thank you all very much for joining us. thank you all for coming to the heritage foundation. thank you. >> let me take the liberty on behalf of the panel and everyone involved to think our panelists for their involvement. >> congress returns from summer recess in september with a busy legislative floor schedule ahead. the house and senate are expected to take up federal spending bills funding to government through next year to prevent a government shutdown. current government funding expires on september 30th. lawmakers are also facing end of the month of deadlines to reauthorize faa and pandemic preparedness programs. the senate will continue working with president biden's judicial and executive nominations including for the federal reserve. watch live coverage of the house on c-span, descended on c-span two, and a reminder

that you can watch all of our congressional coverage without free video app c-span now or online at c-span.org. >> a healthy democracy doesn't just look like this, it looks like this. americans can see democracy at work. the citizens are truly -- our republic thrives. get informed straight from the source on c-span -- unfiltered, unbiased, word for word from the nation's capital to wherever you are. get the opinion that matters most. this is what democracy looks like. c-span, powered by cable. >> thank you for coming to this panel about a very important subject, health inequality and health justice. we have here two fantastic authors with books i think every american needs to raid. first off we have bat may see

she's a virginia-based journalist her previous book was, duke sick dealers, the drug, doctors on the drug computing that addicted america. she was an executive producer on hulu's pew body -- before that she spent many years reporting for the roanoke times in virginia and occasionally contribute essays to the new york times. she's here with her book, raising lazarus, hope, justice in the future of americas overdose crisis. and next to her we have stephen fracture, he holds the inaugural run burchard northwestern school, i jeweler professorship in the world. to focus on lgbtq research in the world to focus on lgbtq research. he is also on the faculty of northwestern's institute of sexual and gender minority health and well-being. he has written about the aids hiv, covid, and monkeypox

academics for the new york times, buzzfeed news, and numerous scholarly journals. he is here with his book the viral underclass, the human toll when inequality and disease collide. i think we are going to have a great discussion. i want to start this off sort of framing with this quote that appears in raising lazarus for martin luther king junior. of all the forms of inequality injustice in health, it's the most shocking the most inhuman because it often result in physical death. i think that is so important to keep in mind as we continue with this discussion. i want to start with you live the viral underclass. this is in many ways the follow-up to dope sick. i can imagine that was a difficult book to report on. i can imagine the sorrow and the pain that you would have to share with people in that. can you just explain why you

reported on the opioid crisis? i would love you to share the story of that title. it is such a vital part of the book. >> thank you. thanks, everybody, for coming. i already can't stop talking to stephen. this is a great pick, whoever picked this. why write a second book about the opioid crisis? i was so bereft by the time i finished dope sick. my main person i had been following, a young woman who struggled with addiction for five plus years, had been murdered after being abandoned by every system that was meant to help her. the last image in that book, for those of you who have read it, is a mother saying goodbye to her body at a funeral home. she's bereft because of the loss and bereft because of the four responses of our nation to the opioid crisis. i really was not ever going to write about it again. my husband said that i should write a cookbook.

>> but (laughter) >> i started talking to people in a learning about really innovative things that surprised me, particularly when you have people doing cutting edge harm reduction and low barrier care in rural space, in rural communities which haven't even passed medicaid expansion. i am like, holy cow, if they can do it, why aren't they the model for our nation going forward? we still have an 87% treatment gap in america for owe you the, opioid use disorder, and that means only we still have an 80% percent treatment gap and america for all you due to, opioid use disorder. only 13% of folks were able to access treatment and it's largely because of stigma and inaction. i thought with this opioid money about to be coming down the litigation settlement money, why don't i write this book which is more hopeful? the bits of hope are

not to the scale that we wish it were. this will help teach communities how to best spend that money which is in the way that the evidence supports and also just in the ways that humanity supports. that leads to the title. a lot of people think the title raising lazarus is a reference to narcan, the overdose reversal drug. narcan is part of it, but i started reporting on these two women who were married and they started what they called the nation's only, biracial, faith-based harm reduction group. they started passing out needles on the slide before it was in the back of their pick up truck. they were poised when it needle exchange was legalized in north carolina to

