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March 27, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:00:42
The Coming Storm | Ep. 981
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New York prepares for a coronavirus tsunami as other major cities build their seawalls.
New information suggests coronavirus may be far less deadly than originally suspected.
And President Trump mulls over how to reopen the economy.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Alrighty, so we bring you all of the updates.
The biggest update, of course, is that the U.S.
now leads the world in confirmed coronavirus cases, and members of the media are going nuts over this.
The United States, we're number one.
That was trending on Twitter yesterday.
Wow, we're number one.
People suggesting that this shows that America really is a third world country.
Julia Jaffe, the ex-Gribble columnist, For GQ.
She actually tweeted out, who's the bleephole country now?
Who's the bleephole?
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.
Again, that was a very controversial comment at the time and poorly expressed by the president, but let's just put it this way.
The United States is not a bleephole country because we have a lot of tests, okay?
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.
It is not even close to the countries that are having the toughest time with coronavirus.
How can we tell?
Because what doesn't matter is the number of cases diagnosed.
What does matter is the number of cases of deaths over the number of cases a country has.
That would be a good measure.
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.
It's how those people actually recover from the crisis, how many people die.
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.
Supposedly, according to China, they're having like 25 new cases of coronavirus a day.
Does anyone believe that?
Literally the day after they expelled American journalists, they apparently stopped testing in China.
That is according to sources inside China.
Beyond that, the United States right now, as of now, has about 86,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus in the United States.
Okay, that's not spectacular, but that means a death rate of approximately 1.3%.
Italy has 81,000 cases of coronavirus and 8,200 deaths.
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.
Spain has 64,000 diagnosed cases and nearly 5,000 deaths.
So the notion that the United States is a bleephole country because of the number of coronavirus diagnoses is ridiculous.
I mean, France has more deaths right now, and they only have 30,000 diagnosed cases.
By the way, nationalized healthcare systems in most of these places.
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.
Or alternatively, it demonstrates that you don't understand math.
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.
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.
That has been the question for a long time.
I've been talking about it on the program for weeks at this point.
When we talk about flattening the curve, the point of flattening the curve is not that everyone will not eventually get coronavirus.
In all likelihood, everyone will eventually get coronavirus.
The question is whether that swamps our capacity to deal with it.
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.
The media obviously Are trying to kind of get ahead of those reports.
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.
And so the notion that we are being overwhelmed right now, right this second, we don't know that yet.
There have been these forecasts that we were going to get overwhelmed by earlier this week.
I remember Andrew Cuomo suggested that by Tuesday, New York City's hospitals, ICU beds, their ventilators were going to be overwhelmed.
And then the suggestion was that by today, by Friday, that the New York system was going to be overwhelmed.
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.
That is, as things stand, at current.
But the United States does lead the world in confirmed coronavirus cases because we are ramping up testing, which is a good thing.
We should be ramping up testing.
You want to get back to work?
You want to know how bad this thing is?
We need more testing.
And we need tests of blood serum.
We need to know whether people have developed the antibodies.
Because one of the things that we're trying to figure out right now is just how deadly this thing is.
What exactly are the death rates?
That is something that we'll have.
And by the way, I strongly suspect that not tens of thousands, not hundreds of thousands, but millions of Americans actually have had coronavirus.
That is my deep suspicion.
Not just my suspicion, by the way.
The suspicion of virtually everybody who has taken a look at these numbers.
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.
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.
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.
If instead you had 300 million people with the flu, more people on an absolute level will die.
This is how percentages work.
But the reason I suspect this is because you're seeing a lot of prominent people come down with this thing.
Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, announced today that he has mild symptoms of coronavirus, and he tested positive for coronavirus.
So the question becomes, why is it that all of these prominent people are getting coronavirus?
You've got the NBA, where a bunch of people have coronavirus.
You're seeing celebrities like Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson have coronavirus.
You're seeing fairly famous people come down with coronavirus.
So the question is, is this a thing that only famous people are getting?
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?
Which is probably the accurate assessment of the situation, right?
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.
So it's not that only NBA players are getting it or that only Prime Minister Boris Johnson is getting it.
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.
Okay, so, according to the New York Times, the United States is the world's third most populous nation.
So, of course, that's not a shock that we also have the world's highest number of coronavirus cases.
And also, it's difficult to compare the United States to, like, Italy, right?
