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tv   Fareed Zakaria GPS  CNN  April 26, 2020 7:00am-8:00am PDT

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this is "gps," the global public square. welcome to all of you in the united states and around the world, i'm fareed zakaria. today on the show, bill gates, the head of the world's largest charitable foundation. what do we now know about the strange virus and its effects. has the lock jodown worked?
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is america ready to open up for business again? will we have a vaccine and when? i will ask bill gates these questions and more. also, where in the world did the virus come from? was it from a wet market or a chinese lab? will we ever know? we will get the latest science from one of the world's foremost virus detectives. finally in this earth week, i'll tell you about the silver linings in the covid crisis for mother earth. first, here's my take. poor brian kemp, he obviously didn't get the memo. when the governor on georgia announced on monday that he would begin opening up his state's economy, he must have assumed president trump would lavish him with praise. just days earlier the president said publicly the country was starting our life again and indicated some states were ready to open up.
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on wednesday, trump tweeted states are safely coming back. our country is starting to open for business again. and yet, hours after that tweet, at his daily press conference, the president announced that he disagreed strongly with kemp's decision. welcome to donald trump's reelection strategy, where he is both the government and the fiery opposition to that government. populism has always fundamentally been a protest movement of outsiders railing against a corrupt elite that runs the country. right wing populism makes a distinction between the real people and the others who tend to be foreigners, immigrants, blacks, jews and other minorities. this strategy works well out of government. one you're inside, you face a challenge. politicians who win elections usually try to broaden their base and unify the nation. but populism depends on division and dissatisfaction. in addition in times of genuine emergency, people sober up.
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across the world, many populist parties that frivolously attack the establishment have struggled to make their voices heard. in a pandemic, it turns out many people want their governments to take an active stance, preferably based on advice from experts. trump's solution is to play insider and outsider simultaneo simultaneously. one day he announces a careful plan devooised by public health officials that is a step by step opening up, the next day he sides with street protesters against governors who are following those very guidelines. it's a complicated dance. you can watch the two trumps at his press conferences. he begins the session as president trump making the day's official pronouncements, reading in a dreary money tone from a script he doesn't appear to have looked at before. and then from time to time, donald trump, the populist icon, suddenly pops up. commenting on his own script. for example, to say after recommending the use of masks -- >> this is voluntary.
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i don't think i'm going to be doing it. >> the dr. jekyll and mr. hyde routine continues throughout the briefing as his own health officials take the podium to make a substantive point, trump will jump in to say something that is at odds with the message they're trying to convey. trump is worrying this dance may not be enough to win him re-election. the president has surely noticed his approval ratings remain roughly where they were before the pandemic which is astonishing given that crises usually boost presidential approval enormously. so he has doubled down on the attack strategy against the usual scapegoats, the media and what has become an absurd daily routine as well as blue state governors, liberal cities, international organizations, and now, of course, most pointedly china. he's also returning to his favorite target, immigrants. the president's ban on immigrants seeking green cards from coming into the country for 60 days is strange since the
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u.s. has already largely halted immigration. but it's not really a policy, it is a political symbol. a reminder to trump's base that they can always count on him. there is, of course, another path. donald trump could have used the crisis to rally the nation around a common foe. he could have provided calm, sensible leadership, stayed on message with his own health officials, and fostered unity rather than division. that's the approach of german chancellor, angela merkel, who now has a 79% aroepproval ratin. it's the strategy of emanumanue macron who has moved up ten points in his very polarized country. it turns out president trump only knows one dance, call it the populism hustle. and he seems uninterested in learning any other. for more, go to cnn.com/fareed and read my "washington post" column this week. and let's get started.
