The Ben Shapiro Show - The Coming Storm | Ep. 981

00:00:00.000 New York prepares for a coronavirus tsunami as other major cities build their seawalls.

00:00:04.000 New information suggests coronavirus may be far less deadly than originally suspected.

00:00:08.000 And President Trump mulls over how to reopen the economy.

00:00:11.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:00:11.000 This is the Ben Shapiro Show.

00:00:13.000 Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN TV.

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00:00:21.000 Keep yourself safe at expressvpn.com slash Ben.

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00:00:28.000 Alrighty, so we bring you all of the updates.

00:00:30.000 The biggest update, of course, is that the U.S.

00:00:32.000 now leads the world in confirmed coronavirus cases, and members of the media are going nuts over this.

00:00:36.000 The United States, we're number one.

00:00:38.000 That was trending on Twitter yesterday.

00:00:40.000 Wow, we're number one.

00:00:41.000 People suggesting that this shows that America really is a third world country.

00:00:45.000 Julia Jaffe, the ex-Gribble columnist, For GQ.

00:00:48.000 She actually tweeted out, who's the bleephole country now?

00:00:51.000 Who's the bleephole?

00:00:51.000 That, of course, is supposed to be making fun of President Trump, who suggested he didn't want people immigrating from bleephole countries because they might not actually be the best American citizens, depending on the culture from which they came.

00:01:03.000 Again, that was a very controversial comment at the time and poorly expressed by the president, but let's just put it this way.

00:01:08.000 The United States is not a bleephole country because we have a lot of tests, okay?

00:01:12.000 If you were going to identify which countries are having the hardest time with coronavirus, the United States, yes, we are having a rough time with coronavirus.

00:01:19.000 It is not even close to the countries that are having the toughest time with coronavirus.

00:01:22.000 How can we tell?

00:01:23.000 Because what doesn't matter is the number of cases diagnosed.

00:01:26.000 What does matter is the number of cases of deaths over the number of cases a country has.

00:01:31.000 That would be a good measure.

00:01:33.000 Truly, because you cannot measure the ability of a country to deal with a crisis by simply the bottom line number as to how many people have experienced the crisis.

00:01:41.000 It's how those people actually recover from the crisis, how many people die.

00:01:44.000 So while it is true that the United States now has the most cases of diagnosed coronavirus, that is largely because China has undoubtedly been lying about the coronavirus situation in China. 0.80

00:01:54.000 Supposedly, according to China, they're having like 25 new cases of coronavirus a day.

00:02:00.000 Does anyone believe that?

00:02:01.000 Literally the day after they expelled American journalists, they apparently stopped testing in China.

00:02:05.000 That is according to sources inside China.

00:02:08.000 Beyond that, the United States right now, as of now, has about 86,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus in the United States.

00:02:14.000 Okay, that's not spectacular, but that means a death rate of approximately 1.3%.

00:02:20.000 Italy has 81,000 cases of coronavirus and 8,200 deaths.

00:02:25.000 So eight times as many deaths as the United States, about seven times, eight times about as many deaths as the United States, and fewer diagnosed cases.

00:02:32.000 Spain has 64,000 diagnosed cases and nearly 5,000 deaths.

00:02:37.000 So the notion that the United States is a bleephole country because of the number of coronavirus diagnoses is ridiculous.

00:02:44.000 I mean, France has more deaths right now, and they only have 30,000 diagnosed cases.

00:02:49.000 By the way, nationalized healthcare systems in most of these places.

00:02:51.000 So the kind of triumphalism, a very weird triumphalism you're seeing from the media, well, now that the United States has the most coronavirus cases, that demonstrates that the United States is the worst country.

00:03:02.000 Or alternatively, it demonstrates that you don't understand math. 0.99

00:03:04.000 So maybe we have the worst math programs in the country, because you idiots don't understand what a numerator and a denominator are in terms of determining rates. 0.99

00:03:11.000 But with that said, again, the United States is dealing with this thing so far, and the big question is going to be whether coronavirus overcomes the capacity of the healthcare system. 0.98

00:03:20.000 That has been the question for a long time.

00:03:21.000 I've been talking about it on the program for weeks at this point.

00:03:24.000 When we talk about flattening the curve, the point of flattening the curve is not that everyone will not eventually get coronavirus.

00:03:29.000 In all likelihood, everyone will eventually get coronavirus.

00:03:32.000 The question is whether that swamps our capacity to deal with it.

00:03:35.000 And right now, it is unclear exactly how much we are going to be swamped because we're seeing reports that suggest we're going to be swamped.

00:03:41.000 The media obviously Are trying to kind of get ahead of those reports.

00:03:46.000 We saw Casey Hunt over NBC News tweet out earlier today that hospitals were already making decisions about who would get a ventilator and who would not, except for the fact that hospitals are not actually doing that at this point.

00:03:57.000 And so the notion that we are being overwhelmed right now, right this second, we don't know that yet.

00:04:03.000 There have been these forecasts that we were going to get overwhelmed by earlier this week.

00:04:06.000 I remember Andrew Cuomo suggested that by Tuesday, New York City's hospitals, ICU beds, their ventilators were going to be overwhelmed.

00:04:12.000 And then the suggestion was that by today, by Friday, that the New York system was going to be overwhelmed.

00:04:16.000 And we'll see whether it is indeed overwhelmed, although the reality is that most of the New York public officials are saying right now that they are not overwhelmed.

00:04:25.000 That is, as things stand, at current.

00:04:29.000 But the United States does lead the world in confirmed coronavirus cases because we are ramping up testing, which is a good thing.

00:04:33.000 We should be ramping up testing.

00:04:34.000 You want to get back to work?

00:04:35.000 You want to know how bad this thing is?

00:04:36.000 We need more testing.

00:04:37.000 And we need tests of blood serum.

00:04:41.000 We need to know whether people have developed the antibodies.

00:04:44.000 Because one of the things that we're trying to figure out right now is just how deadly this thing is.

00:04:47.000 What exactly are the death rates?

00:04:50.000 That is something that we'll have.

00:04:51.000 And by the way, I strongly suspect that not tens of thousands, not hundreds of thousands, but millions of Americans actually have had coronavirus.

00:05:00.000 That is my deep suspicion.

00:05:03.000 Not just my suspicion, by the way.

00:05:04.000 The suspicion of virtually everybody who has taken a look at these numbers.

00:05:07.000 Yesterday, we had on a doctor from Stanford University suggesting that he thinks that if you take the number of people, broadly speaking, across the United States who have had coronavirus or do have coronavirus and don't know about it and experience no symptoms or mild symptoms and then moved on with their life.

00:05:21.000 If you take that number and you take the number of deaths over the actual number of people who have had or do have coronavirus, you're looking at a death rate that actually does look much more akin to the flu.

00:05:30.000 Now, that does not mean you're not going to see more absolute death in the United States because if 300 million people get it and it has the same death rate as the flu, you are still going to end up with like five times as many people dying from that as from the flu because every season in the United States, you get about 50, 60 million people with the flu.

00:05:46.000 If instead you had 300 million people with the flu, more people on an absolute level will die.

00:05:49.000 This is how percentages work.

00:05:50.000 But the reason I suspect this is because you're seeing a lot of prominent people come down with this thing.

00:05:55.000 Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, announced today that he has mild symptoms of coronavirus, and he tested positive for coronavirus.

00:06:03.000 So the question becomes, why is it that all of these prominent people are getting coronavirus?

00:06:06.000 You've got the NBA, where a bunch of people have coronavirus.

00:06:08.000 You're seeing celebrities like Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson have coronavirus.

00:06:11.000 You're seeing fairly famous people come down with coronavirus.

00:06:14.000 So the question is, is this a thing that only famous people are getting?

00:06:18.000 Or alternatively, is it that in a time of a shortage of testing, Is it possible the only people who are getting tests are the celebrities, right?

00:06:24.000 Which is probably the accurate assessment of the situation, right?

00:06:28.000 The NBA was getting early tests because all those people are rich and famous and celebrities and they have hookups with doctors and they can get a connect.

00:06:35.000 So it's not that only NBA players are getting it or that only Prime Minister Boris Johnson is getting it.

00:06:39.000 It's that you may have had it or you might have had it, but you didn't get a test because you're not famous and because the tests are hard to come by.

00:06:45.000 Okay, so, according to the New York Times, the United States is the world's third most populous nation.

00:06:49.000 So, of course, that's not a shock that we also have the world's highest number of coronavirus cases.

00:06:54.000 And also, it's difficult to compare the United States to, like, Italy, right?

00:06:58.000 Italy has nearly as many cases as we do, and they have 60 million people.

00:07:01.000 We have 330 million people.

00:07:03.000 So, on a per capita basis, we're not even close to number one.

00:07:06.000 On a per capita basis, we're somewhere in the middle of the pack, actually, in terms of diagnosed coronavirus cases.

00:07:10.000 If you took the United States versus the EU, which is closer to apples to apples, then you would be looking at the EU just swamping the United States.

00:07:18.000 And as I say, China is number one in terms of population.

00:07:20.000 India is number two in terms of population.

00:07:22.000 We have no actual data on it.

00:07:26.000 I think China is more than India, but it's pretty close.

00:07:26.000 I think that's right.

00:07:28.000 In any case, we don't actually have any data from India, and China's been lying about their data.

