>> thanks for joining us. this is an a block where you're not going to know with why i'm starting with what i'm starting with. but if you stick with me to the end it has a really big pay off. so, let's break the wall a bit to tell you how this is going to go. but that's how it's going to go. i want to start in 2018 which feels like roughly 35 years ago now, but two years ago, 2018, the country had a big problem with lettuce. there was an e. coli outbreak affected romaine lettuce in the united states in 2018. do you remember that? it was a big deal. it was reported in 36 states, 96 people hospitalized, more than two dozen people got a really serious complication that basically resulted in kidney failure, five americans ultimately died. when that happened in 2018, the fda and the cdc and investigators in several states, they got together and did the public health detective work that needed to be done to figure

out what had gone wrong in that outbreak. and those investigators ultimately pinpointed the source of the problem with romaine lettuce. that was both a hard thing for them to do -- it was very impressive. but it was also something that had practical consequences for us, the lettuce-eating public, and for the produce industry that sells the stuff. >> at the pasadena farmer's market this morning lettuce lovers can shop easily knowing this locally grown romaine is safe. >> i had a couple of customers asking about the romaine lettuce, whether or not it was california grown, if it was safe to eat. and yes. >> the concern, romaine grown in arizona and shipped across the country. the cdc is warning about an e. coli outbreak from lettuce grown there, telling grocery stores, raupts, and consumers to toss it all out if they can't be sure where it came from. >> we're looking at the lettuce in the grocery stores from california, not arizona. >> a distinction that puts the

shoppers at ease. >> i feel confident we're not going to have any issues. >> california lettuce shoppers at ease once the disease detectives found that the contamination in romaine lettuce in 2018 was not coming from california farms. so, it was safe to buy california romaine. it was an interesting public health case study. the team that did that investigation produced this report that not only outlined the problems that they detected at these farms in arizona. they also produced really blunt findings about what growers and processors needed to do to fix this problem and to avoid something similar happening in the future. it's really, you know, blunt, specific advice. assess and mitigate risks related to land uses near or adjacent to growing fields that may contaminate water or leafy green crops, for example nearby

cattle operations or facilities. also ensure water that contacts the portion of the crop is safe and adequate for its intended use including agricultural water used for the application of crop protection chemicals. it's really specific stuff. it goes on like that for pages. and documents like this are common in the food industry. and in public health at large. the cdc specifically has a whole team that works on things like this for public health, the epidemic intelligence service. and it's as cool as it sounds. they really are more like detectives than anything else. and there's public evidence of their work everywhere. we get the reports on what they do. there was, for example, a deadly food poisoning outbreak associated with the jack in the box fast food chain back in the early 1990s. i remember how freaked out everybody was. it was a big concern. the cdc investigated that to figure out what was going wrong. that's how america found out what was happening there and how

jack in the box got back on its feet. here's the cdc report after they investigated an outbreak on south bass island in ohio in 2004. it was an outbreak of gastroent riets. they didn't know where it was coming from. the cdc came in, traced it to contaminated ground water on the island and made a bunch of really specific recommendations. the septage should be disposed of. all island ground water should be treated before consumption. a moratorium on the corruption of new on sight waste treatment and disposal systems should be imposed. when you have a bad public health situation of some kind, people are getting sick and it all seems to be from some sort of source but nobody can exactly figure it out. what happens is the cdc comes

in, the disease detectives investigate it and they tell you what you need to do. and then you do it. that's the system we have in this country. and it's for big famous outbreaks like the jack in the box thing. it's like the island outbreak in ohio that you never heard about. duvall county, florida, 2012, they had a tb outbreak at an assisted living facility, one of the biggest in a decade. recommendations there were blunt, straight up cdc style. screen all staff and clients with one of these four forms of testing. replace ventilation filters monthly. keep records. require proof of tb screening for all staff and clients. and this is how things have looked at the cdc, you know, going back to the '80s and '90s and the early 2000s. this is also what they look like during the trump administration. for example when they found leej nares disease in quincy,

illinois two years ago. the cdc did an investigation, called it an epiaid. they told them what to do at this home. residents who tested pneumonia should be tested with one of these -- both of these two types of assays. the cdc told them who exactly should supervise patient transfers from the veterans home to the local hospital. cdc picked who should be in charge of those transfers to make sure that the legionares testing. the cdc went so far as to tell them how to rerig their plumbing to ensure the water temperature was right to kill off the bacteria. the veteran home should establish control limits at fixtures prior to mixing. this is how it woshs. it's really good that we have them and that they're a top-shelf according zags.