become a full-fledged organization. they now do amazing work. they do cutting edge work. people call upon michelle, the minister, when she is trying to get christian groups to check blind spots about harvard auction which is this idea of going to meet people where they are, shooting them with nonjudgmental care, love, and saying it's okay if they are still using. you are still a person if you are still using. we know that people are more likely to enter treatment. i am sorry about the long answer. for the first time i meet michelle, she's in this community meeting where the -- it is hijacked by someone says, well, i think we should let them die and keep their organs. really? she tells a story of lazarus. jesus was four days late getting to lazarus. he was dead when he got there. okay,

jesus performance was a miracle of bringing lazarus back from the dead. it's up to the disciples to roll the stone, to remove the barrier. i have a chapter called stone rollers. it's up to the disciples to do the messy work of an binding lazarus but only by getting close to these folks on the ground. can you experience the miracle of raising lazarus? that's where the title came from. i love the praise, the sticky messy work involved in that. steven, let's talk about the viral, underclass it's not a phrase that you coined yourself. but you used to great effect within the book. i love this framing that you put on the book, when we follow the virus, any virus, we follow the culture, which is a line of what you are exploring in the book. the interrelationship

between the spread of disease and marginalized people. what is the genesis of this book? >> well, thank you so much for having me. i'm happy to be here. (inaudible) he's using it to describe how and why people are criminalized for transmitting hiv, or exposing other people to hiv. there are many points in our books, one of the misunderstanding the ways that stigma is the stone that keeps people from getting the help they need. and for people who don't know, in the, audience it is illegal to expose someone else to hiv or transmit hiv to somebody else under circumstances in half of u.s. states. 70 countries around the world. and it's a really bad law because when people are positive with hiv, or covid, or monkeypox, or anything, what we want is for them to be able to come forward and get the care that they need and to know that they're not gonna be judged, and that they

are certainly not going to be thrown in prison. so i started writing about a case of a young man in st. louis, into thousand 13, who was arrested for criminal exposure to hiv and transmitting hiv to people. he was facing life in prison. he eventually got sentenced to 30 years in prison. because of our reporting, at, buzzfeed and a lot of activists, work we got him out about 25 years early. he spent most of his twenties and prison. it was a real wake up call to me to understand that even if people think that doing things that might lead to exposure to someone, else nobody is trying to give anyone else covid. nobody is trying to get anyone else hiv or aids. but when you tell people that, if you find out your positive, and for the rest of your life you can be prosecuted, they see somebody go to prison for 30 years, that becomes a stone that keeps people from getting tested in the first place. the work of hiv prevention people but i work with got much harder

after the beginning of that case. so a viral underclass, i started seeing -- sean used to talk about people living under hiv, living under. flaws i heard activists using it in slightly different ways. i was trying -- to this became a serious for a long time. it became the basis of my phd dissertation. i understood it as a way to understand systemic racism because overwhelmingly. the people who are prosecuted are black. anywhere around the world of this happens. and i started to use this as a way to think of a viral underclass as an analytic to understand how and why similar groups of people become exposed to the different social conditions and different kinds of viruses. hiv, when you look at where people get hiv, and where it progresses to, a.i.d.s. you also find people who are dying in -- criminalized over policing, police, killings you just see it on maps. when the covid-19 death started happening in 2020, i saw the same maps filling in. so my move in the book, the viral, underclass i build off the work around, race but one of the ways my book intersects is that

this is not only a matter of, race race is a big part, of it but this is affecting poor white people, poor people who are lgbtq. disabled, and in another way, people who have been incarcerated. i want to add one point of hope. activist, since the time i sort of work in, this have done really really good work raising awareness about the criminalization of hiv. only two states have gotten rid of the laws entirely. when people are cynical about the two party system, i tell them the two states that have gotten rid of hiv laws are illinois, where i live, blue top to bottom, in texas. so thank you for all of, you this happened under your government. with lots of bipartisan support. >> that's great. >> great. >> the first area i would like to drill into, you both alluded to in your discussions of your books just then, it is stigma. because it is such a big part of what you both are reporting about in this book. to me,

stigma is about creating a sense of a, where these problems, these issues, therefore other people and other groups that we can shunt away. in this country, most of us have a good awareness of how we treat people as others when it comes to racial divisions, or sexual orientation, or gender identity. when you all -- what you both explored is this treatment of other when it comes to drug use or homelessness, or incarceration, or sex, work or even just people having some of these diseases that come with stigma. hepatitis, hiv. you know, when it's put so well -- treating human beings as objects, rather than -- i would love both of you to drill in just a little bit more how stigma prevents us from reaching solutions in

