you know, people living with disabilities in our country is a substantial number of people, and often underrecognized in terms of the impact the pandemic is having on them as well. so this is all the more reason why we have to be so deliberate about getting to everyone who needs to be vaccinated. >> dr. marcella nunez-smith, really a pleasure to talk to you. thank you for taking the time. >> my pleasure, thank you. >> we hope tonight we helped with answers to some of your questions about the pandemic. >> there is one more thing you should know and that is show you can help. for more information on that, go to cnn.com/impact. also our impact your world team has put together this interactive guide of resources that's at cnn.com/coronavirushowtohelp. you're going to find a list of resources and organizations and ideas where you can donate or find help for yourself or a-ed one. anderson, i thought that was great. >> yeah. >> we covered a lot of ground there. it was nice to have a town hall like this. we're still in the middle of this pandemic.

>> it's nice to have experts who are willing to come and discuss for however long we want to discuss and get actual information out to people. i almost didn't recognize you, i got to say, though. you got a haircut, finally. you cut your hair. was that the first time since this pandemic? >> yep. first time -- >> you. >> -- since the pandemic. yep, i -- you know, i'm realizing looking at our two-shot here, i'm kind of starting to look like you a little bit, like the brown anderson. >> well, yeah -- >> real quick, i got to ask, how's my man, wyatt? >> he's great. >> how old is he now? >> 9 months old today. >> gosh. >> 9 months old today. it's crazy. he's sleeping. i don't want to say this out loud. it annoys people. he's sleeping 12 to 12 1/2 hours a night which is fantastic. >> i love that. >> he's grown -- i know, he looks sort of like a buddha there. he's grown since then. he's just an absolute joy. yeah. it's incredible. >> well, thank you. thank you, tonight, anderson. that's great. wyatt, send me more pictures. >> all right. i will.

sanjay, thank you. thank dr. anthony fauci. dr. rochelle walensky. and dr. marcella nunez-smith. chair of president biden task force. also thanks to those who wrote in with your questions. to a lot who joined us tonight, i know a lot of people didn't get their questions answered. i apologize. the conversation continues at cnn.com/coronavirusanswers. the news continues with chris cuomo. chris? all right. we're running late. i'm chris cuomo. welcome to "prime time." let's get right after it. what's happening in washington deserves your attention. it may be as dangerous as the pandemic. my question is how many red flags do we need? homeland security just put out a warning of more possible violence to come from violent anti-government extremists. fueled by false narratives that could continue to mobilize to incite or commit violence. now, this -- that's what the gop has to say about this threat. why? the only response they've had to the threat is to keep biden from getting ahead of homeland security.

to head up the attack against this problem. why? my argument and it's why i caution democrats wanting a power-sharing deal with mcconnell that that is like insisting on petting a starving snake. the big mouth is gone, but the republican chorus remains echoing his animus and hungry for more chaos. think about it. now not a word about the ton of terrorists who say they acted not just on behalf of trump but because trump told them to act. no comment from the leadership. why? cruz, hawley, the senators desperately to be outspoken. mr. green eggs and ham, himself. yet so quiet on how wrong this was. why? the rest of you supposed republicans, why are you so quiet on cruz and hawley? if you listen to them, they say we're against violence, we're against extremism, on both

sides, but while the fight against racism to them is really just an excuse to riot, right, blm, bad. antifa, like al qaeda. but the oath keepers, qanon, proud boys, the groups that the fbi are looking at, silent. yesterday, they had a chance to separate the gop from the idea of what savaged our capitol. and they voted to not even follow their duty under the constitution. they just want to let trump and this contagion continue to spread. if they won't do anything to speak out against it or hold the motivator to accounts they must want more of the same. just listen to their twisted thinking. >> a trial of a former president is simply vindictive. >> it's vindictive, it's backward looking, it's unserious, it's constitutionally sketchy. >> they hate donald j. trump and they're engaging in an act that i think is petty.

