All Episodes
Previous Next
April 23, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
57:40
Who’s Standing With Workers? | Ep. 996
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
As millions more go unemployed, AOC proposes a work strike, and Andrew Cuomo proposes that people get jobs in essential industries.
We learn that the first American death could have been weeks earlier than previously supposed, and President Trump undercuts Georgia's governor on reopening.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
Protect your data from prying eyes at expressvpn.com.
Now, you may have noticed the economy is a trash heap right now, and you may have also noticed that the government is spending oodles and oodles and oodles of dollars, which means that now would not be a bad time to get into the precious metals market.
The fact is the stock market's going to be up, it's going to be down, but one thing you know is that the government is never going to pay off this debt, which means that having diversified into precious metals, probably a pretty smart idea, would have been smart to do that months ago, still smart to do it now.
You should go talk to my friends over at Birch Gold if you're interested in at least putting some of your money in precious metals to protect against inflation and future risk and uncertainty.
Over 22 million people have lost their jobs.
We're now up to 26 million people as of today.
From the economic fallout of coronavirus, we don't know the long-term impact of this many workers being displaced once again.
Diversifying into precious metals is not a bad idea.
Before May 31st, with a qualifying purchase, Birch Gold will actually give you a free emergency kit too, which is kind of a fun giveaway.
The backpack is absolutely loaded with the things you can't buy right now.
So safeguard your savings with Birch Gold, and they will help safeguard your family the same way they have mine and so many others.
There's no obligation.
You have nothing to lose to take that first step.
Birch Gold Group has thousands of satisfied customers, countless five-star reviews, an A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau.
Do not wait until the market drops more.
To protect your hard-earned savings, get your free emergency kit today.
Text my name, Ben, to 474747 and diversify into precious metals today.
Again, text Ben to 474747.
Text Ben to 474747.
Okay, so.
The continuing debate in American society is how, whether to, what we're going to do to reopen.
Because the fact is that the economic fallout from coronavirus is absolutely devastating.
There's a new report out today.
4.4 million more workers have now filed for unemployment.
So we are now up to 27 million workers in the past month and a half, five weeks, filing for unemployment.
The relentless increase in the jobless has intensified the debate over when to lift restrictions, according to the New York Times.
State agencies are scrambling to handle the overwhelming flood of filings, as well as set a set of federal eligibility rules instituted to deal with the crisis.
A lot of these offices are understaffed.
In a survey the Pew Research Center released on Tuesday, 52% of low-income households below $37,500 a year for a family of three said someone in the household had lost a job because of coronavirus, compared with 32% of upper-income families.
That's people who earn over $112,600.
42% of families in the middle have been affected as well.
People without a college education have taken that disproportionate hit, as have black and Hispanic Americans.
So for all the talk about how The people who are calling for a reopening are out of touch with the common man.
It's the people who are not calling for a reopening who are out of touch with the common man, right?
They are out of touch with people who are actually losing their jobs.
Very easy for people on CNN to sit there and militate against people going back to work or being allowed by the government to go back to work.
A lot more difficult when you actually have to go back to work to go out there and feed your family and support your family.
If you want to determine who is out of touch, determine who has a job who's currently calling for everybody else not to be able to go back and get a job.
Now, I want to get into the business side of this, the economic side, the shutdown side of this in just one second.
First, we have to bring you the statistical updates.
There are a couple of pieces of news that are somewhat interesting.
First of all, we now know that coronavirus was spreading fairly widely in the United States well before anyone really suspected.
That it was.
According to the New York Times, by the time that New York City confirmed its first case of coronavirus on March 1st, thousands of infections were already silently spreading through the city.
A hidden explosion of a disease many still viewed as a remote threat as the city awaited the first signs of spring.
Hidden outbreaks were also spreading almost completely undetected in Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, and Seattle, long before testing showed that each city had a major problem, according to a model of the spread of the disease by researchers at Northeastern University.
Even in early February, while the world is focused on China, the virus is not only spreading in multiple American cities, It was seeing blooms of infection elsewhere in the United States.
In five major U.S.
cities as of March 1st, there were only 23 confirmed cases of coronavirus, but according to the Northeastern model, there actually could have been about 28,000 infections in those cities by then.
Now, that's bad news because it means that we didn't detect this thing as quickly as we should.
It is good news in the sense that a lot more people have had this thing than we already thought and didn't even know it at the time, right?
And antibody tests continue to show that a huge number of people who never were Diagnosed with coronavirus have already had coronavirus in the first place Which means that the case fatality rate of this thing is again way lower than we have been led to believe It is probably in my opinion somewhere between 0.2 and 0.6 percent.
It is not 3% It is not 4% It is not 13% or 11% right now in New York City If you just look at the number of deaths over the number of diagnosed cases You're looking at something like 10% or 11% if you look at the actual number of cases that have happened Right, asymptomatic cases, cases where people have antibodies but never were actually diagnosed with coronavirus in the first place.
Every single study done shows a high multiple of that, in terms of the number of people who actually had this thing, right, and were asymptomatic.
Now, the bad news about that is that asymptomatic people are the ones who are most infecting people, because you're going around, you don't know that you have a problem, and you are infecting everybody else around you.
This makes testing regimes, particularly in high-population areas like New York, extremely vital, right?
This is why, when people talk about testing, Testing is designed to prevent the hotspots from flaring up.
I've pointed this out many, many times.
Flattening the curve is designed to prevent overwhelming the healthcare system.
Testing is basically a variation of that.
Testing, widespread testing, is not designed to prevent everybody from getting the disease.
The general idea is that over time, many people will get the disease.
We're basically buying time for people to come up with therapeutics, is really what we're doing here.
Two things, to build up medical capacity and buy time to come up with drugs that actually work better against coronavirus.
Those are the two things that we are doing right now.
And testing regimens basically allow us to identify when a hotspot has emerged and then contact trace those hotspots.
But the idea that We are going to be able to fully go back to American industry, or that even with the lockdowns lift, that we are going to see a V-shaped recovery, that people are just going to go back to bars, people are going to go out to nightclubs, people are going to go back to their normal lives.
It's just not true.
It's just not true.
Now, again, it is important to recognize the differences in population here.
The Fox News has an analysis of the people who have died in New York City.
And here's what, and they're quoting a study from the Journal of American Medical Association, JAMA, which is sort of the industry standard.
A new study by a medical journal revealed that most of the people in New York City who are hospitalized due to coronavirus had one or more underlying health issues.
Health records from 5,700 patients hospitalized within the Northwell Health System, which houses the most patients in the country throughout the pandemic, show that 94% of patients had more than one disease other than COVID-19, according to JAMA.
Data taken from March to early April showed that the median age of patients was 63 years old, and 53% of all coronavirus patients suffered from hypertension, the most prevalent of the ailments among patients.
Now, I've talked to Dr. Marty McKaysey from Johns Hopkins, and he suggests that hypertension doesn't exist alone, that usually when somebody has hypertension, that person also has a second condition, and the second condition is really the one that's a problem, not the hypertension.