cdc gets called in because there's a public health disaster somewhere. they investigate what happened. they tell you what to do to fix it and to stop it from happening again. and you do it. that is how it works. that is how it's supposed to work. that is not how it is working now. let me explain. let me also back up for a second first. as of today, the u.s. is now over 1 million cases of coronavirus. absolutely dwarfing any other epidemic anywhere else in the world. we are up over 58,000 americans dead from coronavirus over the course of not much longer than one month. remember when the university of washington model that the white house was relying on said that we would likely hit 61,000 dead americans by august 4th? that was the projection the white house was relying on. well, we're likely to hit 61,000 dead americans by the end of this week, easy, and it's still

april. so, the rosy estimates about how we were going to get out of this with just 50,000 or 60,000 people dead, no, that university of washington model, they revised upwards how many americans this thing is going to kill. now they're saying more than 74,000 of us dead by the first week in august. we'll see. americans by large majorities support the policies that have been put in place to slow the spread of the virus, stay-at-home orders, limits on the size of gatherings. "washington post" has a new national poll that shows big majorities of americas support those policies. plus another 16% of americans say the restrictions aren't tight enough, that we should be doing more. nevertheless, there are governors around the country who are starting to tell businesses and different entitys in their states to open up. and the white house is letting them all do it, encouraging them to do it themselves, make up

their own models for disease control in a global pandemic. you know, and governors often go out of their way to say that they're very data driven in these decisions. but it's clear that most of them are making that up. just from the data we about what's happening in the epidemic right now, it's at least clear where it's the worst idea to open things up. "the new york times" put on the front page today the aggregated local information about where the american epidemic is worst right now. i find it very helpful that they stacked the data into metro areas rather than by looking at it by county because we're not always familiar with what county names mean. if you talk about metro areas, it's usually something that you recognize. look at the list. top ten places in the country where the outbreak is the worst right now. this is new cases over the past two weeks. and you see some expected locations there, right? the tri-state area of new york, new jersey, sect sect is obviously the hardest hit area in the country and has been from

the beginning. new york city you see on there in fifth place, fairfield, trenton, new jersey. but look at everything else on that list. i mean, number one is marion, ohio. why is that number one on the list? oh, right. they have a state prison in marion, ohio where more than 80% of prisoners, more than 2,000 men in that facility have tested positive. so, yeah, they're number one. grand island, nebraska is ranked second in the nation in terms of where the outbreak is worse right now. it started at a meat processing plant in grand island. there's no stay-at-home order statewide in nebraska or locally in grand island. the governor wouldn't let them do it. so, the outbreak there just exploded in grand island, nebraska. pine bluff, arkansas is third. that's another prison outbreak. that's cummings prison with over 900 prisoners and staff infected. it's not -- it's not -- you can go by these one by one.

it's not rocket science to figure out where and why the raging out of control the american coronavirus epidemic is at its worse. where prisons are testing, those trurning out to be some of the worst and biggest outbreaks in the country. still don't have a national strategy we're working on about that, but the more places test, the more you will find that to be true. we're going to have more on that a little later this hour. seeing nit prisons. we're also seeing it where there are meat plants with thousands of employees. of the top ten mow tretro arease the coronavirus is the worst right now, four of ten appear to have sprung from big meat processing plants with thousands of waters. why should the waterloo cedar falls area in iowa have hundreds of cases and still be growing? one of the worst outbreaks in the country. te they'll tell you in waterloo it came from the tyson plant there.

