Ben Shapiro talks about the devastating toll of coronavirus deaths in the United States, the growing crisis in Italy, and the growing need for emergency medical services across the country to cope with the crisis. He also talks about how important it is to have a system in place to respond to the crisis, and why we can't just go back to work if we have the virus. He also discusses the impact of the crisis on the economy and the potential impact it could have on our health care system, including the potential for an economic rescue bill from President Trump and the Democratic Party. Ben Shapiro is the host of The Ben Shapiro Show on the Fox Business Network and host of the Daily Wire's "Ben Shapiro Show" and is a regular contributor to the New York Times and CNN. He is also a frequent contributor to The Daily Wire and the Wall Street Journal and has been featured on CNN and NPR. He is a frequent guest on Fox News and NPR and hosts the podcast "The Situation Room" on the FiveThirtyEight radio show on the Seven Network and the Today Show on CBS Radio in Washington, D.C. and NPR in New York. and on NPR Radio in Boston. Ben Shapiro's new book, "The Coronavirus Crisis: The Untold Story," which he wrote and co-hosted with Alex Blumberg, which is out now and is available on Amazon Prime Video and CBS Radio and the BBC Radio One in the UK, among other places around the world. Click here for more information on the latest on the outbreak, including updates on the situation and the situation in the U.S. and the world, including in the Philippines, Italy, Italy and South Korea. Also, check out his new book "Virus: The Virus That Couldn't Kill You: What's the Real Story." here on the Virus That s Killing Us. here and here on his new podcast, here and here on the podcast, here on The Hill s newest podcast, "Viruses and much more! and his new website, here and there on the BBC Scotland's new podcast on the breaking news on this week's new show, and the latest in the latest from the Philippines and much much more on all things going on in the rest of the world on the road, including Canada and the Caribbean, here on NPR s "The Real Scoop on the Bay Area. , here and elsewhere.
00:00:56.000Once we start testing, you're going to start finding things that you are testing for, as opposed to what China, there's rumors that China is actually continuing to see coronavirus cases and they stopped testing.
00:01:06.000And that's why they're not seeing an increase in the number of cases that are out there.
00:01:08.000Now, one of the big problems here is that China's path is one of the great hopes for the world, because if China's been able to tamp this thing down, it makes everybody feel like, okay, well maybe we can tamp this thing down too.
00:01:17.000That's why more people are putting faith at this point in South Korea, which has seen 9,000 total cases and 120 deaths, and has not completely shut down their economy to do so.
00:01:25.000The difference being, South Korea had massive testing regimes already in place Thanks to H1N1 and their response to SARS in the past.
00:01:33.000Because of all of that, they had been pretty well prepared for all of this.
00:01:36.000The United States simply was not and we were late on the game.
00:01:38.000Because we were late on the game, the entire ballgame here has been how do we shift from Chinese lockdown strategies, everybody stay home, into South Korean social distancing, everybody wear a mask, strategies where most of us can go back to work.
00:01:52.000If you're elderly or you're vulnerable, you stay home, right?
00:01:55.000Everybody keeps saying, I hear this from a lot of people on the right side of the aisle, why don't the old people and the vulnerable people, why don't they just stay home and everybody else goes back to work?
00:02:02.000And the problem is right now there's too much social mixing.
00:02:04.000You don't know who has it and who does not.
00:02:06.000There's no way to tamp down the people who actually are sick.
00:02:08.000And so because we have not yet gotten this thing under control, you can't go to South Korean type measures.
00:02:13.000The question is how fast we can get there.
00:02:15.000Meanwhile, in Italy, The situation continues to be incredibly grim.
00:02:18.000Italy has about 64,000 cases at this hour with approximately 6,000 total deaths.
00:02:22.000Their death rate is significantly higher than that of the United States.
00:02:25.000Again, we have what we are gaining on them in terms of total number of cases, but we have fewer, well under 1,000 deaths at this point.
00:02:33.000Italy has 64,000 cases and 6,000 deaths.
00:02:36.000That is because their healthcare system is being overwhelmed.
00:02:38.000And that is why so many people in the United States right now are worried about the overwhelming of our healthcare system at this time.
00:02:45.000That is why people are also worried about a bed shortage looming in California.
00:02:48.000According to the New York Times, Governor Gavin Newsom estimates California will be short about 17,000 hospital beds.
00:02:53.000Although the state is frantically trying to source thousands more of them, the pace of testing remains stubbornly slow in California.
00:02:59.000I've been hearing from hospitals in the area that they are indeed inundated with people who are coming in for coronavirus, although we have heard no stories about ventilator shortages at this point in time.
00:03:08.000Elon Musk actually came up with a thousand ventilators yesterday.
00:03:11.000We are quickly ramping up production across the country of ventilators, of masks, of personal protective equipment.
00:03:16.000That's those PPEs you hear everybody talking about.
00:03:19.000And the fact is that it takes a little while for the U.S.
00:03:21.000economy to get going on this sort of stuff, but once industry kicks in, we are fantastic.
00:03:26.000at producing what it is we actually need to produce.
00:03:28.000New York state has conducted twice as many tests as California for the virus.
00:03:31.000As of Monday, New York had tested almost 80,000 people, including 33,000 in New York City.
00:03:35.000California had conducted 26,400 tests by Sunday.
00:03:39.000That was the most recent data available.
00:03:40.000Officials in California have rushed to reopen hospitals that had been shuttered by motels to house the state's more than 150,000 homeless people and retrofit college dormitories to serve as hospital wards.
00:03:51.000Again, the homeless problem in California continues to rear its ugly head because the fact is that Los Angeles homeless people are not exactly socially distancing.
00:03:59.000All of the fun and games with regard to letting people live on the streets and declaring they have a right to live on the streets and be a health threat.
00:04:06.000It turns out that has some pretty serious consequences.
00:04:08.000There's some video of LA homeless folks, not exactly people who are concerned about cleanliness and social distancing at this point.
00:04:15.000I mean, you can drive around Los Angeles right now and you can see there's nobody anywhere, but you'll see large congregations of homeless people in downtown LA under overpasses by the LA River.
00:04:23.000None of that speaks well of the possibility of tamping down the coronavirus epidemic.
