technical problem from within that was corrected. and it was an issue of embracing the way we have now and should have the private sector who clearly has the capability of making and providing tests at the level that we will need them for any of the things that i've just spoken about. so having said that, right now i totally understand and i'm not alone. my colleagues understand, that although we say there are x number of tests out there and you're going to hear from admiral giroir about that. the fact is there have been and still are situations that are correctible and will be corrected and some of which have been corrected. i know. i get on the phone a lot with my colleagues. because believe it or not, some long time ago, i was where they are in the hospitals, in the

emergency rooms looking at very sick individuals that you need to take care of. and i know what it means when someone tells you, hey, you have what you need and you look around and you say, well, maybe you think i have what i need, but i don't really have what i need. so we have to figure out how do we close that gap. and there are a lot of things that i think we've learned and that we are correcting and going to correct. mainly, you have a situation where tests are needed and appropriated and either people are found there's no tests or there's no reagents or there's no swabs or a person needed a test and were told that there was a restriction, they couldn't get a test. these are all the things that i'm telling you, you already know because you've heard them. so right now -- or there's a delay of five to seven days. what does that mean if you want to get somebody out of circulation. we understand that that existed, but upon careful examination,

what you are going to hear that many of those have been already corrected and other of those will be corrected. because what i think people don't appreciate, through no fault of their own, there are two issues. there's supply and demand. and if you have a supply that can meet the demand, but the supply is not connected to the demand, then the supply demand falls apart. what do i mean by that? i mean there is existing capacity that we have that for one reason or other maybe has not been fully communicated as to the availability of that existing capacity and you're going to hear about that now. there's production capacity that gets better and better and better. that's what we're talking about. for what we need now, we believe

that, with better communications, we'll be able to make that happen. so i know there's going to be a lot of questions about that. i didn't want to go on too long. let me finish by saying, given what i've just said and i believe what you're going to hear, for what we need in the first phase, if these things are done correctly what i believe they can, we will have and there will be enough tests to allow us to take this country safely through phase one. thank you. dr. redfield. >> thank you plrks vice president. i want to make a few comments here. first i want to talk a little bit about cdc has developed multiple systems to monitor disease outbreaks. i think many of you are familiar how we monitor for food borne illness or antibiotic resistance

in hospitals. we've also developed a system to monitor for upper respiratory tract disease. if i can get the first slide there. this is an example. when we talk about what we know about this current pandemic, reality is we know a lot. we've developed monitoring systems. up on the slide is a system we've developed initially for flu. what it does, you can see there's a multiple different flu seasons and they track them over the course of the year. i want you to look the a. the red line. that happens to be this year's respiratory season. you see there's a peak there up over the 50, 52 week. that peak what is when we had a peak of influenza b. this year was a little different because after that, syndrome came down and we had another peak when influenza a was active

through our country. you can see influenza a started to drop, but then you saw a third peak. that peak was ufrp looking at the coronavirus 19. so we have systems all the way down to the county level that we can see where there's respiratory tract illness. so it's not just taking a test. it's monitoring these systems that have been developed over decades. we have multiple ones. we have another one. it's monitored in emergency rooms looking at syndrome diagnosis. they showed the same thing. we're well-equipped to monitor to see when respiratory tract viral disease will come. it becomes a very good surrogate for when you begin to understand when we need to start looking eat logically what's going on. in week 15, you can see we're

really coming down to the baseli baseline in -- from the overall coronavirus situation right now. the second thing i wanted to say is that cdc continues to enhance the state's public health capacity to accelerate their ability as tony talked about, it's critical as we open america again. to diagnose individuals that present with influenza-like illness or coronavirus-like illness, to diagnose them. be able to isolette them and to be able to contact trace around them and then diagnose the contacts and those that are coronavirus positive, to go back and do their contacts. this is the traditional public health approach. when it started in this outbreak in january and february and was quite successful, as i mentioned

before to february 27th, this country only had 14 cases. we did that isolation and that contact tracing and it was very successful. but then when the virus more exploded, got beyond the public health capacity. right now, cdc is enhancing that public health capacity and if i can get the second slide, i want to show you that this is just showing as we sit here today that cdc has embedded in these health departments and all of these states across this country, more than 500 individuals. we also have an additional almost 100 individuals that are working on more than 20 coronavirus outbreaks that are going through all these states. finally, at the direction of the president, we've been asked to further enhance this deployment in each of the states as the vice president said so that there's additional health personnel to help accelerate the state's ability to basically move forward aggressively and we

assist them so they can operational ayes the president's guidelines to open up america again. i just wanted to make those points for you today. >> thank you. dr. birx. >> thank you, mr. vice president. and thank you dr. fauci and dr. redfield for all of that clarity. if we can have the next slide. i'm going to go back to what dr. fauci was talking about to emphasize those points about the two types of tests and i'm going to talk about a third one. first, we all know about sampling in the front of your nose. to all of the labs out there and to the providers, you don't have to use the nasofair -- nasofair jeel swab. that's sampling for the virus itself. it replicates in your nose and throughout some of the respiratory tissues.