So, obesity is a condition that has great overlap with hypertension.
Diabetes has great overlap with hypertension.
42% of coronavirus patients who had body mass index data on file suffered from obesity.
32% of all patients suffered from diabetes.
Data gathered from 2,600 patients who either died or were discharged from the hospital showed 12% were placed on ventilators, and of those who were, 88% of them died.
So for all the focus on ventilators, if you were put on a ventilator, basically your odds of getting out of the hospital were about 10%, 12%, which is really bad odds, right?
So when we're talking about ventilators, we're talking about Significant but marginal increases in life possibility.
But once you hit a ventilator, you were in very, very serious trouble.
We also now know that coronavirus deaths in the United States are largely happening at nursing homes.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the number of U.S.
coronavirus-linked deaths in long-term care facilities, including nursing homes, has clipped 10,000.
As nursing home owners said, they are struggling to access the testing they need to detect and curb outbreaks.
A growing number of state health departments are reporting data, including fatalities, linked to facilities that primarily house older people who are often in frail health and particularly vulnerable to infection from the new coronavirus.
Some states still have not actually reported data on deaths in such facilities, but it seems like these places are the death traps for coronavirus, which makes perfect sense.
You have a bunch of people who are very vulnerable in a closed space, not going out into open air very often and breathing all over each other because it's an enclosed space.
One thing that summer and spring should do, and this is why it's so idiotic for governments to shut down parks, it really is moronic, as long as people are socially distancing, parks are the best place in the world for people to be.
People being inside small, crowded areas is the worst place for people to be.
I mean, this is what happened with Chris Cuomo, right?
Chris Cuomo at CNN, he had coronavirus.
He infected his wife.
He infected his 14-year-old son.
That's not his fault.
I mean, he's in a house, right?
You're in a house with your family.
But the vast majority of coronavirus infections that are happening, at least according to Chinese studies, are happening in small enclosed areas.
And largely, they're familial transmission.
Somebody in the house gets it, and then everybody in the house gets it.
Which is one of the reasons that I, on a personal level, on a very personal level, is one of the reasons I'm concerned.
Because my parents are 64, and they're over at our house a lot helping to take care of the kids.
We've locked down.
We have a very closed circle.
But it's one of the reasons why I would be more careful than if my parents were not over here, right?
I'm not really that worried about infecting my wife or infecting my kids.
We're all young and healthy, thank God.
But my parents, even though they are healthy, are 64 years old, right?
So I would be concerned about their health.
And so people who are surrounding themselves with people in a vulnerable population obviously have to be more careful.
Where do we go next in terms of the modeling?
This is one of the big questions.
I asked yesterday, what if nothing changes?
What if there are no real therapeutic cures that come about in the next two months that really change the game?
The vaccine is at least a year away, we say, 12 to 18 months away.
What if nothing big happens?
What if the summer doesn't kill off coronavirus?
What if, basically, this is what it is, right?
I mean, what we are experiencing now is what it is.
What sort of precautions can we take?
What sort of people should be going back to work?
And yes, it is vital to go back to work, because if nothing changes, if this is the new status quo, we're going to have to figure out how to work within this status quo, because what is happening right now is completely unsustainable.
And as we'll see when we talk about reopening this thing, when you hear from politicians things like, well, if you just save one life, that argument is the last refuge of the political scoundrel.
Single-factor analysis is the enemy of good sense.
Single-factor analysis is the enemy of good sense.
If all you are saying is, if we save one life, that makes for the worst public policy in the entire world.
Because if you just save one life, it is the policy that leads you to get rid of cars, it's the policy that leads you to never go out from your house.
It's the policy that leads you to never go out from your house.
If you just save one life is not the only question here.
There's also the question of quality of life, of freedom, of relationships, of how you live your life.
I mean, it seems to me that there are two very serious questions.
One is death, obviously, but the other is quality of life, which makes a difference to people who are alive, which is going to be the vast majority of people who even get COVID-19.
The vast majority of people who get COVID-19 are going to live.
What is quality of life like for the 329 million people who are not going to die of COVID-19, right?
Out of 330 million people, 329.5 million people are not going to die of COVID-19 in the United States.
Quality of life for those people matters.
And I'm not talking about marginal changes in quality of life.
We're talking about people losing their life savings, people losing their possibility of income, people who are now reliant on the government, reliant on food stamps.
We're talking about blowing out the debt for future generations so that people will never be able to recover in the United States, so that the United States basically becomes a state-run system.
These are serious, serious questions.
And to pretend that the only consideration for the midterm is just how many lives you save in the short term, that doesn't even take into account what happens during a second wave, especially if the lockdowns are not actually saving lives.
Remember, the purpose of the lockdown is not to exceed the capacity of the healthcare system.
So once we have built up the ICU beds and built up the ventilators, I'm not sure what else you can do other than putting in place testing regimens that allow you to identify the hotspots and prevent a spike above medical capacity And making moves to protect nursing homes, for example – Other than that, there's not all that much you can do.
Now, that doesn't mean that we're gonna have that big, booming recovery coming right out of this, because all evidence suggests not.
But let's look at the forecast as to what could theoretically happen in terms of coronavirus deaths.
So there are five different forecasts that have been put out by a variety of models.
The Imperial College model suggests that we are just basically going to continue to rise.
The Imperial College model says that we're going to continue to rise in terms of deaths because people are going to leave their houses, people are going to infect each other, and it's going to continue to move through the population and kill people.
And then there's the MIT model, which suggests that it's going to tail off to the point where we are experiencing about a thousand deaths a day.
The IHME model, the one that's been widely ripped, which is now projecting 66,000 deaths in the United States by August 1st, that model basically suggests we're going to be down to basically zero deaths a day by August 1st.
That seems very optimistic to me.
I mean, given what we know, that seems like a very optimistic model.
That's the one people have been citing.
There's a Columbia model that suggests that by August 1st, we're still going to be having just under a thousand deaths a day.
According to the New York Times, most of the models shown above predict that the country is currently past or near the peak of number of deaths for this wave of the epidemic, but they estimate a range of total deaths from 60,000 to 100,000 through May 23rd.
Models use different techniques to project the future.
Most of them share an important basic assumption.
They're all built around the notion the current regimen of stay-at-home orders and social distancing will continue.
Almost all of them cut off their predictions after two months or less, even though epidemiologists believe the coronavirus pandemic will be with us for far longer.
This is one of the problems with models, is that these particular models are assuming that we all stay home forever, which obviously is unsustainable.
It is something that cannot happen.
And so what you really need to see is what the models say about things that are not complete lockdown orders.
What do the models say about the mid-range solution?
Right?
Young, healthy people going back to work, wearing masks and socially distancing.
Right?
That's what you need to see.
You don't need the model that says, what if we go out and swap spit with each other in public places?
And you don't need the model that says, what if we just lock down for the rest of time?
Because neither of those two things is going to happen.
What you need is, what do the models say about a variety of public policies in the middle?