Italy has nearly as many cases as we do, and they have 60 million people.
We have 330 million people.
So, on a per capita basis, we're not even close to number one.
On a per capita basis, we're somewhere in the middle of the pack, actually, in terms of diagnosed coronavirus cases.
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.
And as I say, China is number one in terms of population.
India is number two in terms of population.
We have no actual data on it.
I think that's right.
I think China is more than India, but it's pretty close.
In any case, we don't actually have any data from India, and China's been lying about their data.
So we don't actually know if the United States is number one.
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.
Very weird.
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.
Right?
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?
We sort of deserved it.
They have this very weird sort of quasi-religious view that Mother Nature is taking her revenge.
In some sort of vague sense.
It's very weird.
We'll get to more of this in just one second because there is good news today and there's bad news today.
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.
The theme of the show, if you haven't noticed for the past several weeks, is I don't know.
And you don't know, and anybody who claims they know is lying to you.
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.
Some people are gonna be honest about that, and some people are gonna lie to you about that.
We're gonna be honest about that and suggest we don't know what we don't know.
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.
To declare it's either a huge problem or no problem at all.
And we're not going to do that.
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.
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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.
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.
He put out a chart showing the emerging situations in various American cities and how exactly the deaths are doubling.
In New York City, basically, deaths are doubling every couple of days.
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.
Michigan is really jumping.
Michigan has a very steep curve right now in terms of the number of people who are dying every day.
Again, there's not a lot of data.
You're like four days into some of these charts, right?
Michigan's only being measured after like four days, basically.
You're seeing a pretty sharp curve up in New Jersey.
You're seeing a fairly sharp curve in Georgia.
California, for some reason, is lagging, and that's interesting.
Florida is also kind of lagging, and that's interesting as well.
There was an article in the Associated Press asking why Los Angeles, for example, has so many fewer diagnosed cases than New York City.
Part of that may be lack of testing.
Part of that is undoubtedly the fact that being a lifelong resident of Los Angeles is a much more spread out town.
I mean, New York, everybody is right on top of each other.
The subways are always crowded.
There are gonna be some serious questions to be asked, by the way.
People are talking about Andrew Cuomo, presidential candidate.
Look at all of his great leadership.
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.
Seriously, like, why were all the subways running?
I mean, those are the places that are most likely to be the areas in which people acquire coronavirus.
It's a bunch of hard surfaces in small areas underground, right?
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.
It turns out that Maybe your personal protective equipment was your car.
Being on public transportation is a place where you're most likely to acquire germs.
Among others, New Orleans is seeing a pretty sharp spike right now.
New Orleans, Dallas, Atlanta, Miami, Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, among others, New Orleans is seeing a pretty sharp spike right now.
In China, no province outside Hubei ever had more than 1500 cases.
In the United States, 11 states are already hit that total.
Our epidemic is likely to be national in scope.
Well, it is true it's likely to be national in scope, but there are likely to be differences by area.
We're going to get to that in just a moment.
Meanwhile, again, all eyes on New York City, because New York City is sort of the canary in the coal mine.
It is the epicenter of the outbreak in the United States.
According to the New York Times, the New York City death toll hit 365 last night.
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.
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.
By comparison, more than 4,400 new cases were added from Tuesday to Wednesday, so maybe the curve is starting to flatten out.
Andrew Cuomo had suggested that to the governor.
The number of virus-related deaths climbed to 365 on Thursday, up from 280 the day before.
From Wednesday morning to Thursday morning, 100 people died of coronavirus in the state overall, said Andrew Cuomo at a news briefing on Thursday.
He said the number of patients hospitalized in New York had shot up 40% in a day, which was the sharpest increase in days.
He said that older and weaker patients have been keeping on the ventilators for 20 days or longer before they succumb to respiratory failures.
That means that the shortages that we're talking about are not just number of ventilators versus number of people who are sick.
It is also that once you're on a ventilator, you're staying on a ventilator for quite a while.
He says the longer you're on a ventilator, the more probability of a bad outcome.
He said the governor emphasized that the numbers on any single day did not necessarily capture the damage being caused by the virus.
He said when you talk to projection models, what they'll say is you get a fluctuation.
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.
However, Cuomo did express some optimism that perhaps New York was in fact slowing the growth of the curve.
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.