the second cast is, of course, then your immune response to that infection in your nose. that's the antibody test. so those are the two tests we want to talk about. but i want to come back to something that both dr. fauci and dr. redfield said. we covered it yesterday. testing is a part of the exquisite monitoring that needs to occur in partnership with cdc and state and local governments utilizing the surveillance systems that are available, what we just talked about, the flu surveillance system because we no longer have flu and the syndrome i can respiratory system. you can see it's going back to baseline. we'll be able to see on the community level any deviation from that baseline. in addition, what we talked about yesterday was adding that asymptomatic component because i think you'll see as more and more articles come out for surveillance at other -- and

monitoring that other states have done, higher and higher antibody in multiple individuals who don't remember having a sickness. that will give us an idea. that's our asymptomatic monitoring in these sentinel monitoring sites. what did we talk about yesterday? we talked about nursing homes, indigenous people and vulnerable people in the inner city. really ensuring that something that is so small that can't even be seen on the surveillance monitoring will be able to be seen in the asymptomatic. so those are the two tests that we have. one available now, two that have been approved or three by the fda. i want to just leave you with my last concept on the antibody tests. antibody tests have different specificity and sensitivities. the fda, we've made -- the fda has been very cautious about the

antibody test because -- i know you see reports every day of countries that ordered the antibody test and found that they were 50, 60, 70% faulty. so we're taking that very seriously. because you never want to tell someone that they have an antibody and potential immunity when they don't. and so those tests perform better when there's a high prevalence or a high incidence of disease. so we want to work with mayors around the united states as those antibody tests become available to really see what it is in first responders and health care workers in the highest prevalence states so that we can know about the quality and the real life, real field experience of those as says. things can look very good in the lab and then when you take them into the field, sometimes they're not as good. i've learned this lesson repeatedly in working around the globe. the next slide.

>> so this is what we have asked commercial and diagnostic companies to be working on. because when you talk about multimillions worth of tests, the way we do this in the united states today for strep, for influenza and for malaria, we test for the antigen. we don't know right now, as you shed antigen in the front of your nose. that is a question that scientists and companies are working on right now. because that becomes a simpler test. now, the flu test, i think many of you will look it up tonight. you will see that outside of the flu season, because of the specificity of the test, it doesn't work so well. so these are tests we're working on today that would be like a screening test. because if you're positive on it, it's a good test. but it may miss that you actually have the flu. so then you would move into

the -- what we call the knew clee i can acid test. the full science of the united states into the reality of the clinic. so bench to clinic. this is what we're working on for the future. next slide. so as i promised both the senators and the governors, this is the united states current platform capacity. designated as high and low through putt. what do i mean by that? >> we've talked about roche and abbott and others and the gene expert and other machines that may be moderate through put. i want to show you how it's through the united states. these are the current testing platforms available today throughout the united states for covid-19. as you heard from dr. fauci, everything has to be working

from the -- to the transport media to the laboratory to really get those tests run and the results back to the client. the next slide. so then we've looked at all of the testing capacity from those platforms and this gives you an idea of what that capacity is. the darkest red, you can see like in texas and new york, those are states that have hots of different platforms, as you saw on the prior slide and the ability, you add up the platforms and the potential for tests of over a million tests per month. so this is what we're working with each of those states on unhocking that full potential. -- unlocking that full potential. how are we doing that? we're calling on the american society, microbiologists, they work closely with 300 lab directors around the country. we talked with them this morning. the walter reed team who developed the entire hiv testing program for the military 35

years ago, called them back into service and they're calling lab by lab to find out what are the technical difficulties to bring up all the platforms that exist in your lab. is it swabs, is it transport media, is it extraction? i really want to thank them. they've already worked through over 70-plus of those laboratories to really understand and the american society of micro buy olss and the academic societies are working together to ensure that all of this potential can be unlocked. next slide, please. we talked a little bit yesterday about new orleans. and the president talked about how many tests new orleans has done. during its outbreak, which you can see now is waning. they've done throughout the last month, 27 tests per 1,000 new orleans and louisianaians. so 27 in per thousand.

