very good job of bringing that home. it's great spending time with you. thank you for making time tonight. >> thank you for having us, chris. thank you. that is "all in" for this evening. "the rachel maddow show" starts right now. good evening rachel. >> good evening, chris. thanks for joining us this hour. you may be hearing the breaking news at this hour that ruth bader ginsburg has been hospitalized today. the news from the associated press began has a one-sentence story that said in total, quote, supreme court says justice ruth baden ginsburg hospitalized with infection. justice ginsburg is 87 years old. she has fought off cancer of the pancreas and cancer of the lung. as of january of this year she declared herself to be cancer-free. but tonight she is back in the hospital, and it is apparently because of her gallbladder. the u.s. supreme court has now released a statement about it. it says, quote, justice ruth

bader ginsburg underwent non-surgical treatment for acute choloe cystitis, a benign gallbladder condition in baltimore, maryland. following oral arguments on monday, justice ginsburg underwent outpatient tests in washington, d.c. those tests confirmed she was suffering from a gallstone that migrated to her cystic duct, blocking it and causing infection. the justice is resting comfortably and plans to participate in the oral argument teleconference tomorrow morning remotely from the hospital. she expects to stay in the hospital a day or two. joining me now is pete williams, justice correspondent, for the latest on this news. pete, thanks so much for making time to join us tonight.

i appreciate it. >> sure think about how tough ginsburg is at 87. she takes part on the first oral argument in the pandemic on monday. then she goes to a hospital here in washington where they diagnose this condition. she takes part today in the telephone conference this morning. then she goes up to baltimore. then she has the treatment for the coal yo cystitis. she'll be back on the phone tomorrow morning. she won't miss any oral argument. her health has been the subject of the intense interest. she had surgery for cancer. i suspect one reason she wants to be on the phone tomorrow is that it's the subject important to her. the court will hear arguments in the case about whether the trump administration can go ahead with its plan to give more exceptions to employers who want to cite a religious or moral exemptions or moral reasons for not providing

contraceptive coverage to their employees. >> yeah. an issue quite near and dear to her. pete, neither you nor i is a doctor. so, tell me if i'm asking something here that is beyond our kin. i am focused on two words from this statement from the supreme court tonight. one, this was a non-surgical treatment. any time anyone aged 87 is having surgery, that itself obviously becomes something you worry about just in terms of the strain on the body. also that this is described as a benign gallbladder condition, meaning it's not associated with cancer. it's an infection related to a gallstone. this isn't something that's likely to cause continual or chronic health problems. does that seem like a fair reading of what the court is telling us tonight? >> it does. i'm not a doctor either, but i live with one who's been explaining to me that the cystic duct which is what was blocked here is what connects the gallbladder to the plumbing that in turn goes into the intestine

to help with digestion. so, somebody gets a gallstone like this is commonly treated with ultrasound to break up the gallstone. surgery wouldn't be the normal thing for treatment of a gallstone. and then usually antibiotics are administered to take care of the infection which is what the choloecystitis. >> do you think there will be any changes that will have to go into effect to have the justice on the teleconference tomorrow for the arguments from the hospital as opposed to from her office or home or where she would otherwise be participated? >> i can't imagine. i'm sure she would just tell everybody in the room to shut up so she can do it by phone. this is one of the advantages to doing it on phone. she takes pride in not missing arguments. she missed a few early this year. she had what the chief justice describ

described as a stomach bug, coping with the flu has many people were in washington. she won't have to miss this one. she can do it right from her hospital room. >> pete williams, thanks for taking time to help us understand it, pete. i appreciate it. >> my pleasure. >> we are going to keep an eye on this story. we'll bring you updates as we get them. bottom line is that the supreme court has announced that justice ginsburg, 87 years old and all of about three pounds, underwent non-surgical treatment for essentially a gallstone situation at johns hopkins hospital in baltimore. she was in teleconference oral arguments yesterday before undergoing tests that revealed the condition that needed to be treated. she was treated today. she expects to be back in the teleconference for oral arguments tomorrow morning. remarkable. just puts your heart in your throat to think about it. all right. yesterday while i was reviewing