There is the suggestion that the peak is not going to be hit until sometime in April.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When the range is literally fourfold...
It is very difficult to tell exactly where this thing is going to go.
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.
The analysis also highlights the strain placed on hospitals.
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.
New York alone has been calling for 30,000 to 40,000 ventilators.
So this study from the University of Washington says that at peak, you might need 20,000 ventilators.
That's half of what we were being told like days ago about the 40,000 ventilators that were going to be needed.
The doctors at University of Washington, they said the virus is spreading more slowly in California.
They say that peak cases there would come later in April.
Social distancing measures might need to be extended in the state for longer.
They expect that Louisiana and Georgia are going to be fairly hard hit throughout all of this.
All of this has led to the politicization of talk around ventilators.
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.
I want to give you the actual story, because it's buried in like paragraph 10 of the New York Times piece.
According to the New York Times piece, basically the Trump administration thought ventilators were too expensive.
That's not the actual story.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so.
There's a story from the New York Times.
We're going through all the bad news and we'll get to some good news, so don't worry.
It'll be balanced out in a moment.
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.
The story's by David Sanger, Maggie Haberman, and Zolan Kano-Youngs.
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.
Now, notice, it really is fascinating how variable all these numbers are, right?
Again, I go back to my main point.
Nobody knows anything.
Okay, that University of Washington study says that at peak we might need 20,000 ventilators.
This story is about how the U.S.
government was going to try to acquire 80,000 ventilators.
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.
And that's just the way that life is sometimes.
But let's recognize that this is not pinpoint accuracy.
We have the hard data.
We know what the science is.
We don't know a lot of things.
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.
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.
Government officials said the deal might still happen, but they're examining at least a dozen other proposals.
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.
So that would be the actual story, right?
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.
And so people on Twitter were like, okay, hold up a second.
We're spending $6 trillion and you can't find $1 billion to provide the ventilators?
But that's not what's happening here.
It sounds like GM couldn't even guarantee they were going to produce the ventilators.
It sounds like they didn't even know they were going to produce 7,500 ventilators.
And so the government, FEMA, went back and opened up the contract and said, OK, well, let's get some competitive bids in here.
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.
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.
He said, you go into major hospitals sometimes and they will have two ventilators.
And now all of a sudden they're saying, can we order 30,000 ventilators?
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.
Like Cuomo's calling him up and saying, I need 30,000 ventilators.
Trump's like, I don't believe you.
Here's two.
They're giving them all the ventilators they can get their hands on.
I mean, Cuomo himself has said that at this point.
Okay, as far as where this is all going, Dr. Anthony Fauci did say yesterday, we're not going to work by Easter, right?
There's no information to suggest that we're all back at work by Easter.
That is very likely.
I mean, that would be April 12th.
It's already March 27th.
We're likely not to hit the peak according to any study until around Easter.
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.
Here's Dr. Anthony Fauci saying, no, Easter is a little bit optimistic.
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.
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.
Okay, and I think that everybody gets that, right?
Trump was expressing an optimistic date when he said April 12th.
He was not saying we're definitely open by Easter.
But, you know, to have your eye on the ball as to when we reopen, that is a good thing.
Now, it's time for a little bit of good news, so...
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%.
Now, just a few weeks ago, that was verboten.
You weren't allowed to say that.
Just a few weeks ago, if you said this, they claimed that you were downplaying the virus.
They said that, no, the WHO is saying it's 3%.
They're saying that it's 4% in some areas.
Look at Italy, where it's 8% or 9%.
The reality is it probably is below 1%, right?
Likely the death rate on this thing is the mortality rate is below 1%.
It may be well below 1%.
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.
As I say before, I think that the best data suggests that that is the case.
Here's President Trump saying, I think the mortality rate is well below 1%.
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.
Because you were hearing 3, 4, 5 percent.
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.
And I think that's a tremendous, that's a tremendous thing.
Okay, and he's right about this.
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.
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.
And by the way, Anthony Fauci was saying this, like, in late February.
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.
And he wrote this.
It was accessed last, on March 26th, 2020.
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.
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.
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.
But if you said this in the media, then you were labeled a denier.
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%.
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.
Now again, that doesn't mean that on an absolute level, like just the way stats works, you may be the one, right?
Okay, so this is why everybody should still be, you know, concerned.
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?
You acquire coronavirus, you die.