00:07:32.000 So we don't actually know if the United States is number one.

00:07:34.000 That, again, is not stopping people in the media from suggesting that this is because the United States is uniquely weird and evil and all this.

00:07:40.000 Very weird.

00:07:41.000 The same people who will accuse religious Americans of having this apocalyptic view of the United States Uh, accuse religious Americans of sitting around going, well, God is sending a plague on this cruel nation.

00:07:52.000 Right?

00:07:52.000 Those same people are sitting around going, well, the United States, we're a bleephole country, we sort of had this coming, didn't we?

00:07:58.000 We sort of deserved it.

00:07:59.000 They have this very weird sort of quasi-religious view that Mother Nature is taking her revenge.

00:08:04.000 In some sort of vague sense.

00:08:05.000 It's very weird.

00:08:06.000 We'll get to more of this in just one second because there is good news today and there's bad news today.

00:08:10.000 We're going to get to the bad news first and then we'll get to some of the good news as to where things stand because, again, there's a lot of data floating around that we're going to try to go through all of it.

00:08:18.000 The theme of the show, if you haven't noticed for the past several weeks, is I don't know.

00:08:21.000 And you don't know, and anybody who claims they know is lying to you.

00:08:25.000 Okay, so when you watch the media, and you watch the media's narrative on this thing evolve in real time, understand that's because the data's moving around.

00:08:31.000 Some people are gonna be honest about that, and some people are gonna lie to you about that.

00:08:34.000 We're gonna be honest about that and suggest we don't know what we don't know.

00:08:36.000 Okay, because right now there's this sort of pressure for everybody to come down hard, for people to go to their priors, to people immediately.

00:08:45.000 To declare it's either a huge problem or no problem at all.

00:08:48.000 And we're not going to do that.

00:08:48.000 We're just going to give you the data and then we're going to, you know, kind of comment on how people are reacting to it.

00:08:52.000 First, let us talk about the reality of the situation.

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00:10:11.000 Okay, so as I say, that was the big headline that the United States is number one in terms of coronavirus diagnoses, but that doesn't make a huge difference It's really how many people die compared to that number and whether the health system gets overwhelmed.

00:10:25.000 Now speaking of that, Scott Gottlieb, who is the former Trump head of the FDA, has become one of the trusted voices on this thing.

00:10:32.000 He put out a chart showing the emerging situations in various American cities and how exactly the deaths are doubling.

00:10:41.000 In New York City, basically, deaths are doubling every couple of days.

00:10:44.000 Andrew Cuomo suggested that that is starting to flatten out, that thanks to the social distancing, thanks to the lockdown, that is starting to flatten out a little bit.

00:10:52.000 Michigan is really jumping.

00:10:53.000 Michigan has a very steep curve right now in terms of the number of people who are dying every day.

00:10:59.000 Again, there's not a lot of data.

00:11:00.000 You're like four days into some of these charts, right?

00:11:02.000 Michigan's only being measured after like four days, basically.

00:11:05.000 You're seeing a pretty sharp curve up in New Jersey.

00:11:09.000 You're seeing a fairly sharp curve in Georgia.

00:11:11.000 California, for some reason, is lagging, and that's interesting.

00:11:13.000 Florida is also kind of lagging, and that's interesting as well.

00:11:17.000 There was an article in the Associated Press asking why Los Angeles, for example, has so many fewer diagnosed cases than New York City.

00:11:26.000 Part of that may be lack of testing.

00:11:28.000 Part of that is undoubtedly the fact that being a lifelong resident of Los Angeles is a much more spread out town.

00:11:33.000 I mean, New York, everybody is right on top of each other.

00:11:36.000 The subways are always crowded.

00:11:37.000 There are gonna be some serious questions to be asked, by the way.

00:11:40.000 People are talking about Andrew Cuomo, presidential candidate.

00:11:42.000 Look at all of his great leadership.

00:11:43.000 There are gonna be some fairly serious questions to be asked to Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio if this really does get bad in New York City as to why they were leaving public transportation running in the middle of all of this.

00:11:53.000 Seriously, like, why were all the subways running?

00:11:54.000 I mean, those are the places that are most likely to be the areas in which people acquire coronavirus.

00:11:58.000 It's a bunch of hard surfaces in small areas underground, right?

00:12:02.000 That's going to be... What you're noticing here, by the way, is that many of the areas that have public transportation systems are the ones that are getting the hardest hit.

00:12:09.000 It turns out that Maybe your personal protective equipment was your car.

00:12:14.000 Being on public transportation is a place where you're most likely to acquire germs.

00:12:17.000 Among others, New Orleans is seeing a pretty sharp spike right now.

00:12:19.000 New Orleans, Dallas, Atlanta, Miami, Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, among others, New Orleans is seeing a pretty sharp spike right now.

00:12:25.000 In China, no province outside Hubei ever had more than 1500 cases.

00:12:29.000 In the United States, 11 states are already hit that total.

00:12:32.000 Our epidemic is likely to be national in scope.

00:12:35.000 Well, it is true it's likely to be national in scope, but there are likely to be differences by area.

00:12:39.000 We're going to get to that in just a moment.

00:12:41.000 Meanwhile, again, all eyes on New York City, because New York City is sort of the canary in the coal mine.

00:12:47.000 It is the epicenter of the outbreak in the United States.

00:12:49.000 According to the New York Times, the New York City death toll hit 365 last night.

00:12:53.000 The case count topped at 23,000, which means that Somewhere between one-third and one-half of all cases in the United States are happening in New York City.

00:13:02.000 Health officials reported late Thursday that New York City had added 3,100 new confirmed coronavirus cases since the same time on Wednesday, bringing the total to 23,112.

00:13:10.000 By comparison, more than 4,400 new cases were added from Tuesday to Wednesday, so maybe the curve is starting to flatten out.

00:13:16.000 Andrew Cuomo had suggested that to the governor.

00:13:18.000 The number of virus-related deaths climbed to 365 on Thursday, up from 280 the day before.

00:13:24.000 From Wednesday morning to Thursday morning, 100 people died of coronavirus in the state overall, said Andrew Cuomo at a news briefing on Thursday.

00:13:30.000 He said the number of patients hospitalized in New York had shot up 40% in a day, which was the sharpest increase in days.

00:13:35.000 He said that older and weaker patients have been keeping on the ventilators for 20 days or longer before they succumb to respiratory failures.

00:13:42.000 That means that the shortages that we're talking about are not just number of ventilators versus number of people who are sick.

00:13:48.000 It is also that once you're on a ventilator, you're staying on a ventilator for quite a while.

00:13:51.000 He says the longer you're on a ventilator, the more probability of a bad outcome.

00:13:55.000 He said the governor emphasized that the numbers on any single day did not necessarily capture the damage being caused by the virus.

00:14:00.000 He said when you talk to projection models, what they'll say is you get a fluctuation.

00:14:03.000 They don't know if it's a deviation in what hospitals happened to report that day, so he says don't take the day-by-day numbers in New York, take the three-day averages, the three-day swinging averages.

00:14:13.000 However, Cuomo did express some optimism that perhaps New York was in fact slowing the growth of the curve.

00:14:19.000 With all of that said, We're still trying to figure out where these projections end up, and it's very difficult to tell where these projections end up at this point.

00:14:28.000 There is the suggestion that the peak is not going to be hit until sometime in April.

00:14:33.000 There's one study that came out, I mentioned it briefly yesterday, from the University of Washington School of Medicine, suggesting the coronavirus pandemic could kill more than 81,000 people in the United States in the next four months and might not subside until June.

00:14:44.000 They say the number of hospitalized patients is expected to peak nationally by the second week of April, Though the peak may come later in some states because, again, this thing does not spread perfectly evenly.

00:14:51.000 Some people could continue to die of the virus as late as July, although deaths should be below epidemic levels of 10 per day by June at the latest, according to the analysis.

00:14:59.000 The analysis has a wide range of outcomes, ranging from as low as 38,000 deaths to as high as 162,000 deaths, which is why, again, you should take every prediction with a grain of salt.

00:15:08.000 When the range is literally fourfold...

00:15:11.000 It is very difficult to tell exactly where this thing is going to go.

00:15:15.000 The variances do impart to disparate rates of the spread of the virus in different regions, which experts are still struggling to explain, said Dr. Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, who led the study.

00:15:27.000 The analysis also highlights the strain placed on hospitals.

00:15:29.000 At the epidemic's peak, sick patients could exceed the number of available hospital beds by 64,000, could require the use of around 20,000 ventilators, which is interesting because that study says 20,000 ventilators.

00:15:39.000 New York alone has been calling for 30,000 to 40,000 ventilators.

00:15:43.000 So this study from the University of Washington says that at peak, you might need 20,000 ventilators.

00:15:47.000 That's half of what we were being told like days ago about the 40,000 ventilators that were going to be needed.

00:15:54.000 The doctors at University of Washington, they said the virus is spreading more slowly in California.

00:15:59.000 They say that peak cases there would come later in April.

00:16:01.000 Social distancing measures might need to be extended in the state for longer.

00:16:04.000 They expect that Louisiana and Georgia are going to be fairly hard hit throughout all of this.

00:16:10.000 All of this has led to the politicization of talk around ventilators.

00:16:13.000 There's a story from the New York Times about how the federal government had supposedly canceled a contract with GM and Ventec Life Systems to produce ventilators, and it was flying around Twitter last night.