00:04:28.000Gavin Newsom said the state is chartering flights to China to procure protective equipment.
00:04:31.000China has been hoarding all of that protective equipment.
00:04:35.000Oh, those wonderful folks in the Chinese government.
00:04:37.000This is some video that we were talking about of the situation with the homeless in Los Angeles.
00:04:42.000That looked like a place that is thriving and ready for health to you.
00:04:47.000Across California, the promise of widespread access to testing for the virus has not yet materialized.
00:04:51.000Doctors say they were alarmed about shortages of protective equipment.
00:04:54.000One of the other big problems is that the states are handling this sort of differently.
00:04:59.000And so while California has locked down and New York has locked down, Texas and Florida have not yet completely locked down.
00:05:04.000And this is leading epidemiologists to believe that there could be hotspots in some of the states that have not yet locked down that are not yet measurable.
00:05:11.000Meaning the testing is not happening in Texas and Florida the same way it's not happening in California.
00:05:16.000But lockdowns have not really gone into place in Texas, in Florida, the same way they've gone into place in California either.
00:05:22.000In New York City, the attack rate, meaning the amount of transmission, the number of people who have this thing, in the general population in New York is much, much higher than anywhere across the rest of the country so far, as we can tell.
00:05:50.000This is why when you read old books about the plague hits London, and all the rich people immediately jump in their carriages and head off to the country cottage, there's a reason for that.
00:05:59.000People are trying to do that in New York right now.
00:06:00.000They're trying to flee to Florida, and Florida's saying, no, you guys don't get in.
00:06:15.000The New York metro area of New Jersey, New York City, and parts of Long Island have an attack rate close to one in a thousand.
00:06:25.000This is five times what the other areas are seeing.
00:06:29.000Through the high-throughput lab investigations, we're finding that 28% of the submitted specimens are positive from that area, where it's less than 8% in the rest of the country.
00:06:43.000So to all of my friends and colleagues in New York, this is the group that needs to absolutely social distance and self-isolate at this time.
00:06:55.000Intensity is really an enemy in a situation like this, says Dr. Steven Goodman, an epidemiologist at Stanford University.
00:07:00.000With large population centers, where people are interacting with more people all the time, that's where it is going to spread the fastest.
00:07:05.000We'll get to more coronavirus updates, particularly economic updates, because we're starting to ask the unaskable question here.
00:07:12.000And that is the question that we should have been asking all along.
00:07:15.000How do you balance all the policy considerations?
00:07:17.000And I know that that's considered bad taste.
00:07:19.000We're not supposed to say things like, how exactly do we generate a policy that is most likely to save the economy and also save lives?
00:07:25.000We're instead supposed to say that everything shuts down until every life is saved.
00:07:29.000And that, of course, is not plausible.
00:07:31.000I mean, the fact is that we at some point are going to have to unlock the economy.
00:07:34.000The question is how we do that in the safest possible way.
00:07:36.000That doesn't mean that we all go back to work tomorrow without any protective measures.
00:07:40.000It also doesn't mean that we keep the economy locked down interminably and forever, because that is not It's not going to happen either.
00:07:45.000People, I've seen a lot of folks who are protesting that President Trump and people who are talking about the economy, you're overlooking human life.
00:07:53.000It's not that you're overlooking human life.
00:07:55.000It's that every public policy consideration is a balancing of various outcomes that you are weighing.
00:08:01.000And if the suggestion is that we do everything we can in the United States to save even one human life, well then we should all be walking around in bubbles.
00:08:08.000Like all the time, we should be walking around in bubbles.
00:08:10.000We should go back to horse and buggies.
00:08:12.000The fact is there are lots of things we could do in the United States to quote-unquote save lives.
00:08:15.000They also happen to destroy the economy, which would have its own horrific side effects.
00:08:19.000So all of this is public policy balancing, and that should not be an unaskable question.
00:08:23.000In fact, it's the only question that is worth asking at this point when you are talking about government policy, when you're talking about what exactly the federal government and state governments ought to do.
00:08:30.000We're gonna get to more of this in just one second.
00:08:33.000First, Let's talk about how you are going to look when you emerge from this situation.
00:09:52.000You are enough of a man to wear cowboy boots so long.
00:09:55.000Okay, so the reason that people are starting to go nuts about even mild considerations of public policy is because they are afraid that we are going to jump one way or the other, that we're going to jump precipitously back into a vast amount of social life with no social distancing and everybody going back to work and then millions of people die Or, alternatively, the economy is going to be shut down forever.
00:10:23.000And those are not the only two approaches.
00:10:26.000They better not be the only two approaches, because if those are the only two approaches, then neither one of those is worth choosing.
00:10:31.000But to pretend that there are no economic effects of this, that we can do this interminably, is of course idiotic.
00:10:35.000Nelson Schwartz at the New York Times writes, The American economy is facing a plunge into uncharted waters.
00:10:40.000Economists say there is little doubt that the nation is headed into recession because of the coronavirus pandemic.
00:10:45.000With businesses shutting down and Americans being shut in, it's harder to foresee the bottom, how long it will take to climb back.
00:10:51.000Economist at Oxford Economics, says the economy is assured of a recession.
00:10:55.000Output will fall 0.4% in first quarter, 12% in the second.
00:10:59.000Goldman Sachs says they expect a 24% drop in the second quarter.
00:11:03.000And Morgan Stanley is saying that it might be up to 30% in the second quarter, which would be the greatest economic retraction in the history of the United States by a long margin.
00:11:11.000On Thursday, the Labor Department reported that initial jobless claims jumped 30% the previous week, in one week, to 281,000, the highest level since the aftermath of a hurricane In 2017, but Goldman Sachs foresees that this week, this week, 2.25 million unemployment failings this week.
00:11:30.000Okay, so this cannot continue forever.
00:11:33.000And so when President Trump talks about how we need to stop this at some point, that of course is true.
00:11:38.000And that doesn't mean that Trump is downplaying this thing.
00:11:40.000He is not downplaying this thing, right?
00:11:41.000Here's President Trump yesterday, did a press conference.
00:11:43.000He said, yeah, things are going to get real bad this week.