that's a good mark. that's what italy has done about 20 per thousand. in evaluating an outbreak and really to get control of this outbreak, they did about 27 tests per thousand. using that as a measure, next slide, we then looked across all the states of the united states of america and looked for states that had 30 or more, ability to do 30 or more tests per thousand this and -- in each state. you can see across the country, except for oregon and maine and montana -- i worked overseas way too long. thank you all. >> so those are the three states we're working on building capacity in. so this is just to give you a perspective of how seriously we're taking the testing issue. as we've described, we've measured every single platform

and every single state. we know exactly where they are by geography, by address, by zip code. what their capacity is, what their roadblocks are, not ability to run all their full capacity and we're addressing those. each one of those is different and you have to address each of them one by one, with the governors, with the state and local labs and with all of the hospitals. i have not come across one laboratory or one laboratory director or one society that doesn't want to contribute to solving this issue of testing and ensuring that this testing is available for everyone. there is a strong, just as all the americans have social distanced in behind everyone, we don't often talk about the laboratories. we'll talk about the nurses and doctors on the front line. behind all of them are the laboratory technicians and laboratory directors coming in every day and putting things together to ensure that every

single person that needs to be diagnosed is diagnosed. hopefully, you can see from these labs, i mean these slides that really there is capacity out there. it is our job working with the states and having the state and the leadership role and the laboratory directors in the leadership role to provide support to ensure that all the potential for testing in the united states is brought to bear. i just want to end with, these are new clay i can acid tests. there will never be the ability on that kind of test to do 300 million tests a day or to test everybody before they go to work or to school. but there might be with the antigen test. so that's why there's a role for the acid test and a role for the antibody test and a role for the future development of these other key tests to bring the full ability to the united states. so let me finish this. we'll be talking to all americans. there's other tests that other

americans should have. i think this has brought to light the importance of diagnosis and we'll talk to you further about hepatitis c and t.b. and other things that we can do to assure americans -- this really raises the awareness about how you do test for different kinds and different parts of your disease state and what is long lasting immunity and what made the long lasting immunity. what is an antigen test. with that, add miles an hour giroir. >> let me amplify one point as the admiral steps forward to include his remarks about our approach and the efforts we've put underway. governors across the country have been working very closely with us to roll out the level of testing that we have today. all the information we presented to you is going to be reviewed in the days ahead with all of our governors. our objective is to connect

every one of america's governors and state health officials and to all of the labs that are currently able to do coronavirus. but as dr. birx, dr. fauci both described, we believe today that we have the capacity in the united states to do a sufficient amount of testing for states to move into phase one at the time and manner that they deem to be appropriate. with that, i'll allow the add miles an hour to complete our briefing on testing and we expect the president to return. >> thank you, mr. vice president. thank you to all my really great colleagues. can i have that -- my next slide. so i wanted to start by where we are today. just to visit where we've come in such a short period of time. as everyone on the stage has said before, our testing right now is well over 3.78 million

tests that have been completed. and if you are impressed by bar graphs, that's over 1.2 million tests reported just in the last week. ambassador birx talked to me earlier and said we only do 2 million molecular tests for hiv, something that's been developed for 35 years. we're doing twice that number of tests in a month for a disease that has never been known before, that there's never been a test developed before and that's sort of where we are and where we've ramped up. i want to give you a better idea, the lighter blue or lighter gray is our i.d. now tests. we talk about them a lot because they're a care test that can be between five and 15 minutes. they have a specific role. but they're not for everybody. if you have to screen a few

thousand people, four tests an hour doesn't get you there on the machine. you have to use the higher through put items. but they have a very important role. coming into the market at 50,000 per day is really an important adjunct to us. she talked about the gene expert. very important. we don't talk about that very much. it's one of the backbone mobile point of care, not as easy to do, per se, as the abbott. but it is a point of care test that really carries tuberculosis screening all through africa. there are those machines on her slide. every one of the 50 states has this and over 600 sites. they've done over 700,000 tests just on that relatively through put but very important platform. next slide, please. i wanted to give you an idea of how the tests are distributed and how they're changing over time? on the left are the -- although

their numbers are relatively small. about 350,000. the state public laboratories were absolutely critical. they're a critical kpor component of our testing. not only there early and first, but they support outbreak investigations in nursing homes or investigations in certain plants that have close proximity with everyone because of their work vierpts. they also do testing on many people who don't have the opportunity to be tested elsewhere. they are performing very well. i know we hate acronyms, but this is america's commercial industrial backbone that we're standing behind the president and vice president. when i was there in the rose garden be a few month ago, this is the bioreference laboratory. mayo. sonic. arup. they've done almost 2.3 million

tests. this is the high through putt machines that dr. birx talks about. i want to be clear about this group. it doesn't matter where you are. i took one of the largest labs and i said, map out for me where you are within ten miles of where you are every site in the country and when you do that within ten miles of a site of one of these 93% of the u.s. population is covered. these are truly national reference labs that cover almost everybody within the united states. so if you cannot get a test at your hospital, the chances are overwhelming that you could send this to these habs that are fully caught up now. they have no backlog of tests. they've ramped up their production. so their turn around time is 48 hours. you may need to transport it from the middle of america out to a lab.