And those are the models that are not really being presented to the public.
According to the New York Times, researchers still aren't sure the rate at which people who become infected die or the rate of transmission to other people, which are like the two key stats, right?
That would be the infection rate, the replication rate of the virus, and it would be the case fatality rate, which I've been talking about.
So the only two stats that matter, researchers still don't know the answer to.
This is why those antibody tests matter, so we can at least establish the baseline case fatality rate.
They suspect the infection rate is really high.
I also suspect the infection rate is incredibly high, like three.
So if I were just going to ballpark this thing, Best available scenario to me, if there were no lockdowns right now, right?
No social distancing, no lockdowns.
I think that you'd probably be looking about half a million dead over the course of the year.
The reason I say that is because you're looking at the flu killing maybe 50,000 people a year.
The flu has a 0.1% death rate.
It also does not infect as much of the population.
It has a replication rate of just over one the flu.
The replication rate for coronavirus is about three.
So it's about three times as infectious and it's about three times as deadly.
So that means that using those factors, this thing will kill about nine times as many people as the flu would in a given year.
So you're looking at about anywhere from 400,000 to 500,000 deaths if this were left unchecked.
Now with social distancing and with the hand washing and people not touching their faces, You hope that that cuts that down pretty significantly, but you are going to end up in six figures of death.
For the year, there's just no question.
You'll end up in six figures for death from coronavirus over the course of the year.
I'd be willing to bet a significant sum of money, considering that we already have almost 50,000 deaths in the United States in the past five weeks.
I think that you're looking at more than that.
Now, looking at that in isolation does not answer the question as to how we go back to work, because again, We do have to go back to work.
There are countervailing concerns here, and even keeping people at home indefinitely is not going to kill the virus itself.
We are going to leave our houses at some point.
We cannot live like this forever.
Several epidemiologists say it's hard to expect the models to offer precise forecasts at this point because they're relying on uncertain inputs.
Again, the Imperial College model was suggesting that we were going to get up to 4,000 deaths a day in the near future, so like 3,500 deaths a day.
The Columbia model was suggesting that we were going to get about 2,000 deaths a day.
Sorry, that's the IHME model.
The Columbia model was suggesting that we were going to get just under 2,000 deaths a day.
All these models are incredibly variable, but when people suggest that the models were just plain wrong, that really is not quite true.
It really is not quite true.
I mean, the models are not exact, but the models are not dead wrong because the IHME model, the one that was widely cited and I've said changed over time, was a curve-fitting model.
It's taking new information in and then it's providing you with a better curve.
Right now, their estimate of 67,000 deaths looks optimistic by August 1st.
Okay, so what exactly are we doing to reopen and how seriously should we take reopening?
I'll tell you what is incredibly stupid.
What is incredibly stupid is some of the things people are saying about reopening.
We're gonna get to that in just one second.
First, let's talk about the fact that there has never been a better time to do education online.
Like now would be the time to do education online.
You literally cannot go to a college campus right now.
Anyway, this is why I recommend Ashford University.
Ashford University's online bachelor's and master's degree programs allow you to learn on a convenient schedule that works for you.
Right now, you need to make yourself more employable.
There are tons of people Or out of work.
Getting a new skill set that allows you to be more attractive to employers is going to be a huge thing when we come out of this pandemic, even if it is a Nike swoosh shaped recovery.
You can pursue a degree to help you have a brighter future in one of Ashford's 60-plus programs like Business Administration, Healthcare Administration, and Psychology.
With 24-7 access to your classroom, daily support, and financial aid available, Ashford will give you the tools you need to keep climbing.
You're made for moments like these because you are hashtag tenacity made just like Ashford.
These are tough times.
Now's the time for you to really boost that resume.
Education is personal at Ashford.
Your success is their success.
There's no fee to apply or standardized testing required to enroll.
Go do it today!
Go to ashford.edu slash ben.
That is ashford.edu slash ben.
Ashford.edu slash ben.
Not all programs available in all states.
Go check them out right now.
Okay, so.
How exactly are people going to go back to work?
How exactly is this transition back to normal life going to happen?
Well, New York City is trying to prep for large-scale testing programs to combat the coronavirus's spread.
That obviously is really, really necessary in New York, and it's going to have to be a massive testing regimen because it's going to have to almost be block by block.
The place is just so populous that if you have a hotspot, that thing can spread almost immediately.
You've got public transportation.
Honestly, I think there's a good case to be made that they should shut down the subway system, and they should have shut down the subway system months ago, and tell people to ride bicycles.
Like, ride bicycles, walk, work from home, and if it takes longer to get to work, employers should be a little more flexible about that.
Putting people in small, bullet-shaped containers with no open air in the middle of a pandemic seems like pretty much the worst idea I can imagine at this point.
That is a terrible idea, unless you are going to actively take temperature checks at subway stations, Unless you're going to have people take antibody tests before they get on the subway.
By the way, there's talk about doing this for traveling on planes, right?
Is that you might have to have a clean bill of health before you can get on a plane so you don't infect everybody who is on a plane.
But some important things to note about the removal of lockdown.
So let's talk about what removal of lockdown can do and what removal of lockdown is unlikely to do.
So what it can do is it means that you're going to see an uptick in the economy as people go out and they shop in a certain amount of social distancing, wearing masks.
Grocery stores are still operating because people still need their groceries.
You're going to see some retail shops go back to operating.
You're going to see haircut places operating, although people are going to try and space out when they get their haircuts a little bit more.
I don't think people are going to get – you're not going to go to the nail salon as often, ladies, and you're not going to go get a haircut as often, gentlemen.
There's just – people are going to space out their behavior.
The reason I say that is because people were spacing out there.
I'm going to give you a stat that does go to show you that the American people are responsible.
And this is an argument in favor of getting rid of the lockdowns.
The argument in favor of getting rid of the lockdowns is that the amount of social distancing in the United States was increasing rapidly before the lockdowns happened.
Before the lockdowns happened, people were already starting to not go out.
People were like, I've said for my own family, we decided not to go to a Purim party.
This is like March 6th, I believe, was Purim in the United States.
Let's see, Purim, Purim date 2020.
Purim in the United States was March 10th.
So March 10th was before the lockdown in Los Angeles.
Los Angeles lockdown only began the following week.
I remember March 10th, as I've said before, was the date when I turned to my family.
I was like, I don't think we're going to this Purim party.
I think that we are going to stay home, given what is happening.
That's what's happening with a huge number of people.
Lyman Stone is a political scientist over at American Enterprise Institute.
He put out a chart and it shows state by state how social distancing preceded the stay at home orders in virtually every case, often by several weeks.
I mean, the chart basically looks like, here is the date of the lockdown order, and you can see social distancing starting to, the amount of social contact starting to decline.
Lockdown, flat.
Meaning that people had already started to lock down, not go out as much.
And this makes perfect sense, right?
People are not stupid.
They don't want to die, right?
People want to socially distance.
This is why I think you can trust the American people.
I've said this before.