That is one out of every thousand people if you're at 0.1%.
Well, if you're the one, it doesn't matter what the rate was.
If you're the one, your rate is 100%, right?
But if you are just taking your odds, it makes a very big difference.
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.
There's a thousand marbles.
One of them is black.
The other 999 are white.
And if you pick the black one, you're gonna die.
You'd feel a lot more confident in picking the marbles than you would if it were ten times that rate.
If there were a hundred black marbles in there, or if there were even ten black marbles in there out of a thousand.
So, that is some actual good news.
And it does raise the question as to whether the lockdown measures that have been taken are actually the most effective.
And by the way, I'm not the only person who's been asking that.
I mean, Andrew Cuomo is asking that.
Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, he said, maybe we shouldn't have done a total shutdown.
Maybe this wasn't actually the best policy.
Maybe we were over the top in how we did this entire thing.
Now, I think a hard stop was necessary because we didn't have the data at that point.
But as the data comes in, we're going to have to reassess this.
And we'll get to that reassessment in just one second.
But the kind of new fangled consensus is that the most catastrophic studies here are overstated.
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.
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.
And Deborah Birx, who's well-respected, okay?
She has served in administrations of both Republicans and Democrats.
She said this yesterday.
Members of the media went nuts.
They were very upset about this.
How could Deborah Brooks chide the media for citing the worst case scenario statistics?
How could she do that?
And she was like, well, because those probably aren't going to materialize.
Maybe you should actually give some nuanced information.
Here was Deborah Brooks just tearing into the media yesterday.
Please, for the reassurance of people around the world, to wake up this morning and look at people talking about creating DNR situations.
Do not resuscitate situations for patients.
There is no situation in the United States right now that warrants that kind of discussion.
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.
We don't have an evidence of that right now.
Okay, so, I mean, that is a pretty stunning statement, right?
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?
And Deborah Birx is like, guys, you might want to wait on that.
By the way, it's not just Deborah Birx.
It's not just Deborah Birx.
Bill de Blasio, who's been as panic-stricken as any public leader in America, truly, Right.
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.
He said there's a lot of fear.
I don't blame any health care professional.
Look what they're having to deal with.
He says the truth is we have again the supplies for this week and next week.
We have to make sure every hospital is getting them to their extraordinary heroic medical personnel.
But we've but they do exist.
By the way, Andrew Cuomo, again, said the same thing.
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.
We are reassured after meeting with colleagues in New York, there are still ICU beds remaining.
They're still significant.
Over a thousand or two thousand ventilators that have not been used yet.
She said, like, stop exaggerating this thing.
She says, you could be thinking about it in a hospital.
Certainly many hospitals talk about it on a daily basis.
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.
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.
I just want to be clear about that.
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.
And by the way, I trust Dr. Deborah Birx.
More than I trust the people at the New York Times.
And until five seconds ago, it was people at the New York Times saying we should trust Berks and not Trump.
So which is it, guys?
What I'm saying is replicating what Fauci said, right?
I'm quoting Fauci and I'm quoting Berks.
And yet, if you quote them, now this is controversial.
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.
Like, again, best data suggests that there will be a lot of people who die from this.
We don't have the data.
I mean, this has been my constant complaint.
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.
What are the priors?
What are the inputs in that model?
If it's bad data in, it's bad data out.
How many ventilators we are going to need that we don't already have?
How those ventilators are going to be deployed?
How much the New York City system is going to be overwhelmed?
Are there outlying systems where people can be shifted out of hospital beds?
This is happening, by the way, in New York City.
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.
The Javits Center is being converted for normal hospital beds, right?
You had a surgery two weeks ago and you're still recovering from the surgery, but you don't need ICU care.
So we're converting over a lot of the beds that are in hospitals where you can have better treatment.
And we're taking we're setting up hotel rooms and stuff for people who are just sort of in recovery.
But all you need is an IV, which all that stuff is being done in real time.
And again, there's still serious questions to be asked about the models that are being applied in the first place.
The Netherlands has been applying completely different models.
According to Science Magazine, Martin Enserink and Kai Koepfertschmidt writing, they say, with COVID-19, modeling takes on life and death importance.
They say, The Netherlands has so far chosen a softer set of measures than most Western European countries.
It was late to close its schools and restaurants.
They didn't order a full lockdown.