that's really very, very good. the hospitalization -- as the president and vice president have said, as for more and more labs come online, they're increasing the amount of testing that has been done in academic centers. now up to 600,000 tests. again, matching the other slide ahead, the abbott point of care test just to give you a oil and vinegar. in second populations where a point of care test is kwichk. it could be where someone needs to know if a person is positive for now to go to a frit cal drive. or times to get people screened back into the work environment. post people don't need a point of care test. that rant replace the millions of tests. next slide. >> i don't know how interested

you are in swabs. i did not know a whole lot about swabs. yes, there have been containing elements. number one, because this is an unprecedented scale hup of this type of economist indicated molecular test that never put a demand on the system. when we started off a few weeks ago, one type of swab, only get it one place in the u.s. and one play in italy. we were skuk with that for a while because it's not just the quantity. it's the quality. what i don't want to do is put a lot of things in the system to make people bheef it's not a good test. hasn't been validated by the fda. a positive is a positive and a negative is a negative. in the past yeek, both the scientific community, the fda and really opened up our ability

to not that all i the way back into your nose but to broaden the amount that are available. we're really at a point by the end of april we'll put another five million swabs, in addition to everything out there now be and bit end of may, over 12 new swabs in the system. more than enough to obtain the capacity that we need. next slide. >> for these molecular tests, you take a swab and stick it into a test tube. that test tube has to have a specific kind of liquid in it. when we started it was viral transport media. very special kind of media. the cdc has their own -- there's a lot of ingredients in there but limiting. we've worked with many, many different laboratories. worked with the fda. now pbs, phosphate buffer, saline and kind of laboratory grade saltwater can be used for

this. this greatly opens the ability to expand the test to support all the capability that dr. birx talks about. again, by the end of april we will have put well over 5 million new tubes of either viral transport media or saline into the system. i am going to get to a conclusion here. this was more of a technical briefing. next slide. >> so let's talk about the fact that the science tells us that we have and will continue to have enough tests to safely go into phase one. let me be granular about this. we've heard it's beyond the possibility to test everyone in this country every day. it's not possible. it's a bad strategy. testing a person now just means

they're negative now. dr. fauci could be positive tomorrow because it's brewing in his system right now and we don't know it or that he contacts that. that's not the way we go about things. the way we go about things is as dr. redfield said, just think of the weather radar. if the weather radar is clear, you're not going to have a thunderstorm or tornado. when something pops up, that's when you've got to go to where the action is or know that your warning system is up. sort of think of that in the background. that's monitoring. let me talk about how much testing we need just for overall testing. i'm just going to give you a number. i'm not saying this is the number that's there. let's take a number that we're going to enter phase one when there are 200,000 new cases per month in the united states. don't get hung up on that. it's going to be much less than that. let say 200,000 cases. how many tests do we need? we need to test those 200,000

people to make the diagnosis. everybody nod your heads. we have to do that. what's a safe number over that? you know if everybody i test has the disease i'm not testing enough. right? if i test 100 people to have one person with the disease, that's probably overtesting. so we kind of assume that a safe number that really gives us a good idea is one out of ten people are positive. then we know we're oversampling the population enough that we're getting all the positives. if there's 2 hup,000 cases, i need 2 million tests. now to go to dr. redfield's points. each one positive have contacts that need to be traced. on average, the cdc tells me for every positive, there are about five contacts that really need to be traced. let's assume that those 200,000 people have five contacts. now we have an extra million tests. 2 million tests out there to detect the 200,000 cases.

an extra million out there to trace those contacts. we're up to 3 million cases. if you want a fudge factor, say that's 4 million tests. those are generally done at the main hospital labs, commercial labs, state and regional labs. all this can be done, as well as some of the labs talked about by dr. birx. next slide. the second group of testing fits exactly perfectly with the influenza-like surveillance system that dr. redfield talked about. this is the monitoring. this is sort of the radar, the weather radar that would be out there. we're not testing people who are symptomatic. we want to do testing on people who are asymptomatic. because you can have asymptomatic carriage. you could have this virus and shed it and not have symptoms or only mild symptoms. what is the strategy here? the strategy here -- this is an unprecedented strategy. this is really unprecedented.