the sioux city area, why over a thousand cases and still growing? local mayors there would like to know. quote t mayors of all five cities called for greater transparency from state and county health officials about places contributing to the recent spike in the covid-19 cases. the mayors asked businesses to, quote, take responsibility for any outbreak or spread of the cove in their facilities, publicly disclose any cases, and release a detailed plan for disposing of the virus. they should close until such time as a response plan is in place according to the mayor's statement. the mayors weighed in on the subject as county and state health officials continued to side step questions linking the surge in positive cases to tyson fresh meets, dakota city beef

plant, sioux city metro's largest employer. dakota city beef plant in dakota county, nebraska, more than 4,300 workers there. it's in the sioux city area. dakota county, nebraska, they've got 600 cases reported in that county. there's no hospital in that county. that's the second highest number of cases in all of nebraska's counties. the other one is another big meat packing plant. i mean, this dakota city outbreak, that's -- nobody's talking about how many workers are positive there. the mayors, local mayors there in the sioux city areas are asking the three governors in that tri-state area, the republican governors in south

dako dakota, iowa, and nebraska to please provide information about where outbreak or spread as occurred. they're asking for help. please tell us where our hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of coronavirus cases are coming from here in the sioux city area. you might be barking up the three wrong trees because those are three republican governors who never put in place any stay-at-home orders and who are even today bragging about how much more they're now opening up even though they didn't actually close anything in the first place. so, we'll see how the iowa, dd dd, and nebraska governors feel about the sioux city area mayors freaking out about their hundreds of coronavirus cases and their open meat plants with thousands of workers and nobody telling them how many cases there are at those plants. but that's what's happening in that part of the country which is among the worst-hit areas in the country now. i should also tell you that in iowa today, the lead story in the "des moines register" is how

the governor last week received an explicit warning from the university of iowa about the pace of the epidemic in her state, warning the governor explicitly, quote, prevention measures should remain in place. without such measures being continued, a second wave of infections is likely. she was advised as such by the university of iowa last week, but today she moved to loosen everything up anyway. two of the fastest-growing, worst outbreaks in the country are in iowa, but who cares, right? open it up. but this meat packing thing isn't just in south dakota, nebraska, and iowa. it's everywhere there's meat packing. in caste county, indiana, they have no reason to have over a thousand cases except for the tyson meat plant there. in greenly, colorado, where the local hospital is groaning, local health officials writing to the county this week to tell them to please not open anything

up. quote n our hospitals we have never before seen numbers of patients relying on ventilators to stay alive. that's local health officials in weld county. that's because weld county is groaning under the weight of its coronavirus patients already because of the jbs plant in greenly, colorado with an untold number of workers infected there because the jbs plant there decided just not to test them all before opening back up yesterday. that's 6,000 people in the plant. the plant told nbc news yesterday they're proceeding as if everybody in the plant is infected. they're not testing them. there's no stay-at-home order in weld county because weld county decided that they didn't decide to believe that the governor's stay-at-home order was enforceable. and weld county is telling businesses to do whatever they want. i have to tell you though, wrap this back around. the cdc did get called in to do

one of their famous aid investigations at one of these meat plants, at one of the first worst outbreaks, the smithfield plant outbreak in sioux falls, south dakota. cdc got called in to investigate what happened, to tell them what to do. but something hinky appears to have happened there. just a few minutes ago the language i described from the other aid reports on other public health disasters they've investigated. they don't tend to mince their words in terms of telling people what to do. screen all staff or clients with these four forms of testing, a moratorium on water systems should be imposed, veterans home should establish control limits for the hot water temperature range at fixtures. that's how cdc reports look. that's the language that you find decade after decade, outbreak after outbreak,

investigation after investigation from the cdc, public health disaster. the cdc comes in, diagnoses it, figures it out, and tells you what to do. a moratorium should be imposed, screen all staff, establish limits. that's how reports are written except not anymore. not in this crisis, apparently. not in the meat packing plant in sioux falls, south dakota, that accounts for already more than 1,000 cases in sioux falls. cdc went in and did their investigation. their recommendations in terms of what the plant ought to do. if you look at all the nouns, all the substance of what they say would be a relevant fix, it all seems rational. but for some reason, there's a whole lot of very un-cdc language throughout this report. it just flat out says, quote, these recommendations are discretionary and are not required or mandated by cdc.