In a March 17th speech, Prime Minister Mark Rutte rejected working endlessly to contain the virus and shutting down the country completely.
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.
He called on the public to respect the government's expertise on how to thread that needle.
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?
His simulations predict the number of infected people needing hospitalization will taper off as of next week.
So there are some pretty stark differences between models, right?
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.
I talked about this yesterday.
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.
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.
That was not him throwing out his old model.
It was him saying that if we apply like heavy tamp down, then we are going to dramatically lower the curve.
I mean, it's pretty dramatic lowering of the curve from 500,000 to 20,000.
But even his models are under pressure.
Oxford put out a model that suggested the death rates were even lower than that.
The Netherlands has put out models suggesting that this thing is going to peak next week.
Welinga is confident that the number of new infections caused by each person when no control measures are taken is just over two.
He trusts data showing that three to six days elapse between the moment someone is infected and the time they start to infect others.
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?
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.
It's not there at this point.
Maybe it will be.
Maybe it will be.
We keep hearing that it's about to happen in New York City.
That's why I say the tsunami may be coming.
We just don't know because it's hard to know whom to believe.
The story seems to be changing on a daily basis.
The media are not particularly trustworthy in their tone and tenor.
They're bringing you best available information, but so much of it is anecdotal.
The New York Times every day is printing stories about a doctor or a nurse who says, we're being overwhelmed at a hospital.
And then you go to the hospital administration and the hospital administration is like, no, we're, We're okay.
I mean, we're stretched and we're strained, but we're handling it.
And by the way, even in Italy, new coronavirus cases are actually slowing.
According to Chico Harlan and Stefano Petrelli over at the Washington Post, Italy's nationwide lockdown is showing the first small signs of payoff.
The number of coronavirus cases is still rising, but at the lowest day-on-day pace since the outbreak began.
The WHO calls the slowdown encouraging.
The health chief in the hardest hit region says there's light at the end of the tunnel.
Italy was the first Western country to contend with a mass outbreak and order a lockdown.
Now they're trying to figure out how long the restrictions could last.
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.
All of which is a very, very good thing.
President Trump spoke yesterday, by the way, about the resources that are being applied in the United States.
He says, we're shipping tons of resources.
Like, people are pretending that we're not getting masks out to people.
We're not getting personal protective equipment out to people.
That's not true.
Here's President Trump at a press conference yesterday talking about the numbers of resources being shipped all over the country.
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.
Okay, so again, the notion that the federal government is doing nothing is just not true.
And that is a real media bias.
I'm going to get to more media bias in just one second.
President Trump said last night on Hannity that hospitals are actually being set up in New York City.
Resources are being brought to bear.
So the panic, in other words, may be over, maybe it's not, but may be overstated.
Deborah Birx, who I trust a lot more than the New York Times, is suggesting that the panic is overstated.
I trust her more than I trust the New York Times.
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.
Here's President Trump yesterday, saying we're building hospitals in New York.
We're building four hospitals, four medical centers, and many other things.
We've developed and sent thousands of ventilators, and hopefully they're going to do well.
So again, resources are being brought to bear.
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.
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.
New York City is a hotspot center.
Is Des Moines Iowa?
Right?
L.A.
so far has been really trailing.
New York.
Is L.A.
exactly the same as New York?
I mean, major cities are gonna be the epicenters of this stuff, but how about outlying rural areas?
Are we seeing mass death in the rural areas?
Which, by the way, is where you sort of would expect to see mass death, considering hospital resources are far less.
There are tons of counties in the United States that don't have a single hospital.
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.
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.
And Donald Trump is getting just his ass kicked by the media.
And meanwhile, Andrew Cuomo is getting his ass kissed by the media.
Trump is getting his ass kicked and Cuomo is getting his ass kissed.
And they're saying exactly the same thing about how we reopen this thing, how we open this thing back up.
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.
I don't even care.
I don't even like ventilators.
Ventilators are bad.
Like, that's not happening.
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.
We're gonna get to that in one second.
First...
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Okay, so as I've been saying, the media's coverage of this thing has just been a bleep show.
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.
In the presidency, even in Congress, in the police, except the media.
People still hate the media.
They think the media are lying to them.
Why?
Well, maybe it's because the media are wildly biased and insane.
Probably it's because of that.
Okay, I'll give you an example.
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.