00:11:45.000You're going to see the numbers go up.
00:11:46.000By the way, the numbers will continue to go up next week.
00:12:20.000I think we're doing a very good job of it.
00:12:23.000The president did announce some new measures that were being taken by the federal government yesterday.
00:12:26.000He said that FEMA is distributing millions of critical supplies.
00:12:29.000And it is true they are activating in terms of getting N95 masks out to as many medical workers as possible, ramping out the distribution of personal protective equipment.
00:12:41.000You know, in a crisis, the crisis doesn't stop just because people are mobilizing.
00:12:44.000The question is how long it takes to alleviate the crisis.
00:12:46.000Here's President Trump announcing that FEMA is getting directly involved.
00:12:49.000FEMA is distributing 8 million N95 respirator masks and 13.3 million surgical masks across the country right now, focusing on the areas with the greatest need.
00:13:01.000We have shipped 73 pallets of personal protective equipment to New York City and 36 pallets to the state of Washington.
00:13:12.000In the past 96 hours, FEMA has also received donations of approximately 6.5 million masks.
00:13:18.000We're having millions and millions of masks made as we speak.
00:14:21.000There are no tested trials as far as hydroxychloroquine in any mass numbers to see whether this thing is incredibly effective across the board.
00:14:29.000Trump did pump hydroxychloroquine again yesterday at his press conference.
00:14:32.000He's been pushing this thing pretty hard.
00:14:34.000There have been a lot of stories of people who say they feel better after using hydroxychloroquine in coordination with azithromycin as well as zinc.
00:15:18.000This is a heartache I'll never get over.
00:15:19.000What exactly is she talking about here?
00:15:21.000She's talking about a story in which a woman suggested that she and her husband had taken hydroxychloroquine in order to fend off coronavirus, even though they'd not been diagnosed with it.
00:15:31.000And then her husband died and she ended up in the ICU.
00:15:34.000And Heidi Prisbilla tweeted, her husband is dead and she's in the ICU after ingesting chloroquine.
00:15:39.000We saw Trump on TV, every channel, all of his buddies.
00:15:55.000The couple each mixed one tablespoon of chloroquine, a phosphate, with soda.
00:15:59.000Within 20 minutes, they began experiencing severe sickness and called 911.
00:16:02.000I was in the pantry stacking dog food, and I saw it sitting in the back shelf, and I thought, hey, isn't that the stuff they were talking about on TV?
00:16:31.000Trump kept saying it was pretty much basically a cure.
00:16:33.000Do we have that audio of this woman talking to Vaughn Hilliard at NBC?
00:16:36.000This supposedly national news here about Trump killing somebody because he told them to take hydroxychloroquine?
00:16:41.000You know, they kept saying that it was approved for other things and, you know, Trump kept saying it was, you know, basically pretty much a cure.
00:16:53.000What would be your message to the American public?
00:17:25.000Okay, so according to the media, it sounds like President Trump has been pushing chloroquine phosphate, and that some lady took his advice, gave it to herself and her husband, and then he died, and she's in the ICU.
00:17:35.000Wait until you hear the punchline of this story, which demonstrates that the media are full-scale insane.
00:17:40.000I mean, this is, really, this is the most insane case of Trump Derangement Syndrome I have ever heard of, and there's a lot of Trump Derangement Syndrome out there, but the mainstream media have picked up on this story.
00:17:52.000Okay, first, let's talk about the fact that even when all of this is over, taxes are still going to be a part of your life.
00:17:57.000So you got to make sure that you get those things right and save money while you are at it.
00:18:00.000That is why you need to lean on LegalZoom.
00:18:02.000Never has there been a better time to cut costs, particularly legal costs, than right now as you prepare for an unsteady future in this economy.
00:18:09.000So LLCs, DBAs, S-Corps, they all mean different things when it comes to paying taxes and limiting your personal liability.
00:18:16.000I've been using LegalZoom myself for years.
00:18:18.000As a lawyer, and long before they were an advertiser on the program, they've got tons of resources to help you, including their own network of independent attorneys and tax professionals.
00:18:25.000They'll provide the advice you need to ensure you're operating your business the way you want to.
00:18:29.000And since LegalZoom is not a law firm, you'll save time and money while you avoid hourly fees.
00:18:33.000Whether you need to incorporate, form an LLC, set up your business another way, Use LegalZoom to maximize your business's potential and make your accountant happy at the same time.
00:19:04.000Okay, so what is the punchline to this story where Trump supposedly killed some dude and then put his wife in the ICU after recommending inappropriate substances?
00:20:08.000Here's the story from Fox 29 in Arizona.
00:20:10.000Medical experts with Banner Health are warning the public against using inappropriate medication and household products to prevent or treat coronavirus.
00:20:17.000The warning by Banner Health comes after an Arizona man in his 60s died from taking a substance used to clean fish tanks at aquariums in order to prevent contracting COVID-19.
00:20:26.000In a statement released on Monday, experts emphasized that chloroquine, which is a medication used for malaria, should not be taken to treat or prevent COVID-19.
00:20:33.000Banner Health officials say the man who died, along with his wife, both took chloroquine phosphate.
00:20:37.000The man's wife, also in her 60s, is currently under critical care.
00:20:40.000Officials say both were taken to a Banner Health hospital for immediate treatment after they experienced immediate effects within 30 minutes of taking the substance.
00:20:48.000Most patients who become infected with COVID-19 will only require symptomatic care and self-isolation to prevent the risk of infecting others, read a portion of the statement.
00:20:55.000The routine use of specific treatments, including medications described as anti-COVID-19, is not recommended for non-hospitalized patients.
00:21:01.000The FDA has reiterated in a statement there are no FDA-approved therapeutics or drugs to treat, cure, or prevent COVID-19.
00:21:08.000Chloroquine has been used to treat malaria since the 1930s.
00:21:10.000Hydroxychloroquine came along a decade later and has fewer side effects.
00:21:14.000The latter is sold in generic form under the brand name Plaquenil for use against several diseases.
00:21:18.000The drugs can cause heart problems, severely low blood pressure, and muscle or nerve damage.
00:21:23.000Plaquenil's label warns of possible damage to the retina, especially when used at higher doses.
