transitions light under control. ♪ upbeat music transitions signature gen 8, available now in 4 new style colors. transitions. this is the health minister in great britain. you see on the left side of your screen there. she fell ill a few days ago. she got tested for coronavirus. her test was positive. that is bad news for the british health minister. it's also bad news for the british government. before she was tested, she reportedly sat in not only on cabinet meetings and carried out her regular government business, she also attended a reception at number 10 downing street with the british prime minister boris johnson. again, she is now not only positive for coronavirus, but she is symptomatic.

today the british prime minister, boris johnson, told the british people basically to steel themselves for what's ahead, saying in public remarks, quote, many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time. the chief scientific adviser to the british government today said although the number of officially confirmed cases of coronavirus in the uk is just under 600, he believes -- this is the top science adviser to the government -- that a more realistic snapshot of how many cases there are in the uk would be more like 5,000 to 10,000. the british government announced yesterday that they will move to rapidly upscale the number of tests they are doing. they are currently carrying out about 1,500. they say they are going to move to 10,000 tests per day, so they're trying to basically quintuple the rate of testing immediately. again, it's stark to see. the chief scientific adviser to the british government say in his opinion he believes there's probably 5,000 to 10,000 cases

in the u kurks already. never mind that there's under 600 official tests. and for us here at home, you know, that's a snapshot of what's going on in another country, just another dear ally of ours dealing as best they can with a rapidly escalating crisis of this virus. but because it's the uk, just taking that little view, that short-term view of the circumstances there today, the news about coronavirus there today, also gives lie to the randomness of what our own government is doing in terms of our own national response because honestly our own government's response is basically just a splatter painting thus far from the president and from this administration. i mean just look at one day's worth of headlines of what's going on in the uk in terms of coronavirus, the number of cases in the uk versus other countries, the circumstances that the uk government believes itself to be in, the fact that a senior member of the british government itself has herself

tested positive. i mean just look at one day's news out of the uk, and it's clear there's no scientifically rational reason why our government just instituted a travel ban from europe that doesn't include the uk. i mean why do that? no matter how much you like the uk, you know, or enjoy british detective stories -- i'm right there with you. no matter how much the president might have a personal affinity for their new prime minister or for the queen or whatever, i mean it makes no rational sense. this european travel ban excluding the uk is random. why is our own government behaving in a random manner? our federal government response to this epidemic is not rational. it is not well designed. it is not likely to accomplish its stated aims, and sometimes its stated aims make no sense either. honestly there is no reason why the tom level response at this

time should be a travel ban from anywhere. what that is supposed to do is tell every country in the world, you can't escape this by virtue of your geography. it's everywhere. that's the day we institute a new, inexplicable travel ban? the president last night calling this a, quote, foreign virus. in a way i think that may have been a little bit of a blessing for us because that is so wrong. it is such an irrational, unscientific, nonsensical way to talk about this that maybe something that dumb coming from the president in a prime time oval office address, maybe that is clarifying. maybe simplifies our national understanding of where we're at because that alone should clarify for everybody beyond any shred of a doubt that the u.s. response to this is going to have to be led from somewhere other than the top of the

federal government because at the top of the federal government right now, it is a fountain of nonsense. and, you know, it is one of the odd through-lines in this global pandemic as it evolves that people at the very top of governments around the world are themselves at risk. i mean there's the british health minister who i just told you about. in spain, they've also had a cabinet minister test positive. that resulted in the entire spanish cabinet announcing that they would be tested as well as the spanish king and the spanish queen. they've all been tested. they're awaiting their test results now. the leader of the far-right vox party in spain has been tested as well and is positive. in brazil, we reported last night on the delegation of top brazilian officials who not only came to the united states, they specifically went to mar-a-lago this past weekend to meet with the president and with members of his family. we reported last night that a press minister from the