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♪ let's get right to the main event. bill gates barely needs any introduction. i will simply remind you he's one of the world's richest people and has dedicated a large share of his fortune and expertise to fighting diseases. he's now taken a lead role in the search for a vaccine and a cure for the coronavirus, the bill and melinda gates foundation is funding factories for each of the seven most promising ideas for a vaccine, even though gates freely admits that only one or two of them will actually be used. i'm now joined by bill gates. pleasure to have you on, bill. >> good to see you. >> so, if you were to explain to people in general, would you tell them that we now know the coronavirus is more deadly, less deadly, more transmissible, less transmissible? how do you characterize this
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one? >> well, we know that if we do these extreme social isolation measures we get the reproductive rate below 1, which means the total number of active infections starts to go down. what we don't know is we go slightly back to normal which activities create the risk of a rebound. and so we need to put into place a very dense testing regime so you would detect that rebound going back into the exponential growth very quickly and not wait for the icus to fill up and there to be lots of deaths. if you see the hot spot, you kind of understand the activities causing that. change policy there and get it back down to the -- into the decline. so that the -- the brute force tactic that was used did work it worked in every country, but that's cost such damage we want to back off from that and we're
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a little naive about how to prioritize those activities. we need the testing, we need strong leadership where the scientific community and the politicians are saying, okay, what's the value? things like school obviously have a high value, if we can figure out a format that's not driving a lot of infection. >> so, you talk about testing. everybody talks about it. and it seems bizarre, you know, just from the outside that it would be so hard. this is the richest country in the world. you know, people have made analogies to wars during world war ii, the united states went from a standing start of zero planes to being able to produce a plane every 63 minutes in one of the ford factories. why can't testing be ramped up to the million a day level that a lot of people -- experts believe would be necessary to help reopen? >> yeah. so it looks like with new machines and using them in a better way we'll be able to get
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up to 400,000, 500,000 a day, that's just barely enough for really doing the tracking. there's some very innovative ways of running those machines or eventually getting the strip test that could take us to higher numbers. the key thing about the u.s., though, this focus on the number of tests understates the cacophony and the mistakes we made in the testing system. the access to that testing system is very unequal. the wrong people are being tested and any time you don't get results in less than 24 hours, the value of the test is dramatically reduced. so, the u.s. is unique in terms of just, you know, who you know, whether you get in front of the line, asymptomatics can get in front of the line and you get these lines that -- that are way too long. >> let me ask you about the vaccine that you've been so involved in. so -- i talk to experts, there's a range of views. one of which is, look, we may
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not get a vaccine. don't have vaccines against some other coronaviruses. there are some viruses for which you don't get one. on the other side people tell me with so many efforts being made like yours, the government is also doing one, the british government is doing one, the chinese are undoubtedly doing one, we will actually end up with a vac kecine much faster t people are predicting. >> well, it's very hard to compress these timeframes. if everything went perfectly we would be in scale manufacturing within a year. we may not achieve that. it could be as long as two years. there's over 100 efforts. what we need to do is pick the most promising of those, get money, sort of go full speed, build the manufacturing in parallel, system of which is shared like the finish, the last step, where there's nowhere need the capacity for the 7 billion doses. >> but are you optimistic it will be on the shorter end? i heard people say in september we could start production.
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>> no. i don't -- maderna -- you have to do these phase three studies that help you understand if somebody has condition x, y, or z, does it create a side effect. there's people with defective immune systems, all sorts of things. so the size of the phase three, the global regulators have to get together and decide how many people, what length of time that goes in. and you'll have to trial with a very heavy infection rate. so the idea -- the idea of being in manufacture in the last year, that's beyond my -- what's likely. dr. fauci and i have been fairly consistent to say 18 months to create expectations that are not too high. this influences when we get to go back to true normal. >> next on "gps," bill gates on when and how the economy will come back.
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for the same medications as the vet, but up to 30 percent less with fast free shipping. visit petmeds.com today. we are back now with bill gates whose foundation has already committed more than a quarter billion dollars to fighting covid-19. let me ask you about the economy. when trying to open up, one of the challenges is some states are opening up earlier than others. some countries are opening up earlier. can we be sure that we know what exactly the right levels are and how to open up? i ask this because there are a
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lot of governors, for example, who are criticizing the predictions that were made. the florida governor says, look, there were all these models that predicted to us that we would need 200,000, 300,000 hospital beds in use for covid. we have 2,000 beds. in other words, the predictions were way off. we didn't -- and the implication is they didn't do an enormous amount of the hard core lockdown and they're still okay. what do you say to them? >> well, i wouldn't say they're okay. they're not suffering as widespread epidemic yet. if they open up enough, they can go back into exponential growth and compete with new york on that basis. the uncertainties about this mean that because of the exponential nature of this, y some models were wildly wrong. models will never be perfect in these things but we can learn when you have countries that are