local tv news reports in iowa because that's kind of what my days are like now -- yes i came across something that i thought was a little bit weird in the local news in the city of perry, iowa. perry is dallas county, iowa, northwest of des moines, on the north raccoon river, a small place. less than 8,000 people live there. one high school, one hospital, one big employer which is a tyson plant, a meat processing plant. as i mentioned, perry is only a town of about 8,000 people. but more than 1,200 people work at that one plant. so, you can imagine how dominant it is in terms of what happens in that town. over the past few days the mayor of perry iowa and other officials in perry have started speaking out about their concerns that they haven't had any idea what's going on with coronavirus at that tyson plant. they had been told yes the plant has some positive cases, but the plant wouldn't specify how many,

and it wouldn't say anything more about how serious the problem was at that place. and as you can imagine in a town that small with a plant in it that's that big, the size and characteristics of the outbreak of communicable disease at that plant is the kind of thing the town actually would need to know. >> we would like to have the numbers so we know what we're dealing with. so the sicitizens of perry can know what they're dealing with and so we can all react accordingly. >> that's an interview with mayor from the town of perry. that was done by kcci, local station there. the station also reported that the town couldn't even figure out why the plant won't tell them how many workers are positive there. so, that's an interesting thing. but then the local tv station, kcci looking into this trying to figure out why local officials can't figure out how many employees are infected at this plant, why the plant won't say

anything, they then got this piece of information which i think is truly odd. i have spent the last few weeks marinading in local news coverage from all over the country. i have never seen anything like this anywhere around the country. watch. >> right now in perry it is unclear how many cases of covid-19 there are at the tyson foods plant. last night kcci told you about our push to get answers. neither tyson foods nor dallas county public health will tell us how many cases there are at the plant until 10% of the work force tests positive. >> until 10% of the work force tests positive, they will not tell us how many cases there are at the plant until 10% of the work force tests positive. what's that? what's the magic threshold you cross where the town mayor where your plant is is only allowed to know how many people have coronavirus at the town's largest workplace once 1 in 10 of the people there is infected. but before then, he's not allowed to know.

nobody's allowed to know. what is that? i mean, in a public health apocalypse, the higher cooler rings of hell are for bad and counterproductive policies that aren't based in science, that aren't based in public health imperatives. i think there is a slightly deeper hotter ring in hell for policys that have random numbers stuffed into them to make it seem like they're based on something derived from numbers like math or statistics or some kind of science. it's just random numbers assert sbood policy and the policy is just usual trash. that's apparently what has been in effect. the tyson meat plant in perry iowa wouldn't tell the town of perry, iowa how many cases it had in the plant until a magical 10% infection rate was crossed. that's what perry officials have been waiting on while not incidentally the iowa governor, kim reynolds have been bragging about how awesome iowa has been

doing with this whole coronavirus thing and it's time to open everything up because everything's fine. our state stayed open in the covid-19 pandemic. here's why our approach worked. well, here's how it worked in perry, iowa today. lucky for the town in terms of knowing what's going on, the plant in perry, iowa, the tyson plant there, did hit their magical 10% threshold and so now the plant has elected to disclose to the town exactly what kind of coronavirus problem they've got in that gigantic workplace. here's how the very, very, very local newspapers, "perry news" headlined it today. jaw dropping 58% of perry tyson workers test positive. there are 1,250ish workers. 730 of them have tested positive. that's 58% of the work force in that plant. there's a tyson plant in

waterloo, iowa with over 400 cases. that has produced over 1,500 cases in surrounding blackhawk county. it has produced absolute despair among their overwhelmed local officials and hospitals. there's another tyson plant in columbus junction, iowa that closed because of some indeterminate number of cases and the state and the plant wouldn't talk about it for weeks. well, the state now says it was over 220 cases at that one plant in columbus junction. but now it's 730 cases among workers at that one plant alone in little perry, iowa. spare a thought for perry, iowa and it's one hospital and what they're about to go through in dallas county. if you want to watch for them to appear as the next spike in american coronavirus outbreaks, they will probably be listed as dallas county, iowa. watch for that. and then in a couple of days, you should watch for madison county, nebraska to become another nationally discussed