00:16:23.000 I want to give you the actual story, because it's buried in like paragraph 10 of the New York Times piece.

00:16:29.000 According to the New York Times piece, basically the Trump administration thought ventilators were too expensive.

00:16:32.000 That's not the actual story.

00:16:33.000 We'll get to that in just one second.

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00:17:54.000 Okay, so.

00:17:55.000 There's a story from the New York Times.

00:17:56.000 We're going through all the bad news and we'll get to some good news, so don't worry.

00:17:59.000 It'll be balanced out in a moment.

00:18:01.000 There's a story from the New York Times that the Trump administration had almost cut a deal with General Motors and Ventac to produce all of these ventilators.

00:18:07.000 The story's by David Sanger, Maggie Haberman, and Zolan Kano-Youngs.

00:18:10.000 See, the White House had been preparing to reveal on Wednesday a joint venture between GM and Ventec Life Systems that would allow for the production of as many as 80,000 desperately needed ventilators to respond to an escalating pandemic when word suddenly came down that the announcement was off.

00:18:22.000 Now, notice, it really is fascinating how variable all these numbers are, right?

00:18:26.000 Again, I go back to my main point.

00:18:27.000 Nobody knows anything.

00:18:28.000 Okay, that University of Washington study says that at peak we might need 20,000 ventilators.

00:18:33.000 This story is about how the U.S.

00:18:34.000 government was going to try to acquire 80,000 ventilators.

00:18:36.000 Now listen, I'd rather have too many than too few, obviously, but when you are off by, you know, a factor of four in some of these predictions, it is very diff- I mean, this is all catch-as-catch-can-as-catch-as-catch-can, it is incredibly sloppy.

00:18:48.000 And that's just the way that life is sometimes.

00:18:50.000 But let's recognize that this is not pinpoint accuracy.

00:18:53.000 We have the hard data.

00:18:54.000 We know what the science is.

00:18:56.000 We don't know a lot of things.

00:18:57.000 The decision to cancel the announcement, government officials say, came after FEMA said it needed more time to assess whether the estimated cost was prohibitive.

00:19:04.000 That price tag was more than $1 billion with several hundred million dollars to be paid up front to GM to retool a car parts plant in Kokomo, Indiana, where the ventilators would be made with Ventex technology.

00:19:14.000 Government officials said the deal might still happen, but they're examining at least a dozen other proposals.

00:19:18.000 They contend that an initial promise that the joint venture could turn out 20,000 ventilators in short order had shrunk to 7,500 with even that number in doubt.

00:19:25.000 So that would be the actual story, right?

00:19:27.000 The way that the New York Times played this and the way that the reporters tweeted this out was that the Trump administration was on the verge of generating all the ventilators overnight tomorrow and they just decided a billion dollars was too much.

00:19:37.000 And so people on Twitter were like, okay, hold up a second.

00:19:39.000 We're spending $6 trillion and you can't find $1 billion to provide the ventilators?

00:19:43.000 But that's not what's happening here.

00:19:44.000 It sounds like GM couldn't even guarantee they were going to produce the ventilators.

00:19:48.000 It sounds like they didn't even know they were going to produce 7,500 ventilators.

00:19:51.000 And so the government, FEMA, went back and opened up the contract and said, OK, well, let's get some competitive bids in here.

00:19:57.000 Longtime emergency managers at FEMA are working with military officials to sort through the competing offers and federal procurement rules while under pressure to give President Trump something to announce.

00:20:07.000 With all of that said, President Trump got himself in a little bit of hot water yesterday because he suggested that We don't actually need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators.

00:20:16.000 He said, you go into major hospitals sometimes and they will have two ventilators.

00:20:19.000 And now all of a sudden they're saying, can we order 30,000 ventilators?

00:20:22.000 People in the media, again, fulminating over President Trump saying that, but there's been no information that Trump is actually denying New York what it needs.

00:20:29.000 Like Cuomo's calling him up and saying, I need 30,000 ventilators.

00:20:31.000 Trump's like, I don't believe you.

00:20:32.000 Here's two.

00:20:34.000 They're giving them all the ventilators they can get their hands on.

00:20:36.000 I mean, Cuomo himself has said that at this point.

00:20:40.000 Okay, as far as where this is all going, Dr. Anthony Fauci did say yesterday, we're not going to work by Easter, right?

00:20:45.000 There's no information to suggest that we're all back at work by Easter.

00:20:48.000 That is very likely.

00:20:49.000 I mean, that would be April 12th.

00:20:51.000 It's already March 27th.

00:20:52.000 We're likely not to hit the peak according to any study until around Easter.

00:20:56.000 That is the most likely time when we hit the peak number of cases in the United States according to sort of the pandemic, the pandemic studies, the pandemic methodologies that are being applied.

00:21:05.000 Here's Dr. Anthony Fauci saying, no, Easter is a little bit optimistic.

00:21:09.000 I think that the president was trying to do, he was making an aspirational projection to give people some hope, but he's listening to us when we say we really got to reevaluate it in real time, and any decision we make has to be based on the data.

00:21:25.000 I mean, you know, the numbers that you showed, when you have a situation when the cases today compared to tomorrow is increased dramatically, and then the next day is increased dramatically, that's no time to pull back.

00:21:38.000 Okay, and I think that everybody gets that, right?

00:21:39.000 Trump was expressing an optimistic date when he said April 12th.

00:21:42.000 He was not saying we're definitely open by Easter.

00:21:45.000 But, you know, to have your eye on the ball as to when we reopen, that is a good thing.

00:21:48.000 Now, it's time for a little bit of good news, so...

00:21:51.000 President Trump yesterday, he did an interview on Sean Hannity's Fox News program, and he suggested that he thinks the mortality rate for this thing is well below 1%.

00:21:58.000 Now, just a few weeks ago, that was verboten.

00:22:00.000 You weren't allowed to say that.

00:22:01.000 Just a few weeks ago, if you said this, they claimed that you were downplaying the virus.

00:22:04.000 They said that, no, the WHO is saying it's 3%.

00:22:06.000 They're saying that it's 4% in some areas.

00:22:08.000 Look at Italy, where it's 8% or 9%.

00:22:11.000 The reality is it probably is below 1%, right?

00:22:13.000 Likely the death rate on this thing is the mortality rate is below 1%.

00:22:16.000 It may be well below 1%.

00:22:18.000 Again, we had a doctor from Stanford University yesterday on the radio show, and he suggested that this thing might look a lot more like actual influenza death rates than it looks like SARS or MERS, which is likely.

00:22:33.000 As I say before, I think that the best data suggests that that is the case.

00:22:36.000 Here's President Trump saying, I think the mortality rate is well below 1%.

00:22:39.000 One thing that I can say that's really good, the mortality rate is much, much better in our way than I was, than people were thinking at the beginning.

00:22:51.000 Because you were hearing 3, 4, 5 percent.

00:22:53.000 And now, with all of the testing and all of the things, you see the people who die, you take a look at the people, you know, I think you're talking about very significantly under 1 percent.

00:23:04.000 And I think that's a tremendous, that's a tremendous thing.

00:23:08.000 Okay, and he's right about this.

00:23:09.000 So again, if you said this a few weeks ago, if you said that the death rate looked a lot more like flu and a lot less like SARS or MERS, then you're considered a denier.

00:23:17.000 This is one of the problems with fast-developing scientific consensus, is that very often, they are happening before you actually have the data in.

00:23:24.000 And by the way, Anthony Fauci was saying this, like, in late February.

00:23:28.000 On February 28th, there was a piece that he wrote, along with Robert Redfield, who is one of the heads of the CDC, and Clifford Lane.

00:23:35.000 And he wrote this.

00:23:35.000 It was accessed last, on March 26th, 2020.

00:23:40.000 And in that article, he suggested that the best data suggests the overall clinical consequences of COVID-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza, which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%, or a pandemic influenza, similar to 1957 or 1968.

00:23:51.000 pandemic influenza similar to 1957 or 1968, like that was actually called the Hong Kong flu in 1957, rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10 percent and 36 percent, respectively.

00:24:05.000 So this has actually been a fairly well-known scientific consensus, it sounds like, for several weeks, is that this thing is far less deadly than originally thought.

00:24:11.000 But if you said this in the media, then you were labeled a denier.

00:24:15.000 Okay, well, the good news about that is that means that when we see vast swaths of people getting this thing, Yes, some of those people are going to die, but it ain't going to be 3 or 4%.

00:24:22.000 And if you get it, the chances that you're going to die of it, unless you are vulnerable prior, unless you're elderly, unless you have a pre-existing condition, are pretty low.

00:24:31.000 Now again, that doesn't mean that on an absolute level, like just the way stats works, you may be the one, right?

00:24:37.000 Okay, so this is why everybody should still be, you know, concerned.

00:24:41.000 But if you're just taking a lottery and the rates are 0.1%, like influenza, that means that one out of every thousand people is going to die of acquiring this thing, right?

00:24:52.000 You acquire coronavirus, you die.

00:24:54.000 That is one out of every thousand people if you're at 0.1%.

00:24:57.000 Well, if you're the one, it doesn't matter what the rate was.

00:24:59.000 If you're the one, your rate is 100%, right?