i think it is retribution. i think it is vindictive. i think it's a waste of time. >> you think vindictive was a talking point to them? you know what's vindictive, meaning seeking revenge? a coup. you know what vindictive? a confederate flag paraded through our capitol you say nothing else. you know what's vindictive? cruz. people forcing you to hide. you hid in fear. i get it. because day were looking for you. that's vindictive. by definition, seeking revenge. you know what that is? inciting domestic terror. to attack the capitol because you lost. that is vindictive. if you're going to have a talking point, apply it to the right things. this is vindictive. they wanted it to be vindication, but it wasn't because democracy held. this is the same party that held benghazi hearings for years who now think we have to forget all about this attack on our capitol.

just move on. why? well, people died in benghazi, remember that? people died. yeah, yeah. one fewer than died in the capitol. why doesn't it matter? if they were not hellbent on taking us all to hell in a handbasket, why would mitch mcconnell go from trump provoked this and fed that mob lies -- remember, he said that -- and pleading, we need time, let me move this trial, it must get due consideration, the president must have time to prepare. why would he say that and then immediately go to voting to dismiss the trial before it even starts? he wants the chaos. they want to comfort our attackers by doing so. again, just think about a better reason. why would house minority leader kevin mccarthy go to florida tomorrow to kiss the ring of the rogue former president? why? there's only one reason. to stay close to the man who is the king of the chaos and the crazies.

matt gaetz, a florida nobody, going to wyoming tomorrow to smear a top republican who spoke up against the king. the trip is a hit job on liz cheney. that's all it is. why? she voted to impeach trump. no one speaks against this guy. no one. why? think about it. they removed steve king from committees. remember him? need more white babies. they did it reluctantly but they did it after we kept highlighting his poison. but guess what they're doing now. they are empowering someone way worse. a qanon kook, marjorie taylor greene. this woman indicated support for executing prominent democrats. she once called the parkland shooting a false flag operation. now she's been assigned to the house education committee. look at this for an education. >> david, why are you supporting the red flag laws?

you are using your lobby and the money behind it and the kids to try to take away my 2nd amendment rights. you don't have anything to say for yourself? school zones protected by security guards with guns, there would be no mass shootings at schools. >> let me ask you something. would you chase after a kid who survived a mass shooting asking him why he doesn't want more guns? seriously. think about it. i don't care about 2nd amendment you are. i'm a gun owner, too. would you do that? bragging that you are doing it with a weapon on you as you antagonize this kid? and who's doing it? that woman thinks putting bullets in nancy pelosi is something to play with and she wonders why anyone would question people like her getting a concealed carry permit? you are the reason for red flag laws, lady. this is the person that you promote? my republican brothers and sisters? the party of lincoln? hello. you're promoting someone who's

more like john wilkes booth than lincoln. don't you see? my fear is you do and you like what you see. and for the rest of you, remember where their head is. trump didn't get us here alone. think about those who remain who sent every signal that they want to be every bit of his animus and more. silent about the insurrection. slowing homeland security's ability to fight the same people that did this. silencing any who fight for the old gop. promoting people who play at killing nancy pelosi. and members of the fbi. these who want to bring weapons into congress but don't want metal detecters. subverting the constitution to clear trump. slow walking pandemic response. who does all of these things unless you want chaos? gop used to stand for "grand old party." now it's like "gang of pirates."

let's bring in two wise men with some deadly serious advice. van jones, michael smerconish. first, smerc, am i off? what is the sum total of the calculus of their actions if they don't want more trouble? >> you're off a little bit. i don't know that they necessarily want chaos. by the way, the congresswoman, she's loathsome. >> they just put her on a committee. >> understand what i'm about to tell you. >> they just promoted. >> unbelievable. >> so, why? they put someone who wants to kill pelosi on a committee? how do you square those with not wanting chaos? >> what i'm saying is this is all -- this is horrible to say -- good for their business because, chris, you got to get out of that bubble a little bit. the state legislatures, the gubernatorial mansions, the gain of seats in congress, the probability that they will control the house if historical precedents hold firm.

add in the data that says 56% of republicans want donald trump to run again in 2024. >> yeah. >> the things you, i, van, are discussing that we find horrible is ratifying that base and that's their bread and butter. >> one quick thing. okay? i understand what you're saying. we both do stories, shows on sirius radio. we get people from all over the country. i've been all over this country more than most people on this network and certainly you have when it comes to reporting. i know trump people. i live in a trump county. i get it. what i'm saying, how you play the game at the top, michael, matters, and the fact that you think it may be beneficial doesn't make it okay. your silence about insurrections -- i know, you're saying, hey, this is good for them. it takes you to the same place i am, brother, they want the chaos. >> i'm saying you would have expected the party to pay a price already. you would have expected the party to pay a price -- >> i'm saying the price is yet to come. i'm saying the price is yet to come. people are receptive to the animus.