spike because the tyson plant there just closed as well after almost 100 workers tested positive. the test results for more than 1,000 of the other workers in madison, nebraska are due to come in tomorrow or thursday, so brace yourself for whatever those numbers are going to be as well. the reason i spend my days now reading like "the perry news" and the business pages in nebraska is because i feel like it's my job now, bottom line -- it's hard to say. bottom line, i feel like my job right now is to try to get my head around how many tens of thousands more americans are going to die from this thing. in large part because of the way our country is botching the response to this epidemic. and in order to do that, you have to look at the perry, iowa news and the nebraska business pages and everywhere else this thing in blowing up. i know i'm supposed to cover

politics here too. that's part of my job. but i can't fathom the politics that would lead a governor like kim ray nolds in iowa to brag about reopening her state right now this week as the state crosses 10,000 cases and starts turning up 2, 3, 4, 700 cases in small towns that only have one hospital. and i mean, it's not just iowa, right? i'm sure there's politics that explain why texas is so excited to brag about how it's opening up whole new categories of businesses statewide on the same day that dallas, texas announces its highest number yet of new cases. i mean, i'm sure we will look back at this moment and there will be a clear and hindsight political explanation for headlines like this, the u.s. just reported its deadliest day for coronavirus patients as states reopen. i mean, the president today decided the stay-at-home order isn't working for him anymore. he's got ants in his pants now, so he flew out to arizona for a

photo op at a mask factory where he didn't wear a mask. and he did so on the day that arizona announced its highest daily death toll yet. why are we opening things up when the epidemic is getting worse? why are we opening it up specifically in states where cases are going like this, right? the american epidemic over all has ballooned to over 70,000 dead now and 1.2 million cases among americans. you have to use a wide angle lens. you have to look in places you don't usually look in order to characterize what's going on and what's going so wrong in this epidemic and in the public policy response to it. you have to use a wide angle lens to look in these places you don't usually find big national news stories. if you look there now, you will find what amounts to the biggest story on earth. and actually to that credit, i think "the new york times" did it elegantly tonight in what will likely be a land mark front

page story for them, one that finally i think at least gets the ed hadline right in terms of providing a reality check anecdote to the happy talk from washington and from increasingly republican governors around the country. here's the headline, coronavirus in the u.s., an unrelenting crush of cases and deaths. and here's the grab. coronavirus in america now looks like this. more than a month has passed since there was a day with fewer than 1,000 deaths from the virus. almost every day, at least 25,000 new coronavirus cases are identified meaning the total in the u.s. which has the highest number of known cases in the world is expanding daily by between 2 and 4%. that is very bad. quote, rural towns that one month ago were unscathed are suddenly now hotspots for the virus. it's rampaging through nursing homes, meat packing plants, and prisons killing the medically

vulnerable and poor, and new outbreaks keep emerging. while dozens of rural cases have no known cases, a panoramic view reveals a grim picture. if you include new york it looks like a plateau moving down, says an associate professor of public health. but if you exclude new york, it's a plateau slowly moving up. and then the "times" in their data visualization department, they do that work to show you what that looks like. on the left, that is the comforting graph shape we are all so used to seeing by now. that is specifically the new york metropolitan area. and that is a terrible thing. that represents thousands of cases. and as we know, thousand of deaths. and that curve isn't coming down near nearly steeply enough. but at least it's coming down convincingly. that's new york on the left. on the right, that's what's happening from the overall

american epidemic if you drop out the numbers of new york. up, up, up, keep going up, keep going up. the new york metropolitan area got the gigantic epidemic under control at the cost of 25,000 dead new yorkers among other things. but they got it under control. the rest of the country is ascending relentlessly. but for some reason the way our politics and brains are working right now, we think we're doing great as if the whole country is new york, right? i mean, we think we're doing great. we're past all this, time to stop working on it. turns out it's no big deal. why are our brains and our politics working that way right now when what we're going through as a country right now is an exploding epidemic that is getting worse. in hearts dale tennessee, we talked about the testing they did of the men incarcerated in the state prison. they turned up 1,200 positive