And Andrew Cuomo was late to the game.
He has shifted his narrative somewhat.
Bill de Blasio was saying, we need a full shutdown.
And Cuomo's like, I'm not doing a full shutdown.
And then five minutes later, he's like, you know what?
Maybe we need a full shutdown.
Well now, Andrew Cuomo is saying, maybe we shouldn't have done a total shutdown, maybe we should have done this in parts.
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.
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.
It's all performance art for the media.
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.
What we did was, we closed everything down.
That was our public health strategy.
Just close everything.
All businesses, all workers, young people, old people, short people, tall people, every school, close everything.
If you rethought that or had time to analyze that public health strategy, I don't know that you would say quarantine everyone.
I don't even know that that was the best public health policy.
There's Cuomo acknowledging full-on that maybe we should have considered other public health policies.
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?
That's what this giant bailout package was, or stimulus bill, whatever you want to call it.
It really isn't the bailout.
It really isn't even a stimulus.
It's more like a shoring up bill.
That is hitting a button with a blunt instrument.
It's taking a hammer and hitting a nail.
And the nail may be tiny and the hammer may be huge.
And the same thing is true with these sort of lockdown things.
As I say, I'm not anti-lockdown.
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.
I say that, people rip me up and down.
You're not taking this seriously enough.
Andrew Cuomo says the exact same thing, and people are like, oh man, what a genius.
I mean, wow, like he's really being serious about this thing.
Here is Andrew Cuomo saying, over time, maybe some people can go back to work.
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?
Younger people can go back to work.
People who have resolved can go back to work.
People who, once we get this antibody test, Uh, show that they had the virus and they resolved can go back to work.
Uh, that's how I think you do it.
It's not, we're going to either do public health or we're going to do economic development, development restarting.
We have to do both.
Okay.
President Trump said exactly the same thing yesterday, like exactly the same thing, almost word for word.
So president Trump yesterday said, listen, we can open up parts, open up parts of the country.
We're going to need to do that on a case by case basis.
In fact, the Trump administration issued guidelines for classifying U.S. counties by coronavirus risk, which makes perfect sense.
This is an enormous country.
OK, the risk in Sweden is not the same as the risk in France is not the same as the risk in Italy.
All of those countries are classifying their coronavirus risks differently.
By the way, the U.K. quietly late last week downgraded the the deadliness of the virus itself.
Right.
Even in the U.K. where they are deeply worried.
They called it a high risk disease.
They changed that very quietly late last week.
But it's being treated differently all over the continent.
It's being treated differently all over the world.
The United States is a very, very large chunk of territory.
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.
And the Trump administration pointed this out.
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.
to help state and local authorities decide whether to bolster or relax social distancing measures instead intended to combat the coronavirus.
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.
He wrote, this new information will drive the next phase in our war against this invisible enemy.
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.
Okay, and this was immediately, this was immediately seized on by the media as Trump doesn't care about humans.
He wants them all to die.
He said the same thing as Cuomo.
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.
Why is that in any way unreasonable?
It's 100% reasonable.
Every single major world leader is considering exactly that thing.
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.
I'm hearing it loud and clear from everybody.
They don't want to sit around and wait.
So here's President Trump yesterday.
He said a couple of things.
Again, this is very much in line with what Andrew Cuomo is saying.
It's just that when Trump says it, it's bad because he's an orange person.
And when Andrew Cuomo says it, it's very good because he doesn't like the orange person.
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.
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.
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.
So I think we can open up sections, quadrants, and then just keep keep them going until the whole country is opened up.
But we have to open up.
The people want to get back to work.
They want to get back.
Oh, no.
I mean, that's that.
Wow.
I mean, he said that Texas is a really big state, which it is.
Okay, it takes you like, if you were gonna drive across Texas, like width-wise, horizontally, how long would that take you, Colton?
Colton's from Texas.
That would take you, I mean, it would take you 15 hours probably.
Yeah, 15 hours, right?
I mean, that would take forever.
It is a huge state, of course.
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?
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.
Trump isn't saying anything wrong there.
People are like, well, that means he's going to open up the entire country.
He's encouraging everybody in New York to go to Shea Stadium and hang out with each other and make out.
He's not doing any of that stuff.
What are you talking about?
He's saying the same kind of stuff as everybody else.
Trump says, by the way, that social distancing will remain after coronavirus.