they are afraid. they're afraid of culture change. they're being baited that diversity is your downfall. i know it works. that's why demagogue is a greek word. it's effective. there was never a positive opposite. i'm saying it's now their plan. van, let me bounce to you. you guys want to work with them. you want a power-sharing deal. it's lunacy to me. you see what they're about. the wasp and the bull frog. the frog says, no, you're going to sting any. why would i? they both die. stings him in the middle of the pond. on the way down, what does the wasp say? i am what i am. you know who they are. why give them a ride? >> well, you're reducing the entire republican party to its worst elements and i think that there are people with who are wise to want to resist that. we are in a hell of a situation because we're damned if we do, damned if we don't.

if we don't reach out and try to work with the republicans, these guys are out to get us, won't work with us at all. we have to stick together. if we do reach out, to your point, some will use that against us. i am a follower of joe biden at this point. i'm a joe biden democrat. the only way to solve the actual problems is to get enough republicans onboard that we can get stuff done. and until all outlets have been exhausted, i think it makes sense for democrats to reach out. i don't think that our viewers understand how much fear there is now on both sides. people hate when you say "both sides," but when you talk with some of these republicans now, they have been told that this country is being taken over by communists who want to silence them, deplatform them, deprogram them, take their guns and turn their kids into transgender kids -- >> been hearing that for years. >> and so, and now they feel that, you know, democrats have all the power. >> right. >> on our side we're hearing

that you got -- that's coming for us, and so the people who stand in the breach right now are at a moment of maximum difficulty and frustration. but i am still on the side of the democrats who have been trying to figure out is there one, are there two, are there three? what republicans can we work with and can we start to roll this thing back? >> well, look, one thing, you didn't just see a bunch of lgbtqs attack the capitol. okay? so maybe both sides are being fed bs. one of it has come to pass and one hasn't. but, michael, do you think there's a chance there are enough people willing to risk getting kicked out of the gop and getting no assignments as we see what's happening with kinzinger, what they're doing with liz cheney, to join the democrats in the name of progress? >> we have quantitative data that says that's not the case and the number is five. that's how many in the senate on that constitutional challenge led by rand paul stepped out from their party. may i make one other observation.

>> go ahead. >> that memo that was released today from the department of homeland security, when i read it warning of a domestic threat, i said, wait, i've been to this movie before. do you remember soon after president obama's election, april of 2009, janet napolitano's office issued the same warning and then it got pulled back. why? because it said, you know, returning veterans are ripe for recruitment. and there was such a hue and cry that they had to forget they ever issued it. it's the same story. it's been going on all these years. >> well, it's a lot worse now. it's a lot worse now because now you have a group of people that unfortunately did include some of our veterans who have attacked the capitol and most of these people are still walking around just fine and they're, you know, planning worse acts. so, yeah, there was a warning earlier. wasn't heeded. the trump administration pulled back rather than leaning forward on some of this domestic extremism and now it's getting worse. >> well, look, fool you once, shame on you.

fool me twice, shame on me. all right? this is on us. we know what's happening. we know where everybody is positioned. what will be done next? van jones, thank you. michael smerconish, always a pleasure, brother. >> thank you. you've seen the pictures of january 6th. okay? for the first time we're hearing some of the conspiracy-fueled chatter from the days before the attack. here's a taste. >> there's going to have to be some serious anarchy that goes on otherwise nothing's going to change. >> now, it gets uglier from there and i want you to hear it because these are real people. your neighbors, maybe your relatives, and now we have a political system where half doesn't want this to happen and the other half is dead silent. "new york times" journalist who captured it joins us next.