these public health crises. >> that's a great question. someone -- domenico? first so much of the stigmatization comes from this place where people fall through the gaps and die. that is this tension between treating people like a criminal, a moral failure, and treating them like the human beings that they are with a treatable medical condition. they really are people with a treatable medical condition. just like you would take insulin if you had diabetes, which i have. so if you look at that, it goes back to the narcotics act of 1914. it goes back to nixon's war on drugs. i take a brief digression to talk about nixon in his early years, when he actually had treatment

funded as well as he had incarceration for drug use funded. he appointed the nation's first drug czar, this super crusty psychiatrist name jerome javid hooper reported directly to him. designed a program of on demand methadone clinics. but then, you know, you see a start to become a way to place people in order to get votes. and the southern strategy that he employs, which is well documented, that is harsher against poor people and people of color. when i think of stigma, i think of the story in my book that got me the most. i was falling around in hiv worker whose job was to tell -- test and treat people for hiv in charleston, west virginia, the state that has

the most concerning hiv outbreak in the nation. and the criminalized needs based syringe exchange. the one thing we know works to prevent the spread of these infectious diseases. so i'm following around this ryan white work named brooke parker. she's looking for three people, but they're mostly unhoused. she can't find them. and that needs are to streaming on her like, coming at her right and left. and at one point were looking for a person, write a homeless encampment. we run into this man in a wheelchair. he's dope sick, he's crying, he's got maggots coming out of the abscess in his feed later in the day. he will go to the hospital, even though he's gonna die of this bacterial infection. because he went there last week and he was treated like (bleep) for 18 hours. she's begging him to go. it was like watching jesus, she sits on the dirty ground, she opens her first day, catchy puts gloves on, she puts packet after packet of antibiotic ointment on him. he's wincing, he's crying, he's dope sick, he

needs to get drugs to get well. and at that moment, a police officer comes up, and puts an eviction notice on the homeless encampment. i thought, all of the stories just came together in that moment. a sex worker who also lives in the homeless encampment comes up and says, to brooke, honey, that antibiotic ointment ain't going to cut. it i was a nurse for 17 years. an lp end, and then i got married. and then it was like -- it she went like this, it was incredible. and she walked away, and brooks said, she should be the person treating him. if something had gone wrong for her, this is what we have to remember, this is the base of stigma. if we

have to remember that this guy and we'll share had a family. he had kids. he could be just like us, and so i think stigma is really at the base of all those many things, all the layers of discrimination in that one moment, and just how poorly people in our own health care system, which by the, way participated in starting the opioid crisis, and they need to participate in putting an end to it. >> stephen? >> so, the statistic that i think about the most that i read about in the book, and have for years, is one and every two black men are projected to become hiv positive in our lifetime. there's no reason for that to happen. certainly there's no reason for anyone to die of aids. hiv is extremely slow acting virus. it can take five, seven, ten years for people to start having bad health effects. 10 to 15 years until

they die. 10,000 people still died of it in the united states are. you're the better part of 1 million diet around the globe. and a big part of it is economics. but a lot of that is the stigma. people are made to feel so bad, it is so shameful through hiv criminalization, laws, jokes through the ways people are treated in health care settings. that they don't get the help that they need. and i was thinking what you were talking, beth, if people don't have a safe place to sleep, it doesn't matter whether or not you get them these drugs. hiv is relatively easy to deal with when you catch it in its early stages. people take one pill a day, they go on with her life pretty much normally thereafter. but stigma is a huge barrier in getting the care that they need. i was saying something nice about your state earlier with hiv criminalization, laws but what they're doing with trans children and the ways that lgbtq people are getting formalized in this state, in florida, arkansas, it's creating these pathways of the state to let viruses into bodies. trans people, -- if principle can get the medically