00:25:01.000 But if you are just taking your odds, it makes a very big difference.

00:25:06.000 If somebody said to you, you have We're going to put a gun to your head, and now you have to pick one marble.

00:25:13.000 There's a thousand marbles. 0.99

00:25:15.000 One of them is black.

00:25:16.000 The other 999 are white. 1.00

00:25:18.000 And if you pick the black one, you're gonna die. 1.00

00:25:20.000 You'd feel a lot more confident in picking the marbles than you would if it were ten times that rate. 0.92

00:25:24.000 If there were a hundred black marbles in there, or if there were even ten black marbles in there out of a thousand.

00:25:30.000 So, that is some actual good news.

00:25:33.000 And it does raise the question as to whether the lockdown measures that have been taken are actually the most effective.

00:25:39.000 And by the way, I'm not the only person who's been asking that.

00:25:41.000 I mean, Andrew Cuomo is asking that.

00:25:43.000 Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, he said, maybe we shouldn't have done a total shutdown.

00:25:46.000 Maybe this wasn't actually the best policy.

00:25:48.000 Maybe we were over the top in how we did this entire thing.

00:25:51.000 Now, I think a hard stop was necessary because we didn't have the data at that point.

00:25:54.000 But as the data comes in, we're going to have to reassess this.

00:25:57.000 And we'll get to that reassessment in just one second.

00:26:00.000 But the kind of new fangled consensus is that the most catastrophic studies here are overstated.

00:26:07.000 The kind of estimates that huge numbers of Americans are going to die, hundreds of thousands of Americans are going to die, that is probably a wild overestimate.

00:26:14.000 Deborah Birx, who is leading up the coronavirus effort on behalf of the administration, She basically lectured the media yesterday, saying, you guys keep suggesting that all of our ICU beds are going to run out, that everybody's going to be sharing a ventilator, that there's going to be mass death in the streets, cats and dogs living together, the end of the world.

00:26:29.000 And Deborah Birx, who's well-respected, okay?

00:26:30.000 She has served in administrations of both Republicans and Democrats.

00:26:33.000 She said this yesterday.

00:26:34.000 Members of the media went nuts.

00:26:35.000 They were very upset about this.

00:26:36.000 How could Deborah Brooks chide the media for citing the worst case scenario statistics?

00:26:40.000 How could she do that?

00:26:42.000 And she was like, well, because those probably aren't going to materialize.

00:26:45.000 Maybe you should actually give some nuanced information.

00:26:46.000 Here was Deborah Brooks just tearing into the media yesterday. 1.00

00:26:49.000 Please, for the reassurance of people around the world, to wake up this morning and look at people talking about creating DNR situations.

00:27:00.000 Do not resuscitate situations for patients.

00:27:04.000 There is no situation in the United States right now that warrants that kind of discussion.

00:27:11.000 You can be thinking about it in a hospital, certainly many hospitals talk about this on a daily basis, but to say that to the American people, to make the implication that when they need a hospital bed, it's not going to be there, or when they need that ventilator, it's not going to be there.

00:27:27.000 We don't have an evidence of that right now.

00:27:30.000 Okay, so, I mean, that is a pretty stunning statement, right?

00:27:32.000 The media keeps saying, as I say, they keep saying kind of worst case scenario, we're going to run out of beds, ICU beds, there won't be any, there won't be any hospital beds, we're not going to have any ventilators, you're going to go into the hospital, it's going to look like Italy, where they're going to shuttle you off into a hallway somewhere where you choke for breath and then die, right?

00:27:47.000 And Deborah Birx is like, guys, you might want to wait on that.

00:27:49.000 By the way, it's not just Deborah Birx.

00:27:51.000 It's not just Deborah Birx.

00:27:52.000 Bill de Blasio, who's been as panic-stricken as any public leader in America, truly, Right.

00:27:58.000 Bill de Blasio came out today and he said, you know, you guys keep talking about this protective gear shortage for health care workers in New York and it doesn't exist.

00:28:05.000 He said there's a lot of fear.

00:28:06.000 I don't blame any health care professional.

00:28:07.000 Look what they're having to deal with.

00:28:09.000 He says the truth is we have again the supplies for this week and next week.

00:28:12.000 We have to make sure every hospital is getting them to their extraordinary heroic medical personnel.

00:28:15.000 But we've but they do exist.

00:28:18.000 By the way, Andrew Cuomo, again, said the same thing.

00:28:23.000 Andrew Cuomo said, we do have the personal protective equipment in New York, but if you watch the media, it's all nurses and doctors wearing trash bags, shortage of medical equipment, everybody is going to die in the hospital after being coughed on by a patient with coronavirus, everyone's going to have to share a ventilator, we're going to have to convert all the CPAP machines, mass casualties.

00:28:43.000 We are reassured after meeting with colleagues in New York, there are still ICU beds remaining.

00:28:46.000 They're still significant.

00:28:47.000 Over a thousand or two thousand ventilators that have not been used yet.

00:28:51.000 She said, like, stop exaggerating this thing.

00:28:54.000 She says, you could be thinking about it in a hospital.

00:28:55.000 Certainly many hospitals talk about it on a daily basis.

00:28:58.000 But to say that to the American people, to make the implication that when there's a hospital, but it's not going to be there, we don't have evidence.

00:29:03.000 She said, there's no reality on the ground where we can see that 60 to 70 percent of Americans are going to get infected in the next 8 to 12 weeks.

00:29:09.000 I just want to be clear about that.

00:29:10.000 So when people say, like, a huge percentage of Americans will be infected or have been infected, that may happen in the future, but not necessarily right now.

00:29:18.000 And by the way, I trust Dr. Deborah Birx.

00:29:19.000 More than I trust the people at the New York Times.

00:29:21.000 And until five seconds ago, it was people at the New York Times saying we should trust Berks and not Trump.

00:29:25.000 So which is it, guys?

00:29:26.000 What I'm saying is replicating what Fauci said, right?

00:29:28.000 I'm quoting Fauci and I'm quoting Berks.

00:29:30.000 And yet, if you quote them, now this is controversial.

00:29:34.000 Like, Berks started trending on Twitter yesterday for having the temerity to point out that people are getting panic-stricken about this and that the media are deliberately stoking the panic.

00:29:44.000 Like, again, best data suggests that there will be a lot of people who die from this.

00:29:49.000 We don't have the data.

00:29:51.000 I mean, this has been my constant complaint.

00:29:52.000 We don't have the data from the New York government, from the federal government, as to how many ventilators they actually think we're going to need.

00:29:57.000 What are the priors?

00:29:58.000 What are the inputs in that model?

00:30:00.000 If it's bad data in, it's bad data out.

00:30:02.000 How many ventilators we are going to need that we don't already have?

00:30:04.000 How those ventilators are going to be deployed?

00:30:07.000 How much the New York City system is going to be overwhelmed?

00:30:10.000 Are there outlying systems where people can be shifted out of hospital beds?

00:30:13.000 This is happening, by the way, in New York City.

00:30:15.000 People are being moved out of beds that are not ICU beds, just kind of normal hospital beds, and they're being moved to other sort of medical centers so we can make room.

00:30:23.000 The Javits Center is being converted for normal hospital beds, right?

00:30:26.000 You had a surgery two weeks ago and you're still recovering from the surgery, but you don't need ICU care.

00:30:30.000 So we're converting over a lot of the beds that are in hospitals where you can have better treatment.

00:30:34.000 And we're taking we're setting up hotel rooms and stuff for people who are just sort of in recovery.

00:30:39.000 But all you need is an IV, which all that stuff is being done in real time.

00:30:44.000 And again, there's still serious questions to be asked about the models that are being applied in the first place.

00:30:49.000 The Netherlands has been applying completely different models.

00:30:52.000 According to Science Magazine, Martin Enserink and Kai Koepfertschmidt writing, they say, with COVID-19, modeling takes on life and death importance.

00:31:01.000 They say, The Netherlands has so far chosen a softer set of measures than most Western European countries.

00:31:06.000 It was late to close its schools and restaurants.

00:31:07.000 They didn't order a full lockdown.

00:31:09.000 In a March 17th speech, Prime Minister Mark Rutte rejected working endlessly to contain the virus and shutting down the country completely.

00:31:15.000 Instead, he opted for controlled spread while making sure the health system isn't swamped with COVID-19 patients, which, by the way, is sort of the South Korean model, kind of.

00:31:22.000 He called on the public to respect the government's expertise on how to thread that needle.

00:31:28.000 The predictions put out by Jaco Willinga, whose computer simulations are being used by the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment over in the Netherlands, right?

00:31:37.000 His simulations predict the number of infected people needing hospitalization will taper off as of next week.

00:31:42.000 So there are some pretty stark differences between models, right?

00:31:45.000 You had the Imperial College model that was suggesting that half a million people were gonna die if there were no measures taken in the UK.

00:31:50.000 I talked about this yesterday.

00:31:51.000 And then yesterday, the head of that study suggested that thanks to the lockdown models, and then he sort of Kind of slid in there.

00:31:58.000 And also thanks to the lower death rate, he was predicting now that there might be only 20,000 people who died in the UK.

00:32:03.000 That was not him throwing out his old model.

00:32:05.000 It was him saying that if we apply like heavy tamp down, then we are going to dramatically lower the curve.