cases among the prisoners at that facility in tennessee. plus dozens of staff members. it's only 11,000 people in the whole county. so, the space of a week and a half,that little county went from 27 known cases to more than 1,300 known cases. how have they responded to that this week? they've decided to open back up all the businesses in the county this week. they went from 2,700 to 1,300, that's this week, so they're celebrating by opening up all the businesses because why not? why were they closed anyway? everything should be fine. where do you think the people who work in that prison go home to after their shifts? the disconnect between what is happening in the epidemic and what decisions are being made not about whether or not it's over is a disconnect that reflects something about american politics. it's a disconnect between what a

bad situation we're in and what kinds of decisions we're making. that disconnect honestly reflects a country with bad leadership, with bad politics that aren't correcting bad decisions at a critical time. i mean, when you're talking about decisions for the country that will either kill tens of thousands of americans or keep them alive, those decisions should be based on a realistic perception of what's actually happening in this crisis. but instead, we've got, you know, headlines every day that look like this. trump cheers on governors even as they ignore white house coronavirus guidelines in race to reopen. all right. we've got these white house guidelines, supposedly president trump's own guidelines that say states shouldn't open up until among other things they've got 14 straight days of declining cases. the american states that are right now opening up by and large do not have anywhere near that because the american epidemic is getting worse, not better. but meh, whatever.

who said he cared about his own guidelines anyway? why did they even issue them? in sioux falls, south dakota they have reopened the big smithfield meat plant there that was the direct source of more than a thousand cases in sioux falls. they reopened that plant despite all the people who have gotten infected there. they reopened yesterday without testing all the employees who were going into the facility for the reopening. instead, they decided they would just scan all the employees to see if they had a fever on their way in. well, what does that do? if you have covid-19 but you're not symptomatic, you don't have a fever, you could still spread the virus to others. you're still infectious. so, scanning for fever -- i mean, yes, it might identify individual people who are already sick which is a nice thing, i suppose. but when it comes to actually trying to keep covid-19 out of that facility so hundreds of other workers there stop getting infected on the job, scanning for fever at the gate is nothing.

scanning for fever at the gate is what we used to call security theater. it's non-sense designed to make you feel like you're doing something to keep yourself safe even though you're not. it's like if you were trying to keep everybody under the age of 18 out of your venue so you put up a sign that says you must be this tall to enter. okay. maybe you'll catch some. put tall kids will get in fine and short adults will be excluded. you're scanning for something, you're testing for something that isn't actually determinative of the thing you are looking to exclude. why would you do this? why would you allow the reopening of this plant without testing everyone? this is a plant that's led to more than a thousand infections. why would you let them reopen without testing everybody? turns out there's an answer to that. >> one of the most effective things we can do is test smithfield employees to make sure they are covid negative before they're going back into work. we also want to make sure that their family member versus the

opportunity to be tested. this event is optional for smithfield employees and is not a requirement for them to return back to work. >> whose decision was it to make the testing for employees at smithfield optional and not mandatory for returning to work? >> that decision was made by smithfield as the employer. >> okay. thanks. >> okay. thanks. that's the state health director and the governor of south dakota saying basically how it would be really important for everybody to be tested before they go back to work in that plant. that plant that's already given us over a thousand infections in sioux falls. but yeah, as much as we want that, the plant's reopening and testing, it's optional. might happen. might not because the meat company, smithfield, decided they didn't want to test everybody before they reopened. how can that be that the company just decides and the state is like oh, okay, whatever.