I think you can trust the American people.
I think that the media right now are nut picking.
They're going out and they're attempting to find people who are actively militating against this sort of stuff, just so that they can argue for the lockdowns to continue, as though you can't trust the American people to do this stuff.
There's a CBS News poll today, and it shows if stay-at-home restrictions were lifted, would you be comfortable going to a bar or a restaurant?
29% of people say yes.
71% of people say no.
Get on an airplane.
15% of people say yes.
85% of people say no.
Go to a large event.
13% of people say yes.
87% of people say no.
In other words, most Americans are not going back to anything remotely resembling normal.
Even when the lockdowns are removed.
So it's important to know that when you're talking about the lockdowns.
And again, that's good news in the sense that Americans are not rushing out to be irresponsible.
And it's bad news in the sense that the economy is just not going to recover the same way that people seem to expect it's going to recover once these lockdowns are over.
By the way, we're seeing this in Germany as well.
German shoppers are not rushing back as stores reopen, according to Reuters.
German consumers are counting their pennies rather than returning to shop in large numbers as stores gradually reopen after being locked down.
Which makes perfect sense.
People are losing their jobs, people are losing their income, people are saving instead of spending.
It's gonna change all sorts of spending habits in the United States.
Like really gonna change, seriously, the spending habits and the association habits in the United States.
Okay, we're gonna get to more of this in just one second.
And we're gonna talk about how the single factor analysis being used by some people in the media and governors on the left, is really, really stupid and backwards and fails to take into account a lot of really important factors.
We're gonna get to that in just a second.
First, let's talk about how important your home is to you, particularly at a time like this.
Imagine getting evicted for nonpayment of a loan that you never took out.
I mean, forget about all of the financial troubles that everybody's experiencing right now.
Think of you own your home, you're making your payments, and suddenly you get evicted anyway.
That actually happened to Debra.
It's happening everywhere.
It's called home title theft.
The FBI says it's one of the fastest growing crimes in the country.
This is why you should get home title lock.
Your home's legal title is kept online.
Thieves do know that.
They will forge your signature on your home's title and then that's it.
People will think that they legally own your home.
And then they will take out loans against your home and load you up with debt.
Your bank doesn't cover you.
Your insurance doesn't cover you.
The only way I know to avoid this thing is Home Title Lock.
Go to HomeTitleLock.com Register your address to see if you are already a victim, and then use code SAVE for 30 free days of protection to help you get through this crisis.
Again, enter SAVE at HometitleLock.com.
Get that 30 days of free protection so you don't have to shell out any cash right at the moment when everybody is short on cash, and you can protect your home.
Anyway, HometitleLock.com, again, it's a smart thing to do to protect your property.
HometitleLock.com protects your credit and your property at HometitleLock.com.
Okay, so New York is talking about how they are going to ease this burden, right?
How they're going to ease the economy.
And obviously, let me first give you a couple of factors as to why it's so important to ease this, okay?
Because what you're about to hear is a bunch of politicians who pretend that the economy is not part of real life and that people's livelihoods and people's lifestyle and people's happiness is somehow not even a remote consideration here.
By the way, it should be noted that people's lives are on the line, and it's particularly more true not in the United States than it is in the United States.
Thank God the United States is an incredibly prosperous country, but the UN is actually estimating that the coronavirus pandemic could push 130 million people to the brink of starvation.
It turns out that a lot of people are very much reliant on America's economy, and that when America's economy goes down, when the European economy goes down, when the world economy goes down, That hundreds of millions of people could starve.
According to CNN, famines could take hold in about three dozen countries in a worst-case scenario.
According to the executive director of the World Food Program, ten of those countries already have more than a million people on the verge of starvation.
He cited an economic recession, a decline in aid, a collapse in oil prices as factors leading to vast shortages of food, and urged swift action to avert disaster.
When the economy goes down, people don't eat.
That is a reality.
It's more true outside the United States than it's true inside the United States, but it's true for American citizens as well.
And it's also true that businesses are going under that support people.
And by the way, the Congress set up a series of ridiculous and perverse incentives with regard to employment in the CARES Act that they should fix immediately.
There were some Republicans who tried to stop this provision of the bill and they were mocked for it.
Bernie Sanders got up and said, Are you really saying that people are going to leave their jobs in order to get a little more money this month?
Yes, because they don't have a guarantee on the other end.
That's a rational decision.
They don't have a guarantee on the other end that they will have a job.
There's an article at CNBC today.
About a woman named Jamie Black Lewis.
She says she felt like she won the lottery after getting two forgivable loans through the Paycheck Protection Program.
Black Lewis saw the $177,000 and $43,800 loans, one for each of the spas shown in Washington State, as a lifeline she could use for payroll and other business expenses.
She had halted pay for all the 35 employees at her spas.
When Black Lewis convened a virtual employee meeting to explain her good fortune, she expected jubilation and relief that paychecks would resume in full, even though the staff couldn't work.
Instead, people were angry.
They were angry because it turns out that if they were considered unemployed, they could get more money than if they stayed employed by her.
Okay, you can't set up perverse incentives because incentives matter.
To pretend that people don't actually use their brains when it comes to their own economic situation is idiotic.
The bulk of funds from these loans have to go toward payroll.
Salaries have to remain intact.
Employee headcount must not decrease.
Businesses have until June 30th to rehire laid-off or furloughed workers.
Black Lewis was trying to meet the rules.
But the anger came from employees who determined they would make more money by collecting unemployment benefits than their normal paycheck.
That, of course, is a perverse incentive that's been set up.
Meanwhile, small businesses are being destroyed by the fact that everybody is scared to come out of their houses.
And it's extending to, it has ripple effects through the economy.
So even industries that are not being directly hit, like say the construction industry.
You're in the construction industry.
Well, that has nothing to do with, you know, the restaurant industry or the travel industry or the hotel industry.
It's just you building a house.
The problem is the person who wants you to build the house no longer has the money to pay you to build the house.
And so here's a letter that I just got from a man named Justin.
He said, I'm listening now to your show talking about how to help small business survive.
Once our Paycheck Protection Program money runs out, we will most likely shut down.
Prior to the shutdown, we had a $2 million backlog.
As a direct result of the government shutdown, we have only $400,000 work in process, with the majority being pushed out to deliver in June, July, and August of 2020, when the original schedule had this work due in April.
We'll probably be here for eight more weeks due to the Paycheck Protection funding.
After that, our revenue stream will be drastically reduced, and we are going to have to shut down.
He says our company was founded in 1967 by my grandfather.
I'm a third generation owner.
I've been here since 2007, owner since 2014.
We won't recover.
The almost 50 people we employ will no longer have a job, many of whom have been here for 20 plus years.
So, are we going to pretend that those stories don't matter?
That these people don't matter?
The reason I ask that question is because there's been this bizarre notion, I mean really bizarre, that if you want the economy reopened in a responsible fashion, recognizing all of the obstacles here and the failure of easy answers, and recognizing also that the status quo may not become the status quo ante.