brazilian government, southeastern heseen here in a photo with the president, the man on the right in the make brazil great again hat. we reported last night he was undergoing testing for the coronavirus. he has now tested positive. the president of brazil, who was also at mar-a-lago this weekend, also meeting personally with president trump and shaking his hand, he himself was today tested for the coronavirus and expects to receive his results tomorrow. not only president trump but also vice president pence, who was supposedly leading the u.s. coronavirus response, they both had relatively extensive contact with this brazilian delegation over the weekend at mar-a-lago, and we know that because of photo and video documentation even as the white house insists, despite our lying eyes, that president trump and vice president pence definitely aren't going to be tested for coronavirus despite those contacts because the white house says really there wasn't really

much contact at all. really, we swear. at this point the white house insistence that the president, the sitting president of the united states, who won't stop shaking hands, no need to. the number of relatively large number of people who have been exposed to the virus with whom the president has had close, face-to-face contact and with whom he has shaken -- shook hands within the past few days, none of that warrants any special precautions for the president at all, let alone testing the president. i mean at this point the handling of the president's personal susceptibility to this virus is getting a little bit weird. it's getting hard to believe our own government even about that. but as i say, that is just one element of a federal government response that is largely irrational, inexplicable and, needless to say, ineffective. republican u.s. senators lindsey graham and rick scott were both at mar-a-lago this weekend. they both reportedly interacted

with that same brazilian delegation that also interacted with president trump and vice president pence. both of these republican senators themselves are now under quarantine while they at least take steps to try to protect themselves and anybody else who they might infect given that they were exposed to the virus if in fact they got it. it's now actually quite a number of members of congress and members of the senate who have potentially been exposed and who have isolated themselves because of it. so far there's one senate staffer, a staffer to washington u.s. senator maria cantwell, who has tested positive and is reportedly symptomatic. a number of u.s. senators today announced they would close their d.c. offices even as mitch mcconnell, the senate majority leader, announced that the planned senate recess next week would be canceled and the senate would stay in session. at last count, it is 30 u.s. states that have declared a state of emergency to try to speed state government response to the virus. schools across the great states of ohio and maryland and

kentucky will all be closed. we learned that tonight. large public school districts in houston, texas, and after, california, both of those large school districts announced tonight that their schools will be closes. the smithsonian is closing in d.c. as is the national zoo as is arlington national cemetery, as is the metropolitan museum in new york, as is broadway in new york. tonight disney world announced that they're closing on sunday. disneyland is doing so as well. disneyland has only closed like three times in the last 50 years. they're closing because of this. new york city has declared a state of emergency. new york state, new jersey, california, oregon have all instituted statewide bans on gatherings of large numbers of people. the u.s. capitol is closed to visitors. the supreme court of the united states is closed to visitors. and as you have no doubt seen today in a veritable cascade of

announcements, pro and collegiate sports of all kinds have basically been shut down. seasons of all major pro sports have been at least suspended if not called off. as of this time last night, we thought the ncaa college basketball tournament would be a series of games played in front of empty seats. as of tonight, the tournament itself just will not happen. the season is over. it's called off. i don't think there's been a single individual tipping point at which our country started to wake up to the magnitude of this crisis and what is coming in terms of the strain that is about to be put on our public health system, our economy, and all other governance systems that we've got. i don't think there is a single tipping point. but this past 24-hour period, it does feel like enough shocking things happened in short order that, again, there wasn't one point, but we have tipped. we are inarguably in a different headspace as a country about

this. we are on a different footing as a nation than we were even 24 hours ago. i think part of it is the sports stuff being canceled honestly, just in terms of the psychological reset that we are undergoing right now. even if you don't care about the news at all, even if the only live media you ever consume is sports, well, your life just changed drastically. no matter how much you like to keep your head in the sand about anything that doesn't involve a ball or points or both, it's unavoidable now even if you have been not paying attention to any of this stuff deliberately or just as the matter of the way you live your life. i think part of it was also the president's bad speech last night from the oval office, confusing, strange, a little bit alarming in terms of his strange affect. if that speech was meant to reassure the country about how the government has this under control, boy, did it do the opposite. i think part of it is also that the economic ditch just keeps getting deeper. they had to stop trading again