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sending, say, young children back to school, germany, denmark, austria have good enough testing regime, more confident than the u.s., so they will be able to see the effect of that. norway is actually doing it in a differential than different parts of the country that will help inform us. the problem with the united states, any state that goes too far and gets into that exponential growth will be seeding other parts of the country. it will be like international travel, you have force of infection coming in, that's tricky to deal with. but, you know, the need for the testing piece, you know, i haven't had anyone argue with it, but the -- they're not stepping up to actually do it yet and that's got to be the federal level. >> so, everyone says when we open it's going to be slow, it's going to be parts of the economy. people have estimated 20%, 30%. give us, you know, the best case
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scenario. you know, you heard this metaphor of the hammer and the dance. the dance being now you start opening up these -- the economy, and through kind of a moderate amount of social distancing, you are able to achieve what will we be able to achieve? what is the good-case scenario? >> the best case, you pick the high value activities like school, manufacturing, construction and figure out a way to do those with kind of masks, distancing. in the school, you don't want the hallways to have tons of kids all at once or the lunch room. and then you can see, is that -- are those schools a source of infection spreading up into the elderly, which then would cause some level of mortality. >> bill, can i -- can i just ask you about schools? everyone is so -- so curious and worried about this. you have three kids. you know how schools work. lots of people crowded together
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in classrooms, dorm tory dormii hallways, that's the definition of school. how do you get it going? >> for the underaged kids where the online substitute is inferior -- more inferior than as you get up to the college level, then online can capture at least in terms of the academics a lot of what goes on. there, you know, what we've seen in terms of infection levels is pretty low. you do have some european countries that are moving ahead with that. and because of their testing will understand what the viral load is and compare households with kids going to school versus households that don't have that coming in. so over the course of the summer some of that will be learned. and in the fall that will be one of the toughest questions. it's right on the boundary of is is there a way to do it that particularly for the low-income
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students where the online learning has not been fully enabled because, you know, they don't have the equipment or the connection or the teacher is not set up for it. you know, the inequity has gotten greater in education. so if we can figure out how to do k through 12 in the fall, that would be good. i even think if we're creative about it and things have gone well, we'll be able to do college. but there's a lot of data that we'll be learning from globally and we'll see the progress on the tools as well that will inform those decisions. so, it will probably be in august where, you know, the idea of what's the protocol, how many schools are -- are opening up, and we won't really know enough until pretty close to the start. >> so, you've written both in your paper on gates notes, which i really recommend people read, and you've said elsewhere, the economy is not going to be anything like it was.
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it's going to take a long time to recover. people will be surprised at how slow and how fitful this is. so what is it that the stock market is seeing that you, bill gates, are not seeing? the stock market is now basically at a routine annual correction. it seems -- it has not really factored in, it seems to me, the kind of economy you're describing. >> well, you know, some companies, their valuation, if you took out two years of earnings, there's still enough earnings that the valuation won't change that much. and, you know, so if you have companies that don't run into a liquidity problem, and whose long-term profitability is strong, then the valuation adjustment is not necessarily that dramatic. you do have an economy that's going to be operating at a lower level, that affects all sorts of spending. there's no doubt that will be the case for years to come.
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and so that, you know, should affect overall valuations. buying treasury bills right now doesn't seem that attractive. so i'm not -- i'm an expert on vaccines and therapy, i talk to people about the economy. like you, i find it a little surprising where the market is. but, you know, i'm not going to focus on that. >> are you surprised that microsoft, for example, is trading at the same price that it was in december before, you know, the coronavirus? >> you know, tech companies in some ways benefit from an acceleration of a move towards digital approaches, even though the next few years they'll have a lot of customers that they'll be helping out, giving free licenses to, where things won't be as strong. so, you know, if there's any sector of the economy where you could say, okay, it's not that
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drastic of a change, you would probably pick that. again, valuations is not -- is not where i add the most value. next on "gps," bill gates on china. is that the country that is the villain of this crisis as president trump has implied? what is that? uh mine, why? it's just that it's... lavender. yes it is, it's for men but i like the smell of it laughs ♪
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it's more than just fast. it keeps all your devices running smoothly. with built-in security that protects your kids... ...no matter what they're up to. it protects your info... ...and gives you 24/7 peace of mind... ...that if it's connected, it's protected. even that that pet-camera thingy. [ whines ] can your internet do that? xfinity xfi can because it's... ...simple, easy, awesome. [ barking ] let me ask you about the rest of the world, which, of course, particularly the poorer countries are going to be hit hard for all kinds of obvious reasons. they don't have as good a health care system, things like that. now, i've read as a result a couple of very interesting analysis that say, look, for
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these countries there's a real question about whether they should be going for a full lockdown model because, first of all, many of them have people very -- living in slums, which are very tightly crowded. i grew up in bombay, there's a slum there haravi, where the density of people is 800,000 per square mile. to compare, new york is 27,000 per square mile. actually if you send those people work, you're helping them soberly distance themselves. by staying at home, they're kind of living in petri dishes. it's also the fact it's warmer, they have fewer older people. for that reason poorer countries should be thinking about this differently. >> yeah. i think that's right. the -- this is, to me, one of the greatest uncertainties is the reported cases coming out of developing countries, whether it's india, pakistan, nigeria,