supervised care that they need for hormones in a safe setting. if people are dealing with addiction as a health matter cannot get syringes, then the state opens up their fans and their bodies to hiv and hepatitis another pathogens. because they're going to get the care they need somewhere whether or not it is sterile. and stigma, not only is that a physical matter, but stigma becomes this barrier that makes people feel ashamed to get the help that they need. so one of the stories that touch me the, most in the first person in my outer social circle to die of covid was a really amazing activist named -- who was known as the trans latinx mother of -- the mother of the trans latinx community in jackson heights, new york, in queens. she had been living with hiv for decades. she had been a sex worker, she did amazing volunteer work, she would go out on the street and get people sit there ulcer. inches

she would give them food and condoms, and anything they needed. and met people where they were. and she was the first person i knew who contracted covid and died. when she had covid, those very early days in march 2020, she did not want to go to the hospitalriencd because of all the bad experiences that she had had in the hospital herself. i won't go into any depth here. i wrote about an experience that i had when i needed a testicular sonogram when i was doing my ph.d. work. i was a bit older frustrated, but not that old. i was made to feel very unwelcome because of my age. the receptionist made a joke about not thinking i could be a referral from a student health center. that really made me understand the ways that, if a trans person's going for health care, particularly around something sensitive like sexual reproductive health or cancer or something, if they're met with that response, you don't look like what i was expecting, that's a big reason why they might not want to go in and get care. that's one of the reasons they are so much more likely to

get sick. unnecessarily. >> i want to ask about intention here. so we have this health care system in our country that is capitalistic, and profit driven. so what interests me to explore a little bit is to what extent you think that the people making the decisions in our public health system and our health care companies and hospitals, have some sense of malignant intention to intentionally marginalize these groups. to what extent is this just a byproduct of the structure of our system? because it is profit driven? >> go ahead. >> well, before dopesick came out. i was asked to talk to the nonprofit hospital system in my region, the largest employer in the whole half of the state. five hospitals, medical school,

everything. tess had died and i watched her struggle not to be cared for at their own hospitals. i said, i know not all of you took a free trip courtesy of purdue pharma to arizona and florida to become speakers from the country. but you all participated in this system. you should participate in the correcting of it. side so i think that was 2017. two years later they totally change the way they do medicine. they started doing medication assisted treatment, offering it in the ev, whereas before they thought that was just treating it recognition with another drug. it wasn't their job. so they can change. the world didn't and when they changed. one guy with a lot of power decided he could change the rules. and he had incredible -- and that's what i see over and over in this book. one person,

sometimes a mother, a sister, of somebody who's died of overdose, somebody -- sometimes it's just somebody like dr. burton. i asked him what happened he said well, we read your book. and then we looked into the research, and we said, how could we not be doing this? now he becomes kind of an evangelist for other hospitals wanting to do this evidence based practice. it's like 5% of hospitals doing. it it's not that heavy a lift. i don't know that it's because of the capitalist system as much as the creation of the overdose crisis to begin with. which begins with purdue pharma, introducing a very addictive drug in 1996, and basically buying off all the politicians and lobbyists, the fda, the guy who stamps approval on oxycontin. goes to work for purdue, tripling his government salary. three years later, i mean, nobody is regulating these systems. so we've got to

get rid of the revolving door as one thing. you see that happen again later when the dea basically gets kneecap from going after suspicious pill miller doctors and suspicious orders. because of a law that the lobbyist basically wrote that used to work for the drug companies. you almost could not make this up. but i think it is both. i think the health care providers want to get back to doing no harm. i quoted this addiction medicaid? dr.. he wore this big cross, he's very religious, he runs a homeless shelter out of the basement of his office. he said the answer comes back to a quote from 1926, francis peabody, at harvard, said that for the secret of caring for the patient, it is

to care for the patient. and i think when we let capitalism rule, we have to get back to caring for the patient. >> i directly blame capitalism. [laughter] the point of capitalism is to extract profit and value. the health care system under capitalism is not about health care. the point of these companies is to drive profit. that is their primary motivation. and many of the sicknesses are opportunities to do so. there is a phrase i've heard a lot of activists use. it was one of the main a.i.d.s. organizations that fought aid successfully, fought government reaction, business reaction to it successfully in the 19 80s and 90s. perhaps their most important contribution is that they force the fda and the government to change how trials were done, and that's why billions of us have now been able to get vaccines for covid, in a process that used to take ten, years could take as little as one year now. they had a phrase that they, used by 1990,