it would be really good to have everybody tested but they don't want to. hm. how could that be? remember the president's executive order to keep the meat plants open? we got our first court ruling today on what that means in practical terms for trying to make american meat processing plants operate in a way that stops infecting hundreds and thousands of those employees at a time. a federal judge in missouri today ruled that because of the president's executive order, he, the judge, can't require meat plants to follow osha and cdc guidelines in order to stay open safely. he can't require them to do it. he has to defer to those agencies themselves. and states can't close these plants down or stop them from reopening if the plants don't follow those guidelines. oh, and the trump administration says through those agencies that it runs that the plants don't have to follow those guidelines at all. they're just good thoughts. they're nice ideas. but don't worry. we won't hold you to them, not we believe you're acting in good

faith. so, meat packing plants across the country are operating now while making their own rules and nobody is holding them to anything. and every day we get hundreds more workers at these plants finding out that they're infected. and yeah, you can lament that meat processing plants are closing down and the meat supply is crimped and wendy's stopped selling burgers at a bunch of their restaurants now because they can't get beef. tyson said did an investor call yesterday that the pork supply has been crimped 50% and that's only going to get worse. you can lament that about the u.s. food supply, but what are you going to do about it? you can't keep these plants open without any workers in them. and if perry, iowa -- god bless them. if perry, iowa is going to have 58% of its workers from its big meat plant test positive, then no. you're not going to be able to keep that plant open because you've infected all your employee ls with a highly contagious communicable disease

that may hospitalize 15% of them and kill a good number of them too. the way to keep the meat plants open is not by ordering them to stay open and then telling the meat companies there's no rules for them to follow. if you do that, what will happen? you will have all of the meat plants close anyway because their work force will all get sick. if you want wendy's to have burgers and the pork supply to not be shut off, you have to work on this as a public health matter. you have to figure out a way -- it's not hard to do. you have to only allow these plants to reopen after you have required them to follow really strict rules about how to operate without infecting all of their workers. and that includes mandatory and frequent testing of everybody who comes through the door. and yes that will be a difficult and expensive thing to do. making them follow the guidelines that will prevent their employees from all getting infected, making sure they're all testing before people come in. that will be expensive, time consuming to do.

but a, these are rich companies. and b, there aren't that many of these plants. that's why they're all -- that's why all these plants have so many workers, right? the consolidation of the meat processing industry means there are a relatively small number of large plants. so, fix them! make them follow really strict rules. help them do it if they need help. this is not rocket science. don't just tell them to reopen, you geniuses. make it possible for them to be open and stay open by operating in such a way that doesn't infect everybody who works there. this is not rocket science. basic public health concepts. you're not trying to keep the workers from getting infected because you love the workers. we know in the trump administration that's not your strong suit. you don't have to love the workers. if you just want to keep the meat supply unbroken in this country, you have to keep people who work at meat processing

plants alive and at the job which you can only do if you change the way plants work. why don't you get this? but this is our government right now, and they apparently cannot handle concepts even this simple. so, we've got from our government the disastrous meat plant executive order that is putting the meat supply at risk more than anything else in the crisis. there's also the fda decision and the trump administration to willy nilly anything calling itself a coronavirus antibody test on to the market without any quality control or testing of the tests at all. the fda has been doing that for weeks. they're only now getting around to telling the hundreds of entitys that have put these mostly dodgey tests straight on the market that now after the fact now they're going to need to show data that indicates those tests might work. good job, trump administration. friday night, the president got rid of the health and human

services inspector general, the one who reported that hospitals were having a hard time getting necessary supplies including both tests and ppe to protect their staff. undoubtedly true, helpful report from the inspector general so she's got to go. tell them all about the boy genius volunteer team that presidential son-in-law jared kushner put together to be in charge of getting necessary ppe to american hospitals. well, that team under jared's leadership was excellent it turns out at things like expediting requests and paying special attention to tips and questions from conservative tv hosts buch hosts. but they were not so good at getting ppe to health workers in american hospitals. maybe because oh my god this is how the u.s. federal government decided we would tackle this challenge. quote, the document alleges that the team responsible for ppe have little success in helping the government secure such dwimt

in part because none of the team members had significant experience in health care or procurement or supply chain operations. in addition, none of jared's volunteers had relationships with manufacturers or a clear understanding of customs requirements or fda rules according both to the complaint and to senior administration officials who corroborate. so, that whistleblower complaint per "the post's" reporting is corroborated by multiple administration officials. they're making lots of good decisions up top these days. today we learned they're going to disband the coronavirus task force since, you know, all better now. let's reopen. everything's fine. they're still in the strufrp administrati trump administration as of right now fighting to take away health insurance for millions of americans by killing the affordable care act by supreme court case. seems like an excellent time to take health insurance away from