Much of the guidelines like shaking hands, maybe people aren't going to be shaking hands anymore.
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.
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.
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.
As soon as we open.
That doesn't mean you're gonna stop with the guidelines.
You'll still try and distance yourself.
Maybe not to the same extent because you have to lead a life.
Okay, well, again, what is he saying that's so wrong?
I mean, he's explicitly saying that social distancing is good.
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.
He's saying maybe we shouldn't shake hands ever again.
By the way, I'm totally on board with that.
I really am.
Like, shaking hands as a general practice is kind of gross.
You are sharing germs with lots of people, and that's been true no matter what.
The point here is that the media coverage of Cuomo, who's saying the same stuff as Trump, is glowing.
The coverage of Trump is very bad.
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.
So here's the deal.
Let's wait for the data.
Let's get all the resources where they need to be, and then let's wait for the data.
By the end of next week, we're gonna know an awful lot more.
I thought, frankly, we were gonna know an awful lot more by the end of this week.
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.
It looks like it's lagged a bit.
Maybe because of this lockdown.
Probably because, at least in large part, because of the lockdown.
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.
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.
And then the question is going to be, did we have the resources that were necessary on hand?
Are we Italy?
Or do we end up just being the UK, right?
Where again, the new estimates suggest that the health system will not be overwhelmed.
Now, with all of that said, the Democrats are moving swiftly to try and use crisis in order to push forward even more spending.
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?
The House is supposed to vote on this thing today.
Nancy Pelosi says, well, this is just the beginning.
We're going to spend even more and more and more and more.
We literally are spending $6 trillion.
$6 trillion.
To put that by way of contrast, the entire American economy on a yearly basis is about $20 trillion.
We're spending about one third of the entire American economy in like a week.
Seriously, on this thing.
And Nancy Pelosi's like, but we can spend more.
We should always spend more.
And it's like, okay, really?
It feels like People are very uncomfortable, just generally.
People are extremely uncomfortable with not being able to simply go back to their pre-existing suppositions about the way the world works.
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.
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?
How do we craft a policy that works for right now?
And then as soon as humanly possible, we're not comfortable in that space.
We're comfortable going back to our corners.
And so you see people like Nancy Pelosi immediately swivel into green new deal.
You see Nancy Pelosi swivel into we need more spending.
And you see Republicans, meanwhile, swivel back into their priors too.
Like everybody swivels back into their priors.
Now, listen, I agree with the Republican priors, obviously, a lot more than the Democrat priors.
But how about this?
How about we just wait?
I know, it's the hardest thing to do.
It's the hardest thing to do in life.
But we don't have enough data to be jumping on, let's spend trillions more dollars.
And we also don't have enough hard data at this point to say, reopen the American economy wholesale.
And I don't think tons of people are saying the latter.
I think a lot of people are saying the former.
Here's Nancy Pelosi claiming we need to spend even more, and more, and more, and more, forever more.
We had bigger direct payments in our bill.
I don't think we've seen the end of direct payments.
This is an emergency, a challenge to the conscience, as well as the budget of our country.
And every dollar that we spend is an investment in the lives and the livelihood of the American people.
We can go bigger.
Especially now the interest rates are even lower than at the time of the tax scam.
We can go even bigger?
Even bigger?
How?
Endlessly?
What are you just doing?
Inflate the currency?
Who's going to buy our bonds?
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.
You can just continue to take out debt and debt and debt and debt.
Well, that assumes there's an appetite for the debt.
Who the hell has the money to pay for the debt right now?
Do you think Britain's going to be buying American bonds en masse?
How about China?
You think they're going to be buying American bonds?
By the way, breaking news, China had started reopening all of their movie theaters.
Weirdly, they are now closing all of their movie theaters again.
So what do you think?
You think the coronavirus thing is done in China?
You think we've been given accurate statistics about China?
I think not.
I think not.
So all of this happy talk from Nancy Pelosi, let's go back to our priors.
Let's completely remake the world economy like Bernie would want.
How about this?
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.
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.
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.
How about that?
Let's start there.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
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.
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.
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.
I remember that I think the governor at the time was Kathleen Blanco.
I remember she said sort of the same thing.
It's always the impetus is always on local leaders to try and blame national leadership for your own failures.
Well, this week, the New Orleans mayor blamed President Trump for not shutting down Mardi Gras.
