Sean Hannity Show - Playing Politics with COVID

April 6, 2020 - Sean Hannity Show

01:39:44

Playing Politics with COVID

Sean Davis, co-Founder of The Federalist and Sharyl Attkisson, Investigative Reporter, “Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson” discuss the media and the flip flop we have seen from the MSM as they covered COVID-19 and the politics at play from the left.The Sean Hannity Show is on weekdays from 3 pm to 6 pm ET on iHeartRadio and Hannity.com. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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	This is an iHeart podcast.
	Glad you're with us and happy Monday, if you can call it that.
	I know these are hard times for everybody and everyone's getting a little stir crazy and wanting to get out of the house.
	I've been getting out of the house walking.
	That's right, taking in some pressure.
	It seems to help me a lot.
	Again, 800-941, Sean, you want to be a part of this extravaganza.
	Fascinating information to pass on.
	Fascinating data to pass on.
	The great hydroxychloroquine debate, which we will do a deep dive into today.
	It seems hospitalizations, need for beds, et cetera, et cetera, in New York are not materializing anywhere near what they thought it would be.
	There is some anecdotal evidence.
	We could be at the apex, the leveling, and then hopefully the decline if the patterns hold true, which we have talked extensively about.
	You know, it's moments of crisis.
	I tell you, it's just like my appetite for stupidity is zero.
	You know, some idiot from the media mob calls and is like, I'm like, do you know anything?
	Do you read this?
	Did you read that?
	Did you read this?
	Did you read?
	I'm going through a list of things.
	I said, why don't you sequester yourself for the next 48 hours and call me back?
	Because you don't know a thing.
	And his lack of utter curiosity is breathtaking to me.
	The guy's a young guy.
	And I said, let me advise you right now.
	Do your research.
	Do something on your own.
	My appetite for Joe Biden reversing himself from the xenophobic, hysterical, and fear-mongering travel ban.
	I mean, it's moments like this.
	You just see, wow, I don't know what's worse, that he didn't support it, that he called the president racist, xenophobic, hysterical, and a fear-monger.
	Or now, you know, as I said Friday night, two months and three days later, a little late, Joe.
	You're a little late.
	You know, you can't have a serious discussion about hydroxychloroquine with people that say, well, Trump must, he must probably have a financial tie to hydroxychloroquine.
	The drug's been around 45 years.
	There's nobody making a lot of money on hydroxychloroquine.
	I can tell you that.
	If anyone knows anything about the pharmaceutical industry and how it works, those years that you make money, you got a short window and then everybody starts making it and then you get it for next to nothing.
	That's pretty much how the pattern plays out.
	There is the epic fail of the governor and the mayor of New York.
	I mean, it is the most pathetic display of leadership, all talk, no action that I've ever seen in my life.
	But for Donald Trump, New York would be in far worse shape today by a factor of 100.
	It's amazing.
	And I'll explain all of that.
	I want to spend a lot of time.
	Dr. Oz will check in with us today.
	And some of the data being put out by Sean Davis of the Federalist, Cheryl Atkinson, is fantastic stuff to look at if you're interested in how this is moving and how the predictions are wrong and where do we think it's going, just to try and get ahead of what we expect and manage what our real expectations should be.
	But it is pretty amazing.
	We've never had a mobilization, a healthcare mobilization as this one.
	All the books are being rewritten.
	I mean, you know, we're seeing Navy ship hospitals being deployed to California and New York in record time.
	You've got four huge, including the largest hospital now in New York, 3,000 beds at the Javits Center.
	Not only did the Army Corps of Engineers build it for Cuomo, but now they're going to be manning it for Cuomo because of potential down the line, this being the toughest week, personnel shortages.
	That is an amazing thing.
	We also have eight large medical stations with 2,000 beds for California, three large medical stations and four small medical stations with 1,000 beds, the state of Washington.
	Now, additional locations showing up in New Orleans and other locations in Louisiana, and one in Texas, as I understand it.
	We told you about the USNS Comfort and USNS Mercy in Los Angeles, 1,000 beds each.
	Somehow, COVID-19 got into the comfort in New York.
	That is now going to be converted.
	I think they're going to now take on coronavirus patients there.
	Certainly takes away the overflow.
	One thing they've noticed in New York, first, there are some people in the medical community that are losing jobs.
	I'm sure their skills could be utilized other places if they so desire to get into that fight, different from maybe what their specialty is.
	But just knowing your way around a hospital could probably be very helpful.
	As of April 1st, a number of days ago, 11.6 million N95 mask respirators had been sent out, 26.3 million surgical masks, 5.2 million face shields, 4.3 million surgical gowns.
	Again, this is all from the federal government.
	22.4 million gloves.
	You know, we have 7,000.
	Since then, I know that another 3,000 ventilators have been set.
	10,000 ventilators have been sent.
	Medical beds going up quicker than I could have ever thought possible.
	One thing that Fauci said, and we're running into an old order of the way of doing things versus the new speed of technology and demand for, let's just say, thinking out of the box, because whatever book was written about pandemics, it's now rewritten, starting with travel bans will be automatic.
	Public-private partnerships, that's the future.
	Telemedicine, that is the future.
	At-home testing, which they're developing, that's the future.
	This week they roll out antibody testing to see if you had COVID-19.
	The new ABBA test, they're going to start this week doing 50,000 tests a day, which is great.
	Anyway, Fauci had authored Navigating and Unchartered.
	And if one assumes the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%, which he had said to me in the last interview I had with him, which suggests the overall clinical consequences of COVID-19 may ultimately be more akin, again, this is Fauci, to those of a severe seasonal influenza,
	which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1% or a pandemic influenza similar to 1957 and 68, rather than a disease similar to SARS and MARES, which have had case fatality rates 9 to 10% and 36% respectively.
	If there's any good news, if we're going to take any good news out of this, if you look at the government records numbers, as all of this is reported, when they were making their models and projections, for example, they thought that over 121,000 Americans would be hospitalized as of yesterday with coronavirus.
	The actual number was only 31,142.
	And then if you look at the specific states, there's a breakdown.
	You know, the state of Texas, for example, they predicted 1,716.
	It ended up being dramatically lower, like 200 and something.
	Same with Georgia.
	They thought it would be close to 3,000.
	It was more close to a thousand and other states all across the board.
	In New York, for example, they had predicted 51,000 New Yorkers would be hospitalized as of yesterday.
	The actual number was 18,368.
	What does that mean?
	That means that it is not as bad as the original projections and that mitigation efforts, travel ban, quarantine, and the guidelines as issued by the task force being listened to are having a significant impact.
	That I would say is a good thing for everybody.
	Now, as it relates to the treatment, let me just start with, I don't know why, as I watch the mob in these press conferences, I get the very distinct impression that they don't read and that they don't listen to anybody or anything other than their own points of view.
	I mean, the level of ignorance just in their questions alone is pretty spectacular.
	You know, there was this international study, and I'll give you the details as we go on here.
	You know, 6,300 doctors worldwide, their number one treatment for coronavirus is hydroxychloroquine, along with the Zithromax, and in some cases, zinc, in other cases, also adding something like vitamin C.
	I mean, just different variations of it.
	We know NYU is testing hydroxychloroquine as a possible preventative.
	That test is also being done by Columbia, and Dr. Oz will join us later because patients with lupus and rheumatoid arthritis that have been taking hydroxychloroquine are seemingly not getting or not, the rate of contraction is negligible versus the general population, if at all.
	We have some people in New York, doctors now, up till even today.
	Now, we have 29, according to the president yesterday, 29 million doses of hydroxychloroquine right now available.
	I know that millions were sent to Cuomo today and yesterday, and millions were sent to New Jersey today and yesterday.
	And I had been saying to Cuomo, and I wrote an op-ed, and we put it up on Hannity.com.
	It's on my Twitter page, that he's got to let doctors and patients make the decision themselves because in a survey of 6,300 doctors, if patients want the right to choose Governor Cuomo, let them choose if their doctor recommends it, hydroxychloroquine.
	And as many as 4,000 seriously ill coronavirus patients in New York are now being treated with the drug.
	And they've been treated, by the way, in New York hospitals.
	But the problem with his plan is that he's forcing people whose doctors want them on it, but have no need to be in a hospital.
	You can't get it any other place but a hospital.
	And if you put it into the pharmacies and it is working and Dr. Oz is going to argue on this program today, it's no longer anecdotal as I've been suggesting.
	A lot of anecdotal evidence, what doctors are saying, what doctors that are prescribing are saying, what patients that have taken it are saying after having taken it.
	It's now beyond that.
	And he will explain in detail.
	He has some really good news to share with you today.
	But a state health department official, you know, they ship now doses all over the place.
	Now the president said the governor of New York finally is going to open it to pharmacies.
	That will relieve some of the pressure on hospitals as we hit the apex week that his own health department task force warned about.
	And this is that week.
	And if he had purchased per their recommendation, because they said it was his responsibility to do so and that this was going to happen, this was foreseeable, but he failed to do it, we'd be in a lot better shape.
	Anyway, so even the president said, again, everyone makes their own medical decisions in consultation with your own doctor.
	I know many of you lost your doctor, lost your plan, and are paying more, but putting that separate issue aside.
	A Connecticut dad, this was in the New York Post, was on death's doorstep before chloroquin saved his life.
	I was in the New York Post today.
	The wife of this guy, Elizabeth, said when doctors first tried hydroxychloroquine, there was not an immediate noticeable response.
	Then his condition started to turn around just as doctors were about to switch him to a different treatment.
	I want to know what worked for him.
	Well, a lot of doctors and a lot of people are saying that.
	Long Island Doctor says hydroxychloroquine has saved dozens of infected nursing home patients.
	The list of people that I can now name and doctors now supporting this is a mile long.
	And people are saying, well, you're not a doctor?
	No, but the president reads these people and the mob and the media, they clearly don't want the information.
	Again, what's important to them at any given moment?
	It seems to be always trivial and always hate Trump.
	Because if they would read the data, don't believe Dr. Hannity, believe Dr. Oz, because I'm not a doctor.