00:32:10.000 I mean, it's pretty dramatic lowering of the curve from 500,000 to 20,000.

00:32:13.000 But even his models are under pressure.

00:32:16.000 Oxford put out a model that suggested the death rates were even lower than that.

00:32:19.000 The Netherlands has put out models suggesting that this thing is going to peak next week.

00:32:23.000 Welinga is confident that the number of new infections caused by each person when no control measures are taken is just over two.

00:32:30.000 He trusts data showing that three to six days elapse between the moment someone is infected and the time they start to infect others.

00:32:36.000 Welinga says he is least confident about the susceptibility of various age groups, but he also suggests that we are not going to be overwhelmed in the Netherlands, okay?

00:32:44.000 Again, there's this assumption that every case is going to be worst case like Italy or Spain, but the evidence that every case is going to be like Italy or Spain is just not there.

00:32:52.000 It's not there at this point.

00:32:54.000 Maybe it will be.

00:32:55.000 Maybe it will be.

00:32:55.000 We keep hearing that it's about to happen in New York City.

00:32:57.000 That's why I say the tsunami may be coming.

00:32:59.000 We just don't know because it's hard to know whom to believe.

00:33:02.000 The story seems to be changing on a daily basis.

00:33:06.000 The media are not particularly trustworthy in their tone and tenor.

00:33:09.000 They're bringing you best available information, but so much of it is anecdotal.

00:33:12.000 The New York Times every day is printing stories about a doctor or a nurse who says, we're being overwhelmed at a hospital.

00:33:18.000 And then you go to the hospital administration and the hospital administration is like, no, we're, We're okay.

00:33:22.000 I mean, we're stretched and we're strained, but we're handling it.

00:33:25.000 And by the way, even in Italy, new coronavirus cases are actually slowing.

00:33:29.000 According to Chico Harlan and Stefano Petrelli over at the Washington Post, Italy's nationwide lockdown is showing the first small signs of payoff.

00:33:35.000 The number of coronavirus cases is still rising, but at the lowest day-on-day pace since the outbreak began.

00:33:40.000 The WHO calls the slowdown encouraging.

00:33:42.000 The health chief in the hardest hit region says there's light at the end of the tunnel.

00:33:47.000 Italy was the first Western country to contend with a mass outbreak and order a lockdown.

00:33:50.000 Now they're trying to figure out how long the restrictions could last.

00:33:54.000 But the bottom line is that even Italy, which has been overwhelmed, is starting to tamp down and move beyond the day-to-day increases in the virus.

00:34:06.000 All of which is a very, very good thing.

00:34:09.000 President Trump spoke yesterday, by the way, about the resources that are being applied in the United States.

00:34:12.000 He says, we're shipping tons of resources.

00:34:14.000 Like, people are pretending that we're not getting masks out to people.

00:34:16.000 We're not getting personal protective equipment out to people.

00:34:18.000 Here's President Trump at a press conference yesterday talking about the numbers of resources being shipped all over the country.

00:34:18.000 That's not true.

00:34:25.000 FEMA has shipped over 9 million N95 masks, 20 million face masks, 3.1 million face shields, nearly 6,000 ventilators, 2.6 million gowns, 14.6 million gloves, and we're sending more every day, and we've got tremendous amounts of equipment coming in.

00:34:47.000 Okay, so again, the notion that the federal government is doing nothing is just not true.

00:34:53.000 And that is a real media bias.

00:34:55.000 I'm going to get to more media bias in just one second.

00:34:57.000 President Trump said last night on Hannity that hospitals are actually being set up in New York City.

00:35:01.000 Resources are being brought to bear.

00:35:04.000 So the panic, in other words, may be over, maybe it's not, but may be overstated.

00:35:08.000 Deborah Birx, who I trust a lot more than the New York Times, is suggesting that the panic is overstated.

00:35:13.000 I trust her more than I trust the New York Times.

00:35:15.000 Dr. Fauci has not made any public statements, so far as I'm aware, that all of the systems in New York are going to be completely overwhelmed, death in the streets, we're going to have to choose between old patients and young patients, this is going to be Italy. 0.84

00:35:24.000 Here's President Trump yesterday, saying we're building hospitals in New York.

00:35:28.000 We're building four hospitals, four medical centers, and many other things.

00:35:33.000 We've developed and sent thousands of ventilators, and hopefully they're going to do well.

00:35:41.000 So again, resources are being brought to bear.

00:35:44.000 And this does raise the question, OK, so if we have raised, as I've said all along, if we have flattened the curve enough and we have raised that line of medical resources enough that the line now clears the flattened curve, then we have to start having conversations about how to get back to work.

00:35:56.000 And maybe that is not applied on an even basis across the United States, because not every place is a hotspot center of this outbreak.

00:36:02.000 New York City is a hotspot center.

00:36:04.000 Is Des Moines Iowa?

00:36:05.000 Right?

00:36:06.000 L.A.

00:36:07.000 so far has been really trailing.

00:36:08.000 New York.

00:36:09.000 exactly the same as New York?

00:36:09.000 Is L.A.

00:36:11.000 I mean, major cities are gonna be the epicenters of this stuff, but how about outlying rural areas?

00:36:16.000 Are we seeing mass death in the rural areas?

00:36:18.000 Which, by the way, is where you sort of would expect to see mass death, considering hospital resources are far less.

00:36:22.000 There are tons of counties in the United States that don't have a single hospital.

00:36:25.000 There may be neighboring counties that have the hospital, but rural outlying areas, they don't actually have the medical resources being brought to bear, but you're not seeing mass death in those areas.

00:36:34.000 So in one second, we're going to get to the question of when we reopen, because what you're going to see, it's pretty incredible, is that Andrew Cuomo and Donald Trump are basically saying the same thing. 0.99

00:36:42.000 And Donald Trump is getting just his ass kicked by the media. 0.99

00:36:45.000 And meanwhile, Andrew Cuomo is getting his ass kissed by the media. 1.00

00:36:50.000 Trump is getting his ass kicked and Cuomo is getting his ass kissed. 1.00

00:36:53.000 And they're saying exactly the same thing about how we reopen this thing, how we open this thing back up. 0.99

00:36:59.000 And that is because the media's desire for a binary narrative in which President Trump is responsible for every cruel ill of the United States and Trump is sitting there with his arms crossed putting on the Trump frown and saying to people, No, not gonna give the ventilators.

00:37:12.000 I don't even care.

00:37:12.000 I don't even like ventilators.

00:37:13.000 Ventilators are bad.

00:37:14.000 Like, that's not happening.

00:37:16.000 He and Cuomo are saying almost identical things, and the media is treating them as though they're saying things that are separated by 180 degrees, and it's just a lie.

00:37:23.000 We're gonna get to that in one second.

00:37:25.000 First...

00:37:26.000 It is indeed that glorious time of the week when I give a shout out to a Daily Wire subscriber.

00:37:29.000 Today, it's Tiller on Instagram.

00:37:31.000 He knows what it takes to get through the long work week.

00:37:33.000 In the picture, Tiller is sporting an American worker trucker hat while holding the world's greatest beverage vessels in front of an eye chart that hilariously reads, Epstein did not kill himself.

00:37:42.000 It's true, if you can see.

00:37:43.000 The post caption reads, Making parts for the Apache helicopter can be exhausting, but I'm able to work 50-plus hours weekly thanks to my refreshing Leftist Tears tumbler.

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00:37:53.000 Hashtag Leftist Tears.

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00:37:55.000 Hashtag USA.

00:37:56.000 Hashtag Hot or Cold.

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00:37:58.000 Hashtag Thank God it's Friday.

00:37:59.000 First of all, thank you to all of the folks in the supply lines.

00:38:02.000 Thank you to all the folks in the trucking industry who are doing hard work each and every day to make sure there's stuff at the groceries, making sure this country is still moving.

00:38:09.000 You see folks, this is why you need to become a DailyWire member.

00:38:11.000 Don't take it from me.

00:38:12.000 Take it from a man making the vital components of an incredible attack helicopter that supports the greatest military the world has ever known.

00:38:18.000 And also my personal gender identity.

00:38:20.000 Attack.

00:38:20.000 Apache attack helicopter.

00:38:21.000 Thanks for the pick, Tiller.

00:38:22.000 Keep up the good work.

00:38:23.000 Also, 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 check it out.

00:38:29.000 Jeremy Boring and I kicked it off last week.

00:38:31.000 All of the other hosts have done live streams over at dailywire.com.

00:38:34.000 We're gonna continue all this week at 8 p.m.

00:38:36.000 Eastern, 5 p.m.

00:38:36.000 Pacific.

00:38:37.000 Basically, it's really just casual.

00:38:38.000 We hang out.

00:38:39.000 I literally have no program when I come on in to All Access Live.

00:38:42.000 So, I'll just do whatever I feel like.

00:38:44.000 Earlier this week, I just started playing Brahms on the pro- I don't know why.

00:38:47.000 It was fun.

00:38:48.000 So, just come over and hang out with us.

00:38:49.000 I know, listen, we're all isolated.

00:38:51.000 We're all a little bit lonely. 0.98

00:38:52.000 This really sucks. 1.00

00:38:53.000 Okay, no matter how you slice it, it sucks. 1.00

00:38:55.000 I'm glad we're safe, but this does suck a lot. 0.98

00:38:57.000 So, come over to DailyWire and join the community and hang out with us. 0.66

00:39:00.000 I think the live streams are great, not just for our viewers, but for us over here as well.