six with aids medications coming out, science one. science won the debate about what to do about aids. they figured out how to do, it they figured out how to save lives. science won the battle, but capitalism won the war. capitalism is the reason why more people have died of aids after the invention of the medication that died before. capitalism is the reason why there is a higher rate of aids among african americans in 2015 there ever was among white americans before there was medication 20 years earlier. this is the kind of results that the capitalist pulp system creates. the people you are writing about that are doing the work out of the back of their truck, they're interested in care. and i think a point between our books that i noticed is we are writing about people who have a different ethics of care. a new ethics of care. i hope that the covid-19

pandemic would inform, and it, has many more people to have different senses of ethics of care. i certainly know so many people who worked in offices prior to the covid-19 pandemic, that once they were home, they truly enjoyed doing things like getting groceries for the neighbors and being a mutual aid network. things like that. those are the models i think we need to look at for more care for people. the person doing the housing in their basement. they are doing that work. the people that i have interviewed about monkeypox this summer, sex, clubs saunas, who worked their assets off all summer to inform people about monkeypox, -- distributing the vaccine, stopping sex parties and activities, turning them into places to get people vaccinated. they are the ones doing a new kind of work that's interested in people's health. as alas, thought i will say something else i thought about reading her book, beth, about how covid-19 put into effect a very different response to the

world from the world government and companies than hiv days and monkeypox did. and that work around anything that involves sex or drugs, -- and we could have an ethics of care that did so what much less judgment about those activities that would not only benefit people on individual levels, but would create a much better public health outcome in society. >> great, i would like to invite anyone from the audience that would like to ask a question of our panelists to come up and step up to the mic. we well we are doing that, i want to talk a little bit about hope here. just a little bit towards a solution because one of the things that comes across in your books is this idea that the people that need the most care are the ones with the least access to care. it seems distorted, and you both point

to individuals who are sort of -- i don't wanna say fighting back against the, system but finding ways to help in the ways they can. are those solutions scalable? is there a way to take the models that you find and make them work on a large scale? >> i think they have to, be we can't lose hope. i also write about a bureaucrat who comes along and in the same community where they said let him die and take their, organs figures out a way to offer post overdose response teams, and peer recovery specialists. to every person who now overdoses, they get a person in recovery to come out and help them make those first steps into care. but he had the battle, it's a political problem more than it is. anything else. he has to battle judges that don't want to allow drug court, even though he has money for it. we and so, when these peers, my rowdy angels, the people who do peer recovery work, they reach out in this one community, find

one good cop, i, mean one of my advices at the end of the book, and something gives me. hope if you can turn one good cop into doing things differently, diverting people to care from jail, and into care. then you can show how that works. that is something go to scalable. >> i want to say, very briefly, what i think has been scalable in the past three years are things that people who do work around drug use and around health for decades, it's now understood by millions and billions of people much more. i think we will see ripples and not for decades. the huge unionization effort that's happened at starbucks and amazon in places like that is a direct result from covid-19 pandemic and people feeling unsafe in their workplaces and coming together to build things. i think that young people, teenagers, people in

their twenties are going to take the lessons they've learned from these years we and understand they need much more of a collective response than everyone feeling like their individual failures and they must figure out their problems individually. >> let's go to the audience. >> can you hear me? >> no. >> is it on? do you want to come up here? or you can repeat it? just say, i will repeat it into the. might [silence] [laughter] go. >> is it on? do you want to come up here? or you can repeat

it? just say, i will repeat it into the. might [laughter] >> sing out, louise. we will repeat it. (inaudible) (inaudible) [inaudible] [inaudible]