but we're going to do between 300,000 and 500,000 tests per week in the most vulnerable populations that we know that the virus could circulate. what are they? number one, nursing home and long-term care facilities. we know that from the history of this virus that that can circulate and be devastating and it could circulate even in a way that you don't have symptoms. so we're going to survey in a very controlled way driven by the cdc, supervised by the cdc, surveys over -- surveying in the areas to cover in a selective way the 15,000 or so nursing homes. secondly, we want to work in vulnerable members, in the cities. the way we think about that is community health centers. i'm a huge fan of community health centers that are led by

hrsa. there are about 30,000 community health center sites. they take care of 30 million people, children, adults, elderly. they care for about one-third of americans below the poverty level. they are arrayed to take care of our most vulnerable populations. so we want to survey asymptomatic people in those community health centers. we also want to do and some of our indigenous population. you know i was out here bringing machines out to the indian health service. 18 members provide care to the indian health service and their director and chief medical officer are both admirals in the indian health service. workplace monitoring, particularly for workplace environments that may have very close contact or may have a high risk. some could be agricultural facilities. let's total that up. we have 200,000 people who need a diagnosis.

to make that diagnosis, we want to test 2 million. okay? so that's 2 million. we're going to contact trace with a million. let's throw you a fudge factor of 25% on that. that's 4 million. we have this background testing of about 400,000 per month. so to safely do the testing, we need to be in the range of 4.5 million. you followed my numbers. i want you to understand. per month -- pardon me? >> for phase one. >> for phase one. i want to tell you that's really how it adds up. that's where we are. right now we're doing about one million to 1.2 million per week. we're going to continue to push that farther and further as we open up the laboratories and we're able to open all the supplies that we need for that. i think that's where i would like to end. thank you. thank you. >> i'll ask the team to step

back up for questions. we do anticipate as his schedule permitted that the president would be returning momentarily. please. >> you talk about phase one. will there be enough testing for phase two? do you have to ramp up capacity for that? how do you deal with that? >> that's a very good question. >> yeah. that's a great question. what we will be doing is monitoring how much we have to use in phase one to really help inform phase two. because the really unknown in this, to be completely transparent, is asymptomatic and asymptomatic spread. so if we find that there's a lot of asymptomatic individuals that we find in this active monitoring and what we are concernedb the most vulnerable. we'll have to have increased testing to cover all of those sites. >> as we've made clear to the governors and other health officials, we're going to

continue to scale the testing. as the president made clear, we want governors and states to manage the testing operations in their states. we've given criteria, we've given guidance for how we think that would best operate. but we're looking for the states and the governors to manage it. but in the midst of that, all these great experts, working with all these great facilities are going to continue to use that great american ingenuity to scale and increase the availability of testing for state to be able to implement as they move closer and closer to that day the president speaks of often where we reopen america and put all of america back to work. >> mr. president? >> they all did well. >> i think. >> i'll bet they did. >> please, go ahead. >> president, thank you. earlier today, said that your tweet encouraging -- ainsley.

said your tweets encouraging liberation in minnesota, michigan, virginia, rebellion, wondering how that squares with the sober and methodical guidance that you issued yesterday. >> i think we do have a sobering guidance. some things are too tough. if you look at some of the states you mentioned, it's too tough. what they've done in virginia with respect to the second amendment is a horrible thing. he's a governor under a cloud to start off with. when you see what he said about the second amendment, when you see what other states have done, no, i think -- i feel very comfortable. go ahead. just to be clear, when you talk about these states, michigan, minnesota, virginia, do you think they should lift their stay-at-home orders or can you talk -- >> the elements of what they've done is too much. you know the elements because i've already said. but certainly, a second amendment and second amendment having to do with the state of

virginia, what they've done in virginia is just incredible. okay. please. >> sir, are you concerned, though, that people coming out in protest are going to spread covid to other people? they're congregating in ways that health experts have said they should not. >> no. these are people expressing their views. i see where they are and they seem to be responsible people to me. but it's -- they've been treated a little bit rough. please. >> thanks, mr. president. i'm curious about more of the dynamics we might see as the country begins reopening as a puzzle. as you've mentioned, we have states where we're seeing the curves begin to flatten but others like florida or more rural parts aren't projected to peak for weeks or even months. can you talk a little bit about some of the difficulties that those later peaking states, they need to stay locked down longer, even as other places around them are starting to open back up.