	Believe Dr. Oz.
	Listen to him.
	All these doctors, and I will list the names throughout the show today.
	Listen to them.
	We'll get the names of all the patients that are gladly telling their story how it helped save their lives or loved ones talking about their loved ones being saved because of the use of it.
	If you have a survey worldwide, and it's the number one treatment of doctors worldwide, when the country of Turkey confiscates all the hydroxychloroquine so they can take control of it and get control of the disease within their country by using it, and 73% of patients in Spain are taking it.
	And, you know, you ask yourself the simple question, what are the risks?
	Well, as of now, they're mild to negligible.
	And don't forget the drug has been around 45 years.
	You know, people are taking it for lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, and it's an anti-malarial drug.
	And people are acting like this is just something that was cooked up in a scientist's lab over the weekend and we're just passing it out like candy.
	No, there's a ton of stuff you can read about it if you care to learn something.
	These people are so pathetically lazy.
	It's unbelievable.
	6,300 doctors worldwide survey.
	Their number one treatment option is hydroxychloroquine.
	Those are facts.
	I'm not a doctor.
	Make up your own mind.
	For me, I made up my mind.
	And I'll share as much data information and tell you how I got to my decision.
	Dr. Oz has some good news on the program.
	The American Thoracic Society, they issued guidelines Monday suggesting patients with pneumonia get doses of hydroxychloroquine.
	The president has added now 29 million doses of hydroxychloroquine, sending millions to New York.
	So now it appears that finally Andrew Cuomo, who needed everything done for him, everything, he listened to nobody, and I'll get into that.
	Andrew Cuomo will then have to allow the pharmacies to now again fulfill prescriptions for hydroxychloroquine.
	I'm going to talk to Dr. Oz at the top of the next hour.
	He is saying the time for saying this is anecdotal is over, and he's going to explain it.
	The prediction was, as of yesterday, that we would have had 121,000 Americans hospitalized, many of them in New York.
	That number never materialized.
	It was 31,142.
	And similarly, those needing ICU units is only a fraction of what had been predicted as well.
	Now, when we get back, the debate over hydroxychloroquine, and, you know, at the end of the day, you're going to decide.
	Your doctor's gonna decide because you can't get it without a doctor's prescription.
	But why is this being embraced?
	And why do I look at it as something interesting?
	All right, 25 now until the top of the hour, 800-941, Sean, you want to be a part of the program?
	Dr. Oz at the top of the next hour.
	No, we've had all these doctors on the program.
	We've been asking all of them, what do they think of hydroxychloroquine?
	Now, this is a personal decision.
	Every individual's got to make it themselves.
	Every doctor will have to make it themselves.
	There is, in my mind, an underlying conflict and battle that has emerged.
	I mean, it is, you know, in the words of Dr. Oz, what he's been saying is, well, you go to war with what you got.
	And then you have, you know, look, I would say with all the new rules being written on pandemics, travel bans were never brought into effect.
	Now, that'll be the future.
	Telemedicine will be the future.
	Drive-up testing, home testing, then or after, now that we can break down the sequences of viruses, by the time you get to a vaccine, too many people will have died if it's a pandemic.
	But, you know, this is a predictable thing that's going to happen.
	So, you know, you have this old style of thinking.
	Well, we've got to have, you know, before we can put our seal of approval on a treatment method, we must have the clinical trials.
	And there are many doctors that are completely and totally risk averse.
	And frankly, there are other doctors that fit into the category.
	I don't feel like getting sued.
	And that is a big part of that category.
	And so you begin by looking at what we call anecdotal information that is available.
	Now, one of the things that I've been fascinated by, and there are studies being done by both NYU, Langone, it's being funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is patients that take hydroxychloroquine palupis and rheumatoid arthritis.
	Well, they seem very less, they seem in a category all unto themselves in terms of least likely to contract, according to as of now, anecdotal evidence, the coronavirus, contract the disease.
	Well, why is that?
	Does it have to do with the medicine that they're taking?
	Well, the doctors I talk to and bring on the air to you seem to suggest there is now evidence that suggests that's true.
	That would be good.
	You have to assess with your doctor, okay, what are the risks?
	You have to ask doctors, well, why are you prescribing it?
	You can listen into all the people that we've interviewed, the doctors that have used hydroxychloroquine along with azisromyosin and or zinc, in some cases, vitamin C.
	Okay, what are the risks that we do know?
	Well, we know you can get a rash.
	That's one of the risks.
	We know that if you have underlying health issues, it's always a bigger risk no matter what you do, or hepatitis C or something like that.
	If you have arrhythmia, that's a big risk associated with hydroxychloroquine.
	If you take it in high doses, well, then it has the possibility of impacting your eyesight, but not at the doses from all that I've read that we're suggesting here.
	But you got to make that decision on your own.
	Now, if the mitigation along with the travel ban and the quarantines do work, well, and hydroxychloroquine, if people can get it at the first initial signs they may have it or confirmed case, but that may be asymptomatic or only have mild symptoms, well, what would that mean if it is working?
	Like 73% of patients now in Spain have gotten it.
	Turkey is giving it to anybody that would have it.
	And some countries are even giving it out prophylactically because they think it will prevent contraction of the disease.
	And this is where I get so frustrated with the media because they're too lazy to read.
	But if in fact it mitigates further, if mitigation is working and travel bans are working and disruption of our lives are working and using masks and social distancing is working.
	Well, if hydroxychloroquine is helping people get better faster and is maybe at some point we'll learn even more and better news on it.
	That means less hospitalizations.
	That means less need for ventilation.
	By the way, all the talk about ventilators, you don't want to get on a ventilator.
	Your odds then are, you're not in good shape if you're on the ventilator.
	Let me put it that way.
	And that would mean less hospitalization, less need for ventilation, more care available for those that are really sick.
	But if you're really busy and the hospitals were overwhelmed, you're not going to have that ability.
	You know, Dr. Oz, who I've really gotten to know, I talked to this guy at three in the morning now every night.
	We were up talking late last night.
	And he's now making the case that this claim, you know, the supportive data is only anecdotal.
	He says, no, we've moved beyond that.
	He's going to make that case to you at the top of the hour, and I'll let him tell you why.
	There is a new clinical study that was done in France that he's going to share with you today.
	And he got an update just last night from French doctors.
	And, you know, what he's been saying is everyone that's saying it's unproven, but its official definition is demonstrated by evidence or argument to be true or existing.
	He said it's a false statement.
	And he's even saying it's intellectually dishonest.
	And I'll let him make his case for you.
	But, you know, what he had been saying, look, we not only have the patients that he's put on his show, people I've interviewed that have used it on this show and on TV, but we've also had, you know, the doc, the other doctors overwhelmingly saying it.
	You know, again, you can go to the study that came out, which I think is pretty interesting.
	That you have 6,300 doctors.
	And wow, they're all saying the same thing.
	This is a pretty amazing study, a global survey.
	This was in, I first saw it in the Washington Times, an international poll, 6,227 physicians, 30 countries, and they found that 37% of treating COVID-19 patients rated hydroxychloroquine as the most effective therapy.
	And they found the most commonly prescribed treatments to be analgesics and azithromycin and hydroxychloroquine.
	And a ZPAC.
	So they're putting it together.
	Now, that's another risk, by the way.
	If you put a ZPAC together with the hydroxychloroquine, there has been some issues where it is more effective and some issues where maybe a little more risky for patients to take that combination.
	But talk to your doctors.
	I mean, that's why you have a doctor to ask questions of.
	I saw in New York now, we're seeing this basically being the baseline treatment in every hospital of every doctor that I know.
	All these hospitals in New York are using it.
	The problem with Cuomo's stupid policy is Cuomo is forcing people into the hospital system, which we've been worried might be overridden and overtaxed, to get the medicine that their doctors would gladly prescribe if they're at home, but he won't allow pharmacies to fill the prescription.
	So you have to tell your patient, go to the hospital, which is probably in this day and age the last place you want to go.
	Then, of course, you have people playing politics with all of this.
	A Democratic state representative in Ohio, Keith, she can't take it anymore.
	She's vowing to refer President Trump to the International Criminal Court for Crimes Against Humanity.
	Oh, really?
	But anyway, back to Dr. Oz for a second here.
	And he interviewed this French infectious disease specialist who had released the first bit of data on a small group of patients that were treated in a particular case.
	And he believed that the combination of hydroxychloroquine with azithromyosin, Z-PAC, in other words, could reduce the amount of virus released by patients and make them less infectious.
	And anyway, he released the first data of 80 sequential patients on the protocol, and it revealed very few side effects and better results than experts would expect.
	But he says drawing conclusions with a randomized control group is difficult.
	And of course, the American medical community, the Food and Drug Administration, yeah, it would be best if we could all have large randomized trials before supporting widespread use.
	By the way, the Turkeys, the country of Turkey and China, well, they include it in their official protocols, as is Spain, as is the French in France, et cetera, et cetera.
	Anyway, he also points out that in admissions in the Wuhan hospital, and again, more evidence, none of them were systemic lupus or patients taking this, those with rheumatoid arthritis.
	And what they're finding is they noticed coronavirus, that those patients weren't having, there were no rheumatoid arthritis patients.
	There were no lupus patients coming in to get treated.
	None of the 80 patients with lupus treated with the medication were infected.
	Okay, at that point, I'd say we're still at the anecdotal level.
	All the interviews you hear from doctors, et cetera, okay, we can say it's anecdotal.
	And as Dr. Oz said in his first column, this raises the possibility that hydroxychloroquine may prevent infection.
	Well, there are two studies now going into that very issue.
	And Dr. Zan Zhang and her respected team initiated the randomized trial, the results of which they released prior to peer review.
	But they looked at 62 patients diagnosed with COVID-19, 31 randomly assigned to either a control group or experimental group.
	And the control group received standard treatment, oxygen therapy, antivirals, antibiotics, and immunomodulators.
	The experimental group got 400 milligrams hydroxychloroquine per day for five days.
	What did they find?
	Well, those taking hydroxychloroquine, on average, one day less fever and cough compared to control.