The new status quo is different than the old status quo.
If you say that, then people suggest that you don't care about human life.
Andrew Cuomo played this game yesterday, and honestly, what he said is awful.
So the governor of New York has been widely feeded by the media for his brilliant leadership, despite the fact that his state got hit harder than any state in America, and he was late on the ball.
Andrew Cuomo yesterday, he was asked about people who want to work, and here was his ridiculous, sneering answer.
How can the cure be worse than the illness if the illness is potential death?
But what if the economy failing – Worse than death.
Equals death because of mental illness.
The people stuck at home.
No, it doesn't.
It doesn't equal death.
Economic hardship.
Yes.
Very bad.
Not death.
You want to go to work?
Go take a job as an essential worker.
Do it tomorrow.
Right?
You're working.
You're an essential worker.
So go take a job as an essential worker.
But the people aren't hiring because of the pandemic.
No, there are people hiring.
You can get a job as an essential worker.
That's insane.
So now you can go to work and you can be an essential worker.
What an absolute a-hole.
I mean, seriously, what an absolute a-hole.
Just unbelievable stuff from Andrew Cuomo there.
So first of all, the baseline notion, that is the easiest and most scoundrel, it's the most scoundrel-like Take on politics, I can imagine, is death is not equal to any of the other things.
Yes, that's true.
Death is not equal to any of the other things.
Death is worse than all of the other things for the individual.
But for the society, we make these calculations all the time because that's called policymaking.
And responsible policymakers make policy based on weighing a variety of factors, not one factor.
If you're weighing one factor, you're a bad politician, you're a bad policymaker.
Everybody understands this.
Everyone understands this.
No one's willing to say it out loud because they're gutless.
But everybody understands that they're going to have to make these calculations.
Andrew Cuomo pretending I'm saving every life?
And okay, so I ruin the economy.
Also, I just have a question for Andrew Cuomo.
Why does he get to decide what an essential job looks like?
You know what usually decides what an essential job looks like?
People, human beings, the economy.
Not Andrew Cuomo.
You know, saying that you are an essential worker, you know, I'll give you an example.
Apparently, according to Andrew Cuomo, that reporter is an essential worker.
And so I guess that all the people who are out of jobs, you know, working, who are working at restaurants, they can just get jobs as reporters.
I mean, if they want to work, they can just get a job as a reporter.
They can just go become a nurse or a doctor today.
What in the world?
This is a, it's just another version of Learn to Code, right?
It's just another version of, you're gonna lose your job, and therefore, you should just move into an essential industry, except we decide which industries are essential.
You know whose jobs are essential?
Everyone's jobs are essential.
And to pretend that the job is not essential to the person or to the economy is to override both everybody else's free choice and the interests of the person who just lost their job.
And there are 30 million of them.
30 million of them.
Get a job as an essential worker.
Honestly, what is Andrew Cuomo's history of being an essential worker other than working in government?
And by the way, he was just elected to the position.
It is not as though he has provided some eminent and objective benefit to the state of New York through his service.
That's not the way that this works.
Essential workers.
Even the phrase is ridiculous on its face.
That's not to suggest that lockdowns weren't necessary and that there aren't truly essential workers, but I will point out that my job in the media is far less essential than a doctor or a nurse's job.
There are gradations of essential.
And by the way, I'm not sure that, why is it that my job is considered an essential job, doing a podcast and running a website?
Why is my job considered an essential job in the same category as the people who are bringing you your groceries?
It's arbitrary and it's ridiculous and it's silly.
The real reason that they say that the media are an essential job is because they don't want to run into a First Amendment violation is the real reason that they are doing that.
But at the same time, they're saying that pastors and rabbis, I guess, are not essential jobs.
So it's all, this is all arbitrary.
And if it were connected to public health at this point, I'm all in favor of it.
But I don't think that it's connected to public health.
I think that he is using as an excuse for his bad public policy, The, if I save even one life, routine.
Now he's not even the worst.
I mean, first of all, that's an enormous amount of scorn for people who are losing their livelihoods.
And you're seeing it in the media too.
The attempt to portray everybody who's protesting in favor of economy reopening and lockdowns being ended by the government.
The attempt to portray those people as Nazi flag waving morons and white supremacists.
Huffington Post compared them to the Charlottesville protesters.
It's disgusting.
Those are normal people who want to go back to work.
And you know what?
We live in a responsible country.
We live in a republic.
And we will have restrictions on social distancing.
We will have restrictions on wearing masks.
Those will continue to be in place.
But to pretend that those people's interests don't matter, or that, in aggregate, the only interest that matters is a policy that may or may not save lives.
Because we even don't know whether the lockdowns have saved lives in the first place.
I think they probably saved some, at least in the short term.
But we don't know, as the lockdowns are relieved, whether... There's no counterfactual, right?
We don't know what would have happened if we did Y when we did X. There's just no way to tell that.
We don't have a multiple universes machine where we can tell what the counterfactual would have been.
To pretend that you invariably have the right answer because you've decided that it's important that America be bubble boy and that there are no countervailing interests is just bad public policy making.
Speaking of bad public policy making, by the way, I'm just going to point out that AOC continues to just be I've suggested she has the IQ of a kumquat.
I think I'm giving her too much credit.
A kumquat does have a form of life.
It doesn't have a brain, or it doesn't have like a functioning brain stem or anything, but it does have a form of life.
It is animate.
I am not sure that she has an IQ above that of an inanimate object.
I mean, I'm talking about like the IQ of a rock.
Now, a plant doesn't really have a higher IQ than a rock, I suppose, but there's the possibility of some form of life.
Let me put it this way.
There is a vacuum between the ears, like an absolute vacuum.
You could create an ion collider in that head because there's nothing happening up there.
Here was AOC yesterday explaining that after coronavirus is over and we end the lockdowns, people should protest and not go back to work, which is like the most cruel and stupid thing I've ever heard.
Of course people should go back to work.
They should strike, what, so that you can blow out the debt on the basis of future generations and then pay them to not go back to work?
Here's AOC being completely insane.
I think when we talk about this idea of reopening society, you know, only in America does the president, when the president tweets about liberation, does he mean go back to work?
When we, you know, have this discussion about going back or reopening, I think a lot of people should just say, no, we're not going back to that.
We're not going back to working 70 hour weeks just so that we could put food on the table and not even feel any sort of semblance of security in our lives.
Yeah, homelessness is the solution.
Probably dramatic unemployment, refusal to go back to work in a time when there are tens of millions of people who will freely take the job that you once had.
Reopening, only in America is it considered reopening to be able to go back to work.
Really?
It seems like most people want to work.
Most people want to work.
And by the way, if most people don't want to work, then that gives the lie to the basic idea of universal basic income in the welfare state, which is that if you create a disincentive to work, that people will continue to work.
So what she is saying is, of course, full-scale idiocy, and it is scorn for workers, because the idea is you're a sucker.
You're a sucker if you go to work.
If you just listen to AOC, she'll pay your salary.