today on wall street. they hit one of those circuit breakers that makes them stop trading for 15 minutes. still, once they turned it back on, the markets kept falling off the cliff even with the fed announcing hundreds of billions of dollars in basically grease for the wheels, liquidity into the markets to try to keep things moving. the dow today down more than 2,000 points. sell-off by percentage that's larger than anything that happened during the 2008 financial collapse. you have to go back as far as the blackmon wall street crash in 1987 to find a plunge deeper than what we had today. after the president's oval office address to reassure us all. as of tonight, jpmorgan is bluntly predicting a u.s. recession this year. but understanding, really getting how bad it is and how bad it is likely to get, even if we are in that different headspace, even if we are coming to a new understanding about this and people who run sports leagues and states and colleges

and malls are figuring it out and acting accordingly, it still leaves all of us, all of us regular citizens with the day-to-day decisions about what we are supposed to do and what we can do to protect ourselves and to protect our families and to contribute to our country trying to handle this as well as possible. clearly we're not leaving this to the government, and they'll do it. clearly it's going to be us doing the right thing as best we understand it. so i mean i could do sort of breaking news on all the different things that are closing and shutting down and being changed because of the virus for the entire course of this hour, but i'm going to stop there with what i've already said. tonight we're going to talk to a couple different reporters. we're also going to speak with somebody who i think has very valuable experience in successfully forcing improvement in what was a terrible government response to a health crisis. there are people who have gone before us who have succeeded in

forcing a terrible federal government response to a health crisis to get better. we should learn from them now. i mean we do ultimately only have one federal government, and we have to try to survive this crisis and improve our national response to this crisis with the government we have. but let's just look at -- let's look at one very specific slice of this, something that propublica did today in a way that i think was very valuable. it's a public service. we all now have figured out that one of the fiascos, if not the fundamental fiasco of the u.s. government response to this crisis, is that there isn't any testing really, that we are probably the worst in the world, certainly the worst in the industrial world at testing and screening for this virus. we've got it. we've got it in probably every state in the country. we've got states of emergency in 30 states in the country. we're still not broadly testing populations anywhere. virginia congressman don beyer, one of those members of congress

who is self-quarantining because he believes he was exposed to the virus, even he, a sitting member of congress, just outside the nation's capital, even he is unable to get tested while he's under quarantine because we don't have tests that are -- not only do we not have widely available testing in this country, if you're a sitting member of congress, you can't finagle a test in this country, not unless you have the right connections. whether you are in one of the nursing homes where there has been multiple deaths in washington state or you just got off a cruise ship that had positive coronavirus cases on board, a cruise ship that was held offshore in california, or whether you went to a conference in new orleans or washington, d.c. where people were known to be positive or boston or somebody at your synagogue or your church or a wedding you went to has fallen ill or tested positive, if you have been somewhere where you believe there is a good chance that you have been exposed to this highly contagious virus, chances are still, this deep into it, this long into this crisis, that if you as an american are seeking testing to see if you yourself have in fact been exposed, you

are going to have a hard time getting it. even americans who have returned from countries that have raging, out of control outbreaks have found once they get here, even if they want to get tested, there's not necessarily a way to do it. and while the government is trying to scale this up, tony fauci from nih today saying it is a failure of the u.s. system that we've been unable to scale up our testing. it is a failure. acknowledging it is a failure is a good first step to fixing it. the cdc direct for saying under questioning from democratic members of congress that, ultimately, yes, testing will be provided regardless of whether you're able to pay. the government clarifying that for the first time today. the cdc director saying coronavirus treatment will be provided whether or not you are able to pay. that is a check that his mouth wrote today that i am looking forward to thseeing them cash aa government.

they are trying to improve all of these things but right now we're watching the numbers go up everywhere. we know what the infection curves look like in other countries that have community transmission. and we still don't have testing. more than 1,000 confirmed cases in this country, an epidemic of absolutely unknown proportions because we don't have testing, but americans who believe they've been exposed still have to do something. if you believe you've been exposed, the general advice is that you should isolate yourself, right? self-quarantine-ish. propublica today investigated the specific advice americans are being given if they believe they have been exposed to someone with the virus. what they found is that instructions people are getting about how exactly you do self-quarantine, how exactly you do isolate yourselves. these instructions are wildly divergent depending on who you're asking and under what circumstances. it is basically impossible to get an authoritative answer as