	More impressively, 81% of patients taking hydroxychloroquine had improvement in pneumonia on CT scans compared to the control group, which was only 55%.
	Now he's got a new study he's going to share with us of apparently 1,000 patients in France that is showing incredible results.
	And I'll let him break that news for you.
	And he goes on that he interviewed the famous famed virus hunter, Dr. Ian Lipkin, on his show to talk about all of this.
	And, well, if you watched that particular show, he highlighted another recent study that found no difference in the outcome with hydroxychloroquine treated patients and control groups, but the study was even smaller.
	And then he goes into this argument.
	You march into battle with the army you have.
	Sure, the Dr. Fauci's of the world are right.
	It'd be better to wait longer, as long as possible.
	All the studies.
	You got to remember, too, it's a drug that's been around for 45 years.
	In other words, if the risks were such that people would die just from taking the drug, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
	We've got a doctor in LA saying very much the same thing.
	I read that on the Blaze today.
	And so anyway, just to give you a little headline of what he's saying about this trial that took place, is that all of the information that we're now receiving, he is now saying we are beyond using the term anecdotal.
	He says we are.
	He says in every article, they claim it's anecdotal.
	He now is saying this is a case series and randomized trials, and he's right.
	But I'll let him, he's the real doctor, explain all of that to you, which brings us to the question of, well, why are there, you have the American Medical Association president saying to the President Trump yesterday, what do you have to lose your life?
	Now, okay, I can understand that.
	I have issues with the AMA, big Obamacare supporters and big anti-gun people.
	And clearly they have political agendas and clearly they have an agenda for those in medicine.
	So I, you know, I take it with a grain of salt.
	And there are other medical groups out there that actually give guidelines, as I mentioned earlier in the program, because I think that's important.
	For example, the Thoracic Society, they actually issued guidelines for coronavirus patients and doctors too.
	But, you know, ultimately, it's going to be up to you.
	You know, you can't count on the news media mob.
	They just hate Donald Trump, Mika Brzezinski.
	Trump promotes COVID cure so much, he must have a financial tie to this.
	I'm like, okay, if you want to politicize that too, that's.
	Dr. Fauci wasn't allowed to talk about what he feels is important to say about this drug that the president keeps pushing.
	A lot of people would say, follow the money.
	There's got to be some sort of financial tie to someone somewhere that has the president pushing this repeatedly.
	You know, I mean, well, how do you even respond to that?
	One thing I will say now that Cuomo said, oh, yeah, no, we're seeing hopeful signs because hydroxychloroquine is all over his state.
	And now the president's given him the millions more doses that he can put it back in the pharmacies.
	And I wrote a big piece.
	It's on Hannity.com now.
	Governor Cuomo, stop denying New Yorkers, and I go into, in consultation with your doctor, the right to go to a drugstore and pick up this medicine.
	You know, his own Department of Labor can't even handle the crush of unemployment.
	This failure, you know, I went into a deep dive in this other article on Hannity.com, and it's called the Ventilator Allocation Guidelines, New York State Task Force on Life and the Law, New York Department of Health.
	And this is November 2015.
	It says in this report, during a severe, page 30, during a severe influenza pandemic, there is likely to be a projected shortfall of ventilators just in New York, 15,783 during peak week demand.
	Saturday, Cuomo is on TV.
	We ordered 17,000.
	He ordered it like a few weeks ago.
	He didn't listen to his own recommendation, healthcare task force.
	The health commissioner at the time, Dr. Howard Zucker, writes this in the beginning.
	Dear New Yorkers, protecting the health and well-being of New Yorkers is a core objective of the Department of Health.
	During flu season, we are reminded that a pandemic influenza, listen to this, is a foreseeable threat, one we cannot ignore.
	In light of this possibility, the department is taking steps to prepare for a pandemic to limit the loss of life and other negative consequences.
	Now, listen to this.
	An influenza pandemic would affect all New Yorkers.
	We have a responsibility to plan now.
	Part of that planning is to develop guidelines on how to ethically allocate resources, i.e. ventilators, during a severe influenza pandemic.
	This is when they came up with the 2015 ventilator allocation guidelines.
	Why?
	To save lives.
	Did the governor buy any of the nearly 16,000 they said they would be short during peak week like this?
	No, he did not.
	Who built the hospitals?
	Trump.
	Who sent the ventilators?
	Trump.
	Who sent the respirators and the gowns and the gloves?
	Trump sent them.
	Who's building hospitals all over the state?
	Trump.
	It's the single biggest epic fail by the biggest mouth I've ever seen in my life.
	All talk, no action politician, Andrew Cuomo.
	The only one that is worse than him is the Blasio.
	They failed the people of New York, but he talks so much, people think, oh, he must really care.
	Unbelievable.
	Trump built all the hospitals.
	Trump sent all the ventilators, and Trump is sending all the hydroxychloroquine.
	Cuomo decided to waste $750 million on one green project, $90 billion on another green project.
	I mean, it's unbelievable.
	I mean, the millions that this guy wasted, hundreds of millions.
	All right, Glad, you're with us.
	Hour two, Sean Hannity Show.
	The Prime Minister of Great Britain, Boris Johnson, now has been moved to the ICU unit 24 hours after being admitted to the hospital, like everyone else.
	Thoughts and prayers are with him.
	And I know many people have their prayers out for everybody and those that are dealing with this.
	The big debate that has really, well, we have some news that is good news.
	The percentage, the predicted beds that would be needed as of yesterday in the country were about 121,000, and we only needed about 31,000 beds.
	The predictions in terms of ICU, similarly, 25% of that predicted.
	That is good news.
	The battle over hydroxychloroquine being used in the state of New York, now it's being used everywhere, but the governor has issued an executive order that he suggested he'd be lifting as soon as the federal government.
	They have 29 million doses of hydroxychloroquine.
	They will be releasing more to New York.
	He says he will put it into pharmacies, which means that doctors that want to prescribe it for patients, that in fact they would have the option to do so.
	We've been talking a lot about it, and we, up until, say, today, have been saying that, well, we're watching anecdotally.
	Here are the people that have been off-label prescriptions of hydroxychloroquine in many instances with zithromyosin, some instances, zinc and vitamin C, are showing dramatic improvement.
	And we have talked at length about all of these cases, and we've interviewed patients that speak highly of it.
	Doctors, we've told you there was a survey, 6,227 doctors worldwide, and they came out with a, you know, by far, hydroxychloroquine was their treatment of choice.
	Now, if it does, as we have been telling you anecdotally, keep people out of the hospital, then it makes sense.
	Are there dangers?
	Are there side effects?
	Well, everyone has to consult with their doctor, but this drug's been around 45 years.
	If you have underlying health issues, it's a problem.
	Arrhythmia, it's a problem.
	You could have a rash, long-term, high doses.
	You could have eyesight issues.
	But again, you have to make that decision with your doctors.
	Dr. Oz has been on this show every day now for a long time, and he has some really good news.
	And Dr. Oz, you're telling me we are beyond saying it's anecdotal.
	You know, this word anecdote is an interesting one.
	It's sort of an insult, actually, within medicine, because you're basically saying the best you could do is just give just your personal opinion, having watched something.
	It turns out that a lot of the advances came because people were observant.
	And so I don't mind anecdotal reports, but you can't crutch on that to make big decisions.
	But it's unfair to say hydroxychloroquine is purely an anecdotal observation.
	You have a large case series, and that's different from an anecdote.
	The case series is we tracked a lot of people.
	We had a protocol.
	We watched what happened to them.
	It's not one person or five or seven.
	In this case, I just talked this morning to Didier Rolti, very well-known French infectious disease.
	I'm going to slow you down here.
	Did the first.
	Well, I well, it wasn't quite a trial, but he gave the first test of hydroxychloroquine and you wrote about it going back now a couple of weeks.
	Now he's done a bigger test right, but it was a combination of this malaria drug with ZPAC azithromycin.
	That's what he did uniquely and, to my knowledge, the first person to do it, and he got the idea from the Chinese.
	So he's very humble about that.
	I'll come back to China in a second because it's critical to the story, but he's been every week honorably showing up and updating me.
	He's on my show tomorrow.
	You can watch him firsthand.
	He's a very innovative guy.
	He's discovered whole categories of viruses.
	So this guy's not a latecomer.
	He's a professor and has the most number of citations to his name in his field in the world.
	So it's not such a some small-time player.
	And in his opinion, an infectious disease, unlike, for example, high blood pressure research, where you have to do a randomized trial and study both sides carefully because you don't know what difference the blood pressure makes on heart disease.
	It's a bunch of indirect connections that may take years to pan out.
	But he says with an infection, if you come in with a bacteria and I treat it with an antibiotic and I kill the bacteria, that is considered success.
	I don't have to look for a lot of other things about it.
	So randomizing people to not getting antibiotics so they die of the infection is not what we do in my specialty.
	That's what he tells me.
	So he told me today that he has now, he had 80 patients the last time we spoke.
	He now has a thousand patients that he's followed carefully.
	He has more than that that have come to the hospital.
	But 1,000 patients, all COVID, 19 positive, that he's put on this combination drug therapy.
	He's had seven people die.
	You would normally expect to have of the people who go to the hospital.
	This is not everyone who gets the illness, people actually came to the hospital with this.
	You'd have a significantly, I shouldn't say the word significant, that's reserved for a particular purpose, but a meaningfully better result than you would normally expect.
	And then he got 20 people that were in the ICU.
	Again, you would have expected more from 1,000 people normally.
	So he's not trying to make gargantuan claims.
	He's just saying, in my practice, this is working, and it's becoming the norm in other countries.
	I asked him about the Chinese study because that is a randomized trial.
	That's exactly what Dr. Fauci and all the other very thoughtful scientists are asking for.
	Don't bias it.
	put half the people on the pill, half not, and that trial showed that there was a clinically significant and a significantly statistical benefit, reducing cough, reducing fever, and reducing pneumonia, which is the bigger...
	Now, in fairness, there was another trial where they threw the kitchen sink at everybody, and everyone did great.