00:21:28.000But, beyond this, this is not the same thing as, you know, fish tank cleaner.
00:21:39.000Okay, that is like Trump saying that, you know, there have been some studies that show the beneficial medicinal effects of a glass of wine at dinner.
00:21:47.000So you're like, oh, well that means alcohol is good for me.
00:21:50.000So you go in your bathroom, you take two bottles of isopropyl rubbing alcohol, and you proceed to down them.
00:21:55.000And if you do that, that one's on you.
00:21:57.000That one's not on Trump because you're stupid.
00:22:00.000But the media tried to blame Trump for this.
00:22:05.000The amount that the media are trying to turn this into a Trump bleep show, as opposed to we're all in the midst of a pandemic and nobody knows anything, which is really the story of this thing.
00:22:15.000And then we are all sort of muddling through.
00:22:31.000You may think that President Trump says things that are not true.
00:22:33.000That he straight out says things that are not true.
00:22:35.000So who do you want in the administration making sure that the response is handled as correctly as possible?
00:22:39.000Probably one of those people would be Dr. Anthony Fauci, right?
00:22:42.000Wouldn't that be the person who you are actually counting on to keep Trump on the straight and narrow?
00:22:46.000Yet every question coming out of the media right now directed at Anthony Fauci is, why won't you rip on Trump some more?
00:22:51.000Why don't you go rip on Trump some more?
00:22:53.000Like, please, go rip on Trump some more.
00:22:54.000So the New York Times has an entire piece today dedicated to the proposition that President Trump hates Fauci.
00:23:00.000Because if there's one thing that is guaranteed to ensure conflict, it is media coverage.
00:23:05.000According to the New York Times, the president has become increasingly concerned as Dr. Anthony Fauci has grown bolder in correcting his falsehoods about the spread of coronavirus.
00:23:12.000Dr. Fauci, the director of the NIAID, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, since 1984, has grown bolder in correcting the president's falsehoods and overly rosy statements about the spread of coronavirus in the past two weeks, and he has become a hero to the president's critics because of it.
00:23:27.000And now, Mr. Trump's patience has started to wear thin.
00:23:31.000So is the patience of some White House advisors who see Dr. Fauci is taking shots at the president in some of his interviews with print reporters.
00:23:37.000Well, offering extensive praise for Trump in television interviews with conservative hosts.
00:23:41.000Trump knows that Fauci, who has advised every president since Reagan, is seen as credible with a large section of the public and with journalists, and so he has given the doctor more leeway to contradict him, according to multiple advisors to the president.
00:23:51.000When Trump knows he has more to gain than lose by keeping an advisor, he has resisted impulses to fight back against apparent criticisms, sometimes for months-long interludes.
00:23:59.000So far, the president appears to be making the same calculation with Fauci.
00:24:03.000But the president has resisted portraying the virus as the kind of threat described by Fauci and the media are trying to play up.
00:24:09.000The media are trying to play up conflict between Fauci and Trump at a critical point where it's pretty important that Trump be having open conversations with Fauci.
00:24:16.000By the way, Trump in his press conference has been unendingly and unstintingly praiseworthy of of fauci i mean talking extensively about how he thinks fauci is doing an excellent job trump yesterday in his press conference despite all of the talk about how much he hates fauci and he's losing patience with fauci and questions being asked about to fauci about trump being a liar and why don't you stand up to trump by the way if you ever get fauci in interview dumbest question you can ask at this point is what's your relationship with trump like who cares for Who cares?
00:24:46.000As long as Trump is listening to him, that's all that matters.
00:24:49.000And why would you try to undermine that trust if you actually believe that Fauci has something to offer here?
00:24:53.000By the way, again, Trump is mouthing openly his willingness to listen to both Fauci and Deborah Bix, the person who's heading his efforts here.
00:25:02.000We'll get to President Trump praising Fauci.
00:25:04.000Even as the media try to undermine that relationship in just one second.
00:25:07.000And then we'll get to the big controversy of the day, which is Trump suggesting that at some point we're going to have to reopen the economy.
00:25:11.000Which again, I have a hard time finding it, how this is in any way remotely controversial.
00:25:17.000If he opens the economy on Friday, that's controversial.
00:25:20.000But saying we're going to reconsider this thing every step of the way?
00:25:23.000That's just called like being a president.
00:25:25.000That's called being a politician, considering public policy.
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00:26:53.000Okay, so as I say, the media have been trying to foster some conflict between Trump and Fauci, but Trump publicly has been saying he's listening to Fauci.
00:27:32.000Okay, so again, he is not going after Fauci.
00:27:35.000He's actually, you know, he's actually praising Fauci there.
00:27:39.000Also, Trump says that Fauci has not agreed to him.
00:27:42.000So now we get into the big issue of the day.
00:27:44.000And that is, how do we balance the needs of the vast majority of people who are not going to die of coronavirus and the needs of the people who are going to suffer from coronavirus?
00:27:53.000How exactly do we balance the needs of the health system and the needs of our economy?
00:27:58.000Okay, so President Trump, Was raked over the coals by large swaths of the media yesterday for saying he is not looking at a months-long shutdown.
00:28:05.000Now again, I don't know how this is remotely controversial.
00:28:07.000Okay, if the US economy were to shut for literally three or four months, that would not be something the United States could recover from.
00:28:14.000Because right now we're pumping and nobody's buying the bonds.
00:28:17.000The only way to do this would be to inflate the currency tremendously.
00:28:20.000You can only have the government backing every bit of commercial business Commercial bonds for so long.
00:28:26.000The Fed pumping yesterday did not help the market.
00:28:28.000I'll tell you what did help the market this morning was the open conversation that is now happening about when this thing comes to an end.
00:28:34.000And that's a conversation that needs to be had.
00:28:36.000Now I've been urging people at the White House, I've been saying for a long time on the show that what we need here is a metric of when it is possible for people to go back to work.
00:28:42.000That does not mean that the metric is hit on Friday.
00:28:44.000It does not mean it's time to go back to work on Monday.
00:28:47.000What it does mean is that we have to start considering at which point that line of medical supplies rises above the flattened curve.