00:39:03.000 It makes us all feel better.

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00:39:48.000 Okay, so as I've been saying, the media's coverage of this thing has just been a bleep show.

00:39:59.000 And there's a reason that Gallup has a poll out that shows of all the American institutions, faith in all of them has gone up.

00:40:04.000 In the presidency, even in Congress, in the police, except the media.

00:40:10.000 People still hate the media.

00:40:11.000 They think the media are lying to them.

00:40:12.000 Why? 0.96

00:40:12.000 Well, maybe it's because the media are wildly biased and insane. 0.96

00:40:15.000 Probably it's because of that.

00:40:16.000 Okay, I'll give you an example.

00:40:19.000 Yesterday, Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York, widely held by the media to be the greatest of all possible leaders, which, honestly, I found a little bit weird because Gavin Newsom has basically done exactly the same thing as Andrew Cuomo, but nobody ever talks about Gavin Newsom out in my home state of California.

00:40:31.000 And Andrew Cuomo was late to the game.

00:40:34.000 He has shifted his narrative somewhat.

00:40:37.000 Bill de Blasio was saying, we need a full shutdown.

00:40:39.000 And Cuomo's like, I'm not doing a full shutdown.

00:40:40.000 And then five minutes later, he's like, you know what?

00:40:42.000 Maybe we need a full shutdown.

00:40:43.000 Well now, Andrew Cuomo is saying, maybe we shouldn't have done a total shutdown, maybe we should have done this in parts.

00:40:47.000 We had to do what we had to do on sort of a catch-as-catch-can basis, which, at least he's honest about that.

00:40:52.000 I think the real reason that Cuomo is getting high marks is because in these TV pressers, he seems to be authentic and honest, which, again, is all the media care about.

00:40:58.000 It's all performance art for the media.

00:41:00.000 But in any case, Andrew Cuomo says, maybe we shouldn't have done a total shutdown, which is weird, because when Trump says this sort of thing, he gets ripped up and down.

00:41:07.000 What we did was, we closed everything down.

00:41:13.000 That was our public health strategy.

00:41:15.000 Just close everything.

00:41:18.000 All businesses, all workers, young people, old people, short people, tall people, every school, close everything.

00:41:25.000 If you rethought that or had time to analyze that public health strategy, I don't know that you would say quarantine everyone.

00:41:37.000 I don't even know that that was the best public health policy.

00:41:41.000 There's Cuomo acknowledging full-on that maybe we should have considered other public health policies.

00:41:45.000 And this is one of the problems, that in the middle of a panic, which this basically isn't, maybe for good reason, the easiest thing to do is try to hit the policy with a blunt instrument, right?

00:41:55.000 That's what this giant bailout package was, or stimulus bill, whatever you want to call it.

00:41:58.000 It really isn't the bailout.

00:41:58.000 It really isn't even a stimulus.

00:42:00.000 It's more like a shoring up bill.

00:42:01.000 That is hitting a button with a blunt instrument.

00:42:04.000 It's taking a hammer and hitting a nail.

00:42:06.000 And the nail may be tiny and the hammer may be huge.

00:42:08.000 And the same thing is true with these sort of lockdown things.

00:42:09.000 As I say, I'm not anti-lockdown.

00:42:12.000 I'm just saying that as more data comes out, we need to seriously reconsider exactly how we go about getting back to our daily business and how we go about getting back to life.

00:42:20.000 I say that, people rip me up and down.

00:42:21.000 You're not taking this seriously enough.

00:42:23.000 Andrew Cuomo says the exact same thing, and people are like, oh man, what a genius.

00:42:26.000 I mean, wow, like he's really being serious about this thing.

00:42:29.000 Here is Andrew Cuomo saying, over time, maybe some people can go back to work.

00:42:32.000 How do you modify the public health strategy to make it smarter from a public health point of view, but also starts to get you back to work?

00:42:42.000 Younger people can go back to work. 0.99

00:42:44.000 People who have resolved can go back to work.

00:42:46.000 People who, once we get this antibody test, Uh, show that they had the virus and they resolved can go back to work.

00:42:55.000 Uh, that's how I think you do it.

00:42:56.000 It's not, we're going to either do public health or we're going to do economic development, development restarting.

00:43:03.000 We have to do both.

00:43:04.000 Okay.

00:43:04.000 President Trump said exactly the same thing yesterday, like exactly the same thing, almost word for word.

00:43:08.000 So president Trump yesterday said, listen, we can open up parts, open up parts of the country.

00:43:12.000 We're going to need to do that on a case by case basis.

00:43:14.000 In fact, the Trump administration issued guidelines for classifying U.S. counties by coronavirus risk, which makes perfect sense.

00:43:19.000 This is an enormous country.

00:43:20.000 OK, the risk in Sweden is not the same as the risk in France is not the same as the risk in Italy.

00:43:24.000 All of those countries are classifying their coronavirus risks differently.

00:43:27.000 By the way, the U.K. quietly late last week downgraded the the deadliness of the virus itself.

00:43:34.000 Right.

00:43:34.000 Even in the U.K. where they are deeply worried.

00:43:36.000 They called it a high risk disease.

00:43:38.000 They changed that very quietly late last week.

00:43:41.000 But it's being treated differently all over the continent.

00:43:43.000 It's being treated differently all over the world.

00:43:45.000 The United States is a very, very large chunk of territory. 0.96

00:43:48.000 To suggest that we have to treat coronavirus exactly the same way in Salt Lake City, Utah, as we do in New York City, is really kind of ridiculous.

00:43:54.000 And the Trump administration pointed this out.

00:43:56.000 According to Rebecca Ballhaus reporting for the Wall Street Journal, the Trump administration is planning to issue guidelines categorizing counties across the nation as high-risk, medium-risk, or low-risk.

00:44:05.000 to help state and local authorities decide whether to bolster or relax social distancing measures instead intended to combat the coronavirus.

00:44:11.000 In a letter to governors on Thursday, President Trump said the administration's growing testing capabilities would enable it to publish, in consultation with public health officials and scientists, criteria for classifying counties by risk, in the hopes that some parts of the country may be able to return to work sooner than others.

00:44:27.000 He wrote, this new information will drive the next phase in our war against this invisible enemy.

00:44:30.000 As we enhance protection against the virus, Americans across the country are hoping the day will soon arrive when they can resume their normal economic, social, and religious lives.

00:44:38.000 Okay, and this was immediately, this was immediately seized on by the media as Trump doesn't care about humans. 0.97

00:44:45.000 He wants them all to die. 0.86

00:44:46.000 He said the same thing as Cuomo. 0.94

00:44:47.000 He's just saying we're going to have to treat different populations differently based on where they are and what the risk is to them.

00:44:52.000 Why is that in any way unreasonable?

00:44:54.000 It's 100% reasonable.

00:44:56.000 Every single major world leader is considering exactly that thing.

00:45:00.000 In a briefing later on Thursday, Trump said he intended to start the process of relaxing social distancing guidelines pretty soon, said the administration might tailor guidelines to specific parts of the country, said our people want to go back to work.

00:45:10.000 I'm hearing it loud and clear from everybody.

00:45:11.000 They don't want to sit around and wait.

00:45:12.000 So here's President Trump yesterday.

00:45:14.000 He said a couple of things.

00:45:15.000 Again, this is very much in line with what Andrew Cuomo is saying.

00:45:17.000 It's just that when Trump says it, it's bad because he's an orange person.

00:45:20.000 And when Andrew Cuomo says it, it's very good because he doesn't like the orange person. 0.85

00:45:24.000 So here's President Trump yesterday saying, we're going to have to think about opening up parts of the country, but again, we're going to do this on a piecemeal basis.

00:45:30.000 The end result is we've got to get back to work, and I think we can start by opening up certain parts of the country, you know, Farm Belt, certain parts of the Midwest, other places.

00:45:41.000 But I think that, as an example, you go to Texas, there are places in Texas, great governor, Greg Abbott, there are places in Texas where, you know, this is a tremendously big state, That aren't impacted by this.

00:45:56.000 So I think we can open up sections, quadrants, and then just keep keep them going until the whole country is opened up.

00:46:03.000 But we have to open up.

00:46:04.000 The people want to get back to work.

00:46:06.000 They want to get back.

00:46:08.000 Oh, no.

00:46:09.000 I mean, that's that.

00:46:09.000 Wow.

00:46:10.000 I mean, he said that Texas is a really big state, which it is.

00:46:14.000 Okay, it takes you like, if you were gonna drive across Texas, like width-wise, horizontally, how long would that take you, Colton?

00:46:20.000 Colton's from Texas.

00:46:21.000 That would take you, I mean, it would take you 15 hours probably.

00:46:23.000 Yeah, 15 hours, right?

00:46:24.000 I mean, that would take forever.

00:46:25.000 It is a huge state, of course.

00:46:28.000 And by the way, if you've ever been to Texas, you're driving for long stretches of territory where there's like a house, a cow, right?

00:46:33.000 I mean, like, the notion that we're gonna treat You know, some podunk town in Texas, the same way that you read Dallas or Houston, is obviously absurd.

00:46:41.000 Trump isn't saying anything wrong there.

00:46:42.000 People are like, well, that means he's going to open up the entire country.

