at events with President Trump, Tillis was busy renaming a post office.

On February 10, more than two weeks after Tillis received a briefing on the coronavirus, he and Senator Burr introduced a bill to rename the U.S. Postal Service located at 3703 North Main Street in Farmville, N.C. as the ‘Walter B. Jones, Jr. Post Office.’”

While Senator Tillis was doing the critical work of renamining post offices, other Republican Senators were calling for a nationwide effort to increase testing. Senator Tom Cotton urged the Administration to distribute tests to the front lines, “aggressively monitor and track the disease,” and begin investing in “a Manhattan Project-level effort” to develop a vaccine. 

Tillis would wait two more weeks to raise the alarm about coronavirus; since then, he has consistently shown that he won’t stand up to this administration – even staying silent as the President threatened to block federal aid for the United States Postal Service, a move that would hurt rural communities, the elderly and disabled, and small businesses. 

Senator Tillis waited a month to act, spending his time renaming post offices and appearing with the President and wasting critical time that should have been used to prepare for the coming pandemic.