00:28:55.000Because so far we've heard no metric from Andrew Cuomo in New York, no metric from Gavin Newsom, no metric from the federal government as to when we can expect that the resources that are necessary will be available such that when we all go back out to work and there's a second wave of infections, which is what you're starting to see in Asia right now, that there'll be enough ventilators and beds on hand to take care of that so we can all go back to work When are the tests going to be available?
00:29:16.000When are tests going to be widespread and available such that we can use 75,000 tests a day, 100,000 tests a day, and we can all get back to work?
00:29:23.000We can start to use social distancing and masks in order to allow us to go back to our daily life and back to our jobs gradually as we move toward a vaccine.
00:29:32.000What do we have to do in order so that we can up the amount of resources necessary so we can Cordon off the vulnerable populations from the non-vulnerable populations and contact trace all of the people who have actually had coronavirus, which is exactly what's happening in South Korea.
00:29:47.000So when President Trump says, we're not looking at months here, that's good because if you were just watching the headlines right now, if you're the market and you're just watching the headlines, the market is just the aggregate of human knowledge about the economy, and you're watching the headlines.
00:29:59.000And on the one hand, you have Andrew Cuomo saying this thing could last nine months.
00:30:02.000And on the other hand, you have Fauci saying this thing could last 12 weeks.
00:30:04.000And you have Mnuchin saying it could last eight weeks.
00:30:06.000And then you have President Trump coming out and saying, look, I'm not looking at months.
00:30:11.000People start to breathe a sigh of relief because they think, OK, my business cannot last another three months with no income.
00:30:16.000My business cannot last another three months on the basis of small business loans provided by the federal government or grants provided by the federal government.
00:30:25.000Eventually, this thing has to open back up.
00:30:27.000Otherwise, I'm not going to invest in my business.
00:30:28.000I'm just going to sit home, and I'll take the unemployment insurance instead.
00:30:31.000Turns out that running a business is a very risky enterprise, very stressful.
00:30:34.000You know what's easier is if they are sending you a check in the amount of how much money you were making before, and you don't have to run the business, then that is less stressful and easier, especially if you don't know what's going to come out on the other end of all of that, right?
00:30:48.000There's a lot of uncertainty in the economy right now, and Trump trying to provide some sort of timeline here is actually quite necessary.
00:30:53.000So yesterday, Trump says, I'm not looking at months, and people went nuts.
00:30:56.000I'm not looking at months, I can tell you right now.
00:30:59.000We're going to be opening up our country, and we're going to be watching certain areas, and we're going to be practicing everything that Deborah's referring to right here.
00:31:09.000We're going to be watching this very closely, but you can't keep it closed for the next, you know, for years, okay?
00:31:22.000He said, listen, we don't say no more driving of cars.
00:31:25.000Like we're, we're going to have to have some sort of public policy discussion about what level of risk is attendant on reopening the economy.
00:31:50.000And, I am not saying, for one, that we should reopen the economy on Friday, because I don't think that that would be beneficial.
00:31:55.000Frankly, I think that if the risks are still as great as they are right now with coronavirus, and we are still as low in terms of data as we are right now, Then the economy being reopened is actually not going to help the economy.
00:32:05.000Nobody's going to go back to restaurants at this point.
00:32:07.000Nobody's going to go out to theme parks.
00:32:08.000Nobody is going to go back to work if they can afford to stay home at this point, right?
00:32:13.000So just saying, quote unquote, the economy is reopened tomorrow does not mean the economy is going to just zoom and take off and everybody's going to start going and spending tons of money.
00:32:20.000A lot of people are risk averse and are going to stay home.
00:32:22.000So until this thing is actually tamped down to the extent that we feel some level of confidence that huge swaths of humanity are not going to die, the economy is not going to recover.
00:32:33.000But, when Trump says, we don't say no more driving of cars, this of course is accurate.
00:32:36.000And people who are going nuts over this are being deliberately dishonest about this.
00:33:11.000And he's not saying, I'm going to reopen the economy on Friday.
00:33:14.000I think the media are trying to play this up specifically so that they can play up the clicks, the conflict between him and Fauci, the clicks about people ingesting fish tank cleaner, the clicks about Trump is going to buck all the advisors and simply say, go back to work on Monday.
00:33:27.000There's no evidence that that's what's going to happen on Friday.
00:33:29.000Okay, but considering these things is not out of the realm of possibility.
00:33:33.000Even the most ardent shut-it-down people like Andrew Cuomo in New York, even he's admitting this is not a science and it's not even an art.
00:33:40.000We're just kind of blindly groping around in the dark until we get further data, which is to suggest that as we get further data, we're going to have to figure out how to get out of this.
00:33:47.000Here was Andrew Cuomo saying there was no art to what we did in New York.
00:33:49.000We may have even taken the wrong measures in shutting down schools.
00:33:52.000There is an art form here which is overlaying a public health strategy and an economic strategy.
00:34:00.000In other words, what we did is we just closed everything down as quickly as we could.
00:34:05.000Just shut all the doors, border all the windows.
00:34:12.000Is there a public health strategy that says, look, You can start to bring young people back to work.
00:34:19.000You can start to test and find out who had the virus and who resolved from the virus, and they can start to go back to work.
00:34:26.000And that's how we'll restart the economy with a smart public health strategy.
00:34:32.000Okay, and he's saying the same thing as Trump is.
00:34:34.000He's just saying it in more nuanced form, right?
00:34:35.000He's saying, at a certain point, we're going to have to reopen this thing up, and that cannot be forever, okay?
00:34:40.000And that means that we're going to have to talk tough risks.
00:34:43.000We're going to have to talk about what is the level of risk, because there is no world where there are no more deaths from coronavirus over the course of the rest of the year, particularly in a second wave that's going to happen in fall, as most epidemiologists are predicting at this point.
00:34:56.000So to pretend that we're not going to have these discussions is really, really ridiculous.
00:35:01.000Now, that doesn't mean the discussion has to be had in the dumbest possible way, but I think everybody is looking to be outraged because that's sort of our usual mode.
00:35:08.000The usual mode is looking for rationales to be outraged.
00:35:10.000In the world of politics, this is how people make a buck, is to be outraged all the time.