>> we're seeing great numbers. in almost every state. we're seeing big drops. we're really seeing in terms of beds, the numbers we have to look at are the beds. the beds being occupied, people going -- essentially people going in. you have fewer people that are sick. fewer people that feel they have to go to a hospital. those numbers are dropping really precipitously. i think that -- we're just seeing a lot of good signs. now, a place like new york, new jersey, certain parts of louisiana, louisiana has been incredible lately when you look at that drop. that drop has really been great. michigan has had a hard time, but it's starting to do well. so i just think illinois is another one. you look at some of the numbers. but everyone is dropping. they're dropping rather quickly. we don't have any hotspot that's developed where all of a sudden you say owe other than a meat packing plant or two where

incredibly we had -- you saw the number was rather incredible. took place in that plant. people are going to ask about that. i wonder who owned that company. it's a weird situation. but generally speaking, it's been very good. the numbers have been really improving greatly. please in the back. >> thank you, mr. president. u.s. intelligence is saying this week that the current virus likely came from a level 4 lab in wuhan. there's another report that the nih under the obama administration in 2015 gave that lab $3.7 million in a grant. why would the u.s. give a grant like that to china? >> the obama administration gave them a grant of 3.7 million, i've been hearing about that. we've instructed if any grants are going to that area, we're looking at it literally about an hour ago and also early in the morning. we will end that grant very quickly. it was granted quite a while agoment they were granted a substantial amount of money. we're going to look at it and

take a look. i understand it was a number of years ago. >> so you are -- >> what did you hear the grant was made? >> 2015. >> 2015. who was president then i wonder? >> yes, sir. >> mr. president, we know negotiations are underway for the next round of funding for small businesses. tens of billions of dollars went in a matter of days the first time. will this next relief package be enough? >> well i think it will certainly -- it's going to get us to a point that will be rather beautiful. we think that will be the point and could be they want more but maybe at a certain point we're going to stop. it's been a tremendous success. it's been executed flawlessly. sba has done a very good job. but the banks have done a very good job, whether it's bank of america, wells fargo. the community banks have been incredible. i think we had over 4,000 community banks. a lot of people didn't know you had that many banks. 4,000 community banks gave the money out.

it's so organized. it's been such a great program. essential essentially, we're waiting for $250 billion. the democrats are refusing to -- this is money essentially going to the workers. it's going to keep these companies whole. restaurants and a lot of great companies. it's a small amount of money relevant to what it represents. because it represents small businesses, it represents them staying in business. >> i'm ari melber. we have been watching the white house coronavirus task force briefing. it has been going for about an hour and 20 minutes. we broadcast all of the medical parts, as well as the beginning. the president is taking questions. we're cutting away from that now having gone an hour and 20 into it. president trump today has shown himself to be still on the defensive over aspects of the virus handling. we saw that in the briefing u i'm about to be joined live by speaker nancy pelosi. she has been in the news as well with the president attacking her, including on twitter. meanwhile, the battles continue

in congress, the big story that affects so many americans lives is the fate of the paycheck protection program. this was designed to give loans to small businesses to help people work in small businesses around the country. it's already run out of money. leading democrats have argued that the additional funding for the program should be provided within a bipartisan relief package that includes new health care funding. senate republicans led by mitch mcconnell did not want to negotiate on that. instead, tried to go it alone with a vote that did not succeed. republicans are showing new signs they might be ready to work with speaker pelosi and others. house minority leader kevin mccarthy saying he would come back to the table to negotiate with some of the democratic proposals. having heard from the leader of the executive branch, we turn to the leader of the congressional branch, house speaker nancy pelosi joins me live. good evening, thanks for joining me. >> my pleasure. i wish it were other circumstances. but here we are. >> here we are. i understand that.

let's go right to the heart of this issue that affects so many americans. walk us through what you're trying to do, what you see as a solution in this small business program that came -- the path that had apparently run into some shortages. >> well, first of all, let me say that the lives and the livelihood of the american people are of course of the highest priority. but you can't have one without the other. we have to move in a science-based, evidence-based way. testing, testing, testing. but getting back to your question, i will say this. the bill that we passed, cares legislati legislation, was bipartisan. we've had three bills in the month of march, all of them bipartisan because we all want to address and help the lives and the livelihood of the american people. however, with the cares act, it was important for us to assert ourselves and i was very proud that we're working together, house and senate, democrats were able to flip a corporate trickle