Having created zero jobs her entire life, she is going to pay your salary today.
All of this does not show a great deal of sympathy for workers who actually need to go feed their families.
And this is why it's important that we actually take into account all of the costs and benefits of the policies that we are implementing right now.
And by the way, even on the life side of the ledger, even on the life side of the ledger, there's good information that a lot of people are dying because they are not going into ERs, even when they need to go into ERs, because they're afraid of coronavirus.
So all the heart attacks have basically disappeared, according to physicians across the country.
California's hospital EDs are strangely quiet places these days, according to the LA Times, because people who are having strokes and heart attacks simply are not coming in.
And they're not coming in because of coronavirus.
So a bunch of people are dying because they're not getting their cancer treatments and their heart attack treatments.
There are lots of balances to be weighed here.
And to pretend that the balance is easy on either side is to be a liar.
And we can get to more of this in just one second.
First, there are lots of things in life we look back on and we think, how could I possibly have gotten this one so wrong?
Like, for example, hiring Michael Mowles.
Just bad decisions that you make in your life.
Well, we're always gonna get things wrong.
That is life.
But there are things we can get right on the first try, like shopping for life insurance.
This is where policy genius comes in.
PolicyGenius makes finding the right life insurance a breeze.
In minutes, you can compare quotes from the top insurers and find your best price.
You could save $1,500 or more a year by using PolicyGenius to compare life insurance policies.
Once you apply, the PolicyGenius team will handle all the paperwork and the red tape for free.
And PolicyGenius doesn't just make life insurance easy.
They can also help you find the right home and auto insurance Or disability insurance.
It's important to get these things taken care of now because, God forbid, you just don't know what's going to happen in the future.
PolicyGenius can make it quick, they can make it easy, and they can competitively price the insurance you need.
All types of insurance.
So even if you look back on the days when you wore a zoot suit in distress, you'll never be distressed with life insurance from PolicyGenius in just a few minutes.
Find your best price and apply at PolicyGenius.com.
Again, that is PolicyGenius.com.
PolicyGenius.com.
Go check them out right now.
PolicyGenius.com.
Okay, we're going to get to more of this in just one second.
We're going to talk about President Trump and a couple of botched media stories.
President Trump going after the governor of Georgia, which is a bizarre take by the president, because one second he's tweeting, liberate Virginia, and the next he's telling the governor of Georgia that he's doing things too soon.
Like, seems like a bit of a mixed message.
We'll get to that in just a second.
First, Being locked inside right now.
It requires double the excitement.
Double the joy.
Double the leftist tears.
You get two of these.
Two of them.
One of them I activated the invisibility cloak on, actually.
So here's the other one, right?
Here is one, and here is the other.
Just to show you the full capacity of the leftist tears tumbler.
You get two of those.
When you become a DailyWire Insider Plus or All Access member, I'm not lying to you.
I'm not kidding.
With Bernie Sanders now out of the race for president, one tumbler is not enough to hold all of the leftist's ears.
Now, you don't believe me that it actually has the capacity for invisibility.
You don't, right?
You think that I'm just making that up.
Whoa.
Whoa!
View the magic!
Daily Wire members get many amazing benefits, including the magnificent, irreplaceable, singular Leftist Tears Tumblr.
You also get an ad-free website experience, access to all of our live broadcasts and show library, the full three hours of The Ben Shapiro Show, access to the mailbag, and now exclusive Election Insight op-eds from moi.
Daily Wire members also get to ask us questions during backstage.
You get to participate in All Access Live, that is our brand new interactive programming featuring one of the Daily Wire hosts as we hang out with you every night from 8 p.m.
Eastern to 5 p.m.
Pacific.
That content is normally for All Access members.
We've opened it up to everybody during the pandemic.
So, again, become an Insider Plus or All Access member.
Double your tiers with two leftist tiers Tumblr.
Go to dailywire.com slash subscribe to get started.
You get 10% off with coupon code Shapiro, which is a great deal, right?
10% off that deal, and you get two of the Tumblrs.
That's dailywire.com slash subscribe, coupon code Shapiro.
You get the rarest of all beverage vessels times two.
You're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
Now, everybody, if they are honest, understands that there are tradeoffs to the lockdown policies and that we don't actually know the full consequence of the tradeoffs.
We know pretty well what the consequences are economically, and that is complete collapse.
What we don't know are the consequences in terms of the virus.
We don't know that yet, because we are seeing what happens in Germany, we're gonna have to see what happens in Sweden, we have to see what happens in countries around the world, which are reopening, by the way.
They are reopening in the same way that Georgia is talking about reopening, but if Georgia does it, it's very bad, and if Trump promotes it, it's very bad, apparently.
The New York Times is quietly recognizing that, hey, public policymaking is trade-offs.
Peter Baker, writing for the New York Times, he says, Until there's a vaccine or a cure, macabre truth is that any plan to begin restoring public life invariably means trading away some lives.
The question is how far will leaders go to keep it to a minimum?
Some of the more provocative voices on the right say that with tens of millions of Americans out of work and businesses collapsing, some people must be sacrificed for the greater good of restoring the economy quickly.
To many, that sounds unthinkable.
But less inflammatory experts and policymakers also acknowledge there are enormous costs to keeping so much of the workforce idle, with many of the unemployed struggling to pay for food, shelter, or medical care for other health challenges.
So look how the New York Times even phrases that.
Right, so the last part, that if you are a less inflammatory expert and you acknowledge trade-offs, that means that you're good.
But if you are a person stumping for lockdowns to be ended, and you acknowledge trade-offs, that's very bad.
So in other words, if the New York Times doesn't like the fact that you have an R by your name, you're a bad person.
And this is the way the media are treating Brian Kemp in Georgia.
Dana Milbank has an absolutely absurd column for the Washington Post today called, Georgia leads the race to become America's number one death destination.
Okay, we know what America's number one death destination is right now, and it's New York City, it ain't Georgia.
But according to Dana Milbank, Governor Brian Kemp is proposing to offer a new non-stop service to the great beyond.
He has a bold plan to turn his state into the place to die.
He's doing this even though the state ranks near last in testing, even though it's not clear COVID-19 cases are declining there, even knowing we're probably going to have to see our cases continue to go up.
Public health experts fear coronavirus will burn through Georgia like nothing has since William Tecumseh Sherman, but Kemp is making a big gamble his constituents wouldn't want to swab places with anyone, and the tourists will be dying to get to Georgia in any class of travel, economy, economy plus, or intensive care.
I mean, like, this kind of ridiculous Phraseology from Dana Milbank.
Oh, he's a very, very bad man, Brian Kemp.
He's the governor of the state.
You actually think that he wants his citizens to die?
I'm fairly certain that none of the governors want people to die.
They have to determine what is the best policy for their states.
And again, a lot of businesses in Georgia have been told they can open up if they meet certain criteria.
They don't meet the criteria, and they're not opening up.
Or they feel like there's not enough of a market for them to open up right now.