00:35:15.000Let's all just acknowledge We're all groping blindly.
00:35:18.000There is no grand strategy at this point.
00:35:21.000Until there's more data, we don't know what to do.
00:35:23.000But these are conversations that must be ongoing as we add data to this matrix.
00:35:26.000We can figure out, maybe, what is the best thing to do.
00:35:30.000And people are going to articulate this in brusque ways.
00:35:33.000They're going to articulate these problems in awkward ways.
00:35:36.000And that doesn't mean that they're saying some... They're not looking for old people to die on the one hand, or for the economy to be completely killed on the other.
00:35:44.000So, last night, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick was raked over the coals because he was suggesting that at some point we're going to have to reopen the economy, and when that happens, then older people are going to be at more risk.
00:35:53.000Which, by the way, is 100% true, right?
00:35:56.000He phrased it in a very awkward way, but it happens to be 100% true.
00:35:59.000I mean, my own parents have said to me, listen, if this meant that we'd have to basically stay in the House for the next 18 months so that the economy could be revived, then we would do it.
00:36:08.000The problem is right now that that won't work.
00:36:09.000But in the near future, that may be something that that has to be considered.
00:36:13.000I mean, that's what they're doing in South Korea, effectively speaking.
00:36:15.000Here is Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, who's ripped up and down for this last night.
00:36:18.000No one reached out to me and said as a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?
00:36:34.000And if that's the exchange, I'm all in.
00:36:37.000And that doesn't make me noble or brave or anything like that.
00:36:40.000I just think there are lots of grandparents out there in this country like me, I have six grandchildren, that what we all care about and what we love more than anything are those children.
00:36:51.000Okay, so, you know, what he is saying may not be relevant at this moment, right, where he is saying, okay, open it right back up.
00:36:57.000He seems to be saying, open it right back up and I'll take the risk.
00:37:13.000The Party of Life Embraces Trump's Death Cult?
00:37:16.000We've skipped over any nuanced discussion of economic considerations straight to the part where Republicans rationalize letting a million or so people die to fix the economy.
00:37:23.000Nobody is talking about letting a million people die to fix the economy.
00:37:27.000Okay, first of all, we don't know a million people are going to die anyway.
00:37:48.000Now, epidemiologists may have better models than we do, and they may have better models as to how the system gets overwhelmed and how many people die, but there is no level of certainty given the fact that all of this is fluid and we are taking measures on the ground as we speak.
00:38:01.000These are conversations that we are going to have to have, and we're gonna have to have them sooner rather than later, because there had best be a plan.
00:38:06.000And the reason, again, that the economy is jumping again today, well, not the economy, the stock market is jumping again today, is because people are starting to say, okay, at least we're having rational conversations.
00:38:15.000Because if the conversation is we shut this whole thing down until coronavirus is off the face of the earth, we're talking about not an economic depression, we're talking about an economic asteroid hitting the earth and wiping out all forms of economic life.
00:38:27.000Because you're talking 12 to 18 months until there is a vaccine.
00:38:30.000And again, the data that's coming in, we just don't know how reliable any of this data is.
00:38:36.000So, you know, I'm saying the most annoying thing that is possible to say in this circumstance, which is I don't know the answer.
00:38:45.000All we have is a formula with a bunch of variables.
00:38:48.000And as those variables get filled in, then hopefully we can start figuring out what that equals sign looks like on the other side of the ledger.
00:38:57.000So right now this is all a data gathering exercise.
00:39:00.000In the meantime, we are gonna have to have a discussion about when exactly that equals sign is low enough in terms of death rate that we can all start to move back into working.
00:39:11.000So the reason I bring this up is because there are a couple of different theories about how exactly we should go back to work.
00:39:18.000One comes courtesy of Scott Gottlieb, who's the former FDA director for President Trump.
00:39:21.000He's been a very critical voice in terms of everything should shut down.
00:39:42.000I think it's very much askable and necessary to ask.
00:39:44.000And that is, when do people go back to work and what is the metric for when people go back to work?
00:39:48.000We're going to get to that in just one second.
00:39:51.000But if you haven't had a chance to see some of our new content called All Access Live, you should head over to dailywire.com and go check it out right now.
00:39:57.000Jeremy Boring and I kicked it off last week.
00:39:58.000All of the other hosted live streams over at dailywire.com as well.
00:40:01.000We're going to continue all this week at 5 p.m.
00:40:11.000I was literally just playing classical music off of my cell phone so that you could hear some of the pieces that I like and answering questions about apparently their fan clubs devoted to how good-looking I am.
00:40:22.000I mean, I know because I'm the only member, but apparently I find these things out during things like All Access Live.
00:40:27.000The show is intended for our All Access members, but during this pandemic shutdown, We are all going to hang out together.
00:40:33.000So as long as you are a member of any sort, you get to access All Access Live.
00:40:36.000Please let us know what you think of it.
00:41:28.000I think that's actually a very, very good thing.
00:41:30.000By the way, again, the markets think that's a very good thing too, because finally somebody is taking seriously that side of the concern, right?
00:41:36.000The market was up 8% in early trading, like over 1,600 points in early trading.
00:41:41.000And that is because people are starting to say, okay, well, this won't last forever.
00:41:45.000Okay, we don't know what the date certain is when we get off the bench and get back in the game, but it is not going to last forever.
00:41:50.000Scott Gottlieb has an optimistic piece over the Wall Street Journal.
00:41:53.000He says, soon the United States will be able to do 75,000 tests a day that will make changes in strategy possible.
00:42:23.000As public health authorities learn more about infection rates in different parts of the country, governments can tailor strategies to the facts on the ground.
00:42:29.000There's a trade-off between mitigation strategies, which target large populations like sheltering in place, and interventions that try to isolate people who are infected or who might have been exposed.
00:42:38.000Population tactics are blunt instruments necessary for isolating hotspots like New York and Seattle.
00:42:43.000Other places may be able to rely more on individual interventions, Which do cause less disruption and economic damage.
00:42:49.000Every state should be taking steps such as encouraging social distancing, preparing to expand hospital capacity.