what? look at this. quote, consider the following actions to physically separate employees. consider the following actions? just think about it? portable hand washing facilities could be utilized. oh, they could? could they? staggered shifts start times and break times as much as feasible. but smithfield, don't knock yourself out. if it's not feasible, we understand. quote, consider moving training online. you should consider that. quote, make unidirectional paths through the facility where possible. face coverings are generally recommended. quote, if feasible, all employees should wear face coverings. but if not, you know, no big. quote, the facial covering should be discarded and replaced when wet or dirty, comma, if possible. what cdc is this? this kind of language is not

what the cdc does in these kinds of investigations. literally over the course of decades, we've looked at the language in these investigations. this is not the way the cdc tells you what to do after they investigate the public health disaster in your facility or in your town or in your state. all this if feasible, if possible, consider doing this, this isn't mandatory, but you might want to consider -- i mean, this gives all the meat-packing plants any kind of out to not do any of this stuff. all they have to do is say that's not feasible. they told us to think about it. we did think about it. we decided not to do it. what is this? if possible, specifically ask employees about recent history of fever. if it's possible. but, you know, whatever. the trump administration as of tonight is telling all the meat plants to open, to remain open. there's been dozens of meat plants shut around the country.

the president issued an executive order within the last few minutes that tells all the meat plants to open back up. why have the meat plants closed? because they've been infecting their workers with coronavirus by the thousands, and lots of workers have started to die. so, when the president is now ordering them all to open back up, what does that mean for all the workers who are working in these environments where in state after state after state and plant after plant after plant we are seeing that the working conditions in these facilities expose them to mortal risk. there are thousands of americans, thousands of people, who have been infected at these meat plants already. it's not a coincidence. it's not a one off. it's happening because of the way these meat plants operate. so, should the way the meat plants operate be changed? if they're going ordered by the president to reopen? if the president is telling them

to be open to, , to reopen, anye that's closed reopen, right? the trump administration is also apparently overseeing a new cdc where meat plants with disasters unfolding inside of them don't actually get told what to do to keep their employees alive anymore. they just get handy hits that they're free to disregard. i expect anything from the trump administration. i do not expect this from the cdc. cdc, are you okay? would you let us know if you're not? we're going to try to get some answers here, next. our customers a portion of their personal auto premiums. learn more at libertymutual.com/covid-19. [ piano playing ] there will be parties and family gatherings. there will be parades and sporting events and concerts.

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it took thousands of confirmed coronavirus cases at the nation's meat processing plants and at least 20 deaths of people who work at those plants. but the trump administration just this past weekend finally did issue some guidance for those plants on how to keep their workers safe if plants are

going to be kept open. those guidelines are purely voluntary though. and this comes after a sort of strange cdc report on a meat packing plant outbreak in sioux falls, south dakota. that report stopped short of telling the plant to do anything directly and used unprecedented language just suggesting that the plant think about making changes if feasible rather than just bluntly telling them in public health terms what they ought to do. we don't know why the cdc is suddenly like this for the first time in their existence and we don't know why this is being perceived at voluntary. the federal government could have required this but they haven't done so. there's an entire agency who's job is do those kind of things. osha requires workplaces to operate safely, and they mean it, right? they can require you to do stuff. they don't just suggest it or give you stuff to think about.

but instead of requiring anything during the covid-19, the trump administration has just opted for these gentle suggestions. and their guidance for meat plants this weekend osha and cdc issued a handy graphic illustrating how meat packing and meat processing workstations could be aligned, quote, if feasible. if you can swing it. if it's not too much trouble. if it is too much trouble you don't have to do it. just whatever. even with these voluntary, if you want to think about it safety guidelines, even with a meat industry fighting to keep running, there are 20 or so plants that have been shut down this month across the country either because intense local pressure or because so many workers are out sick they can't stay operational. but apparently president trump is now as of tonight going to force those plants to reopen and force the plants that haven't yet closed to stay open. the president signed this executive order tonight declaring meat plants to be

critical infrastructure in the nation's food supply chain. you start shutting down meat plants just because a few thousand of your workers are sick. this white house isn't going to stand for that. forcing coronavirus outbreaks like these meat packing plants to stay open or reopen would pose a tremendous public health challenge even if the federal government were requiring that strict health and safety protocols had to be implemented in these plants. but this order from the white house has the potential to undercut even the voluntary guidance the cdc and osha issued this weekend ahead of the president signing this, the president has just undermined all efforts to stop the spread of disease in these plants. he's essentially saying they must be allowed to operate and there should be no specific requirements that plants must follow to stop the spread of the disease. trump's order would meaningless guidance the cdc said sunday.