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subsaharan africa, those case numbers are still fairly small. now, you know, we funded ramping up that testing capacity, but it's still limited. there are reasons people might not want to come forward and volunteer to be tested. the initial spread is probably more amongst the international travelers, that's a fairly narrow group of people. but sadly, unless there's some magic thing, the slums you're talking about will experience very widespread infection. the social isolation measures probably can't get the reproductive rate below 1. people need food. if the government tries to overdo things, you'll get riots, starvation, you know, you can have a complete collapse in civil order if you're not careful. so i do think the creativity of how you reduce the infection rate and making sure people still get food, that's really an
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unsolved problem. it worked for the rich countries with that gigantic economic price. it might not in these countries. >> and how do they get out of it economically? what -- the united states at some level can print money. most of these countries have to borrow. they have to borrow on international markets. it's much, much harder. what happens here? >> well, i'm afraid a great deal of hardship. you know, even things like routine vaccination, the rates are going down, that alone will account for a lot of deaths. the measles campaigns that are important. that, we've been modeling out what it means. so things at the basic level of very basic health care, very basic sustenance are much tougher. and sadly, as is the case in most countries, the poorer countries and the poorer citizens will bear the brunt of
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the burden. all the more reason that the world should get the billions to build the tools and get those tools not just to the countries that finance them and have the great scientific and manufacturing capability but get them to the entire globe. >> you've been making this case for international cooperation very powerfully and in my mind persuasively. in washington there's a very different mood, which is to say far from cooperating with the second largest economy in the world, it's china is to blame for this virus. you've been following this very carefully. how would you respond to the charge that, look, the chinese covered this up, they essentially deceived the rest of the world, and as a result they should be held in some way responsible for this. >> i don't think that's a timely thing because it doesn't effect how we act today. you know, china did a lot of things right at the beginning, like any country where a virus first shows up. they can look back and say they
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missed some things. you know, some countries did respond very quickly and get their testing in place and they avoided the incredible economic pain. it's sad that even the u.s. which you would have expected to do well did poorly. but it's not time to talk about that. this is the time to talk about the great science we have, the fact we're in this together, fixed testing, treatments, get that vaccine, and minimize the trillions of dollars and many things you can't dimensionalize in economic terms that are awful about the situation we're in. that's a distraction. i think there's a lot of incorrect and unfair things said, but it's not even time for that discussion. >> you worked a lot with the w.h.o. over the years. what do you think of the charge that they didn't push back hard enough or maybe were even
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complicit in china doing a certain amount of deception and not revealing everything? china did not give w.h.o. the access that they should have, also the cdc. do you think the w.h.o. is culpable? >> basically no. i mean, in the retrospective, we'll see things that w.h.o. could have done better, just like every actor in this whole picture. but the -- the w.h.o. has a strong connection with one country. that country is the united states. the number of cdc people who are there, people who used to work for the cdc, there's no u.n. agency more connected to a country than w.h.o. is to cdc. people think w.h.o. is funded to do all sorts of things that their tiny little budget doesn't let them do. you know, so there are thousands -- their budget is a
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thousa thousandth of what is spent on health care in the u.s. they don't do vaccines, but what they do is important, the eradication of smallpoxsmallpox phenomenal organization. so we need to support them, help them, and at the right time, fine, think about for pandemic 2, how should all of us do a lot better. >> you have been caught up in this controversy where you have now -- you and dr. fauci are the targets of a certain, you know, kind of right-wing campaign saying you guys are in some way part of a conspiracy. does it bother you? does it affect the way you need to do your work? >> well, there's a certain irony that having put a lot of energy into trying to warn about this vulnerability and not getting much investment to be made
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sadly -- i always think how could i have gotten the message out in a stronger way? where did i fall short? you know, only 5% of what should have been done was done. the irony of having that person be accused of creating the virus seems a bit strange. i don't know that a meaningful number of people believe that. it does get amplified. there are people who want to view this through a political lens, not a scientific lens. that can lead you to, you know, some strange views about let's not, you know, speak the truth or look at the real numbers or compare countries in a rational way. but, hey, we have to get our heads down here and look at these therapeutics. a lot will fail, but some of the ones that are less celebrated i'm very hopeful for. >> bill gates, always a pleasure to have you on. thank you so much. >> yeah. thanks. that was great. >> next on "gps," one of the biggest mysteries in this crisis is how did the virus make the
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leap to humans? many fingers point to china and its wet markets in wuhan, but what about the virology lab a few miles away? i will get the latest science from one of the world's foremost virus hunters when we get back. so you focus only on what you want. okay, it's got screeners and watchlists. and you can even see how your predictions might affect the value of the stocks you're interested in. now this is what i'm talking about. yeah, it'll free up more time for your... uh, true crime shows? british baking competitions. hm. didn't peg you for a crumpet guy. focus on what matters to you with thinkorswim. ♪ i've been involved in. communications in the media for 45 years. i've been taking prevagen on a regular basis for at least eight years. for me, the greatest benefit over the years has been
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coronavirus come from? that is the million dollar question that scientists around the world are trying to answer, including my next guest, peter daszak. he is one of the world's foremost virus hunters tracking down different strains of viruses in the main host animal often, the bat. peter, thank you for joining me. let me ask you to begin by telling us how do you do what you do? how do you figure out where a virus comes from? >> well, first of all, we look at the past history of pandemics and look at the -- where they originated.