00:46:44.000 He's encouraging everybody in New York to go to Shea Stadium and hang out with each other and make out.

00:46:48.000 He's not doing any of that stuff.

00:46:50.000 What are you talking about?

00:46:51.000 He's saying the same kind of stuff as everybody else.

00:46:53.000 Trump says, by the way, that social distancing will remain after coronavirus.

00:46:56.000 Much of the guidelines like shaking hands, maybe people aren't going to be shaking hands anymore.

00:47:02.000 You know, Tony had mentioned to me, Tony Fauci, the other day that I don't think he would be too upset with the concept of not shaking hands anymore.

00:47:11.000 He was saying that the flu would cut down, the regular flu would be cut down by quite a bit if we didn't do that, if we didn't shake hands.

00:47:18.000 You know, the regular flu, of which, you know, you have a lot of deaths and a lot of problems with that, too, when we're open.

00:47:24.000 As soon as we open.

00:47:26.000 That doesn't mean you're gonna stop with the guidelines.

00:47:28.000 You'll still try and distance yourself.

00:47:30.000 Maybe not to the same extent because you have to lead a life.

00:47:33.000 Okay, well, again, what is he saying that's so wrong?

00:47:35.000 I mean, he's explicitly saying that social distancing is good.

00:47:39.000 So the New York Times ran a headline yesterday, or CNN rather, they ran a headline saying Fauci encourages social distancing while Trump talks about other... Trump is encouraging social distancing.

00:47:49.000 He's saying maybe we shouldn't shake hands ever again.

00:47:50.000 By the way, I'm totally on board with that.

00:47:52.000 I really am.

00:47:53.000 Like, shaking hands as a general practice is kind of gross.

00:47:57.000 You are sharing germs with lots of people, and that's been true no matter what.

00:48:02.000 The point here is that the media coverage of Cuomo, who's saying the same stuff as Trump, is glowing.

00:48:06.000 The coverage of Trump is very bad.

00:48:08.000 But everybody's sort of saying the same thing, and everybody is also saying, underlying all of this, that we're all waiting for more data.

00:48:13.000 So here's the deal.

00:48:14.000 Let's wait for the data.

00:48:15.000 Let's get all the resources where they need to be, and then let's wait for the data.

00:48:18.000 By the end of next week, we're gonna know an awful lot more.

00:48:20.000 I thought, frankly, we were gonna know an awful lot more by the end of this week.

00:48:23.000 I mean, given the projections, I thought by today, by like this Friday, we were gonna know whether the health systems were gonna be overwhelmed.

00:48:29.000 It looks like it's lagged a bit.

00:48:30.000 Maybe because of this lockdown.

00:48:32.000 Probably because, at least in large part, because of the lockdown.

00:48:35.000 But we're going to find out by the end of next week, certainly by the week after that, we're going to be finding out exactly how bad this thing is going to be.

00:48:41.000 Because by pretty much everybody's estimation, early April, mid-April, you're going to start to see this thing start to pick up in terms of tempo and peak.

00:48:49.000 And then the question is going to be, did we have the resources that were necessary on hand?

00:48:53.000 Are we Italy?

00:48:54.000 Or do we end up just being the UK, right?

00:48:56.000 Where again, the new estimates suggest that the health system will not be overwhelmed.

00:49:00.000 Now, with all of that said, the Democrats are moving swiftly to try and use crisis in order to push forward even more spending.

00:49:09.000 So Nancy Pelosi, who held up a bill that her own party had helped negotiate over the weekend, is supposed to vote on this thing today, right?

00:49:15.000 The House is supposed to vote on this thing today.

00:49:18.000 Nancy Pelosi says, well, this is just the beginning.

00:49:19.000 We're going to spend even more and more and more and more.

00:49:21.000 We literally are spending $6 trillion.

00:49:24.000 $6 trillion.

00:49:25.000 To put that by way of contrast, the entire American economy on a yearly basis is about $20 trillion.

00:49:30.000 We're spending about one third of the entire American economy in like a week.

00:49:35.000 Seriously, on this thing.

00:49:37.000 And Nancy Pelosi's like, but we can spend more.

00:49:39.000 We should always spend more.

00:49:40.000 And it's like, okay, really?

00:49:41.000 It feels like People are very uncomfortable, just generally.

00:49:45.000 People are extremely uncomfortable with not being able to simply go back to their pre-existing suppositions about the way the world works.

00:49:53.000 And so, as quickly as possible, people move back into their fighting corners and they wait for the situation to emerge where they can go back to fighting the way that they are used to fighting.

00:50:02.000 Whenever there's a pandemic, whenever there's something brutal that happened with 9-11, whenever there's a major crisis, people get out of their corners for just a minute and they think to themselves, okay, how do I help out my neighbors?

00:50:10.000 How do we craft a policy that works for right now?

00:50:13.000 And then as soon as humanly possible, we're not comfortable in that space.

00:50:16.000 We're comfortable going back to our corners.

00:50:18.000 And so you see people like Nancy Pelosi immediately swivel into green new deal.

00:50:21.000 You see Nancy Pelosi swivel into we need more spending. 1.00

00:50:24.000 And you see Republicans, meanwhile, swivel back into their priors too.

00:50:29.000 Like everybody swivels back into their priors.

00:50:30.000 Now, listen, I agree with the Republican priors, obviously, a lot more than the Democrat priors.

00:50:34.000 But how about this?

00:50:36.000 How about we just wait?

00:50:38.000 I know, it's the hardest thing to do.

00:50:40.000 It's the hardest thing to do in life.

00:50:41.000 But we don't have enough data to be jumping on, let's spend trillions more dollars.

00:50:45.000 And we also don't have enough hard data at this point to say, reopen the American economy wholesale.

00:50:49.000 And I don't think tons of people are saying the latter.

00:50:51.000 I think a lot of people are saying the former.

00:50:52.000 Here's Nancy Pelosi claiming we need to spend even more, and more, and more, and more, forever more.

00:50:56.000 We had bigger direct payments in our bill.

00:51:00.000 I don't think we've seen the end of direct payments.

00:51:03.000 This is an emergency, a challenge to the conscience, as well as the budget of our country.

00:51:10.000 And every dollar that we spend is an investment in the lives and the livelihood of the American people.

00:51:16.000 We can go bigger.

00:51:18.000 Especially now the interest rates are even lower than at the time of the tax scam.

00:51:23.000 We can go even bigger?

00:51:24.000 Even bigger?

00:51:26.000 Endlessly?

00:51:26.000 How?

00:51:27.000 What are you just doing?

00:51:28.000 Inflate the currency?

00:51:28.000 Who's going to buy our bonds?

00:51:30.000 Basically, the Democrats are in real time now going to try, according to Nancy Pelosi, to apply Elizabeth Warren's modern monetary theory, which suggests that you can just float debt just interminably, just forever.

00:51:41.000 You can just continue to take out debt and debt and debt and debt.

00:51:43.000 Well, that assumes there's an appetite for the debt.

00:51:44.000 Who the hell has the money to pay for the debt right now?

00:51:47.000 Do you think Britain's going to be buying American bonds en masse?

00:51:49.000 How about China?

00:51:49.000 You think they're going to be buying American bonds?

00:51:51.000 By the way, breaking news, China had started reopening all of their movie theaters.

00:51:54.000 Weirdly, they are now closing all of their movie theaters again.

00:51:57.000 So what do you think?

00:51:58.000 You think the coronavirus thing is done in China?

00:51:59.000 You think we've been given accurate statistics about China?

00:52:02.000 I think not.

00:52:03.000 I think not.

00:52:04.000 So all of this happy talk from Nancy Pelosi, let's go back to our priors.

00:52:07.000 Let's completely remake the world economy like Bernie would want.

00:52:11.000 How about this?

00:52:11.000 How about we deal with the crisis at hand, and we all get out of those corners, and we deal with it, and then we start figuring out how we go back to a life that happened before.

00:52:20.000 Because I'll tell you what, right now, life is a lot worse than it was three weeks ago, a lot worse than it was four weeks ago.

00:52:25.000 How about we set our sights on, let's get back to where we were four weeks ago, before you decide that you want to fundamentally transform the American economy along your ridiculous big government lines.

00:52:35.000 How about that?

00:52:35.000 Let's start there.

00:52:36.000 Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.

00:52:43.000 So speaking of people who are seeking to go back to their priors, there is this bizarre, bizarre attempt every time there's a national crisis by local leaders to shift the responsibility onto the national leaders.

00:52:53.000 And I recall this happening during Hurricane Katrina when Mayor Ray Nagin, who is the mayor of New Orleans, did not evacuate the city when he was told that he probably should evacuate the city and then the city was swamped.

00:53:04.000 And then he blamed President Bush and suggested that President Bush was a racist and that it was Bush's fault that the resources weren't made available, even though he was the mayor and it really was his responsibility to clear the thing.

00:53:12.000 I remember that I think the governor at the time was Kathleen Blanco.

00:53:15.000 I remember she said sort of the same thing.

00:53:17.000 It's always the impetus is always on local leaders to try and blame national leadership for your own failures.

00:53:22.000 Well, this week, the New Orleans mayor blamed President Trump for not shutting down Mardi Gras.

00:53:27.000 The mayor's name is Cantrell, and she suggested that President Trump is to blame for the city of New Orleans not shutting down Mardi Gras.