to what americans who have been exposed are really supposed to do. and honestly right now with no vaccine and no treatment and very, very, very little testing in this country, that's all we've got. we've got these mitigation factors that we can take as a society to close down vectors of likely transmission, large crowds, school settings, sporting events, et cetera. but for people who believe they've been exposed, we've got one thing you can do, and the guidance on what that one thing is, is all over the map. in the absence of testing, this is all any of us we can do if we've been exposed. what exactly is it? the lack of clear, consistent advice about how to handle this specific part of america's response to coronavirus is something the federal government could fix over the course of a single day if they put their mind toward clarifying and directly specifying best practices for isolation and quarantine. and they issued that advice

nationwide. if they had the authority and wherewithal to do it, they could do it. but as of right now even this far into it, it appears to just be chaos. joining us now is one of the reporters on this piece for propublica that investigated the extent of the range of advice people are being given. caroline chen covers health care for propublica. thank you very much. >> thanks for having me. >> i'm obviously wound up about this, and i do not expect you to be. i'm not asking you for your opinion on any of these matters. >> oh, i'm wound up too. >> you are? okay. well, tell me. i mean your reporting to me was something that i suspected was true, but i find it the wide range of advice people are given to be shocking. >> and i was surprised too because i had gotten some inkling of this from seeing stories on twitter. but we decided on monday of this week to actually seriously do a call-out and start searching out stories and comparing standards. and what we found was that a lot of people are given either misinformation, lacking

information, or are desperately trying to get information and are unable to get information. and so there is a patchwork of information out there about what you should do if you think you've been exposed or you have been exposed across the country. >> and this is people calling their local doctor, their local hospital, the county health department, the state health authoriti authorities. people are calling all sorts of different entities. part of what your reporting indicates is nobody knows who to call 0 to check what it is they're supposed to do. >> i think generally the advice is call your medical provider. >> if you have one. >> yes, if you have one, which not everybody in the united states has. and what i've seen, and i have honestly been impressed and moved by, is how persistent people are because they're concerned. so we've seen a lot of stories and heard a lot of stories of people who either heard about somebody who was positive, for example, a woman who went to a wedding, and then saw a tweet that a server at the wedding she

was at tests positive, and then launched herself on an odyssey of trying to get information because she wanted to do the right thick. >> and to protect herself but also to protect her family, protect anybody else from becoming exposed. >> and her community. >> yeah. >> and also i spoke to a mother of a daughter who came home from a school trip to italy, and when she developed symptoms, her first step was to go to her daughter's pediatrician, and the pediatrician started by saying, well, i don't think she has, you know, covid-19. you know, she has an upper respiratory infection. she's probably fine. and the mother pushed a little bit more and said, you know, we live in manhattan in a neighborhood that has elderly folks. you know, is it safe? and just out of her sense of wanting to do the right thing, called the school and then called 311 herself, and 311 took a different view and said, you know, please take her to an e.r. and, you know, we'd suggest that

given where she came from, that she might be a candidate for testing. so this mom then went out of her own way, you know, got a televisit with nyu's e.r. where they said, you know, we don't have enough testing capacity, so then suggested that she self-isolate the daughter. but then here is where we have an example of different standards. >> mm-hmm. >> so at this point the pediatrician also said if you want to play it safe, you can stay at home. the pediatrician said two weeks from the date of the doctor's office. >> okay. >> the nyu e.r. doctor said two weeks from the onset of symptoms. the mom also again doing her own research looked up the cdc's website, which says two days from leaving italy. >> two weeks from leaving italy. >> yes. so then the mom goes these all have different end dates. i'm going to play it as conservatively as possible as a concerned citizen and keep my daughter at home as long as possible. >> because we're all in the

position of directing our own public health response to these matters at this point. >> yes. >> it's just -- it's remarkable and it's very helpful granular reporting that is really infuriating. caroline chen covers health care for propublica. thank you for your time this evening. >> thanks for having me. >> i would shake your hand, but i don't do that anymore. up next, we're going to look at how some other countries are doing quarantines, what steps they're taking that appear to be working and saving lives, stuff that we're not doing here. that and much more ahead tonight. stay with us. at bayer, we're helping to advance stem cell therapies