without putting in specific safety requirements beyond masks, the disease will continue to spread through the masks and into the community. >> the trump administration could make the guidance that is intended to keep the workers at these plants alive mandatory. it could require these plants to keep their workers safe from coronavirus. they're just not. and ordering them back open when thousands of people have already been infected inside them. so what's going on here? joining us now is debbie bi berkowitz. she's a former senior policy adviser under president obama. thank you so much for making time tonight. you are an in-demand person at this point and i really appreciate you being here. >> i'm so happy to be here, rachel. thank you. >> let me ask you, you obviously are a well-steeped expert in all of these matters that i am

approaching as a layman and as an observer. let me just ask you in all humility just correct me or if i'm looking at any of this the wrong way around or even if i'm just emphasizing the wrong things in the way that i'm trying to explain the situation. >> no, i think you are totally spot on. and it's something that is just very hard to wrap your brain around, that the president has essentially said to 500,000 blue collar workers out there working these really hard jobs in meat and poultry plants that he doesn't care if you get sick or you die because he wants the plants to be open. so, you know, his corporate executive friends can keep making money. i think that one of the things that's important to point out is the president didn't have to do this.

he is creating a false choice that you can either feed america or keep workers safe. and you can absolutely do both. and a caring industry would do both. >> i think that there is -- because we are in a crisis, because so much of what we're living through right now is unprecedented, i think there's a lot of sympathy and people willing to give the government a lot of leeway in terms of understanding that some things are hard to do and that some things may be impossible to do but you've got to try to do them and you know you won't be perfection but at least if you try and you fail a little bit people will understand. i feel like that's true with a lot of things that have gone wrong. but in this case, i feel like there isn't a case for nihilistic resignation, that the cdc and osha to a certain extent have actually done the work to figure out factually what needs

to be done to run meat packing plants in a way that doesn't kill their workers or expose them to this infectious disease. the work is done. it's just a matter of requiring them to do it which is just a decision by the government, isn't it? >> yeah, it's another stunning thing is the department of labor headed by eugene scalia, osha, the agency i once worked at in the last administration has chosen -- this is a choice -- not to enforce any requirements in the meat industry to protect workers. they could. they could enforce everything the cdc laid out at the beginning of march and again laid it out very clearly just now as you said in their new guidance. the industry, you know, looked at these recommendations -- they're voluntary -- and in the end didn't implement them, didn't implement them.

even the workers and the unions and myself all called them all through the month of march. and the result is as you said over 3,000 workers are really sick. 172 17, 20 workers have died. it spread into the communities. this didn't have to happen. had the industry implemented these measures, they would still be operating right now. they wouldn't be shut down. >> let me also ask you about the language that has struck me as unusual, perhaps unprecedented, in the cdc's report what happened in that smithfield plant. we're seeing echos of it in the voluntary lines produced by the administration this weekend. you're an expert when you look at those things. i am just a person who specializes in reading comprehension. and in comparing different epiaid reports from cdc from

different type of outbreaks and crises over the decades, i feel like i have never before seen all of this mealy mouthed you've got an out here kind of language saying don't do this if you don't want to, just consider this, if feasible, if possible, you might want to mull this over. it just doesn't read like a public health document usually does. it doesn't read like cdc instructions usually do after one of these investigations. i would like your expert opinion on whether or not that seems strange to you as well. >> i think cdc knows clearly how to prevent the spread of covid-19 in these plants and how to prevent it from spreading back into the community. i think what happened is they wrote it all up and somebody in the agency clearly took a pen to make it seem like you don't really have to do it. this is voluntary. and i think there's a real price to pay for this kind of -- i

would call it government malfeasance. for osha not to just take these guidelines and make them mandatory, that you have to redo your production lines so workers are six feet apart. you can't make them work shoulder to shoulder, thousands and thousands of workers lining up along metal tables in these cold, wet, noisy conditions, everybody making 10,000 cuts a day. the cdc recommended they restructure them, that workers don't work on both sides of these tables, they work six feet apart, they build tents in break rooms. on a normal day workers don't have time to do to bathroom so it's having to change the way they do business and slow down line. and i just think from the top they don't want to give employers any responsibility for protecting workers. and in the end this is just going to create a second wave.