00:53:34.000 Here she was on CNN with Wolf Blitzer.

00:53:37.000 You're saying no one from the federal government came to you and urged you to at least cancel or postpone Mardi Gras.

00:53:46.000 Yeah.

00:53:47.000 That's absolutely correct.

00:53:49.000 And not only that, it was backed up with the response of our national leader.

00:53:55.000 When it's not taken seriously at the federal level, it's very difficult to transcend down to the local level in making these decisions.

00:54:04.000 Um, what?

00:54:06.000 What?

00:54:06.000 Her name is LaToya Cantrell, the mayor of New Orleans.

00:54:08.000 Now, last I checked, she's the mayor of New Orleans. 0.95

00:54:11.000 Donald Trump is not the mayor of New Orleans.

00:54:12.000 You know who's the mayor of Los Angeles?

00:54:13.000 Eric Garcetti, not Donald Trump.

00:54:15.000 At least Garcetti isn't out there trying to claim that it's Trump's fault that he allowed the LA Marathon to happen like two weeks ago on a Sunday in the middle of a pandemic.

00:54:22.000 I mean, this woman going out there and suggesting that she needed a personal phone. 1.00

00:54:25.000 By the way, you know what would have happened if Trump had called her up and said, you know, you really should shut down Mardi Gras on the basis of this coronavirus pandemic in mid-February?

00:54:34.000 When, by the way, half the media was still not taking this seriously, like, at all.

00:54:36.000 I mean, really, like, Vox.com ran a piece on January 31st about why this was going to be no worse than the seasonal flu.

00:54:43.000 For her to suggest that if Trump had called her up and been like, I want you to shut down Mardi Gras, she'd have been like, Mr. President, you can't do that.

00:54:49.000 Of course that's what she would have said.

00:54:50.000 She would have said, are you kidding?

00:54:52.000 Why would I shut down Mardi Gras?

00:54:54.000 She's the mayor.

00:54:55.000 If you're a local leader and you blew it, it's because you blew it.

00:54:58.000 Why are we pretending the President of the United States is some godlike figure who can descend from on high and then order you to do all the things you're supposed to do as a local leader? 0.99

00:55:04.000 You get the same crap from Bill de Blasio. 0.97

00:55:06.000 You're the mayor of a major city. 0.99

00:55:07.000 You tried to run for president on the basis of that.

00:55:09.000 It seems to me you should be able to make some local decisions.

00:55:12.000 Weird, because it seems like there are some local leaders who did make some of those local decisions to shut down major public events.

00:55:18.000 That her blaming Trump for the outbreak in New Orleans is just, like, everything is Trump's fault.

00:55:23.000 Or, alternatively, again, everybody shifting back to their priors, the New York Times ran a piece today called, The Road to Coronavirus Hell Was Paved by Evangelicals.

00:55:32.000 Evangelicals, okay, let me just ask a question.

00:55:35.000 So the centers of the outbreak that we've seen thus far are China, famous for its huge evangelical Christian population, China.

00:55:41.000 I mean, just tons of evangelicals over there.

00:55:44.000 It's like a convention of religious evangelical Christians over in China, a communist atheist country.

00:55:50.000 And then, Italy.

00:55:52.000 Again, hugely famous for having tons of evangelicals in Italy.

00:55:55.000 Not like it's the home of the Catholic Church or anything.

00:55:57.000 Like, it's all evangelicals over in Italy. 0.98

00:55:59.000 And in the United States, New York City, where evangelicals just swarm New York City. 0.63

00:56:03.000 I know, like, probably two-thirds of the population of New York City is evangelical.

00:56:08.000 Of course, I'm being a little sarcastic here, and by a little, I mean a lot.

00:56:11.000 But if you're blaming evangelicals for the outbreak of coronavirus, By the way, these are the same people, presumably, who would say that if you say Chinese virus, it's very, very racist.

00:56:18.000 If you blame it on the government of China, very racist.

00:56:20.000 But you blame the evangelicals.

00:56:21.000 Evangelicals are sitting over here like, what the? 1.00

00:56:23.000 What in the world?

00:56:25.000 Seriously?

00:56:25.000 Like us?

00:56:27.000 But the New York Times ran this piece anyway, because nothing says unifying the country like blaming evangelicals for coronavirus.

00:56:33.000 Catherine Stewart, the author of The Power Worshippers, Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, So her priors are fairly well established.

00:56:42.000 She says Donald Trump rose to power with the determined assistance of a movement that denies science, bashes government, and prioritizes loyalty over professional expertise.

00:56:49.000 In the current crisis, we are all reaping what that movement has sown.

00:56:54.000 At least since the 19th century, when the pro-slavery theologian Robert Louis Dabney attacked the physical sciences as theories of unbelief.

00:57:01.000 Hostility to science has characterized the more extreme forms of religious nationalism in the United States.

00:57:05.000 Today, the hardcore of climate deniers is concentrated among people who identify as religiously conservative Republicans.

00:57:11.000 And some leaders of the Christian nationalist movement, like those allied with Cornwall Alliance for the Steward of Creation, which has denounced environmental science as the cult of the Green Dragon, cast environmentalism as an alternative and false theology.

00:57:23.000 This denial of science and critical thinking among religious ultra-conservatives now haunts the American response to the coronavirus crisis.

00:57:31.000 What?

00:57:32.000 I'm just going to point out, is Anthony Fauci, who stands next to Trump like every single day on the podium, is that guy like an evangelical Christian science denier?

00:57:41.000 How about Deborah Birx?

00:57:43.000 How about Jerome Adams, the guy who's the Surgeon General, that doctor?

00:57:47.000 All those guys are evangelicals?

00:57:48.000 Trump is listening to people who deny science totally while also recommending what his scientists tell them?

00:57:57.000 On March 15th, says this columnist, Guillermo Maldonado, who calls himself an apostle and hosted Mr. Trump earlier this year at a campaign event at his Miami megachurch, urged his congregants to show up for worship services in person.

00:58:07.000 Do you believe God would bring his people to his house to be contagious with the virus?

00:58:10.000 Of course not, he said.

00:58:12.000 Okay, so your best evidence that Trump is following evangelical science deniers, your best evidence is that a guy who hosted Trump at a campaign event earlier this year said a thing now.

00:58:23.000 That, wow, strong evidence, New York Times.

00:58:26.000 Really, really doing amazing work over here, blaming evangelicals for the rise of coronavirus. 0.97

00:58:31.000 Religious nationalism, says this columnist, has brought to American politics the conviction that our political differences are a battle between absolute evil and absolute good.

00:58:39.000 Only a heroic leader, free from the scruples of political correctness, can save the righteous from the damned.

00:58:43.000 Fealty to the cause is everything.

00:58:44.000 Fidelity to the facts means nothing.

00:58:46.000 Perhaps this is why many Christian nationalist leaders greeted the news of the coronavirus as an insult to their chosen leader.

00:58:53.000 Okay, honestly, this is so tiresome.

00:58:55.000 It's so unbelievably tiresome.

00:58:57.000 In the middle of pandemic, how about you put aside your hatred for evangelical Christians, and you just say, listen, we're all Americans, we're all in this together, and we are all waiting for the data to come out, as opposed to, blame the Christians. 0.95

00:59:10.000 Truly insane. 0.51

00:59:11.000 Truly insane stuff from the New York Times, but there you have it.

00:59:14.000 The New York Times doing its best to divide the country with their op-ed page in the middle of a pandemic.

00:59:17.000 Really solid stuff there.

00:59:19.000 Alrighty.

00:59:19.000 Well, we will be back here later today with two additional hours of content.

00:59:22.000 Otherwise, we will see you here on Monday for all of the updates.

00:59:25.000 In the meantime, try to relax this weekend.

00:59:28.000 Try to hang out with your family.

00:59:29.000 If you want to do something nice for a neighbor, find out if you've got an elderly neighbor who can't go out.

00:59:32.000 Try to get them some groceries or something.

00:59:33.000 Call up some friends.

00:59:34.000 Make sure everybody is doing okay.

00:59:36.000 I know there's some blood drives going on, so you might want to call your local hospital because I know that there are a lot of young people who can give blood.

00:59:41.000 If you're listening to this show and you can't give blood, there are blood shortages around the country, so that would be a great thing to do.

00:59:45.000 My wife has encouraged me to say that on the show, so I'd be remiss if I did not.

00:59:48.000 Try to do something good for the country this weekend and not read the New York Times.

00:59:52.000 And we will see you here on Sunday.

00:59:53.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:59:54.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:59:59.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Colton Haas.

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01:00:03.000 Executive producer Jeremy Boring.

01:00:05.000 Supervising producer Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling.

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01:00:09.000 Technical producer Austin Stevens.

01:00:11.000 Playback and media operated by Nick Sheehan.

01:00:13.000 Associate producer Katie Swinnerton.

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01:00:25.000 You know, the Matt Wall Show, it's not just another show about politics.

01:00:28.000 I think there are enough of those already out there.

01:00:30.000 We talk about culture, because culture drives politics, and it drives everything else.

01:00:35.000 So my main focuses are life, family, faith.

01:00:40.000 Those are fundamental, and that's what this show is about.

The Ben Shapiro Show - March 27, 2020

The Coming Storm | Ep. 981

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