	And I'm saying, well, my goodness, if the Chinese are getting these kinds of results, maybe we want to use hydroxychloroquine, and then we want to, if we can, use the azithromycin.
	And then maybe if they're using an antiviral, which they do in China, it's part of their state protocol.
	They do that, and they seemingly get pretty good results.
	I wish we could get those kinds of numbers.
	But people keep saying, oh, it's an anecdotal study.
	There's flimsy data.
	I mean, please, this is more data than I would bet half of the public recommendations we give.
	Like sneezing into your arm if you have a cold.
	Have you ever told anyone that?
	No.
	No, you sneeze in the arm.
	Yeah.
	Is that a bad idea?
	No, I don't know.
	I actually like the idea.
	Never proven.
	Never proven to be true.
	Here's my questions.
	You know, and I, because one of the main questions I would ask you, and I've read so much.
	I'll be honest, Dr. Oz, I'm not a doctor.
	I tell people I'm not a doctor.
	I joke about not being a doctor.
	So I tell people to consult with their doctors.
	And I have so much respect for you.
	And you're not the only doctor of my life.
	And all my doctor friends say the same thing you're saying and are looking at it the same way.
	Now, there seems to be a conflict between sort of an old style way of looking at everything.
	We must have the clinical trials.
	We must have people that would be completely risk averse.
	Here's my observation.
	6,227 doctors worldwide.
	That is their number one treatment option.
	It is now 73% of my numbers are right of those treated in Spain.
	They're using it in France.
	They are using it.
	We know Turkey has confiscated it all for the distribution to the population within Turkey.
	We know Israel is using it.
	We know they're using it in Great Britain and elsewhere and all these other bits of information.
	So here's my point.
	Now you have to ask these questions.
	What are the risks?
	What are the risks?
	If somebody gets a positive COVID-19 diagnosis, I know what I would do after all that I've read, but I'm not a doctor and people in consultation with their doctor.
	What are the risks that you think that you see?
	Well, let me tell you what I do.
	When I don't know something well, I get a specialist.
	I can tell you that the vast majority of doctors in America have probably never prescribed this drug, or they certainly don't know much about it, because we don't use it in heart surgery as an example.
	However, you know who uses it all the time?
	The rheumatologists, because they take care of the lupus patients.
	So today, I just filmed it.
	It's going to be on the show tomorrow.
	I taped with one of the heads of their society, one of the most prestigious guys.
	His name is Dr. Wallace.
	And this gentleman is the head of the program at Cedars Sina, which is a very prestigious hospital in Los Angeles.
	He's Selena Gomez's doctor, by the way.
	And she's talked about him as being important.
	So he's a big hitter.
	And he said the rheumatology community is stunned, stunned that there's such a big deal being made about this drug being dangerous because they prescribe it for the 300,000 lupus patients in the country continuously.
	They're on it all the time.
	He says, in our protocols, we never mention the heart.
	We don't check the EKG.
	No one has any protocols for short-term use to check for the eyes.
	He says the incidence of eye damage in the reported incidents at five years is zero.
	At 10 years, because you're using it for chronic use, at 10 years, it's 1%, but you can prevent that by examining their eyes.
	We're talking about a week to 10 days.
	What are we learning from lupus patients and rheumatoid arthritis patients that have prescribed this medicine and the rate of infection for COVID-19?
	Aha.
	Great question, Hannity.
	And by the way, I do my research, doctor.
	Yeah, you should toast the show.
	I think you've got a future.
	Yeah, you don't believe in Dr. Hannity.
	But the point is, you're doing a study.
	NYU is doing a study, I know.
	So here's what we're trying to do.
	Two-pronged.
	First, we want to know, if we look at all the insurance and hospital documents on patients over the last couple months, right, what number, what percentage of people who have lupus on this hydroxychloroquine, which most of them are on, got COVID-19.
	And then conversely, how many of the COVID-19 patients we know, because we've got hundreds of thousands now, how many of them have lupus, right?
	So we just did a little punch biopsy of the country.
	Again, this is the big topic tomorrow.
	I'll be talking about it because I want people to understand I'm not claiming that we know the answer, but with a 1% population review, we haven't found anybody who has COVID-19 who has a diagnosis of lupus on hydroxychloroquine.
	And none of the chronic patients on hydroxychloroquine have contracted lupus.
	I mean, I've contracted COVID-19.
	So none of the flu people have lupus.
	None of the lupus people have the flu.
	You know, the infection, coronavirus.
	So now we're starting thinking, okay, well, what's going on here?
	Is that evidence?
	So I approached Tima Verma, who's been fantastic.
	She's the head of Medicare Medicaid, right?
	CMS.
	And she has agreed to help and participate.
	They have 40 million people in that program.
	It's a lot of data.
	And then we're also approaching all the Blues programs, the Blue Cross programs across the country, and some of them have already agreed.
	And we're going to couple together tens of millions of medical records and charts, reviews, and we have a very effective way of using big data and deep analytics to figure out: is this just an observation that is just a blip, not really a big deal?
	Or are we onto something that's pretty significant?
	Now, I asked DDA in Paris, he said the same thing.
	None of his patients have lupus on hydroxychloroquine.
	I asked Dr. Walls in your practice personally, how many patients do you have?
	He said 800.
	How many have COVID-19?
	He said none.
	I said, at Cedar Sinai, how many rheumatologists?
	40, big practice.
	There have been a thousand admissions.
	One patient who wasn't taking the medication in a regular fashion had COVID-19.
	Not another one in that whole group.
	And you think they'd be high risk.
	So I'm not sure yet, but I'm tantalized by this.
	And the reason I'm even going with the show tomorrow because normally I wouldn't, is I'm trying to attract people.
	So it's an APB.
	If you're listening to the Hannity show now, if you know someone or if you personally have lupus taking hydroxychloroquine and you have COVID-19, please let us know.
	On droz.com is a whole page.
	We want to call you.
	We want to understand what happened.
	I'm looking for literally one person in the country where this is true.
	I'm sure we'll find people.
	But I want to identify if that's the case, what happened with you, or if in fact we find nobody.
	What you're seeing right now is that there's a good possibility this is prophylactic applications.
	Am I wrong?
	I don't want to say good possibility.
	Nothing is dissuading me from thinking that from what I've seen.
	You want to be dissuaded.
	So if you take hydroxychloroquine for lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, go to what's with droz.com or we'll link it to Hannity.com, make it easy, but we'll put it up and people should contact you.
	All right, here's what I want to ask.
	For those that are attacking the president, attacking me for putting people like you on and putting other doctors on, I put many doctors on that are saying the exact same thing.
	It's being widely used all around the world.
	This is irresponsible.
	One Ohio lawmaker wants to sue President Trump for saying, hey, what have you got to lose?
	The American Medical Association, you're a life.
	Okay, give us the evidence of that.
	Because I don't see it.
	Do you see that the American Medical Association's right?
	I don't.
	I'm not quite sure what was going on with that.
	I saw it, and I'm just kidding.
	They like Obamacare.
	Let's put it that way.
	But go ahead.
	Well, I'm asking people who do this for a living, and they're scoffing at the physician response to this.
	And they think it's actually influenced by people writing stories about complications that aren't really legit.
	There was an article that I just was exposed to yesterday about how if you combine it with one of the diabetes medications, it's toxic.
	So I asked if that's possible.
	He says, we have a huge number of diabetics with this medication.
	They have no issues.
	And then I looked at the paper.
	It's a rat study.
	They gave literally 10 times more than you would ever give a human.
	Let me get this.
	So it's a useless desperate.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	So let me ask you this.
	Am I being irresponsible, telling people, hey, after all I've read, if you in consultation with your doctor want to take it, that's what I would do.
	I'm not a doctor.
	That's what I tell people.
	Am I being irresponsible?
	I think most doctors would agree with you.
	We have evidence that most doctors would agree.
	Yeah, I know.
	I mean, that's the point.
	Well, anyway, so we're going to have the latest.
	Yeah, go ahead.
	I'm going to have the latest on Hannity tonight.
	Go ahead.
	Well, thank you.
	Yeah.
	I don't want to have an anti-intellectual movement against something that, I mean, it seems that would like, look, what does a doctor do?
	And since you're up-and-coming Dr. Hannity, a doctor does two things.
	You ask questions humbly because you'll never learn at all.
	You ask questions and you search for solutions.
	So that's exactly what we're trying to do.
	This is a cheap, inexpensive product.
	It is the standard in other countries.
	I just don't understand it.
	It is completely.
	And the risks based on all you've read and everybody that prescribes this is low.
	That's what you just got done saying.
	If appropriately prescribed, according to the people who do it, it's extraordinarily low.
	All right, Dr. Oz, we'll see you on Hannity tonight.
	The numbers are much lower.
	ICU beds needed hospital admissions.
	All right, Clint, you're with us.
	25 to the top of the hour.
	Sean Davis, Cheryl Atkinson, in just a moment.
	Rasmussen now has 1,000 likely voters.
	Democrats, 46% likely Democrats, still believe Biden would make the better presidential candidate for their party.
	45% opt for Andrew Cuomo.
	Told you this was coming.
	I mean, the talk, the chitter chatter has been all over the place.
	You know, something needs to be said here because, but for, listen, this, this is, and Sean Davis is tweeting out a lot of really amazing information.
	It was predicted yesterday 121,000 Americans would be hospitalized.
	And that the real number turned out to be 31,142.
	Thankfully, God, you know, much less.
	Same with ICU beds needed.
	We'll get to that with him in a minute.
	But, you know, I watch Cuomo, very all talk, no action politician.
	And I watch everybody.
	Oh, he's amazing.
	He talks and everything.
	He can talk.
	And if it weren't for Donald Trump, New York would not survive all this because he did nothing to prepare the state that would be most vulnerable for any influenza pandemic.
	He did absolutely nothing.
	I mean, what New York has given, now he did say today, yeah, oh, well, now that we're getting all the new hydrochloroquine from the feds, we're going to allow pharmacies probably.
	I'll lift the executive order.