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.
Here she was on CNN with Wolf Blitzer.
You're saying no one from the federal government came to you and urged you to at least cancel or postpone Mardi Gras.
Yeah.
That's absolutely correct.
And not only that, it was backed up with the response of our national leader.
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.
Um, what?
What?
Her name is LaToya Cantrell, the mayor of New Orleans.
Now, last I checked, she's the mayor of New Orleans.
Donald Trump is not the mayor of New Orleans.
You know who's the mayor of Los Angeles?
Eric Garcetti, not Donald Trump.
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.
I mean, this woman going out there and suggesting that she needed a personal phone.
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?
When, by the way, half the media was still not taking this seriously, like, at all.
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.
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.
Of course that's what she would have said.
She would have said, are you kidding?
Why would I shut down Mardi Gras?
She's the mayor.
If you're a local leader and you blew it, it's because you blew it.
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?
You get the same crap from Bill de Blasio.
You're the mayor of a major city.
You tried to run for president on the basis of that.
It seems to me you should be able to make some local decisions.
Weird, because it seems like there are some local leaders who did make some of those local decisions to shut down major public events.
That her blaming Trump for the outbreak in New Orleans is just, like, everything is Trump's fault.
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.
Evangelicals, okay, let me just ask a question.
So the centers of the outbreak that we've seen thus far are China, famous for its huge evangelical Christian population, China.
I mean, just tons of evangelicals over there.
It's like a convention of religious evangelical Christians over in China, a communist atheist country.
And then, Italy.
Again, hugely famous for having tons of evangelicals in Italy.
Not like it's the home of the Catholic Church or anything.
Like, it's all evangelicals over in Italy.
And in the United States, New York City, where evangelicals just swarm New York City.
I know, like, probably two-thirds of the population of New York City is evangelical.
Of course, I'm being a little sarcastic here, and by a little, I mean a lot.
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.
If you blame it on the government of China, very racist.
But you blame the evangelicals.
Evangelicals are sitting over here like, what the?
What in the world?
Like us?
Seriously?
But the New York Times ran this piece anyway, because nothing says unifying the country like blaming evangelicals for coronavirus.
Catherine Stewart, the author of The Power Worshippers, Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, So her priors are fairly well established.
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.
In the current crisis, we are all reaping what that movement has sown.
At least since the 19th century, when the pro-slavery theologian Robert Louis Dabney attacked the physical sciences as theories of unbelief.
Hostility to science has characterized the more extreme forms of religious nationalism in the United States.
Today, the hardcore of climate deniers is concentrated among people who identify as religiously conservative Republicans.
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.
This denial of science and critical thinking among religious ultra-conservatives now haunts the American response to the coronavirus crisis.
What?
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?
How about Deborah Birx?
How about Jerome Adams, the guy who's the Surgeon General, that doctor?
All those guys are evangelicals?
Trump is listening to people who deny science totally while also recommending what his scientists tell them?
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.
Do you believe God would bring his people to his house to be contagious with the virus?
Of course not, he said.
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.
That, wow, strong evidence, New York Times.
Really, really doing amazing work over here, blaming evangelicals for the rise of coronavirus.
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.
Only a heroic leader, free from the scruples of political correctness, can save the righteous from the damned.
Fealty to the cause is everything.
Fidelity to the facts means nothing.
Perhaps this is why many Christian nationalist leaders greeted the news of the coronavirus as an insult to their chosen leader.
Okay, honestly, this is so tiresome.
It's so unbelievably tiresome.
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.
Truly insane.
Truly insane stuff from the New York Times, but there you have it.
The New York Times doing its best to divide the country with their op-ed page in the middle of a pandemic.
Really solid stuff there.
Alrighty.
Well, we will be back here later today with two additional hours of content.
Otherwise, we will see you here on Monday for all of the updates.
In the meantime, try to relax this weekend.
Try to hang out with your family.
If you want to do something nice for a neighbor, find out if you've got an elderly neighbor who can't go out.
Try to get them some groceries or something.
Call up some friends.
Make sure everybody is doing okay.
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.
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.
My wife has encouraged me to say that on the show, so I'd be remiss if I did not.
Try to do something good for the country this weekend and not read the New York Times.
And we will see you here on Sunday.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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Audio is mixed by Mike Koromina.
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