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when we first shifted to covering this health crisis almost full-time on this show, i did an interview here on set in new york with donald mcneil, who is a veteran science and health reporter at "the new york times." i replay that in my head nightly while i don't sleep. he could not have been more stark and more dark about what was on its way and how large a response a pandemic of this scale and speed was going to require. it didn't seem crazy at the time, but it did seem a little bit like he was visiting from another planet and trying to sound alarms that nobody could really hear. not anymore.

that interview was just a couple of weeks ago, but that is thousands of deaths ago now. and now that the u.s. economy has cratered and the u.s. response to the virus has finally started to come into view with testing still almost impossible to get, with the messaging from the top of the government still inexplicable often, with state and local officials taking matters into their own hands, i think it's time to check back in with donald mcneil. what do we know works from other countries at this point, if anything? what could we still change now to try to emulate other countries' best practices? are there things we are doing now or worrying about now that we've got wrong? i need a broader perspective. donald mcneil has covered aids, ebola, sars, swine flu, bird flu for "the new york times." he's now covering this coronavirus crisis as well. mr. mcneil, thank you for coming back. >> thank you for inviting. >> i know you've been here since the top of the show. have i said anything wrong? >> no, no. i thought carolyn chen's reporting was terrific. i'm glad that somebody pointed out the incredible confusion that people face when they want

to know whether or not they have a disease they know is deadly. we are in a headless chicken phase of our approach to the pandemic, and we have a president who appeared to me terrified on camera while he made his speech and who gave an approach that made no sense. i mean, you know, why are we blocking entry from europe when we have epicenters all thoefr this country? we have an epicenter in westchester county right now. we may have one in this room we're in. i don't know yet. won't know for a couple of days. the president under all world standards should be in quarantine right now. he shook hands with somebody who just turned positive. this is just basic medical behavior. if you've been exposed to a dangerous disease, our approach here is to go into quarantine. but there seem to be exceptions. >> the quarantine fiasco, which i think stands alongside the testing fiasco, to me feels like

a point that's worthy of focus because it seems more fixable. the testing thing, we obviously screwed that up royally as a country. they are trying to scale it up. a lot of effort is going into that. it's still going to take a long time and it will hamper our efforts until we've got it in place. meanwhile without testing, all we can do is large scale mitigation efforts like getting rid of crowds, telling people not to fly, things like that. but also people who have been exposed should quarantine. would clear federal standards on how to quarantine and under what circumstances help? >> it's not the right approach anyway. you don't want infected people or suspected infected people with their families. they'll just pass it on to them. china has had enormous success in beating down its epidemic. we don't know what's going to happen when china tries to reopen its economy and let people go back to the factories and back to the subways and back to offices and restaurants and everything else. we don't know what's going to happen, and they're going to do it in a very slow, graduated

way, but they have been in lockdown all this time. but we see the drone shots from the city and think, oh, lockdown, looks terrible. that's had to do that in order to introduce the measures they were going to take that were actually going to fight the epidemic and that is testing, testing, testing, testing. find the virus. one thing is no matter where you go, if you are able to get out of the house, if you go into any building, your temperature is taken. i came into this building, nobody took my temperature. they asked me some silly questions i could have lied about. but, you know, you get your fever taken. you get into a bus, your temperature is taken. you walk into a building, you walk back to your apartment building, your temperature is taken. >> what happens if you show a fever. >> then you're sent to a fever clinic. people are not sent to your doctor's office. one of those tests will make you cough or gag and then you've infected the doctor and then the doctor's office is out and you've possibly infected everybody in the waiting room. so they're sent to specific

fever clinics which they've had since sars. it's separate from the main entrance. they're met by people in complete protective gear. their temperature is taken. they're asked quickly what their symptoms are, whether they've been exposed. they get a quick white blood cell count to see whether or not they have bacterial pneumonia. they get a quick flu test to see if they have flu. if you've got one of those, maybe you can be excluded and go home. but if you don't have either one of those, then you're given a ct scan. ct scans in this country take half an hour to an hour and they're, you know, extremely expensive things. there they have portable ct scanners. they have pushed people through those things at the rate of 200 a day. a couple of slices of the lungs. if you come up positive for that, then you are going to get a pcr test, which is the test