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domestic extremists are fired up by what they saw in the capitol because now they have access to people in the political mainstream to recruit, to radicalize. so if the threat wasn't real to you before, wait until you hear directly from some of these people. >> they're guilty. treason. behead them all. >> bring in the firing squad. >> if the biden inauguration wants to come in and take your weapons and force vaccination, you have due process to blow them the [ muted ] away. do it. >> not exactly what due process is. about animus. about feelings, not fact. it's about anger. my next guest, stuart thompson, writes for "the new york times" and spent three weeks monitoring a unique qanon chat room. you can say, oh, qanon. it's spreading all over the place. people are taking little pieces of it just as a motivator for their anger. these members uploaded their thoughts with short audio recordings like the ones you just heard. stuart, welcome to "prime time."

appreciate you doing the work. >> thanks for having me. >> what was the theory behind the suggestion of your reporting? what did you want to see and what did you see? >> well, i started off looking at stop the steal, the movement that came after the election, that the election was a fraud and going down that rabbit hole ended up in this chat room which was a stop-the-steal-focused chat room but i kind of discovered there's major overlap there, which makes a lot of sense if you believe in a global cabal of sex traffickers. it's not a big leap to say parts of the election were fraudulently handled. i just wanted to try to find out what these people were like. they ended up being sort of like you mentioned earlier, your neighbors, your friends, pretty typical americans, actually. this isn't their life. they're not committing all their time to it. they have grandkids, they're baby sitting, living lives, they're working. a big part of what they do as well is share misinformation, try to further the conspiracy

and talk to each other on this platform. >> right. i hope it hasn't become typically american to discuss how to kill people that you don't agree with, and this isn't just angry talk. it is about inciting harm. here's more of the sound that stuart reported and recorded. >> does he not realize president trump called us to siege the place? >> now, that was one, but i keep hearing from attorneys who are representing those who committed criminal acts at the capitol, they're calling it a cult now. yes, they're trying to find any article of convenience to defend their clients. i'm not -- i don't care about their cases. they have slam-dunk cases. the prosecutors, if they want them. but in terms of the political ramifications, person after person says this is what the president told us to do. now, to some that sounds too convenient, but what did you learn about how active the belief in trump and the motivation to do what he says is?

>> there's major loyalty among this crowd to trump. leading up to january 6th, they fully expected that he would announce mass arrests and release the documents that they believed that he had all along that would prove all of q's theories correct. that didn't happen. the way the movement works, they pushed the goalpost further down the road and it became the 20th, the big day. after that, amounted to nothing. there's a bit of a crisis over whether trump was who they thought he would be and who he -- if he was going to, you know, fulfill the movement. you know, they had to kind of address and come to terms with that. >> right. you and i both get the point that michael smerconish was making in the last segment which is, yeah, the republicans have done well by getting people who are largely white and afraid of culture change and a shift in diversity dynamics and they've harnessed that well. what i'm saying is, yeah, we all get that. it's that now it's gone from a fear in how to change it through

policy and politicking to taking it into their own hands. take a listen to that. >> i wish they'd storm the congress and the senate and pull all them treasonous guys out of there. >> honestly, i think the patriots should have been allowed to go in there, grab those s.o.b.s and pull them out of the building. and, you know, have an execution right there. >> by the way, those are women. they're the reasonable ones in the mix of our society. right? we usually depend on men for stupid things, violence in the absence of thought. and that's my fear about the party. the longer the republican party gives comfort to trump and doesn't say anything about these people, what message do you believe it sends to chat rooms like that? >> they really do believe -- i think when you read online what people say, it's easy to dismiss

that as maybe not real, butting you know, as we saw in the capitol, it is very real and when you hear their voices you really connect with their belief and for them, this is, you know, a big crime that's been perpetrated and they're seeking justice. so, you know, you can imagine how committed they are to that. i think in the wake of trump leaving, what they found was instead of saying, you know, the things we were believing in were nonsense, they say, we were relying on the wrong person, we were relying on trump to do it all and now it's up to us to do it. so that's scary ramifications from the movement now. >> this is the kind of thing that used to be shared around lakes and barbecues. now they're doing it openly and online. stuart thompson, this was valuable. thank you very much for taking the time. you're always welcome to bring your reporting here. be well. >> thanks. so, president biden, he's got all this on his plate and he is going to be pulled in a lot of directions early on. and they have been to this point good direction. a thing we haven't heard a lot about except in the negative,