it's going to defeat the whole purpose of trying to spread -- i mean prevent the spread of this disorder. and it's a really stunning, stunning development. >> debbie berkowitz, former senior policy adviser for osha. ms. berkowitz thank you so much for your time tonight. obviously we'll stay on this story. we're trying to figure out what's going on with cdc in particular on this, but we'd love to have you back as the story progresses. thank you. >> thank you so much. >> we have more to come. stay with us. we have more to c. stay with us and, can leave you feeling extremely sad and disinterested. overwhelmed by bipolar depression? ask about vraylar. not all types of depression should be treated the same. vraylar effectively helps relieve all symptoms

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. even from a distance you can see why protesters showed up this weekend outside the state prison in marion, ohio, the marion correctional institution. supporters of the people living inside that prison held signs like inmates have rights and not a death sentence. it's all because of this, the

shocking numbers of coronavirus cases that have been reported out of that facility. 2,500 men who are incarcerated inside that marion prison. 2,500. of them, more than 2,000 have tested positive. over 80% of the prisoners there. among the staff, there's 169 people who have tested positive already as well. at another state prison nearby in ohio, more than 1,500 prisoners have tested positive. that's roughly 3/4 of the population there. but yet at another prison in the same state, elkton federal prison in ohio, there are 7 prisoners who have died there already. but somehow the prison at elkton has confirmed only 52 cases. wait. marion and pickway have 1,500, 2,000 cases. this other prison in ohio has only 52 cases with all those

people dead already. that seems abnormally low until you realize oh, right, less than 100 of the 2,400 prisoners at elkton have actually been tested because they are testing in the state prisons in ohio, but they're really not testing in the federal prisons. the pattern for this virus is developing in a hurry. any prison not doing wide-scale testing like the elkton federal prison in ohio is putting out numbers that are not believable. any prison that is doing universal testing is turning up numbers that astonish. tahoe ho state facility in marion where over 80% of the prisoners tested positive, 95% of those positive cases were men who were asymptomatic. so, the virus is there churning through our prisons regardless of whether we care enough or can get enough tests to find it. so, yeah, you are going to see protests from family members like the one in marion, ohio this weekend because not only is the virus tearing through that facility. it also inevitably leaves the

prison and creates a problem in the surrounding community, to the point that marion, ohio is number one on "the new york times" list of the worse outbreaks in the country. 32 cases for every 100 people in the county. michigan, lake land just announced the death of its 12th prisoner. it's the first prisoner in michigan to test all of its inmates. with implications of course not just for the prisoners but for the people who work there and for their families who they go home to and the rest of the community in which they live. we are not yet starting to fix this. it is only even in the places that are testing this that we are able to start to recognize the magnificent size of this problem. when does this get fixed? michigan senior senator joins us live here next. r senator joins s live here next

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when a response to a global pandemic is as cartoonishly botched as this government's is, when it's that bad, you don't need to do much to dress up much in order to get the point across. you can just state the facts and have a big voice guy say them to your ad music. >> and now, he has the united states leads the world in coronavirus cases, more than 50,000 americans dead, twice as many deaths as any other country, over 26 million people have lost their jobs, and it's only getting worse. down playing the threat, ignoring the experts, refusing to prepare. donald trump is failing america. >> the way that started, the way the clip came in, you actually missed the first little bit of it which started with donald trump said he would put america first, and now he has. the united states leads the world in coronavirus cases.

that whole america first slogan not aging well obviously in this time. but that's a new ad from the democratic super pac priorities usa that's apparently going to run across three key battleground states that president trump in 2016 where the good people who live there have been hit hard by the coronavirus crisis. wisconsin, pennsylvania and michigan. pennsylvania and michigan both rank in the top 10 of states with the most coronavirus cases already. nationwide the average daily percent increase in cases is just shy of 2.5%. michigan, pennsylvania and wisconsin all beat that right now, which is bad in cheterms o the increasing size of their epidemics. like you saw in the ad, you don't need to weaponize or dress up the president and the administration's failed response on how it's costing american lives. you just tell it, right. you just state the facts. ask the people of wisconsin, pennsylvania and michigan.