we're talking about here. it's basically a nasal swab is the usual way to do it, which is push a q-tip up your nose. it's not very pleasant, but they do that on site. they've gotten it down to four hours. there's no sending it off to the state health department. >> you sit and wait for it to come back? >> you are told sit a couple yards apart from everybody else. they're sitting there and afraid of each other because they know they might be sitting next to somebody who has got the virus. once the scan results come back, and if they can't get the scan results back that day, they have to go to a quarantine hotel and wait until the results come back. >> apart from their family? >> that is the key element. there is no home isolation. there is no home quarantine. 75% to 80% of the transmission in china was in family clusters. what would make the news was things like, oh, my god, it's in the prisons, oh, my god, it's in parliament -- it wasn't in parliament there. but 75% to 80% of it was inside

the family, and they knew they had to stop that if they were going to stop the disease. so people were quickly taken away from these families to these giant gymnasiums or stadiums where they were not concentration camps. there were beds there, and there were nurses in protective gear to watch out for people. they even had dance classes in these things because when you have lots of little old ladies sort of sitting there together waiting to see if they're okay, if you get them all up dancing, one, it helps clear their lungs and the people who can't get up maybe are the one who's are crashing. it's not a bad policy. we laugh at the pictures when you see people dancing in what looked like moon suits but that was something medically smart that was going on. if people actually need to be hospitalized, the people who don't need to be hospitalized are the ones in these so-called 80% of mild cases. i'm sorry i used that expression because mild when you look carefully at the study is everything from almost no symptoms to pneumonia but doesn't need oxygen, doesn't need hospitalization.

now, i've had pneumonia. i've had walking pneumonia. that was not like having a mild cold. that was serious. i had it about two weeks different from when hillary clinton got it. you saw her collapse on the street. i was standing on third base playing softball with some friends and thought i'm going to collapse here and went to the doctor the next day. those are the cases. they're isolated away, and people actually sort of move through the system. suspect cases, mild to moderate cases, and hospitalized severe and critical cases who are actually in hospitals. and the crucial thing about that system is break the chains of transmission and also do what you can to keep the hospitals from getting overwhelmed because when the hospitals get overwhelmed, you have to say, okay, she lives, she lives, but he dies and he dies. she's young and has kids, we'll save her. grandmother, good-bye. those are the choices they are making in northern italy right now, and they're going to be making them all over italy pretty soon, and we will too. >> donald mcneil, science and health reporter for "the new

york times." people are going to clip this and send it to their local health department from having you describe this because of the distance because of what you're describing and what we're doing and preparing for. thank you for being here. >> thank you. >> appreciate it. i'm not shaking your hand. >> nor i. >> we'll be right back. meet jim. for jim, comfort is king. which is why when it comes to his dentures only new poligrip cushion and comfort will do. the first and only formula with adaptagrip cushioning technology. choose new poligrip cushion and comfort. t-mobile has the first and only nationwide 5g network. experience it on a samsung galaxy s20 5g. right now, when you buy one, you get one free. plus get 2 lines of unlimited and 5g access included,

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mr. president, can't an american still bring back

coronavirus under these travel restrictions? >> we have them very heavily tested. if an american is coming back or anybody is coming back, we're testing. we have a tremendous testing set up where people coming in have to be tested. we're not putting them on planes if it shows positive. >> americans coming back, anybody coming into this country is being very heavily tested. we have a tremendous testing set up. that is not true at all. on the menu of things that president trump has said in his three-plus years in office that are not true, this is one of the easier ones to fact-check. this is just flat not happening no matter how many times he says it. >> we have them very heavily tested. if an american's coming back or anybody is coming back, we're testing. >> americans are not being very heavily tested for coronavirus. before they get here from another country, once they get here from another country or if they're just here and haven't gone to another country. that's not happening.