	If you look at all that has been given to New York by Donald Trump, it is Donald Trump's hospitals that are taking on the brunt of COVID-19 for the whole state of New York.
	I mean, not only did Donald Trump build the biggest hospital in the entire country, 3,000 beds at the Javits Center, now they're turning it into a COVID-19 center, which was not the original plan.
	On top of the thousand beds and 12 operating rooms inside of the UNNS comfort, that Donald Trump sent again.
	And the other three or four hospitals now that are being built all over New York State.
	When you look at all the ventilators that New York has, over 5 million of them sent by, I'm sorry, over 5,000 of them sent by Donald Trump.
	If you look at the N95 respirators, over 4 or 5 million now sent by Donald Trump.
	The nearly 2 million surgical masks sent by Donald Trump.
	The nearly 500,000 face masks, Donald Trump.
	The nearly 2 million sets of gloves, Donald Trump.
	You know, you add all of this together.
	Now they're adding another 8.1 million N95 masks.
	Not only that, the Javits Center is going to be run completely by the federal government and the military to take care of those patients.
	They don't need any doctors, any support staff at all because he wasn't prepared.
	And this is the amazing story.
	I look at this document I have in front of me from November of 2015, Ventilator Allocation Guidelines, New York State Department Task Force on Health, Life, Law, New York Department of Health.
	Page 30.
	Online, it's like 272 or 277 PDF pages.
	And it literally says page 30.
	It says, during a severe influenza pandemic, there is likely to be a projected shortfall of ventilators minus 15,783.
	I turn on TV over the weekend and there is all talk, no action Cuomo.
	Remember, we ordered 17,000 ventilators.
	Well, yeah, in the last three weeks, but he was warned specifically in November 2015 at the beginning of this document.
	The New York State Health Commissioner, Dr. Howard Zucker, who's in hiding somewhere.
	If he goes on TV, I guess he could expect state troopers to arrest him.
	Dear New Yorkers, protecting the health and well-being of New Yorkers is a core objective of the Department of Health.
	During flu season, we are reminded that pandemic influenza is a foreseeable threat, one that we cannot ignore.
	In light of this possibility, the department is taking steps to prepare for a pandemic and to limit the loss of life and other negative consequences.
	Listen to this.
	An influenza pandemic would affect all New Yorkers.
	We have a responsibility to plan now.
	Part of the planning process is to develop guidelines on how to ethically allocate limited resources, i.e. ventilators, during a severe influenza pandemic while saving the most lives.
	As part of our emergency preparedness efforts, the department, together with the New York State Task Force on Life and the Law, is releasing the 2015 Ventilator Allocation Guidelines, which provide an ethical clinical legal framework to assist healthcare providers and the general public in the event of a severe influenza pandemic.
	Okay.
	You're going to be short 15,783 ventilators.
	What did Cuomo do?
	He goes back to the task force.
	Well, how can we ration the 2,000 we have?
	That was his answer.
	Now, he did find $750 million to spend on a failed solar panel factory in New York.
	It failed.
	$750 million flop, a $90 million flop on a partnership with a California light bulb company that went nowhere.
	He also flopped on a $600 million computer chip factory.
	This is how he spends New Yorkers' money.
	And then he, you know, this week in his budget, he's saying a permanent ban on fracking.
	Great.
	Can't make money in New York, period.
	Every single thing that has happened that has made this manageable in New York is because of Donald Trump and the federal government.
	Even the hydroxychloroquine he had to get from Donald Trump.
	I mean, and the country's saying, oh, he'd be a great president?
	Okay, if you believe in all talk, no action, it's sort of like Joe Biden on Friday saying, yeah, I think I support the China travel ban now, the one he called xenophobic and hysterical and fear-mongering.
	Anyway, Sean Davis joins us.
	He is the co-founder of the Federalists.
	Cheryl Atkinson, investigative reporter, is with us.
	Thank you both for being here.
	Cheryl has a great piece out.
	We'll get to in a second.
	Sean, I was following your Twitter all weekend and I was stunned.
	And then I found where you got your information and I'm stealing it now.
	But it's from the government.
	They predicted as of yesterday, 121,000 Americans would be hospitalized.
	The actual number was 31,142, and every state had high projections, and it's not materializing.
	Where are we today?
	Right.
	So these models that the White House and a lot of others have been relying on come out of IMHE out of Washington.
	And what we have found by downloading their data sets and looking at their models and comparing them to reality is that their models have been systematically, wildly overestimating the hospitalization needs.
	And recall that we were all kind of put into lockdown, quarantined, all that to flatten the curve.
	It wasn't so much to prevent deaths, it was to prevent the hospitals from being overrun.
	And what we're learning that even today, based on the new models that were released yesterday by IMHE, they are still overestimating hospitalizations by factors of two, five, and even ten.
	So what we're seeing now is a lot of decision-making based on garbage data.
	And it's really concerning.
	Explain again what the IMHE is.
	It's a research institution out of the state of Washington.
	I think Bill Gates funds a bunch of it.
	Some good epidemiologists there.
	I don't doubt their credentials or their knowledge, but I do doubt their model.
	And they're the ones that the White House last week went out and touted their model.
	They put the graph up there.
	They said, this is what's going to happen if we don't do anything.
	We've done everything they said and assumed, and they're still overestimating hospitalization and ICU and ventilators by as much as 10 times what reality has shown us.
	Amazing.
	That's good news for the country.
	Good news for New York.
	We've had a leveling out.
	Even Cuomo in his press conference today confirmed that, you know what, for three straight days in a row, you know, hopefully this will continue.
	They've not needed as many beds, hospital beds or ICEU units.
	They're not running short of any equipment whatsoever, according to Cuomo.
	And yeah, there's promise in hydroxychloroquine.
	A little late, Andrew, as usual.
	Cheryl Atkinson with us, she wrote a great piece how the news media and liberals are attacking conservatives for early pandemic comments that they themselves made.
	And, you know, I've been too busy to really pay attention to all the criticism, but I hear it on the periphery.
	And it's funny, all I did was echo like Anthony Fauci and people like that, who I interviewed in January 27th or 8th.
	How are you, Cheryl?
	That's good.
	I'm doing great.
	Thank you.
	And they're still missing the point.
	Someone flagged a Washington Post article kind of trying to backtrack on these comparisons that really are inaccurate to make, you know, on one side, but not the other as to what was being said.
	And Aaron, I think his name is Blake, is basically saying at the post that, well, the comments that the Fox News personalities made were earlier than some of the comments that these public health officials made and other media made that were similar.
	Therefore, it's bad when Fox said it, but perfectly understandable when the others did.
	And he's still missing the point, which is a lot of the remarks are accurate even as of today as to who gets the virus, who is most likely at risk, and so on.
	Well, I mean, that's the point.
	And what you're saying, and you did it in a very creative way, you know, Sean Hannity gets criticized for this.
	Well, this is what the New York Times said.
	This is what Andrew Cuomo said.
	This is what the CDC said.
	Or Rush or, you know, any other Fox News personality.
	I stand by my timeline that I put up on Hannity.com because we were warning people from day one, this is dangerous.
	This doesn't look good.
	Asymptomatic people walking around for days, you know, infecting other people.
	And we've got to pay attention to this.
	That was my warning.
	Well, and Jeremy Peters of the New York Times has already had to correct and fix a lot of the false statements in his article calling me and others a coronavirus doubters, full of fabrications and misquotes and so on.
	But also failed to note that the same time he's pulling quotes, the New York Times was reporting the exact same thing.
	And I'm not saying the New York Times was equally as wrong when it reported these things.
	I'm saying it was equally as accurate.
	These things are true.
	And we're in this weird dynamic where a propaganda campaign is underway.
	If anybody speaks the truth or gives facts about coronavirus that are not, I guess, as panic stricken as they want us to feel, even when we say at the same time how serious this is and how dangerous it is.
	And we just want to say that.
	Well, they also were the ones saying, what do you mean you can't travel to China?
	They were actually recommending travel ban is ridiculous.
	And they're the ones that said the Trump virus, if you're feeling awful, you know who to blame.
	Sean, you want to say?
	Well, I mean, Cheryl is so right.
	It has been such a surreal through-the-looking glass moment to watch the media through this moment.
	You know, I personally, very early on in February, said this thing looks bad.
	Looks like it's come from China.
	It's probably spreads asymptomatically.
	I think we need to have people stocking up and getting masks.
	And you had the media hordes go, oh, no, you idiot.
	You don't need to wear a mask.
	That's stupid.
	Oh, you don't need to stock up.
	You're stupid.
	And what we're finding is that a lot of people who sounded the alarm early, whether it was travel controls or borders or masks or hydroxychloroquine, they were right.
	But if you don't say the thing that the media wants you to say when they want you to say it, they'll eviscerate you regardless.
	They don't care about the facts.
	They care about the narrative.
	I just had Dr. Ozan at length citing now two French studies, citing all the use of hydroxychloroquine around the country, having talked to the specialists in the field of rheumatoid arthritis and lupus and the use of hydrochloroquine and how low to non-existent the risks are, according to his experts, these doctors that prescribe it.
	And no matter what, they want, you know, you have this one Ohio representative wants to sue Donald Trump.
	I get attacked for looking at what everybody around the world is prescribing daily and what is being used in this country now effectively, according to doctors and patients all around the country, Cheryl.
	Well, and here's what should maybe really give people pause.
	I've spoken to three scientists in the last few days, including some who are working for the government on coronavirus and someone who's working on coronavirus, but not for the government.
	And they're providing information at odds with what is widely being understood in the public about certain facts.
	They're very concerned about coronavirus.
	They're certainly not doubters by any stretch of the imagination, but there is information that's not given in proper context and so on.
	But they told me they don't speak of it publicly outside their offices because they are afraid of being labeled, number one, coronavirus doubters or being perceived as being in conflict with Dr. Fauci, which nobody wants to do.
	And I said, boy, what a time when scientists and journalists are afraid to simply report factual information that's true and accurate and not downplaying anything.
	Like, for example, that's what they're doing.
	And there was absolute truth.