joining us now is the top democrat on the senate agriculture committee, which puts her in a really important job right now. thanks for being here tonight. >> it is great to be with you rachel. i want to thank you for lifting up the issues on meat at packing plants and all of the other worker safety issues and testing issues and prison ns. your voice is really important at this time. >> that's very kind of you to say. well, let me get your top line reaction, especially because of your intense involvement in agriculture issues. the president tonight signed this executive order that compels meat processing plants to stay open or reopen even though so many of them have shut temporarily. thousands of meat processing workers have been infected on the job. what do you make of this move by the president. >> well, it is stunning in what it doesn't do, right? that's what you have been talking about tonight. if we want our meat packing plants to be safe, our workers have to be safe, period.

and, so, he doesn't use the defense production act to make sure we have materials to make sure we have testing kits and reagents so that we can do the tests and make sure that we can protect americans or to make sure we have the protective equipment that we need in our country. that's what we should be doing is making those things in america. instead, he uses it to compel meat packing plants to be open in part to give some liability protection for the owners of the plants. let's be honest about that. i want them to be open. but he doesn't do the piece that keeps it open, which is requiring testing, requiring aggressive protective equip, retiring osha standards, all the things that actually would protect people. so now we know at least 20 lives have been lost in meat packing plants alone. we know that over 5,000 people, in fact, have been infected.

and they go home at night, you know, as we all know. they're going back to their families, back to their communities, many small towns in rural communities where their health care system, their hospitals are very fragile by just the nature of being in small towns. and, so, it's devastating what's happening. and they could do it the right way. we need the food supply. we need the plants open. but we need people's lives to be protected. >> do you agree with the expert that i spoke with earlier this hour who said that this is basically a flip the light switch decision by the administration, that if the secretary of labor, if eugene scalia said, hey, the osha guidelines are mandatory. they're not just suggestions. they're not just guidance, you have to do them, that meat packing plants would be required to meet those standards in order to open back up. it seems like it's not a logistics issue or an it's too hard issue.

it is a lack of will. all they have to do is decide to do it and those things would be mandatory. >> you're absolutely right. i always agree with debby whenever i have the opportunity to do that, from one debby to another. but in all seriousness, osha requirements they can put in place right away. cdc usually not optional. it is usually not a maybe if you feel like it. also we have meat inspectors to go into the plants every day. if the usda meat inspector does not go into the plant, the plant can't operate. so there are multiple ways to basically say to the plants, you have to follow standards to be able to be open. and let me stress again, rachel, it is not that i want them to close. heavens no. we have enough challenges in our food supply system right now with our bulk suppliers, you know, not having markets with restaurants and fast food and all of the other markets that are really shutting down for them at the moment. so i want it to be open.

but not at the expense of people's lives. you know, i mean, the united states of america, that should not be the choice. and that's what i am extremely upset about. 35 senate democratic colleagues and i sent a letter last week to the secretary what needed to be done to protect our food supply and to protect our workers. we have not yet received a response, but instead what we get is they're going to require the plants to be open, which by the way, they wouldn't have to require them to be open because the owners want them to be open. you require them to be open to give them the overlay of liability protection, and to do that without also requiring the plants to have to protect workers, to test people, to have all of the other things in place that need to be in place is what i find incredibly offensive. >> yeah. especially because we have now lived through this real-time experiment where we have seen in real life that these plants are places where thousands of

americans, thousands of people get infected on the job unless things radically things. senator, i really appreciate you making the time to be here tonight. i know you and your colleagues will be back to washington soon. thanks for being here. i appreciate it. >> you're welcome. >> all right. we'll be right back. introducing tide power pods with cat & nat. that is such a large load, don't the stains sneak through? new tide power pods can clean that... whole situation. it's like two regular tide pods and then even more power. even the largest of loads get clean.

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one thing that we're going to be watching for in tomorrow's news, early in the morning tomorrow we will have the first

quarter gdp economic released, that's economic growth for the first quarter of this year, it will be a negative number, which is scarey enough. the worst of the great depression was at negative 4%. tomorrow could turn out to be significantly worse than that. those numbers should come out at 8:30 eastern time tomorrow. we'll be watching for that early in the morning. and i have just one tiny last piece of important news before we go tonight. i need to say happy birthday to suzanne's mom, who is 90 years old today, strong as an ox, as wonderful and terrifying as to me as she was the first day i was so nervous to meet her more than 20 something years ago now. happy birthday. happy birthday. that does it for us tonight. we will see you tomorrow. now it's time for the last word with lawrence o'donnell. >> as much time as you want right now telling the story of how you met those years ago when you were soim