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we do a lot of analyses of that and say what are the underlying drivers. we go to those places on the planet and look at wildlife. almost all pandemics owe ridge n originate in animals, and we try to work outokum out of the viru we find which are pandemic and which are safe. >> how do you figure out, i guess physically you to into bat caves and get, you know, get blood from bats? >> well, we don't go to bat caves. we wear full ppe, mask, gloves, suits to protect ourselves from getting infected, just to even go in a cave. and then as it goes towards dusk, we set nets outside the cave. we catch the bats and sample
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them. we take blood samples, salival swabs, fecal samples and we look for viruses in the lab. we look for the genetic sequences of the viruses. >> in this one, there seems to be a broad consensus that it came from a bat, probably a bat in wuhan, and the controversy is did it come from a bat in the wuhan wet market or from a bat in the level 4 lab that is a few miles away. is there any sense you have as to which is more likely? >> i think the question is right. what we've got to do -- it may be that we'll never really know the answers as to where this virus actually originated. what you've got to do is look at this in a balance of probabilities. our work shows that people in southeast asia are exposed to these viruses every single day, every single year. we predict between 1 million and 7 million people a year get infected by these bat
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coronaviruses. it's only occasionally that that unlucky person happens to go to market or the animal infects someone in a wildlife market and the virus can spread and become pandemic. we think that probably the bats -- the viruses originate in southwest china or even bordering countries. and we found hundreds of bat coronaviruses in those regions. people there have an intimate connection with wildlife, including hunts and eating them. >> you know the head of that level 4 virology lab, shijin lee. do you think she's being entirely honest when she says confidently and with certitude that the virus was not from a bat in her lab? >> well, we work with labs around 40 countries around the world. we've been doing this work for 20 years. we only work with good laboratories. she is an excellent virologist.
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i have no reason to believe she's not telling the truth. everything i heard in my 15 years of working with people in that lab has been absolutely normal and what you would expect from virology labs. the real kicker to all of this is they didn't have the virus in the lab any way. nobody has the virus from bats that then led to covid-19. we've not found it yet. we found close relatives, but it's not the same virus. to my mind, it's not a possibility. >> but there is a concern that there has been some -- a cover-up maybe too strong a word, but the chinese government is not allowing researchers access to the lab, they're not sharing information, there's even a ban and censoring of scientific articles coming out of china on covid-19 wh. what do you think is going on? does that make you suspicious or is it reasonable to be suspicious? >> i think what happened is after we found this pandemic, it
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became politicized. you know, early on china was very open. they shared the full genome sequences of the viruses and openly with the rest of the world very, very quickly. quicker than we've ever seen this before for any country, really. so openness and transparency was there early on. i think we started to see the conspiracy theories, the pointing of the finger at china, and just this sort of politicization which means countries cramp up, and it's unfortunate. what we need now is open communication with scientists across the world. china has done a lot to deal with this virus before us. they know a lot about how to control it. we need access to that information and talking in political terms about this outbreak closes down that access. >> you said we may not ever know, but i want to ask you, there is one possibility, is there not, which is that this went from a bat to another species, and then from that
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species to a human being. >> we saw that with sars. sars went from a bat and then into people. that's happened with other viruses around the world. that's a common pathway by which they emerge. they get into another species, and it just amplifies the amount of virus available to infect people. >> and a final question, just to explain to everybody, why bats? i mean, explain how bats have a higher immune system and they gather together. what -- what explains why bats are the source of all these problems. >> yeah, i feel really sorry for bats because they don't exactly get a good rap in human history any way, and here they are carrying these viruses. the viruses in bats don't seem to do much damage. they're in the gi tract. bats carry ebola, novel virus, rabies and others. usually they're harmless. we think bats have an ability to
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carry a higher viral load, a higher amount of virus in their body and a high diversity of viruses. that may be related to the fact that they're the only flying mammal. flying is such a stress on the system that their immune response would skconstantly be reacting to the breakdown of cell products. and don't forget bats are actually very common, very diverse about one-fifth of all mammals, and we don't see them so we don't appreciate how exposed we are to bats flying overhead at night. bats flying into our farms, people going into bat caves on a bail daily basis in these regions. >> peter, this has been so illuminating. thank you very much for joining me. >> my pleasure, fareed. and we will be back. t liste until i almost lost my life. my doctors again ordered me to take aspirin, and i do. be sure to talk to your doctor before you begin an aspirin regimen. listen to the doctor. take it seriously.