00:42:55.000Some have been too slow to respond, but for any of this to work, the United States needs widespread testing to know where and to what extent the virus is spreading.
00:43:02.000Testing capacity, says Scott Gottlieb, has increased significantly in the past few weeks thanks to relentless efforts from public academic private labs such as Quest and LabCorp.
00:43:10.000A good reminder that nationalization of industry is a dumb idea, generally speaking.
00:43:14.000A new test developed by Cepheid can be deployed in a doctor's office.
00:43:17.000There are people who are talking about Being able to get test results within a couple of hours or at home tests being available too.
00:43:22.000By the end of next week, the US will have the capacity in place to screen more than 75,000 people a day.
00:43:27.000South Korea tested 1 in 160 of its people and deployed technology to identify people who are infected and trace content.
00:43:35.000Serological surveillance, which means blood tests to detect antibodies developed to fight the novel coronavirus, which means that if you've got those antibodies, you're already immune.
00:43:43.000These antibodies confirm immunity, can reveal whether a person has been exposed.
00:43:46.000If a sizable portion of a local community has some protection, authorities can be more confident in relying on less invasive measures.
00:43:52.000One of the problems with lack of testing and lack of serological content is, again, we don't know who's had it and who's already immune.
00:43:58.000It may be literally hundreds of thousands of people in the United States.
00:44:01.000More important is developing a therapy to treat COVID-19 or perhaps prevent people from contracting it.
00:44:06.000America is home to a vast dynamic life science industry.
00:44:10.000One strategy would be to infuse convalescent plasma antibodies from the blood of patients who have recovered from COVID-19.
00:44:16.000This could help boost the immune response in those recently infected.
00:44:19.000Arturo Casadevall of Johns Hopkins outlined such an approach in these pages last month.
00:44:23.000Perhaps the most promising option is antibody drugs engineered by biotech companies, a strategy that was used with success against Ebola.
00:44:29.000Also, regulators need to leverage master protocols which allow providers to test multiple promising therapies in the same large trials.
00:44:36.000He says, with the right mix of controlling transmission, expanding testing, and deploying promising drugs, American ingenuity can beat back this pathogen.
00:44:43.000So, that is the conversation that needs to start.
00:44:46.000Okay, let's do all this stuff, and how fast can we do all this stuff?
00:44:49.000Ezekiel Emanuel is saying we have 14 days to defeat coronavirus.
00:44:53.000He says America's losing the war right now against COVID-19, but we can win it with decisive and extraordinary actions right now.
00:44:58.000By the way, again, I admire the tenacity of people who say that it is very, very bad to discuss public health trade-offs.
00:45:03.000While quoting Ezekiel Emanuel, the Obamacare advisor who once suggested that we ought to minimize treatment for people over age 80 in order to save medical resources for people who are under age 80.
00:45:13.000He wrote that for The Atlantic talking about why he wouldn't mind dying at 80.
00:45:17.000Okay, so now the same people who had no problem having these discussions about trade-offs with regard to nationalized healthcare are very unhappy to discuss any sort of trade-offs whatsoever with regard to American economic response to pandemics.
00:45:29.000Ezekiel Emanuel says that the economy can't be fixed without solving the pandemic, which, as I mentioned before, is true.
00:45:35.000But if you just open the economy right now, people aren't going to go back to work and not socially distance.
00:45:40.000He says the window to win the war is about 7 to 14 days.
00:45:42.000If the United States intervenes immediately on the scale China did, our death toll could be under 100,000.
00:45:47.000Within 3 to 4 months, we might be able to begin to return to more normal lives.
00:45:51.000Now again, that seems like a pretty steep estimate.
00:45:53.000Under 100,000 when we have less than 600 deaths in the United States total.
00:45:57.000At this point, but again, that's how exponential growth works, presumably.
00:46:00.000Ezekiel Emanuel says affected states have led the way by closing schools, bars, restaurants, non-essential businesses, by issuing shelter-in-place orders.
00:46:09.000This isn't uniform across the country, but it needs to be, at least for the moment.
00:46:13.000And there needs to be social pressure for local governments to wield to enforce physical distancing strictly, but compassionately.
00:46:20.000And mayors should close streets to vehicular traffic to make them pedestrian spaces so people can be at a safe distance.
00:46:25.000Also, the president must be honest with the American people that the CDC, FDA, other agencies did not roll out testing quickly enough.
00:46:32.000But we also need to ramp that stuff up very quickly.
00:46:35.000We have to conduct random samplings of people to determine the percentage of population with coronavirus and the percentage of people with the virus who die.
00:46:41.000With those stats, we have better data.
00:46:43.000We need better equipment production, says Ezekiel Emanuel.
00:46:45.000We need hospitals to up their capacity.
00:46:49.000We need visitors to be banned at these hospitals.
00:46:53.000We need businesses to retain workers and keep up their facilities so they can rapidly return to operation when COVID-19 is under control.
00:47:00.000So everybody's now having the right conversations, okay?
00:47:46.000And if we are not thinking already about what is the path to get out of this thing, then we are not doing enough.
00:47:51.000That does not mean we reopen it tomorrow.
00:47:53.000And despite the media, again, trying to foster divisions between Trump and Fauci, and despite people suggesting, let's just open this, like, I have really not seen, I think there's a bit of strawmanning going on.
00:48:02.000I've not seen a ton of people saying, reopen this thing up today.
00:48:20.000Of course we have to have that conversation.
00:48:21.000We're talking about the greatest public policy, either failure or success, in the history of the world right now.
00:48:27.000Of course we have to have conversations about what metrics we can use in terms of what risks are we willing to take as a society.
00:48:33.000I feel like I'm beating a dead horse here, but obviously it's not a dead horse because everybody is too busy going nuts over President Trump and his supposed gall in suggesting that we ought to take into consideration the economy in having these discussions.
00:48:44.000It is not a bad thing to ask that question.
00:48:46.000It is a very good thing to ask that question.
00:48:48.000The only bad thing would be if we get the wrong answer to a very, very obvious question.
00:48:53.000The United States Senate continues to have this ridiculous debate over a Senate bill.
00:48:59.000Now there are problems with the Republican Senate bill that was proposed by Mitch McConnell.