millions of americans. the part of the trump administration that oversees nursing homes and long care facilities, they're loosening the rules about what nursing homes need to do when it comes to infection control. right now, that's what they're working on. they're saying nursing homes should be way more lax when it comes to infection control inside those facilities. sure. why not? we've learned that the official the president put in charge of public health preparedness and things like building up the national stock pile of stuff we would need in a pandemic, he halted an obama era initiative to spend $35 million to build a machine that could produce 1.5 million n95 masks per day. wouldn't it be great to have that? you could have 1.5 million masks every day seven days a week. he killed that so he instead could spend freely on smallpox vaccine supplies from a company he used to work for that appeared to have been severely

marked up. and now tonight a new whistleblower complaint, a doozy from someone who reported to that paragone of trump administration pandemic preparedness. the new whistleblower is named dr. rick bright, recently demoted within the trump administration. he has since been sounding the alarm that he was removed from his post for refusing to go along with serious corruption at the highest levels of trump administration's epidemic response. and now he has spelled it out in great excruciating detail. it is hair curling stuff. that's next.

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about a promising kmound, chloroquine that's making waves in the chinese critical care community. bayer reached out and is willing to give away the drug for free. this can be a big immediate win. assuming this one team inside hhs signs off on saying this chloroquine stuff can work for the treatment of covid-19. so, the scientists on that team do take a look at a chloroquine compound that was being proffered to the administration. and this is what they reported back. quote, attached is a summary of the clinical trials that are associated with chloroquine use. not a single study has posted any data for peer review. quote, the attached publication says chloroquine works without providing any supporting data. quote, one article says to use caution when thinking about chloroquine for widespread use because one clinical trial showed that those treated with chloroquine were harmed. quote, bottom line up front, i do not believe we should accept the donation until we have an understanding on the clinical utility of the drug. accepting the donation could

lead to widespread use that is not supported by any clinical data. >> so, that was the scientists at the biomedical advance research and development authority, scientists telling his boss we should not take millions of doses of it for free for use on the american people. this could hurt people and we don't have any data it would help. his boss, dr. rick bright, at barta agreed but it did not make any difference. two days later, bayer had partnered with the u.s. government on a major donation. dr. bright was getting directives to drop everything and make the chloroquine donated by bayer widely available to the american public. dr. bright says he brought his concerns about the drug to other government officials. he says he alerted his boss, for example, at hhs. but with the president daily hawking it as a potential cure

as well as hosts on the fox news channel, dr. bright says his warnings were ignored. he ended up talking to a reporter about what was going on behind the scenes and for that he says he was pushed out of his job. quote, dr. bright concluded he was left with no choice and he had a clear obligation to the american public to protect it from drugs which he firmly believed constituted a substantial risk to public safety. dr. bright hoped by shining a light on hhs reckless and dangerous push to make the drug available, human lives would be saved. those emails and this recollection from dr. bright come from a formal whistleblower complaint he has now filed alleging that among other things he was pushed out of his job in the trump administration for resisting on scientific grounds the president's continued insistence that his miracle cure that he had already discovered was going to be the one that made the coronavirus go away. dr. bright again filed his formal whistleblower complaint

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time after time i was pressured to ignore or dismiss expert and scientific recommendations. i was pressured to let politics and cronyism drive the decisions. ultimately i was removed from my position. >> that was dr. rick bright on a call with reporters today after he filed a whistleblower complaint saying he was demoted from his job as a top level vaccine expert in the u.s. government. he was demoted for resisting on scientific grounds the administration's campaign to use an unproven drug as a treatment for coronavirus. debra katz is joining us now. she's representing dr. bright in the complaint. i appreciate you making time. >> thank you for having me. >> so, i understand a little bit because i've read a little bit