	No, I have a timeline that completely irrefutes this notion that I called this thing a hoax.
	Uh-oh, we better pay attention.
	January 27th, January 28th, Fauci on radio, Fauci on television, the video's up there.
	You know, me talking early on about how asymptomatic people are spreading it.
	It doesn't matter.
	And yes, there are people that were then Sean Davis and are now politicizing this to bludgeon Trump for their political benefit as they're now questioning hydroxychloroquine.
	And as Dr. Oz said, no, this is not even anecdotal anymore.
	It is a series of studies.
	Well, recall that you had a woman who allegedly, I guess, fed her husband fish tank cleaner and blamed it on Donald Trump.
	And then you had the media go in there and say, oh, they drank this fish tank cleaner and he died because they had a similar substance as what Donald Trump talked about.
	Donald Trump killed this man.
	We have a collection and a class of experts in media now who are not interested so much in facts as they are in making sure that you toe whatever line they seem to be dragging at that particular time.
	So when Trump came out and said, you know what, I think this thing could be promising.
	I don't know.
	I'm encouraged by it.
	The media went and attacked him.
	But when Andrew Cuomo came out and said the exact same thing, they said, oh my goodness, this Andrew Cuomo, he sure is adult.
	Do you know, nobody has confronted Cuomo?
	Why did he not listen to his own health task force and buy the ventilators?
	Do you know, Sean Davis?
	It says in that very report, oh, and the federal government will not be able to help you.
	It actually says that very limited in their help.
	It's your responsibility.
	You have a duty to do this.
	It would have only been 0.4% of his budget, and he didn't do it.
	And they think he's supposed to be the authority on this?
	No, thank you.
	Unbelievable.
	All right.
	Cheryl Atkinson, Sean Davis, thank you both.
	Art, we do have, I think, a fourth stimulus plan, a rescue plan.
	Call it what you like.
	It's coming at us.
	You don't think it works?
	You don't think we should do it?
	No, I don't.
	I mean, as you know, Stuart, I'm the biggest fan of this president ever.
	I think he's been the best president so far in the last 50 years.
	I mean, really, I'm a huge fan.
	But this stimulus package will make things worse, not better.
	What we need to do is let people who work and produce keep their income, not have the government take it.
	And by putting that stimulus package in, just like in the 2008-2009 period and in the Great Depression, it will make the economy worse, not better.
	But I don't get it, Art.
	I don't get it.
	I don't see how massive spending, and we're talking trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars.
	I don't see how that does not put a flaw under the economy.
	I don't see how it hurts the economy.
	You explain it to me.
	You tell me how spending all of this money actually hurts the economy.
	I will.
	Government spending is taxation.
	Government doesn't create resources, Stuart.
	They redistribute resources.
	Whenever the government spends a trillion dollars, it takes a trillion dollars from workers and producers who otherwise would.
	So government spending is taxation.
	And as such, government spending will reduce the growth rate of the U.S. and will hurt the economy in bad, bad times.
	Now, when we're rich and when prosperous, government spending is perfect then because then we can afford to take resources away from producers.
	But right now, we need to be the fans of producers, not the fans of consumers.
	I'm very sorry, but that's what has to be done now.
	We need free markets more than ever.
	All right, that's Art Laugher on with our friend Stuart Varney on the Fox Business Network, News Roundup Information Overload Hour 800941.
	Sean, if you want to be a part of the program, he went into more details.
	We've heard of the Laffer curve, but I have a lot of interest in what he has to say.
	And he went into a long explanation that historically, and he's been around dealing with financial issues, big issues like the one we're facing in the financial crunch associated with dealing with coronavirus, the biggest, the most massive medical operation that we've had in our modern lifetime.
	It's being treated like a war, $2.2 trillion passage of monies to help out those out of work and businesses, small and large, that have been directly impacted by the virus and shutting down economic, a big portion of our economy.
	Anyway, here to shed some light on all this, David Bonson is with us, author of Elizabeth Warren, How Our Presidency Would Destroy the Middle Class in American Dream, managing chief investment officer of the Bonson Group.
	And Steve Moore, former senior economic advisor to President Trump, also author of Trump Anomics, Inside the American First Plan to Revive Our Economy.
	Guys, welcome to the program.
	Thanks, Sean.
	What's going on?
	All right, let me start with you, Steve Moore.
	I happen to like Laffer a lot, and I take him seriously, and I tend to agree.
	I don't like talk of even beyond the $4 trillion in loan guarantees by the Fed that will be available and the $2.2 trillion aid package that has been passed.
	He thinks that really the better part of Valor would be to go with a payroll tax cut, $750 billion worth, as a better cure for what ails us now.
	What are your thoughts?
	Well, Sean, Arthur Laffer was the co-author of Trumponomics with me.
	So he's my best friend in the world other than Larry Kudlow.
	So I'm not going to disagree with Arthur, who taught me economics.
	But he's, of course, right.
	And we learned this lesson from Milton Friedman.
	Remember this one, Sean?
	There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
	You know, if the government takes a dollar and gives it to somebody, as Arthur just said, you have to take it away from someone else.
	And I'm surprised that so many people in Washington are so mystified by this idea that somehow government spending magically makes the economy better.
	Milton Friedman used to talk about stuffing $100 bills into helicopters and dropping them over cities.
	And somehow people would think that that was a stimulus.
	We need a real stimulus.
	We need to get the economy opened as quickly as possible.
	My line on this is very simple, Sean.
	It doesn't matter how many of these trillions of dollars of bills that they pass.
	It doesn't matter how many trillions of dollars the Fed prints.
	If the economy isn't working, if it isn't functioning, if it isn't producing goods and services, it's not going to matter.
	Yeah.
	Well, I mean, that's the point.
	And, you know, at some point here, we're getting to this April 30th deadline.
	All right.
	Today it's only April 6th, but April 30th is coming, David.
	And if we don't start opening up portions of our economy, I really worry, as the president has been saying, we got to open up again.
	We're not made to not work.
	Our society has to function.
	Oh, it's interesting.
	Everyone wants the store shelves filled and their pharmacies filled.
	And they want food deliveries or pickup in the meantime.
	But to have that happen, you need farmers and you need truckers and you need transportation.
	And we have entire industries now that have been shut down and will likely stay shut down for a while.
	But at what point do we get to open things back up, even if it's just geographically for the start?
	Well, you know, Larry Cudlow and Steve Moore and Art Laffer are my friends and economic mentors.
	And there's nothing I could say that they haven't already said on the supply side.
	You have to have goods and services to drive economic activity.
	And I agree with everything Steve said: that there isn't any stimulus in the world that will fill a hole if you stop producing economically.
	But let me add something that I don't think is necessarily the angle that they're even taking right now, which ties into what you're talking about, Sean, and that is the spiritual and moral element of non-productivity.
	People are not meant to be idle.
	They're not meant to be sitting at their homes.
	I understand that there was this period necessary to control things and social distancing.
	I wish it had been handled at a more federalist level, individual states, subsidiarity, local decision-making.
	But we're really the thing that concerns me even more than the supply-side dry-up of economic activity is what's happening to people's existential purpose in life by being held dormant right now.
	Well, I mean, so how do we do it, Steve Moore?
	How would Laffer, you, and Kudlow do it?
	You know, Kudlow seems fairly optimistic in the plan that they passed in Congress, which, you know, I can't believe that, you know, that's a lot of money, and I can't believe they're talking about $2 trillion more for infrastructure.
	So I'll answer that, but I want to just say something in response to what something Dave was saying.
	I agree with you about the spiritual element of this, but there's another element, Sean, about freedom, just freedom, the liberties that we've given up, the kinds of extraordinary powers that are being sued by government.
	I never saw in the United States, we're not talking about Russia and the Soviet Union.
	We're talking about the United States, and I'm very bothered by it.
	The government setting curfews.
	And in some cases, cities, you virtually have martial law.
	I saw the governor of Cuomo is now charging people $1,000 if they violate going outside for a purpose other than what the government wants.
	I don't know about you, Sean, but that very, very much disturbs me because this is a country founded on liberty and freedom.
	Now, on the economic front, what I favor, what Lapper favors, what I think Larry Kudlow favors, and I think Trump favors, is to suspend the payroll tax for the rest of the year.
	Think about this, Sean.
	That would give 170 million workers, every one of us, whether you're rich or poor, a 7.5% pay increase in your paycheck.
	You'll get a 7.5% raise in your paycheck.
	And every employer, and employers are really important in this country, the small business amount of women, this would cut their payroll costs by 7.5% across the board.
	So it would encourage employment and hiring, but it would also encourage people to get back to work.
	And by the way, on the issue of fairness, I'm not so sure how it's fair to give people more unemployment benefits than people are getting who are continuing to work.
	That's a big problem to me.
	I think it's a big problem.
	So again, is it something that you gradually roll out, David, or is it something that you could do more expeditiously?
	Well, I think that the payroll tax cut, the problem in the past has always been that it's been temporary.
	And we talked about Milton Friedman a moment ago.
	He had his very famous permanent income hypothesis.
	People don't spend money when they don't believe that they're actually going to keep it for good.
	And in this case, I think that what Carlo very much wants to see, I've talked to Larry about this directly, is something that is more permanently effective on the supply side.
	And yet, of course, they have to deal with the legislative realities of it.
	And so I suspect there will end up being legislative horse trading to get it done.
	But Steve's exactly right.
	And the thing I'd add to Steve's point, which he knows full well, is that the employer, when you talk about this payroll tax, there's two sides to it.
	Yes, the employee is saving money and the employer is saving their side.
	But for self-employed people, which is so many small business owners, that's two sides.
	That's 15% of savings.
	And so to get that kind of stimulus, which is really growth-oriented, is the right way to go about doing it.
	I'm not sure if it's true that President Trump is against the infrastructure idea.
	I think he's been kind of big on that whole idea for some time.
	And I think a lot of us believe that there's infrastructure that needs to be fixed in our country.
	The problem is it needs to be done when we're in a place of economic strength.
	And now to go into this kind of situation, it becomes more Roosevelt-yan and New Deal-ish than anything else.