00:49:02.000The bipartisan bill that was pushed at the end of last week that Chuck Schumer declared bipartisan and then immediately reversed because apparently Nancy Pelosi had his balls in her handbag.
00:49:20.000And so, Pelosi just rejected the Republican bill out of hand, even though it had been worked on by members of both parties.
00:49:26.000And then, Schumer had basically become her minion, shutting down people from having discussions of this Republican bill, filibustering the bill in, I believe, three separate votes yesterday.
00:49:42.000Now listen, you can have a reasonable conversation about the oversight provisions on the loans to be provided by the Treasury Department.
00:49:47.000Honestly, my preference is zero interest loans given to the banks that are already handing out those loans.
00:49:52.000I mean, I think that right now the banks are in best position to determine which businesses are going to survive and which businesses are not on the other end of this.
00:50:00.000And backing the loans that the banks are giving, such that they don't call those in immediately, would be the best available move.
00:50:05.000I don't like politicians who have no expertise on the economy whatsoever, no expertise in running businesses,
00:50:10.000I don't want them deciding how this money gets handed out, neither do I really want the Treasury Secretary determining how the money gets sent out, which is why I sort of support the idea of the government, yes, creating a slush fund that is basically a backstop for the banks, because they're the ones who have undertaken the risk, and the risks they undertake are likely to be smarter than the risks undertaken by either Treasury Secretary Mnuchin or the morons in Congress who can't tie their shoes.
00:50:37.000But, with that said, that was not the debate the Democrats were having.
00:50:42.000The debate the Democrats were having was a completely different debate.
00:51:29.000$300 million in this bill for the IRS and Nancy Pelosi's version of this bill.
00:51:33.000She wanted $35 million for the JFK Performing Arts Center in this bill.
00:51:38.000She's going to shut down and hold up the American economy so that we can fund the JFK Performing Arts Center.
00:51:43.000Deeply vital stuff for people who are lacking ventilators right now and for small businesses that are on the verge of shutting down and going bankrupt and never reopening their doors.
00:51:50.000She wanted $90 million for an HIV program in a coronavirus bill.
00:51:56.000She wanted $36 million for the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences.
00:52:03.000What the hell is the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences?
00:53:08.000The government is going to force people onto your corporate board if you take a loan that you have to take because the government shut down your business.
00:53:15.000If federal agencies use any banks owned by white people, they have to explain themselves.
00:54:13.000We got small businesses that are closing literally by the hour.
00:54:17.000We have doctors fighting to prevent their hospitals from being over surged and overwhelmed.
00:54:22.000And what is Speaker Pelosi trying to do?
00:54:25.000She's trying to take hostages about her dream legislation, all sorts of dream legislative provisions that have nothing to do with this moment, and say the American public can't get access to the public health piece of legislation or the economic relief pieces of legislation unless she gets hostages that are entirely unrelated to this moment.
00:55:34.000Senator Lindsey Graham, who again is a fairly moderate senator, he says Democrats are obviously trying to prioritize things that do not involve the saving of the United States economy at this point.
00:55:58.000I mean, again, when you've pissed off Lindsey Graham and Susan Collins, it's hard to find a more sort of wishy-washy contingent than that on this in general, in terms of fighting Democrats hand to hand.
00:56:09.000Here's Lindsey Graham saying Democrats have other priorities, not saving the American people at this point.
00:56:14.000You see this as an opportunity to do things you couldn't do otherwise.
00:56:20.000Republicans see this as an opportunity to do things that have to be done now to save lives.
00:56:30.000I have never been more disgusted since Kavanaugh.
00:56:37.000You tried to destroy a good man's life just to keep the seat open.
00:56:42.000And close friends of mine in the House have publicly said this is an opportunity to reshape the country in our image.
00:57:16.000The Democratic leader objected to our convening at 9 o'clock this morning so that we could begin working in earnest?
00:57:27.000How can that possibly be controversial?
00:57:32.000How can any of us want to see millions of Americans lose their paychecks, their health insurance, their contributions to their retirement plans?
00:57:45.000This led also to a great debate between Mitch McConnell and Joe Manchin.
00:57:48.000Joe Manchin, of course, the senator from West Virginia.
00:57:50.000And Manchin was saying, well, of course we're going to filibuster this thing because then you might pass the bill.
00:57:55.000And McConnell was like, we're not even talking about a vote on the bill yet.
00:57:58.000We're talking about a vote to hold a debate on the bill.
00:58:34.000Okay, so again, it got very feisty yesterday.
00:58:36.000Naturally, the New York Times blamed, you guessed it, the Republicans.
00:58:39.000They blamed Mitch McConnell, the editorial board of the New York Times.
00:58:42.000They said, Senator Mitch McConnell failed to do his job this weekend.
00:58:45.000As the economy spiraled downward, McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, said he'd produce a bipartisan bailout bill authorizing an infusion of desperately needed aid.
00:58:52.000Instead, McConnell emerged on Sunday evening with a bill that would provide a lot of help for corporate executives and shareholders and not nearly enough for American workers.
00:58:59.000Except that Chuck Schumer basically endorsed the damn thing on Saturday night.
00:59:02.000Okay, the fact of the matter is that right now is not the time to wait on this stuff.
00:59:06.000Right now, we need the help, we need the backstop of the economy, and we need the open conversation about when the economy reopens.
00:59:12.000The fact that Democrats are putting on the table a pork-laden, three times as long bill that nobody has read, laden with crap like money for the JFK Center for Arts or whatever, it demonstrates the utter unseriousness of the people in Congress.
00:59:24.000It's why the Federal Reserve has become basically the economic resort that everybody uses as a first resort, not a last resort.
00:59:32.000This is why you can't trust government to fix all your problems.
00:59:35.000And when government imposes the problems, the question becomes, how fast can we get out of this alternative universe in which the government runs everything?
00:59:43.000And I understand that the answer is not today.
00:59:45.000When the answer is not tomorrow, the answer is probably not the end of this week or even the end of next week.
00:59:48.000But it better be faster rather than slower.
00:59:50.000Because if you think I want these dolts running the economy and the national healthcare response over the course of any long scale period of time, you have to have another thing coming.