that is an operational thing the president has imagined and is now declaring to the american people as the way it is. that was just today. but this is not a one-off. this is every day from him, and it turns out it has serious consequences when in the middle of a severe public health emergency, the president just lies about it over and over and over again. >> we're going to be pretty soon at only five people, and we could be at just one or two people over the next short period of time. >> congress' top doctor has told senate staffers that he expects 70 to 150 million americans to contract the coronavirus. >> view this the same as the flu. >> the mortality of this is multiple times what seasonal flu is. >> anybody that needs a test gets a test. >> we don't have enough tests today. >> we're very close to a vaccine. >> when you're talking about the availability of a vaccine, you're talking about a year to a year and a half. >> a lot of people think that

goes away in april with the heat. >> we do not know whether it's going to diminish as the weather gets warm. >> the risk of contracting the coronavirus to the american public remains low. >> we do expect more cases. >> we can expect to see more cases in the united states. >> we will see more cases and things will get worse than they are right now. >> it's going to disappear. one day it's like a miracle, it will disappear. >> for us as a country, it is just unfortunate that we have that kind of a president who's that -- who has that easy a time lying during this kind of a problem when we really need to know the truth. but for us as americans, we also have a history, a recent history that we can learn from at a moment like this. there are people among us from whom we can learn about how best to pressure our government into being better when they are being terrible and when they are bungling a health crisis with consequences of life and death

for potentially thousands of americans. there are people among us we can learn from because they've done it and they've fixed it in the past. that's next. stay with us. here we go. lift and push and push! there... it's up there. oh, boy. hey joshie... wrinkles send the wrong message. help prevent them before they start with downy wrinkleguard. hey! bud. hey, pop pop! so you won't get caught with wrinkles again. [woman laughs]

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militant group act up, which has gained increasing influence on aids policy. act up policy has been successful in getting the food and drug administration to loosen the regulation of new drugs for aids. >> act up stands for the aids coalition to unleash power. it was founded in 1987 as the aids epidemic rose to almost unimaginable heights. it was founded with the founding believe that aids was deadly not only because of the virus but because of the failure of our government to recognize the magnitude of the crisis and act rationally and aggressively to fix it and save lives. one of the legendary activists with act-up was a man by the name of gregg gone saul ves. he has cemespent more than 30 y working on issues. he aernded his ph.d. in public health from yale. his life's work has been focused on giving politicians and policymakers a hard time and also giving them the data they need to make better public health decisions and then holding them to it if they show

unwillingness to do it in the time or with the alacrity that they need to save lives. his life's work in other words has been preparing him for this moment. joining us now is gregg gonsalves. he's the 2018 macarthur genius grant winner. it's nice to have you here. >> nice to be here, rachel. >> i want to talk to you because i feel like americans are cottoning to the fact that our government is a big part of the coronavirus problem, that our government response is terrible. i feel like there must be something to learn from the aids movement in terms of how to make a bad government response better. >> for many of us, it's deja vu all over again. it was death by public policy in the 1980s where we had malign neglect by the reagan administration that let tens of thousands of americans die before the president even uttered the word aids. >> yeah. >> and it's been 30 years, and we've seen other health crises come and go and presidents, democratic and republican, rise

to the challenge. now all these years later we have another president, again, malevolence and incompetence put together to imperil many more people in the united states that were imperilled by hiv in the early days. >> the gay community was so galvanized by aids, and the movement was so inflected by the gay community, especially in the early days because that community was so disproportionately hit by the epidemic. this epidemic is a pandemic. it's everywhere. it seems to show no demographic contours at all in terms of suss september 3wi septemberability. i wonder how that makes you think about the possibility of building -- i don't know if it has to be a movement but building some sort of effective citizen feedback loop so our government feels like they can no longer stay this bad in their response. >> well, we have to build a large coalition pretty quickly, and it's interesting that this disease is going to impact people who also were impacted by

the aids epidemic, the incarcerated, immigrants, people of color, people who are underinsured or uninsured totally. so we have a lot of work to do in building bridges with movements that already exist, immigrants, dreamers, people working on prison abolition to try to build a movement very, very quickly to get our government to get off the dime and do what's right. we don't have months and years for this. we have days and weeks to get it right. >> i want to talk to you about treatment and vaccine politics and some of the other ways that you have learned the hard way how to try to influence the government even in places that don't like to be susceptible to pressure, if could hold on to us for one segment. we'll be right back after this.