Now, President Trump, under heavy media pressure, apparently, President Trump, according to CNN, President Trump called up Brian Kemp yesterday, and he had told Brian Kemp that he supported and praised that move, according to a source familiar with the call, which makes sense.
Trump has been calling for everybody to open up sooner.
The fact is, as I read yesterday from Eric Erickson, that the number of diagnosed cases versus number of tests in Georgia is, in fact, declining.
That outside of Atlanta, which theoretically could be a hotspot, there's a lot of rural Georgia that should be opening.
Even treating places across the state as one unified block is really, really silly.
But Trump has been very much urging people to end the lockdowns as soon as humanly possible.
While under pressure, obviously, yesterday, President Trump decided to undercut I have national control of this issue.
Governors don't have national control.
Governors now have national control.
Trump to cover his political rear and a move that I think, frankly, is wrong.
I mean, if you're going to delegate the power.
So here's what he's done in the past couple of weeks.
I have national control of this issue.
Governors don't have national control.
Governors now have national control.
Governors now have control over their own states.
Stop locking down your states.
Also, Brian Kemp, stop doing what you're doing and ending the lockdown.
That's a very inconsistent message, obviously.
I will note that the media have been similarly inconsistent.
They've been yelling, screaming bloody murder at Brian Kemp.
Jared Polis, the governor of Colorado, is a Democrat.
He also is talking about opening up businesses by May 1st.
Zero coverage.
None.
Nada.
Nil.
Why?
Because he's Jared Polis and he's a Democrat.
Anyway, here was President Trump yesterday undercutting Kemp.
I told the governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, that I disagree.
Strongly with his decision to open certain facilities which are in violation of the phase one guidelines for the incredible people of Georgia.
They're incredible people.
I love those people.
They are.
They're great.
They've been strong, resolute.
But at the same time, he must do what he thinks is right.
I want him to do what he thinks is right.
Okay, but he's now completely covered his ass in case things go wrong in Georgia, right?
By saying, well, I told him that if things go bad, it's really on him.
See, you can't have it both ways.
You can't be like, okay, well, Gretchen Whitmer over in Michigan, open things up right now.
And if you keep them closed, then it's on you.
And then, Brian Kemp, I want you to not open things, like...
Some consistency here would be nice.
Now, he does have the medium ground, I guess.
The White House has the medium ground of being able to say that Georgia doesn't necessarily fit all the criteria that we laid out.
But then why is he tweeting about Michigan, which also doesn't fulfill the criteria he laid out?
So it's a lot of inconsistent messaging from the White House.
The bottom line is this.
Governor Kemp is making a decision.
The decision, I think, is based in the baseline reality that things are not going to radically change, that there is not going to be a cure in the next couple of months, that there is not going to be any therapeutic that really changes things dramatically in the near enough future that we can avoid opening up under these conditions, and that people are going to be responsible.
Which again, I think is a good assumption about the American people.
I think most Americans are responsible.
I think there are a minority of Americans who are morons.
And I think that that's why you need the hotspot tracing to find where those minority of Americans who are gathering in large groups and then infecting each other are infecting each other so we can help lock that down.
But overall, if you don't trust the American people, I don't know why you live in a republic.
I don't know.
I think that President Trump did make a promise yesterday that I don't know how he's going to fulfill.
And I think that being realistic with the American people at this point would be really a good thing.
I know that President Trump wants to cheerlead and I know that he wants to make everybody feel better about what's going on.
I'm all for optimism also.
When President Trump yesterday said we're going to knock out a second wave, I'd like to know how.
Because I think that the danger here is that you are setting up expectations that cannot be met.
And that's actually leading people to want to lock down more than is absolutely necessary.
Here was Trump yesterday talking about knocking out a second wave.
Dr. Robert Redfield was totally misquoted in the media on a statement about the fall season and the Virus.
Totally misquoted.
I spoke to him.
He said it was ridiculous.
He was talking about the flu and corona coming together at the same time.
And corona could be just some little flare-ups that we'll take care of.
We're gonna knock it out.
We'll knock it out fast.
Okay, I mean, I don't know how that's actually going to be the case, and I think that that's promising too much.
It's making people feel as though until they have a guarantee of security, they're not going back to work.
Now, meanwhile, the media continue to be irresponsible in how they handle a lot of this stuff.
They are not giving you any sort... very few.
There's some of the media who are doing it right.
Many in the media are not giving you any sort of real information, and instead, they're playing this ridiculous game where they tell you The same way that they accused Trump of happy talk, they participate in a different type of happy talk, which is, if Trump would just provide one million tests every moment, then we would all be fine.
If Trump just had taken the right actions, this wouldn't be a pandemic.
If Governor Cuomo gets what he wants, if Joe Biden is president, then things will be fixed.
None of that is true.
Okay, let's accept reality for what it is.
Let's accept the fact that public policy is trade-offs and that it is a multivariate analysis.
And let's accept the fact that we actually don't know what's going to happen when we open things up gradually.
But one thing we do know is that the American people are a responsible people.
They are.
Okay, overall, Americans are not going to rush out and do things that are stupid and endanger other Americans.
That is an overall truth.
Americans are going to be cautious in this, which is bad for the economy, truthfully, but very good for the balance that has to be struck.
I trust Americans, and you should trust Americans, too, if you live in a free country.
Alrighty, time for some things that I like, and then we'll get to some things that I hate.
So, things that I like today.
So, yesterday I played a clip of myself.
I love me.
No, no, but it was actually just a clip of me playing violin with my dad, playing Ave Maria, the Bach-Gounod arrangement.
And my dad actually recorded two pieces together.
This one is the Meditation from Thais by Jules Massenet, sort of a classic violin piece.
We put this one up on Instagram, I believe, so if you want to check out the full version, you can do that.
that.
Here is just a little taste. ...
So, if you want to check out the full version, you can head on over to Instagram.
We are taking requests that we're going to prep another couple of pieces because people really seem to be enjoying these, at least in the comments, so we will be doing that.
Okay, time for a thing that I hate.
So the media are really doing yeoman's work in trying to tear down Trump here.
It's pretty impressive.
The fact is that Trump's actions, forget about his words for a second, his actions as the head of the federal government have basically been right.
There's very little that Democrats have suggested that Trump has not done.
The stuff that Democrats are suggesting that he do, that he has not done, is mainly stupid.
Trump has actually handled this thing pretty well from the policy perspective.
He really has.
But that is not stopping the media from basically taking the word of anyone who wants to say a mean thing about Trump.
So, let's take an example.
The New York Times had a piece yesterday.
It was called, Vaccine Chief Says He Was Removed After Questioning Drug Trump Promoted.
The first known U.S.
death from the illness came in early February in California, and according to this vaccine expert, this is the New York Times, the doctor who led the federal agency involved in developing a coronavirus vaccine said on Wednesday he was removed from his post after he pressed for rigorous testing of hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria drug embraced by President Trump as a coronavirus treatment, and that the administration has put politics and cronyism ahead of science.