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president biden took aim at the climate crisis today. signed off on a slew of new executive orders. some of the highlights, fulfilling his campaign promise to halt new oil and gas leases on federal lands and waters. expanding the conservation of those same lands from an estimated 12% to now 30% by 2030. he's also directing all federal agencies to consider climate when making national security and foreign policy decisions. climate activists heartened but it's going to take a lot more to undo the damage of his predecessor and tackle the crisis at large. let's get some perspective from a leader in environmental action, governor jay inslee. all right. it's interesting, gov, good to see you, by the way. good luck to you -- >> thank you. >> -- in all the changes you're facing in a state right now with the pandemic. >> thank you. >> the angle is to come to you as a specialist and say this is enough. i'm going to flip it, which is how do you finesse the aspect of the other party, which i believe is in a complete state of chaos, but on this, they got a great angle. every time you go something that's green, you're taking green out of their pockets. keystone pipeline, costing jobs.

no more drilling, costing jobs. jobs matter more to people than the environment when you look at polls. how do you bridge that gap? >> you just blow up their >> lies. i thought you said lives for a second. i was like, whoa. you sound like ted cruz. >> there's two -- there are two great lies that they are relying upon. one, that we stole the election for donald trump. but that the second is defeating climate change somehow hurt jobs. it is exactly the opposite. this is a nation ready to take off in a clean energy revolution. this is perfect for the united states. this is teed up for us to do what we do best which is develop jobs in new industries and we are doing that today. today, clean energy jobs, and the reality is, are growing three times faster than the nation's average.

this is the place to create energy jobs and it's happening -- listen, in my state, you can't turn over a rock without finding a new company coming up with some of the largest solar cell manufacturing in the western hemisphere in billingham, washington. the very first net zero large high-rise apartment building, we broke ground on that monday. the western hemisphere is first. cross-laminated timber in spokane. this is the future and the present. listen, the other side wants to shackle people to a past of an area of declining jobs. this is a reality. we do not want to shackle our children to the dead weight of jobs that aren't going to exist 30 years from now. we want to give our kids the jobs that are growing, and this is the number one job creation engine is clean energy. i couldn't be more tickled. this is a hallelujah moment from my view. we crossed the desert of denial

and deception about climate change and we have a president who understands how to create jobs and he's doing that big-time today. >> on the other big topic of dealing with the pandemic, two issues for you. one is whether or not you believe the biden administration understands how to help you get vaccine into arms faster. and, two, this notion now floated from the fed that -- the cdc -- that kids can be back in schools even though we haven't seen a lot of changes to the problems that democrats, you were worried about, in sending kids into schools. what's your take on those two? >> first, i'm so pleased, the president just a few days has done the two most important things to help the states. number one, to increase production. look it, the number one long pole in the tent is production. he's ordered more production of these doses. i don't know why the trump administration did not do that. he's doing it big-time. that's the single most important thing he can do. he's willing to use the defense

production act. delivering syringes so we can get the extra dose out of the vials. the second thing he's done is give us predictability. it's very hard to, you know, stand up these large-scale vaccination sites unless you have a predictable supply. he told us yesterday he'd have a predictable supply for the next three weeks. this is really going to help us. so, again, he's moving the ball big-time. it's the leadership we've lacked for four years. on the issue of schools, we are having success moving our children back into on-site learning. our educators have done a super job in remote learning. they have been creative, innovative. i've seen it with my own three grandkids. they're just geniuses doing the most they can with remote learning, but you just can't be as effective off-site. >> right. >> we're moving our kids back, on-site learning. we know it can be done because we've done it. we got over 100,000 of our students who have on-site learning for months now in our state with minimal to no

in-school transmission. cdc came out today confirming that scientific basis, but it's not just abstract science. it is experience where i can take you to schools all over my state who shows you how to do this. now, we got to do this safely. we got to make sure educators are guaranteed that we have safety committees and we have hygiene and we space the kids, but if we do those things, we're very confident we can move back. we're moving in this direction quite rapidly. >> why not move the teachers and educators up in the vaccine queue if they're going to be back in the schools? >> well, it's because, listen, i know -- i come from a family of teachers. my dad was a teacher. my brother, brother-in-law, sister-in-law, all retired teachers. i know this about teachers. if you go to a 25-year-old third grade teacher, none of them are going to say, hey, i want to jump in line ahead of my 80-year-old grandmother or my 60-year-old father and mother. that's not how they feel about this. we have limited supply and we know that 80% or 89% of all the fatalities are in a very