down bill to a workers and families first bill. now the 'implementation, there' more money needed. we want more money, we believe in that. the spirit of america is so important. but it is also important for us to have more funds for the funds so those on the front lines, the health care wokers, the police and fire, ems, folks and all those who really need help as they try to save lives. so we're hoping that we can come to agreement. again, we all want the initiative to succeed. so hopefully, we can come to a bipartisan agreement very soon. >> understood. there's been a lot of debate over keeping the country closed for the most part according to medical expertise. the president, though, i want to show, some of the protests we've seen around the country. you're familiar. some of our viewers have seen it. some of it quite heated when we

look at the photography and folks protesting in michigan, gathering together and some of this footage people will see the protesters themselves not following the distancing guidelines. then the president making headlines tonight madam speaker, new york times reporting trump -- foments -- our viewers are seeing again some of that. what is your response to what the president is doing there? >> i won't take the bait. this is another example of the distraction that they want to make from the fact that the president had said that this pandemic was a hoax and that's not true. that the president said it will magically disappear. that's not true. again and again he was in denial and delay in dealing with this. this is just a distraction. don't fall for that. don't take the bait. >> understood. looking at the economic

hardship, which of course is part of the bill you mentioned that you're working on. "washington post" reporting 22 million unemployed. this was wiped out a decade of job gains. president trump has declared a national emergency. let's wipe this out. the u.s. has not seen it th level of jobless since the great depression. speaker, do you view this as simply a product of this tough pandemic or do you view this as a trump recession? >> it's probably a combination. let's right now talk about the pandemic. because that's a matter of life and death. we're in the situation that we're in because early into this the president refused to accept the facts. on march 4th we sent the billow owe passed a bill in the house about testing, testing, testing. you must have testing, testing, testing. that is the key to opening the door to letting us out to grow

our economy. it has to be science-based. the president said in opening it up, i have full authority, total authority. the next day, he said following that he said oh, the governors, it's up to them to open up and following that, he criticized the governors for the approach they were taking, which was to follow the guidelines of the center for disease control. so let's just say, we need truth. we have to insist on the truth as to what this is. we must have testing. we must have contact tracing so that we can stop this. people know, the american people are wise. they know that this is a threat to the health and well-being of their families. of course, they want to get back to work to grow our economy. but the fact is, that they take the health and well-being of their families first and foremost. we can move forward. we can find a cure. we can find a vaccine, we put

money in that. that first testing, testing, testing bill. the second bill was mask, mask, mask. trying to facilitate the personal protective equipment that we don't really have as much as we need it when we needed it because the president wouldn't do defense protection act. so the situation we're in is largely of his making. calling it a hoax. saying magically it will disappear. not calling upon the defense production act to protect the workers who are trying to save lives as they risk their own lives in doing so. that's why in this package we want to protect those on the front lines, whether it's in the hospitals or the ppe, the personal protective equipment. whether it's our police and fire, some of the emergency services people are the first ones to come in contact with somebody. we have to have insistence on the truth. the truth is that the bill that

the republicans put forth would not pass with unanimous consent in the house of representatives. it didn't in the senate either. so let's find our common ground. we all support it we want to support a cares two where we can go to the next step but let's not leave people behind and ignore the truth, which is the door to opening the economy, which is what we want to do with this small business initiative. that door is opened by testing, testing, testing contact tracing. evidence -- >> you just laid out your view of his failures coming from the trump white house on down. do you think those failures cost lives? >> yes, i do. i think delaying were deadly. so you say okay, that's what i didn't know. the reason i'm speaking out and i sent a letter to my colleagues

which i'm overwhelmed by the response i received nationally and from my colleagues insisting on the truth is let's not continue on a path of miss representation and falsehood, let's get to the science, the evidence, the data and facts and that's what we have in our proposal on the hospitals is hopefully to have testing with the data collection how racial differences are revealed in getting the facts and the data. that's so important and contact tracing so that we can know when context it had with other people and their own families and the rest. >> we cut away from the white house coronavirus task force briefing in order to hear from you. now we've heard from as i mentioned the president and your side leader and when you recommend that public officials

get information or do you think it's better to avoid watching them? >> people can do whatever they wish. it would be important for the president to tell the truth and the american people insist on the truth, their lives and livelihoods depend on it and i don't really watch them because every day the president is contradicting himself within the same presentation or from the day before. i'm fully in charge, i have authority. it's up to the governors and following the guidelines, that's wrong and putting in these distractions. we need central command. central command recognizes the health challenge it is and economic challenge it is and relationship between the two and again, the testing from the sta start, the shelter at home so important and the president being frivolous about that.