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however, there is one thing you can be certain of. the men and women of the united states postal service. we're here to deliver cards and packages from loved ones and also deliver the peace of mind of knowing that essentials like prescriptions are on their way. every day, all across america, we deliver for you. and we always will.
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and i like to question your i'm yoevery move.n law. like this left turn. it's the next one. you always drive this slow? how did you make someone i love? that must be why you're always so late. i do not speed. and that's saving me cash with drivewise. my son, he did say that you were the safe option. and that's the nicest thing you ever said to me. so get allstate. stop bossing. where good drivers save 40% for avoiding mayhem, like me. this is my son's favorite color, you should try it. [mayhem] you always drive like an old lady? [tina] you're an old lady. that's why working together ist more important than ever. at&t is committed to keeping you connected. so you can keep your patients cared for. your customers served. your students inspired. and your employees closer than ever. our network is resilient. our people are strong. our job is to keep your business connected . it's what we've always done. it's what we'll always do.
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this week instead of a book
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i would like to recommend a show. "the plot against america." if you want to take your mind off covid, plunge yourself into this rich and brilliant screen adaptation of phillip roth's great novel. the life of a jewish family in newark against the backdrop of an alternate history of america where charles lindbergh gets elected president. it's on hbo, our sister broadcaster. and now for the last look. wednesday was the 50th anniversary of earth day, a day normally celebrated with marches and gatherings all filled with calls to action to save the planet. this year, though, the streets remained empty. the coronavirus called for inaction taking precedence. but all of this inaction, while causing so many humans problems, has actually proven to be quite good for mother earth. in recent weeks, penguins came out to play near capetown,s goats swarmed the streets of
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whales on now deserted beaches of thailand and florida, conservationists noted more see turtle nests than they noticed in years. with one-third of the world's population stuck indoors air pollution dropped dramatically. take los angeles, a city known for traffic and smog, earlier this month researchers from a global air quality tech company rated that city's air pollution one of the lowest on earth. and after india imposed the largest lockdown of the world, researchers found that the air in the capital of new delhi was 60% less polluted than the previous year. milan has even decided to reassign some 20 miles of busy traffic lanes to pedestrians and cyclists to discourage people from getting into cars after the lockdown ends as the guardian notes. globally co2 emissions are expected to fall 6% this year, according to the world meteorological organization. but even that may not be enough.
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the u.n. predicts that to avoid a dangerous rise in temperature, global emissions must fall not 6% but 7.6% each year for an entire decade. an amount even they worry is impossible. and all this progress can be quickly reversed. in february, when china's covid cases were at a peak and large swaths of its population were on lockdown, the country's nitrogen dioxide emissions came down dramatically. satellite imagery shows as soon as the lockdown ended, those no2 emissions started to creep back up. to make matters worse, china is doubling down on coal to overcome a covid slowdown. in march alone, there was more production for more coal fired plants that in all of 2019. with protesters around the world demanding a focus on economic growth i worry more countries are likely to follow suit. thanks to all of you for being a
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feeling better? i'm speechless. thanks for the apoquel. awww. that's what friends are for. ask your veterinarian for apoquel. next to you, apoquel is a dog's best friend.
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hey, i'm brian stelter in new york, this is "reliable sources" our weekly look at the story behind the story. we have some big guests coming up in the coming minutes, including the president of the white house correspondence association, jonathan karl. plus cnn's brooke baldwin