discreet group of people. that's people over the age of 65. so we want to save lives. that's the number-one priority. then in our next tranche, we're going to do educators and grocery workers and the people who are feeding us and doing childcare. we're going to do that as fast as humanly possible. thank goodness we got a good federal partner, a leader that's going to help states. >> listen, i hear you. you understand the conflation involved also, gov, we've talked about it before. >> right. >> kids don't give other kids the disease quickly. they can give it to adults. teachers have their own issues or elderly at home. there are a lot of cross concerns. governor jay inslee, appreciate you being on the show tonight. >> you bet, be well. pandemic developments. okay? if kids are going to go back to school, you're going to have to deal with the educators. kids may not give it to each other, but they can give it to us. these new covid variants are threatening to crush already. okay? especially the hospitals.

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all right. this is a good time to take stock of the pandemic. i know the numbers get numbing. okay? daily deaths remain near all-time highs. cases steady, dropping in states. why? we saw that christmas bubble, went up. it's now coming down. all right? are we doing enough? no. are we relying on a vaccine too heavily? yes. but the vaccine does seem to be ramping up also. so we are racing with variants versus the vaccine. right? variants being new forms of the virus that will spread cases faster. all right? we've seen 300 cases from variants in 28 states so far. we know that's not going to go down. it's only going to go up. right? so you need to get more people vaccinated to deal with it because so far the data is the vaccine still works even with the variant. let's bring in dr. leana wen. always good to see you. welcome back to "prime time." now, can you help us understand something i keep getting asked?

why did we not know what syringe to use to get the maximum amount of doses out of the bottle? >> it's a good question, chris, and so the way that we normally do things is there are normal syringes and needles and the thinking with the pfizer vaccine was that one vial will contain enough for five doses. and so people were just using these normal syringes and needles. but then they were realizing that if they use this particular syringe and needle that really minimizes waste that has not much space, so that's why it's called the low dead space syringe and needle, that they use that particular syringe, they're able to extract a sixth dose and in some cases a seventh dose out from these vials which is great news, except that these needles and syringes are so specialized. they're not commonplace. so i think it's -- it's great that we're trying to minimize waste, but we really need to make the needles just much more widespread and in the meantime pfizer should not be charging the taxpayers for that sixth

dose. >> why would we have any other kind of needle? like, why would you have a needle that creates waste? >> this is the standard needle and syringe. it's produced in much larger quantities and i would think it's much cheaper. and so the specialized low dead space syringe and needle are used for particularly expensive medications that we really don't want to have waste. >> i don't love numbers because i think they're overwhelming, but certain numbers pop up. 16%. boy, that's precise. where did 16% come from? is this about moderna underpromising or overdelivering? i mean, where did it come from? the 16%, by the way, leana, i'm sorry, leana knows what the 16%. is just to remind you at home. the federal government says they have 16% more, they found, in quotes, because i don't know what that means, to send to states. that's the question. what's the answer? >> i don't have the answer,

chris, and i've been looking into this because what the federal government is saying, which i think is, again, great news, is that they are going to be sending the states 16% more vaccine than they were initially promised. but i've been asking and i've been told it's one of three things but nobody will tell me exactly which of these three things are. it could be that maybe they're calculating that sixth dose from the pfizer vaccine. maybe they initially projected five doses. now it's six doses. it could also be that there were some reserve vaccines that just not in the calculation before for supply. or it could also be that manufacturing is somehow higher that initially was promised. maybe there was underpromising and now these manufacturers are overdelivering. we don't know the answer but here's what i don't understand. i don't know why this is such a big secret. we, the american people really should know what's going on with our supply. taxpayers, i think we have a right to know also how much is being produced, where are we, are we on track or not? and this should be publicly available to the states to help them plan as well. >> i'll give them three weeks. i counted, this is the first