some in the republican party say some people will die. i don't think we have to make that choice. i don't think it's the lesser of two evils. we don't want this to be partisan and i hesitate to go to that path. three bills in march, all of them strongly bipartisan. but as long as the president misrepresents the facts like it's a hoke and magax and will disappear. we don't have what we need to protect our workers. i'm an intelligence person for a long time in congress and intelligence and national security, one of the things that we priorities we have any time we have force protection, we want to front protect our troops, president said where we are against a pandemic but force protection isn't there because

we did not protect our people on the front line and we have to do better. why should it be a health care provider in a new york hospital goes there instead of being equipped with the gown, the mask, the gloves, the rest is given a new york yankees rain poncho as her protection? and that people have to go from patient to patient with actually medical degree on their hands and faces. come on, let's do this right let's put whatever is behind us for action later but we cannot allow the same falsehoods to be the basis for our decisions as we go forward. we must insist upon the truth, the lives of the american people depend on it. that is our priority and small business is the vehicle to that. >> understood. before i lose you, a final question on a different issue as

you know there was an axizaticcn of misconduct against joe biden. he's publicly denied it. he's the democratic nominee. are you satisfied with his answer? >> yes, i am. i'm very much involved in this issue. i always want to give the opportunity that women deserve to be heard. i am satisfied with his answer, yes. >> speaker nancy pelosi making time for us here. we're coming up against the end of our hour. i really appreciate you joining me. >> my pleasure. next time under better circumstances, i hope. >> absolutely to you and everyone and i wish you family well. we'll turn right now for reaction. we're bumping up to the end of the hour but i have two guests, michael steele, a lot happened. your thoughts? >> yeah, i think the presser again as you noted is just really trumping on the defensive by saying he's not on the

defensive and trying to push the responsibility of where we are right now on someone else. the testing thing is a glaring, glaring dropped ball with three months into this and only 3 million americans have been tested. that's a little over 1% of the population. oklahoma has a population of 3. million people. so we have, you know, we haven't begun to scratch the surface around this idea of opening up the economy and the country when we can't even get the testing in place to make sure that people are and will be safe going forward. >> jill, we just heard the interview from the speaker weighing in while the president was still speaking. your reaction to her remarks and t tangoing with the president. >> it comes down to testing and phone calls, what congressional leaders have continued to tell him. i think what you saw with the

president's briefing that is on going is a recommendation that testing is the key. up until now, we heard the president insist oh, testing in the u.s. is better than any other country. we're doing fabulously which is not the reality and today you have medical experts still standing up there kind of laying out a scenario getting us to what they describe as the phase one opening for testings but not making clear what happens after that. they still don't really have an answer here. >> from your reporting, jill, where does the president's mind stay on these briefings? >> the president believes these briefings are his best way to be out there every day. he can't do rallies anymore. he can't be out there on the stage surrounded by his supporters and so the best alternative he has is to be out there on the stage for a couple of hours every day speaking directly to the american people making appeals to conservative media and doing that unfiltered through the press.

you've got a situation here where this is a president who is very sensitive about how the media is portraying his handling of all of this. he's been very angry about the stories suggesting that he didn't act quickly enough so he's been out there every day pushing back on that narrative. >> understood. important context. i want to thank jill and michael for your reporting and analysis through a very busy time and my thanks again to speaker pelosi. we're about to head into "all in" with chris hayes. i hope you have a good and pleasant weekend within the tough times we're living through and evbefore we go to "all in" we'll look at the press conference. >> i said you won't be there forev forever. 25 to 50 seats. don't worry about it. eventually you're going to be back to the scene that you used to have, which was -- look, i could tell you about and i'm not

going to do it because i didn't want to bring it up but i can tell you about events that took place and i said things like you'll never do that again or you'll never do this again or i don't even want to mention the events. i don't want to mention what you're supposed to be doing because -- you know one of them was so horrible. i said a certain industry will be out of business, never happen again. two weeks later it was like nothing ever happened. hopefully we get rid of this. we have tremendous talent up here and all over including governors and local governments, state governments i. look forward to the time to me when we can really normalize but normalizing is being back to where we were. yeah, please, go ahead. >> mr. president, some of your allies are calling for china to be stripped as host of the 2022 olympics. wondering what you make of that. is that something that you would consider? >> so i just made a deal with china where they're going to put

in $250 billion of product. they're going to be buying 250 from 40 to 50 billion. i want to see what's happening with china. i want to see are they fulfilling the deal, the transaction? we have a lot of discussions going on. good evening from new york i'm chris hayes. the u.s. has had among the worst most catastrophic responses to the coronavirus among pure nations in large part because the president has failed at every turn and the result is unprecedented illness and misery and death and that doesn't include the economic devastation that has been this president's sole focus from the beginning as he attempts to save his political future. that means the toll of this virus becomes more and more clear every single day and can't be happy talked away. president trump now needs to find s