>> so the question is about older adults and how they are stigmatized and treated as other. this is addressed when it comes to covid how these congregant living situations create these traps for older adults. >> i can jump into. that elderly are a huge part of my book. i have an entire chapter about the closest person of me who died of covid, which was my former village voice editor, -- completely stupid reason. he had a tooth infection, ended up an icu in new york state where i live at the time. they were putting people with covid into nursing homes. and when he was recovering from his tooth infection he got covid and died. one in every ten people in nursing homes died of covid. one and every 12 of congregate care settings which also include younger people who are

disabled, 1 of 12 died as well. i got many letters from people who are elderly about their experiences with covid, and one of the things i hoped with my book was to give people a chance not only to mourn people they lost, but for older people who think -- for people who have had covid to think that they've been forgotten. this was an assault on the elderly, and this figures into my critique on capitalism, capitalism mostly cares about your health and well-being when your, quote unquote, working age. they care much less about children, not about the elderly, and very crude terms, economists talk about the elderly as a drain because they are costing money from the economy, rather than contributing to it. and i read a little bit in other research that i've done that the elderly are also affected by hiv and a.i.d.s. and stis. they're one of the few demographics that increases an stis because we assume elderly people don't have sex. so there's no consideration given to health care, pleasure, things like

that, connection. very much the elderly are a part of how i write about the viral underclass. and norma sly, they borne the brunt of this disease. it was the attorney general here in texas who talked about how can't grandparents give up their lives a few years for the good of the economy? and it's been really really disheartening. that's why i think that the disability justice framework is helpful because the elderly, in a way, are disabled, under capitalism. disability is usually thought of as how productive are you to the economy. so growing old, at a certain, point means your body is not able to do certain things. it's really disheartening to see across the political spectrum, certainly in a lot of mainstream media, a reversion at this point of talking about covid eyes only harming the people who are having other, problems and we don't need to be so concerned because they're not hard enough to survive when we still have more than 10,000 people a month dying, overwhelmingly, elderly people. >> do you want to add to that? >> no.

[silence] [inaudible] >> (inaudible) i live locally, all the hospitals seem to be owned by religious organizations. how that affects peoples care. the limits of their care. and also, i think there means they are tax exempt as well. did you cover that in your books? along with capitalism and the religious aspect of a lot of hospitals? and hospital ownership? o >> i didn't get into that as much from a structural level. but i explain the raising lazarus, the most likely individuals at this point -- individual people with personal

ethics, many of them, based on their religious beliefs, are really the ones leaving us out of this. and are doing the mutual aid. and i tell the story, at the end, there is this catholic nun activist who's in her 80s and she's having to reach out to me for starting a gofundme because she can't pay her bill for her addiction education center. and i say, you know, the sacklers light bill is paid for 200 years. he has this 88 year old counselor working 12 hours a day, and asking for money. most of these nonprofit hospitals, you know, they're not paying taxes. they did participate in the system that ultimately led to 7 million americans being addicted. and i think they should step up.

>> i deal with it very briefly in my book. religion cuts both ways. there are ways that religion contributes to homophobia and transphobia, at an individual level. i've particularly with catholics, there's many people involved in mutual aid work that i've seen doing phenomenal things. i've written a bit more about it this summer since -- i turned in right before the dobbs decision came out. but there's a real link in the ways that we can see eve of religion and tax status and speech, so it's very dangerous the ways that corporations have so far been able to say, we don't want to pay for abortions because that violates our religion. similar things happen with clear stuff, lawsuits have already been filed, that's a really dangerous thing. i think it was the times, it might have been propublica, there was an investigative story two months ago about how these hospitals, these nonprofits, they're using

aggressive bill collecting techniques for people who are supposed to be getting care for free. and they're not even aware that they're supposed to be getting care for free because they're encountering the same bill collectors they get from a for profit hospital system. >> thank you. [inaudible] >>? on the reproductive rights front. i was thinking about this, the height amendment, which basically made abortion illegal for poor people, and there was really only full access to abortion for a few years before the height of it came in. a similar legal thing is happening with trans care. in florida, they've made it so that if you have medicaid, you can't get trans care. that's going to put us on a similar path to how the height amendment led to, overtime, abortion not being legal in many places. >> thank you both for your

books. i look forward to reading them. miss may, ceo talked about one bureaucrat that you talked with who is doing work that is really trying to address these issues. did either of you talk with other people working in the government who are really trying to make change and do things differently to solve some of these issues? >> yeah, i was just at the white house a few weeks ago for a recovery summit, i met with the drug czar, and i know he knows what all the research is because he authored some of it. and again, we come back to politics. and when i am hopeful that this administration knows ways to make sure we get evidence based care, but you know, i kept asking everybody at the beginning. what's the magic wand? what's the fix? and there is no federal fix because health care is run by states and communities. you might have one community that doesn't want