of the medical literature around chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine and the concerns about its widespread use and the weirdness around conservative media and the president hyping it. the thing that i'm less clear on is why your client thinks that cronyism was part of the problem in terms of why that drug was being hyped and why he was being pressured to go along with that. >> well, we're mixing up a little of the allegations here. with respect to other contracts, there was clear cronyism. friends put themselves in the contracting system and pushed for drugs that medical experts and scientists did not favor. and somehow those drugs got approved for the contracts. with respect to the antimalarial drugs, what we know from other reporting is that the president fell in love with the idea that these drugs could work even though scientists told him there was no scientific evidence, no

data, to suggest this was the way to go. what you see from the allegations from the complaint and the emails that were attached, somehow people thought this would be a big political win if bayer donated all of these pills that it was getting from factories in india and pakistan that were not inspected from the fda, and somehow there would be a big political win to flood new york and new jersey with drugs that were unproven and could have had a very damaging effect to people taking those drugs which is what prompted dr. bright to come forward and say no repeatedly. he tried to do that internally and that did not work. the administration was not willing to listen to the scientists. >> in terms of the way things have evolved with your client and his career and his position in government, hhs says they transferred dr. bright to a less prestigious job which they want to be distinguished from firing him from his job. does he intend to start the new

job? has he started the new job? what's he looking for from this complaint? tod >> today with the whistleblower filing -- you're breaking up a little bit here. i don't know if you can hear me. >> i can still hear you. >> it's raining here in washington, d.c. sorry, it's raining here in washington, d.c. the world is coming to an end. what -- i'm sorry. as again. this is freezing. >> oh. i'm sorry. >> with respect to the transfer -- okay. sorry. >> go'd had. >> you know, you asked about his transfer. when they first announced it, the administration said this is a great opportunity for dr. bright. and if you see when he was told about this involuntary transfer from a position that was the best position in science for him given his training, this man worked his whole life and career to be ready to deal with a pandemic of the type we're having. and his supervisor, his boss,

comes to him and says great news. you're a victim of your own success and we're shipping you to a position with narrow responsibilities and essentially stripping you of all your responsibilities. when the administration said this, they had press releases says this is a great opportunity for dr. bright, he is the man for this role. as soon as he said no this is retaliatory, the administration began a smear campaign. so, he has not started that job. there's no roles. there's no responsibility. and contrary to what hhs said today, he has been suffering from hypertension. they know that. he has been out on medical leave. he's out on sick leave. he has a medical condition and they're aware of it. so, the suggestion that he's absenting himself from work is silly. what is true is we have requested today that the office of special counsel seek a stay

to prevent his forced transfer. this is an illegal transfer. the special counsel has the authority to go to secretary azar and ask him to stay that transfer. and that's what we think is warranted here. >> debra katz, the lawyer representing dr. rick bright in this whistleblower complaint which is fascinating in terms of his own situation but also as a window into what the administration has done from the beginning, from the earliest days of the warning here. thanks for helping us understand what your client's going through. i really appreciate it. >> thanks for having me. we'll be right back. stay with us. with h-i-v, keep being you. and ask your doctor about biktarvy. biktarvy is a complete, one-pill, once-a-day treatment used for h-i-v in certain adults. it's not a cure, but with one small pill, biktarvy fights h-i-v to help you get to and stay undetectable. that's when the amount of virus is so low it cannot be measured by a lab test. research shows people who take h-i-v treatment every day and get to and stay undetectable

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the key to everything that we have done has been testing. i think by now you know i've been obsessed with it. >> "i have been obsessed with it. the key to everything has been testing." that's detroit's mayor speaking

earlier today. detroit, of course, is one of america's great cities. it's also in a really vulnerable position when it comes to dealing with this epidemic. michigan has the highest fatality rate in the country, meaning it has the highest proportion of infected patients who ended up dieing from this virus. but within michigan, detroit is the hardest hit city, in that very hard-hit state. in order to try to fight back, one of the things the city of detroit has done is make testing a real focal point, and that itself is interesting, given how bad access to testing has been everywhere in the country. but specifically in detroit, the mayor has done one testing initiative that i think really deserves a bunch of national attention. he's made a huge effort on testing when it comes to the city's nursing homes. listen up, other cities. here is what you are supposed to be doing if you're not doing it already. detroit has committed to conducting universal testing of all of its nursing homes.