	What do you think, Sean?
	Let me just add something quickly to that, which is, are you listening to what Chuck Schumer and others are saying?
	You know, Schumer said yesterday, we don't want just one more $2 trillion spending bill.
	He said we may need two more $2 trillion spending bills.
	I mean, these numbers are starting to stagger even me, and I've been in this business a long time.
	And Sean, I guarantee you, I know what the Democrats want.
	They want the Green New Deal.
	They want Medicare for all.
	They want all of the stuff Bernie Sanders talked about in the campaign.
	And they are using this terrible crisis as their opportunity to get this done.
	And we have to, as conservatives, stop that.
	I agree, and I agree wholeheartedly.
	I just think that at some point, you know, I think that when does the cure become worse than what we started?
	What is the impact long-term?
	Well, in my opinion, I think we were...
	David, let's go to David first.
	David.
	I'm...
	I'm sorry, Steve.
	What I was going to say is that the part I think very few people are talking about, we're focused on government spending.
	We're talking about growth of government, pretty normal things that guys like the three of us are always concerned about.
	But I really believe we have to have a conversation about the power that the Federal Reserve now has in the country.
	I put an article up at National Review today.
	Look, I understand the emergency measures that Chairman Powell had to take here.
	The problem is that we do it when it's not emergency measures.
	The financial crisis had ended nine years ago, and we still have this sort of unbelievably strong role of the central bank in the country.
	And I think that we are seceding more and more to those things that then when the crisis ends, Sean, it doesn't go away, just like government spending.
	That's the problem.
	It never goes away.
	And I'll tell you, it just never ends.
	Anyway, thank you both.
	I appreciate it.
	David Bonson and Steve Moore.
	We've got to watch this very closely.
	Because we've got to know that the cure is not going to be worse than what we've already started with here.
	But we've got to help out workers that need, you know, the bridge, the money through no fault of their own.
	We've got to help out small businesses.
	We want these businesses up, running, and open.
	And by the way, most people I know want to work, want their businesses to open.
	And they want to keep their employees.
	I know many, many business owners that are just keeping their employees on.
	They want to keep them on.
	Some are doing some furloughs, but they want to get back to business as quickly as possible.
	For those, we need an airline industry, and we're not going to let a cruise industry that is massive go downhill either.
	We've got to figure out how to help them.
	And we will.
	We rebuild Europe.
	We fight back every evil the world throws at us and we always lead and we always come up with the best solutions.
	All right, as we roll along, 800-941, Sean, look, there's a lot of consideration now.
	The president may be putting together a second task force to help reopen the economy.
	And he said that he's considering that focused on reopening the country's economy as the pandemic cases rise.
	And he's asked about a tweet that he'd sent earlier in the day responding to a tweet by Dana Perimino suggesting a second task force focused on the economy.
	Thinking about it, he said, getting a group of people, we have to open our country.
	The cure cannot be worse than the problem itself.
	We've got to get our country open.
	He's right.
	We do have to get the country open.
	Now, I guess if, you know, old, once we realize that travel bans work, well, we're going to now travel ban the world.
	I doubt it.
	There will be risks associated with allowing people from other countries to fly into this country.
	Well, now that we know that mitigation efforts and social distancing work and working from home, does that mean we're all going to work from home now?
	No, it doesn't.
	At some point, we're going to get back into regular life.
	At different points, do we have to worry about some type of rebound from the virus?
	Unfortunately, that is a part of life.
	And, you know, mitigation efforts have clearly worked and are working and maybe even better than we first thought they would work.
	But Austria now is the first economy that they're beginning to look forward.
	And I know most Americans want to get back to work.
	And I can tell you that everybody that I talk to is sick of being home at this point.
	And as much as we might actually hate working at different points in our life, not working is a far less attractive alternative because you get bored.
	How many people do you know that retire?
	I'm going to play golf.
	I'm going to go fishing every day.
	And talk to them three months later.
	How's retirement?
	It sucks.
	They may not say it.
	Oh, no, no, it's great.
	It's great.
	But they get bored pretty quickly.
	And a lot of people end up evolving into some new challenge, business, adventure, passion calling in their life.
	Or, you know, those that don't tend to, you know, not be the happiest people you're going to run into in your life.
	You need some type of purpose every day of your life.
	You need to contribute some way in your life.
	Now, geographically, we've got to consider that part of the rollout and the hot spots.
	Certainly, containment strategies, mitigation strategies will continue.
	But I can tell you that it is that that is very concerning.
	I like the idea of a task force.
	I do think that Laffer is right.
	Those considering more monies sound very iffy and dangerous.
	Remember, we learned shovel-ready jobs were not so shovel-ready, were they?
	All right, 800-941 Sean, as we continue your calls and the task force hearing coming up next.
	All right, 25 now to the top of the hour, 800-941.
	Sean, if you want to be a part of the program, you know, I will say this: it is, I watch the media and I don't really pay that much attention to it anymore because it just isn't worth it.
	And it is just so hyper, hyper anti-Trump.
	They just don't even seem to have a desire.
	I mean, one of the things that is really stands out to me is just on the issue of, okay, the same media mob out there, you know, saying Donald Trump doesn't do enough press conferences.
	You know, you know, Mika, Joe Amika fame, liberal Joe.
	I've, they seem like I used to like Joe Scarborough, and, you know, now he's a big liberal and he hates Donald Trump.
	And I look at this, you know, conspiracy TV network that he works on.
	They just hate Trump.
	Mika wonders if Trump has a financial tie to hydroxychloroquine.
	I'm like, it's so idiot.
	This is a dopey reporter.
	Well, where did President Trump's thinking evolve as it relates to hydroxychloroquine?
	And was it this guy, Zelensky, that one guy who's a little eccentric?
	One of the first people that, you know, was saying that, hey, this could be a big deal.
	And I'm like, you know, it's so myopic.
	It's so stupid.
	The question itself, maybe you want to ask yourself, why did Israel decide to give the United States 10 million doses of hydroxychloroquine?
	Why did the country of Turkey confiscate all of the nation's hydroxychloroquine resources to give to those COVID-19 positive patients?
	You know, just little things like that.
	You begin to wonder, hmm, wow.
	Why in Spain, I think it's up to 73% of COVID-19 positive patients are getting hydroxychloroquine.
	Why is it now, and Dr. Oz spelled out in great detail?
	We now have two studies out of France.
	One is a much larger study that hydro, and this is, you know, a known virus, a viral, a virus studier.
	I don't know what you call these people.
	What do you call that guy?
	Virologist.
	Virologist.
	This is what they do for a living.
	I'm not a doctor.
	Oh, Hannity's playing a doctor.
	No, I'm listening to smart people like Dr. Oz.
	You know where Dr. Oz is getting his information from?
	It's old-style hard work.
	He's calling the doctors that have been prescribing hydroxychloroquine, as he explained today, for years for people that have lupus or people that have rheumatoid arthritis.
	And he is giving this information out to people like that.
	The doctors are saying, we don't even have any protocols because the risk is non-existent.
	Now, there are risks that I've discovered in the course of reading it, for example.
	Anybody with any underlying health issue, you got to be careful of anything that you take.
	If you have heart arrhythmia, well, those that are prescribing hydroxychloroquine for lupus or rheumatoid arthritis, they're not even given EKGs, as one of the doctors will tell you on Dr. Oz's show either today or tomorrow.
	The issue of high doses and long-term impact on eyesight, well, they're not seeing any of that either.
	Every doctor, as he says, it's no longer really anecdotal.
	He goes, the fact is, is we have supportive data.
	We keep hearing.
	He says this is now a case series.
	Now, the last case that he mentioned today is, okay, well, this guy, this virologist in France, this is now his second study.
	And it's just, it's Donald Trump they hate.
	They're not asking the same questions of Andrew Cuomo, who said today, yeah, no, promising results.
	Yeah, they're promising.
	Now that they're giving it to me, I'm going to have to let the pharmacies give the hydroxychloroquine that all of these doctors in my state would like to prescribe for their patients.
	Now, I would say trust the doctors.
	Don't trust Sean Hannity.
	Trust your doctor.
	Ask your doctor.
	But if you do get it, after all that I've read and all that I've learned, I can, I always am honest with my audience.
	My conclusion for myself in consultation with my doctor friends, friends plural, is I would take it if I, in fact, got or contracted COVID-19 or coronavirus.
	That's what I would do.
	You know, the media complaining.
	You know, how long do they say Donald Trump doesn't talk to us enough and we don't have enough press conferences and et cetera, et cetera.
	Now you've got the newsweek saying that they don't want to cover.
	Well, we've had four press briefings this month, the arrogance of this cowardly administration, which does not feel it should be accountable.
	That's what they were saying before all of this.
	Mika Brzezinski was saying, are you guys holding off of this press briefing because it's so difficult to figure out how to tell the truth about Trump's policies?
	You know, Karen Tumulty in the Washington Post, the Trump White House, the decision to all but do away with regular briefings sets an unprecedented and unacceptable precedent.
	It is the best interest of the country and the president himself to bring them back.
	All right, the president is holding now daily briefings.
	There might be one any second.
	Now Andrew Feinberg, the same guy, is saying that, you know, Donald Trump wants to hijack everyone's televisions with another briefing instead of letting people go a single day without him on the screens.
	We're in the middle of a national emergency.
	You have one fake news CNN host after another, one conspiracy TV theory MSDNC host after another, outraged, this is wrong.
	We've got to stop these press briefings.
	They're in a national emergency.
	Really?
	New York Times executive editor says they've now withdrawn their reporters from briefings because they wonder if there is anything newsworthy, uncertain newsworthiness and health considerations.
	Well, they had already determined it's the Trump virus.
	And if you're feeling awful, you know who to blame.
	They're the ones telling people to travel to China after the travel ban was put in place.
	That was a brilliant idea.
	And all the other dumb things that they said.
	You know, now Mika is saying the president's need to be on camera forces his coronavirus team to scramble to prepare for a briefing in which they have no news.
	That's not true.
	If they didn't have news, well, then the reporters in the room wouldn't have questions, but they have hours and hours and hours worth of questions.