a needle exchange, and another might have 17. still a lot of states have made it illegal. we still have 13 states that have not passed the medicaid expansion. so it is like, where you live in the country determines your ability, if you're a poor person, to get health care or not. that is really concerning. i think the administration is one where of. it but they're just struggling on how to -- >> i don't interview many government officials, but i'm more into interviewing people in the viral underpass, i'm more critiquing how things play out in the government across -- 400,000 people died of covid under trump, 650,000 and counting have died under biden. trump didn't have the vaccine. he was a cartoon of dealing with the pandemic. the biden administration said they're

gonna listen to the science. lots of good people have gone into the administration. but when people don't have holmes, there's only so much we can do. when the u.s. has more incarcerated people than anywhere else in the world, that is the major driving engine of disease, particularly respiratory illnesses. so i'm writing more about critiques around. that it's dismaying to, me i've known really good people who go into the administration. i feel like i don't hear from them again. >> that's a good point. >> we have another question. >> the question, is why don't we hear from good people? they will be very loud in public. and they will do scholarships, activism, work that's cutting, edge it's critiquing the administration, or critiquing

government response. then they got brought into ostensibly keep doing that work, then i just don't hear from them. they stopped tweeting, they start publishing, everything the right house to be vetted to the administration. i mean -- >> i'm sure they're scared of getting fired. >> i, mean yeah, there are a handful of exceptions. doctor dimitri who is a very very out leather sucks positive person. he worked and it hiv work in new york city. brought in to do monkeypox work. he maintains quite a presence in the world. a lot of people, i'm like, oh, their ideas that are great. i hope that will be what drives the administration. it feels like that's where their ideas go to die. >> one last question here. >> this morning i got my mail and in my email was a political ad from the republican party, some pack that said all these

pieces of misinformation about puberty blockers, about trans youth. and what the treatment is for trans youth. and in our country, i'm -- i'm just curious, what can i do, what can people do to try to combat or reverse that misinformation that's coming out, coming into all the homes in austin. they may be all got this pamphlet. what am i to do to make sure that my neighbors and my friends aren't believing that? >> go ahead. >> well, i think a cisgender person, it's upon us to always explain what is wrong about its anyone who will listen. people take, quote unquote, puberty blockers or all kinds of medications that affirm gender for all kinds of reasons. of all gender spectrums. many of

them have been used by cis people for a long time. it's important to share that as a person i find it's important to explain to other people, when transphobia comes up in our community, that the ways that we were talked about outgate people in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, told you know, it's something you need to get over, you should go through conversion therapy. we would never accept that anymore as people -- that's basically what's asked for for trans. people it's important to talk about it within my community. >> i think it's a real epidemic of misinformation. a lot of that, you can trace back to win the fact that the jobs went away, the government did nothing for the people that were left behind, capitalism ruled that one to. then things like the opioid crisis come into being, and we are eloquent to deal with it. i am thinking a lot about the medias role, specifically the declining medias role and not covering

fact based journalism, i worked a newspaper for 25 years, we won numerous national awards, it had 125 employees in the newsroom when i got there. now it has eight reporters. and so i think it's important that we talk about revolutionizing nonprofit journalism. and we support the journalism that is left out there, because when -- this kind of stuff you're getting in your mailbox, we've got to counter that with factual information. >> one quick fact that people say. we don't know what's going to happen with trans, people this is not. truthers 40 years of research. there's decades and decades of research of it. john stewart, but it than any national level journalist, he got the attorney general of arkansas to say no, no, no, this is how it works. there's decades of research. educate

yourself on the research. that's widely available. and tell your neighbors. >> yeah, i just want to echo what beth said. support local journalism. please subscribe to texas monthly where i work. thank. you thanks so much to bat and stephen for coming. thank you all for coming. they will be in the book signing tent if you would like to purchase a book and get them to sign it. thank you. live sunday on in-depth, bestselling author, christy quinn, joins book tv. to talk and take calls about native american history. the civil war and more. mr. cohen has published several books including empire of the summer moon and rebel, yell. his latest, his majesty's airship, about a british plant that went up in flames and 1930. killing more people than the hendon berke did seven years later. join in the conversation with your phone call, facebook comments, and taxed. in-depth, with a sequin, live sunday at

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