all the residents at city nursing homes were tested. whether or not they showed symptoms. when they did that universal testing, they found more than one in four residents in detroit nursing homes was already positive. in addition to testing all the residents, symptoms or not, the city is testing all the staff, as well. they've begun testing other high density locations that house detroit seniors, like long-term senior care facilities. they're doing that in part through funding from a donor, a private citizen who came forward with a bunch of cash to make sure this detroit effort to test seniors would keep going. as i said, testing access continues to be terrible everywhere. detroit has a big epidemic, and a big problem. but they are testing everyone in the places where people are at most risk from dying from this thing. which is a big deal, because it means they are finding the bull's-eye in terms of keeping people alive. like the mayor said, the key to

everything has been testing. joining us now is the mayor of detroit. thank you so much for making the time to be here tonight. i appreciate your time. >> well, thanks for having me on, rachel. we didn't really have any choice on the testing. we got hit so fast that by the second week , a quarter of our police department was out on quarantine. it was shocking how fast the virus was spreading. but we got obsessed about the testing off the bat. we did it starting in the police department where we took the officers through. if they were positive, they got them medical care, if they were negative, we got them back to work and brought the infection rate down so dramatically, we then looked and said where is our worst problem? and it's been the nursing homes, and we have now tested every single one of the 2,000 nursing home residents in this city. this is the problem, a quarter of the people with no symptoms

were positive. so think about it. if you're in a nursing home administrator and people without symptoms are spreading the disease, you have no way of isolating. it really is the reason why rapid testing is at the center of what this country has to do to beat this thing. >> are you going to keep testing people in an ongoing way, both the residents and the staff? i imagine this is a logistical investment but also expensive, having a snapshot round of tests is invaluable. >> absolutely. we're doing 1500 tests a day. every single worker going to work in grocery stores and grug sto -- drugstores we're testing. so we are testing 1500 people a day and it's making a huge difference. three weeks ago, we had about the highest death rate in the

country. now it's dropped 80% and half of our hospital beds are empty. people in the city have definitely committed to the social distancing. you don't have to explain to detroiters that if an african-american gets covid-19, you're two to three times more likely to die than a caucasian. the people of this city has embraced social distancing commitments. when you can keep the infectious and the noninfectious by the rapid tests, there are tools here. but we brought the rate down very, very fast. >> if other leaders right now are listening to you, wishing that they had access to rapid testing, to be able to test all of their nursing homes and thinking through how they might be able to do the logistics in their own communities, given what you've been able to do in detroit, do you have any advice in terms of other public official whols ms who may want e

same thing you have, specifically thinking about nursing home residents? >> for nine years before i was may mayor, we had a significant advantage. we were running a big hospital system during the h1n1 issue in 2009. but we don't spend a lot of time on politics. i'm on the phone all day with labs and doctors, and so is much of my team. where are the swabs? where are the media, where are the vials, who has the lab capacity? and then i had the big advantage that dan gilbert of quicken loans is a major employer here. they took 40 people and switched them over to a call center. the reason we can run through 1,000, 1200 people a day is because they call the quicken call center and make an appointment. so the average person spends 15, 20 minutes. but it's a lot of boring

details. but given the stakes, it is something we felt we needed to do. and the reaction we've got from the nursing homes, now that the nursing home administrator s -- now they know who's infectious and who's not, they're moving very quickly to separate folks and we're seeing the infection rates go down and the number of deaths drop dramatically. >> mayor, thanks for helping us understand this. i feel like you've been doing in detroit is different enough than a lot of other cities it deserves national city. good luck. >> thanks for having me on, rachel. >> all right. i want to leave you tonight with one thing that has just happened over the course of this evening, as if we were not already living through a ripley's believe it or not episode turned dark. today, you should know that as

the president toured a mask factory in arizona, while not himself wearing a mask, there was something going on with the background music while he toured the plant that you should know about. just listen. >> this is the material that perhaps the particulates. ♪ >> this is the material that traps the particulates, mr. president. this is how the mask works. i see you're not wearing a mask. in the background "live and let die" playing really loudly. guns n roses. that does it again for us. that really happened? that does it for me tonight. and maybe for a long time.