	You got Eric Pop the Pimple over there at the Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, refused to carry full Trump coronavirus briefing.
	Yay.
	Well, we know what they said.
	They said we're lecturing Americans about being afraid of the virus.
	I was warning people this doesn't look good.
	All right, let's go to, is it, let's see, oh, Dave, Dr. David, apparently a doctor in Toledo.
	How are you, Dr. David?
	What kind of doctor are you?
	I'm a retinal specialist.
	Oh, what's going on, sir?
	How are you?
	Thanks for what you do every day to keep people healthy.
	I want you to be ahead of Playa, I think, Alexa's going to make, and that is they're going to come out with the declaration that hydroxychloroquine causes blindness.
	And it's well documented that it does.
	I have read all of that, and I've said it on the air numerous times, that in high doses, it absolutely is a known side effect of this 45-year-old drug from every question.
	And I asked that of Dr. Oz even today earlier in the program.
	And he addressed that very issue and said they're not seeing those effects at these doses.
	Do you agree with that?
	Correct.
	What happens is it's after prolonged dosing with the drug, that is year after year after year, the risk of developing vision loss actually is quite high, but it's after 20 years or so of taking the drug.
	So we don't have to.
	Otherwise, have you seen any other danger signs in your view, having prescribed it or seen it prescribed?
	No, that was the only retinal specialist.
	That was the only thing that we checked for.
	Basically, I appreciate it.
	I got to go to the coronavirus task force.
	The president just took to the podium.
	This week, America continues our aggressive effort to defeat the virus as we enter a crucial and difficult phase of the battle.
	We continue to send our prayers to the people of New York and New Jersey and to our whole country.
	But right now, New York and New Jersey are very hot zones, and we're with them, we're with everybody.
	Your struggle is our struggle, and we will beat this virus.
	We will beat it together.
	I also want to send best wishes to a very good friend of mine and a friend to our nation, Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
	We're very saddened to hear that he was taken into intensive care this afternoon, a little while ago.
	And Americans are all praying for his recovery.
	He's been a really good friend.
	He's been really something very special, strong, resolute, doesn't quit, doesn't give up.
	We have made tremendous progress on therapeutics.
	I had a fantastic call today, which I'll be talking about a little bit later.
	And I've asked two of the leading companies, these are brilliant companies, Ebola, AIDS, others, they've come with the solutions and just have done incredible jobs.
	And I've asked them to contact London immediately.
	They have offices in London, the major companies, but more than major, more than size, they're genius.
	And I had a talk with four of them today, and they speak a language that most people don't even understand.
	But I understand something that they've really advanced therapeutics and therapeutically, and they have arrived in London already.
	Their London office has whatever they need, and we'll see if we can be of help.
	We've contacted all of Boris's doctors, and we'll see what is going to take place.
	But they are ready to go.
	But when you get brought into intensive care, that gets very, very serious with this particular disease.
	So the two companies are there with what they are talking about.
	And it's rather complex and has had really incredible results.
	We're working with the FDA and everybody else, but we are working with London with respect to Boris Johnson.
	Across the country, we're attacking the enemy on all fronts, including medical, scientific, social, logistical, and economic.
	We're pressing into action the full power of American government and American enterprise.
	And our military has been incredible.
	We've just sent 3,000 public health personnel.
	They're now deployed in the New York area, and they'll be over at the Javit Center over at the Great Ship.
	And as you probably have heard, and I was informed that Governor Cuomo has already told you and announced, he called me up a little while ago and he asked whether or not it would be possible to use the ship with respect to fighting the virus.
	And we hadn't had that in mind at all, but we're going to let him do it.
	We're also going to let New Jersey, Governor Murphy, we spoke with him a little while ago, and New Jersey is going to use it also because New Jersey is a hot, a hot spot.
	So Governor Murphy and Governor Cuomo are going to be using the ship to New York, New Jersey, and it's a big ship.
	And it's now COVID.
	It's set for COVID.
	And we are going to, hopefully that will be very helpful to both states.
	The Javit Center, which is 2,900 beds just built per military, also is going to be manned now by the military, and they should be in place tomorrow.
	And they'll start sending quite a few people over to the Javit Center.
	It's convenient.
	It's right in the middle of everything.
	So that'll be something great.
	And we appreciated Governor Cuomo's nice, really nice statements.
	And likewise, Governor Murphy.
	We have worked very well with both of them and with, frankly, all of the governors.
	Vice President Pence had a call this morning with them that lasted for close to two hours.
	And I understand there wasn't a negative person on the call, 50 governors or just about 50 governors.
	I think they were all on from what I understood.
	And they were very positive about everything their federal government has been doing for them.
	And you'll hear what that is.
	And it's rather amazing, actually.
	Nationwide, the Army Corps of Engineers is building 22 field hospitals.
	These are big hospitals.
	And alternate care sites in 18 states.
	So you have a combination of 22 field hospitals.
	In addition to that, we're building alternate care sites, which is a little bit of a smaller version of the hospital.
	And we have a lot of them, and they're going up in 18 different states.
	In total, we've deployed 8,450 hospital beds from federal stockpiles.
	And, you know, if you think this is done over a period of, really a period of weeks, it's incredible, actually.
	More than 8,000 ventilators have been sent from the national stockpile to our cities and states, backed by the Defense Production Act, which we've used very strongly, very powerfully.
	So powerfully that we don't have to use it too much, frankly.
	And it's nice when you don't have to.
	We're getting more than we ever bargained for.
	American industry is stepping up.
	Manufacturers are really going to town and we have thousands of ventilators being built as we speak.
	And we have hundreds that are being sent to different locations.
	And we're ready to roll with almost 10,000 that we have in the federal stockpile.
	When I say ready to roll too, I mean exactly what that states.
	We are, wherever that monster goes, we're able to move with it.
	Great flexibility.
	We have tremendous flexibility.
	And we have people waiting, and they're ready, willing, and able, but waiting to bring them wherever it may be, if they need it, if they're needed.
	It's possible that they won't be needed, that we're fully stocked, because numbers are coming in where, because of what the American people are doing, we're having fewer hospital visits.
	I think that could be the case in New York.
	It could be the case in a few other states.
	And fewer beds, fewer hospital visits mean fewer ventilators.
	So we'll see whether or not our original projections were right.
	But anyway, I had a very good talk with both governors, and I think they're very happy, extremely happy about what we're doing for them, and especially going all COVID.
	So that'll take place almost immediately.
	FEMA and HHS have directly distributed 11.7 million N95 respirators.
	Think of that.
	Get the number.
	11.7 million N95 respirators, 11.7 million.
	26.5 million surgical masks, 5.3 million face shields, 4.4 million surgical gowns.
	and 22.6 million gloves, 22.6 million gloves.
	We have also arranged for vast quantities of additional materials to be allocated through donations and existing supply chains.
	We've also given tremendous medical material and supplies throughout the 50 states and territories.
	And through Project Airbridge, we have succeeded in bringing plane loads of vital supplies into the United States from overseas.
	We had an additional three, these are massive planes, by the way.
	The big planes are very big, very powerful, and they're loaded to the gills with supplies.
	And rather than bringing them into our stockpile, as we've discussed, we bring them to all the different locations where they're needed so we can save a big step and a timely step.
	Because of my actions under the DPA, I can also announce today that we have reached an agreement, very amicable agreement with 3M for the delivery of an additional 55.5 million high-quality face masks,
	face masks each month so that we're going to be getting over the next couple of months 166.5 million masks for our frontline health care workers.
	So the 3M saga ends very happily.
	We're very proud to be dealing now with 3M and it's CEO Mike Roman.
	I just spoke with him and I thanked him for getting it done.
	And Mike was very happy to get it done.
	Great company.
	So we're getting 166.5 million masks and mostly that's going to be for our frontline health care workers.
	Okay, that's 3M.
	Thank you 3M.
	I also want to thank Apple, one of the many great American companies that's taken into, that's really leapt into action.
	Today Apple announced that it is now producing plastic face shields for health care workers at the rate of 1 million per week.
	1 million, and these are the shields that you see on television quite a bit.
	And they're at the highest level of quality and safety.
	We're grateful as well to Salesforce, which has donated 48 million pieces of personal protective equipment, including masks, gowns, suits, and face shields.
	So thank you very much to Salesforce.
	I urge all of our nation's governors to ensure that the massive deliveries that we've made to your states over the past few weeks are distributed as quickly as possible.
	So again, we're working very well with the governors.
	Now they may see you and say, oh, we're not happy, but they're very happy on the phone.
	And Mike Pence is a straight shooter, and he had a great phone conversation to them with all of the government, teleconference.
	And they're very happy, every one of them.
	Were there any negatives?
	No, sir.
	See?
	I told you.
	Mike is the greatest.
	Mike, and you have done a great job, Mike, and I appreciate it.
	The whole country appreciates it.
	Thank you, Mr. Mike.
	Anthony appreciates it, right?
	Don't you?
	See?
	Everybody appreciates Mike, special man.
	So a lot of the things that we've done, again, are going directly to the states.
	The states seem to be very happy.
	If they're not, they can call me directly.
	They can call Mike directly, and we'll make them happy.
	But tremendous progress has been made in a very short period.
	And I think very importantly, the progress has been made before the surge comes, because the next week, week and a half, is going to be a big surge, the professionals tell us.
	And I think we're in good shape for it, Anthony.
	So it's good timing, really good timing.
	We can have this stuff there.
	It's already there for the most part, but we're bringing a lot of different resources to the various locations, especially where the surge is looking like it's going to take place.
	Resources from the national stockpile need to reach our warriors.
	And they are warriors.
	I tell it all the time.
	I saw it again this morning.
	He's young, in many cases, many cases older, but they're walking into the hospital and they're putting on gas.
	I mean, as their doors open, they're going into this place.
	And, you know, it's not exactly too safe.
	And they're going in there and they're putting the outfits on and they're putting their masks on.
	And it's incredible.
	It's really, it's like no different than you watch the war movies or you watch the old clips of the war.

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