Dr. Rick Bright was abruptly dismissed this week as Director of the Department of Health and Human Services Biomedical Advanced Research and Developmental Authority, or BARDA, and removed as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response.
He was given a narrower job at the National Institutes of Health.
So he wasn't really fired.
He continued to have his job inside the federal government at the NIH.
In a scorching statement, Dr. Bright assailed the leadership at the health department, saying he was pressured to direct money toward hydroxychloroquine, one of the several potentially dangerous drugs promoted by those with political connections and repeatedly described by the president as a potential game-changer in the fight against the virus.
He said in a statement, I believe this transfer was in response to my insistence that the government invest the billions of dollars allocated by Congress to address COVID-19 into safe and scientifically vetted solutions and not in drugs, vaccines, or other technologies that lack scientific merit.
I'm speaking out because to combat this deadly virus, science, not politics or cronyism, has to lead the way.
And then the New York Times just reports as though this guy is telling the absolute 100% truth because Trump was pumping up hydroxychloroquine.
So it must be that Dr. Bright That Dr. Bright is telling the truth, and the reason he was fired was over a hydroxychloroquine, right?
And the media asked Trump about Dr. Bright, like, repeatedly.
Jim Acosta, and ladies, find you a man who loves you like Jim Acosta loves himself some Jim Acosta.
Jim Acosta on CNN, he reported that this fellow, Dr. Rick Bright, that he was a casualty of Trump's war on science.
War on science.
The guy presents, like, five doctors at every press conference.
But don't worry, Trump is fighting a war on science.
Here is Jim Acosta being Jim Acosta, which is to say, a swirly of a human being.
He sounds like he's a casualty, Anderson, of the president's war on scientists, war on science in the administration.
Dr. Bright is going to file a whistleblower complaint.
He is protesting his removal from his position, leading that agency that is charged with vaccine development.
He was working on a vaccine for the coronavirus when he was abruptly Pulled out of his position.
He had been clashing with top officials at Health and Human Services.
This tendency on the part of the president, other administration officials to show preference for treatments like hydroxychloroquine when the science is just not even settled on that and there are studies showing it doesn't work.
Okay, so this is them just parroting the story.
Now, there's only one problem.
There's only one problem.
Politico actually reported on what happened with Bright.
It ain't Bright's story.
According to Politico, the abrupt ouster of a top vaccine expert at HHS has split officials who see it as either a boon for the nation's COVID-19 response or the latest indication of a dysfunctional health department.
Rick Bright, the director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Developmental Authority, was transferred to a new, more narrow role at the NIH this week, according to an HHS spokesperson.
The move was more than a year in the making.
He wasn't dismissed over hydroxychloroquine.
The move was over a year in the making.
For a year, he'd been conflicting with other health officials.
Bright had clashed with his department leaders about his decisions and the scope of his authority, but came abruptly, said five current and former HHS officials.
One person familiar with the situation said Bright was frozen out of his email and learned about the reassignment only when his name was removed from the BARDA website this weekend.
As of Tuesday, Bright had not accepted the reassignment to NIH, where he was tapped to work on efforts to deploy point-of-care COVID-19 testing.
Bright told the New York Times in a statement just repeated, just verbatim, by the New York Times that he was fired over hydroxychloroquine.
But an official says if Bright opposed hydroxychloroquine, he certainly didn't make that clear from his emails.
Quite the opposite.
Three people with knowledge of HHS's recent acquisition of tens of millions of doses of a variety of drugs said Bright had supported the acquisitions in internal communications, with one official saying that Bright praised the move as a win for the health department as part of an email exchange first reported by Reuters last week, although Bright's message was not publicly reported.
In a statement late Wednesday, an HHS official directly linked Bright's decision to the health department's acquisition of the malaria drugs.
Spokesperson Caitlin Oakley said, as it relates to chloroquine, it was Dr. Bright who requested an emergency use authorization from the FDA for donations of chloroquine that Bayer and Sandoz recently made to the Strategic National Stockpile for use on COVID-19 patients.
The EUA is what made the donated product available for use in combating COVID-19.
And then Bright didn't respond to multiple requests for comments on Tuesday and Wednesday after the health department fought back against him.
Bright said he will ask the HHS's inspector general to investigate the manner in which the administration has politicized the work and has pressured me and other conscientious scientists to fund companies with political connections that lack scientific merit.
So Trump was asked about all this and Trump, being Trump, proceeded to just slam this guy directly into the ground.
Here's Trump slamming this supposed expert vaccine head.
You say he has great gifts, or gifts, what?
Do you know him?
No, no, but have you reviewed him?
Have you, have you studied him?
Have you reported on him?
You said his gifts, his gifts.
I mean... Well, that doesn't mean you have gifts.
I know a lot of people, they play baseball, but they can't hit 150 in the major leagues.
No, no, but you talk about his great gifts.
I mean, okay, Trump ripping into the guy personally.
If you don't know the story, then don't say you know the story.
You should say this is an internal HHS matter.
But then he should refer it over to Azar or the secretary to explain that this guy, basically, it appears he lied to the New York Times, right?
That's what it looks like.
It looks like he went to the New York Times and said, I was fired for political reasons because I opposed the president's favorite cure, this hydroxychloroquine thing.
And then that wasn't why he was fired.
He was in conflict with people for a year.
And then anytime somebody just gives a statement to the New York Times saying that the real reason I was fired is because Trump is a nefarious bad man, then it's apparently totally – we take them at their face value.
It's just, it's absurd.
I mean, the media do such a crappy job.
It's truly incredible.
It's truly incredible.
So, you know, when we look at the media's coverage of this thing, and then we look at Trump's approval rating, recognize that part of that is because Trump says things.
A large part of that is not because of Trump.
A large part of that is because the media spend every waking minute attempting to demonstrate to the American public that Trump is corrupt and evil.
The reality is that they are willing to stretch anything into a story that paints Trump this way.
And it really is awful.
It really is awful.
Judge Trump on the merits of his actual response.
Don't judge him based on the false reports being made by the media.
Alrighty, we'll be back a little bit later today with two additional hours of content.
Otherwise, we'll see you here tomorrow.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Colton Haas.
Directed by Mike Joyner.
Executive producer Jeremy Boring.
Supervising producer Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling.
Assistant director Pavel Lydowsky.
Technical producer Austin Stevens.
Playback and media operated by Nick Sheehan.
Associate producer Katie Swinnerton.
Edited by Adam Siovitz.
Audio is mixed by Mike Koromina.
Hair and makeup is by Nika Geneva.
The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2020.
The UN is predicting 130 million people around the world might die not because of coronavirus, but because of the economic shutdowns associated with coronavirus.
Is it still all worth it to save just one life, Governor Cuomo?
The new numbers expose a fundamental moral error on the left.
That's been around a lot longer than coronavirus.
Then, failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams begins to openly campaign to be Joe Biden's running mate.
Alec Baldwin inadvertently reveals some spiritual truths about quarantine.
And finally, the mailbag.
▲
Export Selection