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we're back now with gregg gonsalves, who iss an act-up vaughn. thanks for being here. one of the successes of the atsds movement is penetrating a seemingly impenetrable bureaucracy to get drugs developed and into bodies faster than the system would have otherwise got them there. do you envision any sort of treatment activism like that around therapeutics for the virus or indeed a vaccine. >> i think there are people as we speak working on trying to figure out what happened with the diagnostics scale and doing

that treatment activism. we have the kexdconnections we didn't have 30, 40 years ago. >> because you changed the system. >> what's difficult now is that the top of the pyramid, the president, the vice president, secretary of state of health and human services are an impenetrable fortress, and it's been very hard to think about how we can get into that sort of circle of influence to make a difference. >> do you think that public pressure and citizen activism and direct action and the sort of things that were so effective in the aids movement have a role to play here either now or in the future when we start to think about the hospital crunches that are coming, when we start to think about the real point of the spear public health calamities that are coming? do you think that the government's response can be made better by citizens making it so? >> i think we so make noise. it's the only thing we can do at this point. it's incumbent on journalists, an activists, on academics to raise the alarm. we don't have weeks and months.

we have days before our trajectory starts to mirror that of italy's from two weeks ago. so we have to do what we can to point out the failings in the current response and push them to do better. i know it's a daunting task but we really don't have any choice. >> gregg gonsalves, thank you for being here. i want to shake your hand. i'm not going to do. it's great to have you here. thank you. we'll be right back. stay with us. stay with us i don't add up the years.

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you on that have come to pass since we have been on the air over the course of this hour. it's a sort of an era of constant breaking news. i mentioned at the top of the show that the canadian premier justin trudeau was himself under quarantine. his wife returned from a speaking engagement in london in the uk and felt ill. she was undergoing testing. he announced that he would undergo self-quarantine while she awaited results of her test. we've just learned in the past couple of minutes that sophie trudeau, the prime minister's wife, has in fact tested positive for coronavirus. here's the statement from the canadian government. quote, the prime minister is in good health with no symptoms. as a precautionary measure and following the advice of doctors, he will be in isolation for a planned period of 14 days. also on the advice of doctors he will not be tested at this stage since he has no symptoms. for the same reason, doctors say there is no risk to those who have been in contact with him recently. in terms of what's happening in our government right now, while it has been a little bit of a

nightmare to watch the president try to put together a sentence or two on this subject, including last night's disastrous speech from the oval office, things proceed apace in congress. just a short time ago, house speaker nancy pelosi and the chairman of the ways and means committee announce they are close to a deal with the trump administration on an aid package related to the coronavirus crisis. the speaker unveiled this bill late last night. it would provide financial resources to people and businesses affected by the pandemic, reportedly including free testing once we finally have some freaking testing. she and chairman neal reportedly negotiating all day today with the trump administration's designated negotiator, who is treasury secretary steven mnuchin. the speaker told a group of reporters camped outside her office this evening that they should go home for the night and expect an announcement of some kind tomorrow. but according to the speaker of the most of the differences between the two sides have been resolved and this will be the first significant policy response of the u.s. government through congress in terms of legislation that we've had.

the house will meet again in the morning. it looks like they will have something to vote on and again the senate has canceled its planned recess so they will be at work. watch this space. that does it for us tonight. we will see you again tomorrow. now it's time time for "the las word" with lawrence o'donnell. good evening, lawrence. >> good evening, rachel. it's so striking the way the zeal is coming together with nancy pelosi and the treasury secretary. no donald trump involvement. no mitch mcconnell involvement. >> yeah. and you know, mitch mcconnell right now in terms of his handling of the senate, i'm sure that you can read the tea leaves much better than i can. they are taking their weekend. they are not taking their recess. there's no clear signal from mcconnell on what he thinks ought to be done about the crisis, let alone the strength of this deal that's being worked out without him. how do you read it? >> i read it as mitch mcconnell has no idea what to do. like none. zero. >> wow. >> totally lost. >> i believe you. >> every once in a while, it's as simple as it looks. >> law