one. i'll give them two more to figure out everything about the numbers because you know how when you just get in there, you didn't have a team that was trying to help you on the way out, i'll give them time to get their hands around it. then things like this deserve explanation. we can't go back to any kind of degree of non-transparency. schools. they looked at three studies in wisconsin, mississippi, and north carolina and two abroad, europe and israel. i'm not blown away by that sample size to draw a global conclusion that it's okay for everybody to go back to school everywhere, although i very much want my kids to go back to school, very much. my concern is, what has changed the notion that, yeah, kids don't give it to each other that much, but they do give it to you, dr. wen, or to me or to the old people in their homes or the teachers or their old people in their home. has that changed? >> no, i think that's what's changed is these studies are showing that if proper mitigation measures are used in these schools, so there's masking, there's physical distancing, you're also trying

to keep kids in pods and other things, if you use these measures that the rate of transmission in schools is actually lower than the rate of transmission in the rest of the community, which means that schools can be kept relatively safe. the problems are, though, not all schools, in fact, many schools do not have all these mitigation measures in place. they haven't had the ability to upgrade their ventilation as an example. i think we also have no idea what's going to happen with the new variants. in other countries where the variants really took over, schools had to close because things that were much -- that we thought were relatively safe, if you have something that's much more contagious are not safe anymore. so schools in britain are closed. schools in the netherlands are closed. i think if we are to re-open schools here, we have to keep a really close eye because we could have catastrophic outbreaks if we have these variants take over. >> the variants are coming just when our will to be prophylactic is waning the most. people don't want to stay inside anymore. they want kids back just when we have the new variants. dr. leana wen, thanks so much.

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. . . we have to talk about two things that you don't like,

okay? mental health and another reason to consider why kids need to get back to group settings, suicide. this is a heartbreaking reality but should not comes a surprise. we have one district, clark county in nevada, they are doing all they can to speed up reopening schools because they had 19 suicides since march. that's the most recent one of them was just this month. that's more than doubled what the county went through the year before. the youngest victim was nine. now, it is hard to firmly link the rise in suicides to school closings. people having depression and multi factorial. this pandemic has been nothing but sucked and made everything

worse. jesus is joining me now. thank you so much for coming to talk to me about this. >> thank you, for having me, chris, appreciate it. tough topic. >> but we have to discuss it. if it is something physical that we are taking kids, every eye ball in the world to fix it so it does not happen. mental health, people get spooked. has there been any indications from any of these families other than the kids being isolated and hopeless of what was going to happen for their future and senior years and all that. >> i will tell you, chris, it is gut wrenching. i had a conversation with one of our students that took his life after graduated, honor student, great athlete and mom and dad really want to be apart of the

solution and didn't know and did not have the signs. certainly as a father myself, they did not see the signs and they said it was to everything that the child lost his senior year led to from what they claim and suggested to me was really the kid took his own life which is really sitting and listening to parents, it is troubling. as superintendent, we have to obviously look at mental health and looking at the covid number of cases, that's where we all started. when you started seeing the uptake of the numbers it was something we had to act and and put a lot of system in place to try to find the solution to get our kids back in school. >> i want people to hear from one of the families from these

kids. listen to this dad. >> an incredible kid, he was depressed and he was not someone who -- >> social isolation. covid killed my son. not how we think. i believe my son would be alive today if he was in school. >> now, i know about you and you don't just get to be superintendent over night. you are a father but you have been working with kids for so many years and they're like their own. what's the hardest part in knowing that kids are taking their lives in this situation? >> it is really and you see everything gone to

self-isolation at home. everything has closed down and athletics and sports. that's what keeps our kids engaged in our schools and when you see them in virtual classrooms. i substituted a class myself to see and when you are looking into screen, all you are seeing is numbers because they're not turning on their cameras. you are talking to the black hole and you are missing that social interaction with students. when you are coming in here and trying to figure things out, how to get our kids safe on our campuses, it is hard on me. i think of a 15-year-old, i think of a 14-year-old going through the computer all day long and without the break with the lunchroom or getting on the bus, the normal thuings in life. that's why we are doing

everything we can to help, to bring -- >> jesus, this is what i can do. if it is about money or locating different resources, let me know, i am happy to put the word out what the county needs and see if communities around the country want to help. if this is happening to you in nevada, it is going to happen in other places. things rarely happen in a vacuum when it comes to mental health. keep me in the loop. god bless and hope things will be better there. >> thank you, chris. >> tough stuff but we got to talk about it. we'll be right back.

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