deborah berger is the national nurses united president. the largest nurses union in the country, and she is one of the country's top nursing lead eers and outspoken advocate for health care for all. greg whitten is the former special assistant, for nuclear, chemical and biological defense programs at the department of defense. mr. whitten worked for the obama administration and will speak to the creation of a defense response epidemic and how the trump administration has failed. the main point i want to make before i turn it over to the experts is that when you have a global infectious crisis endangering the people all over the world, the people of the united states and, in fact, the people of the world who look to the united states for leadership, want to know we have an administration in this country whose decisions and comments are based on science. not based on tweets that have no scientific basis. not based on politics. not based on policies designed to protect the wealthy and the powerful. and let me just quote if i might just a few,

spoke at a roundtable in detroit alongside public health experts one of them registered nurse deborah berger pointed directly to america's a posse and misplaced priorities when she shot down a question about how a free covert $1000.00 bechstein would be paid for burger president of national nurses united pointed out how we never 7 ask how to pay for other vaccines like polio our government seems to continually find pots of money to fund inless wars and the military industrial complex goes for broke when it comes to disease prevention we should all be concerned in outraged what good is a vaccine if the population can afford it. simmers thing interest is calling on the top administration to make any coronavirus vaccine free and available saying quote does anybody in their right mind believe that if you're rich you should be able to afford a vaccine and save your life but if you're poor you got to die. so much to unpack here here discuss more on the coronavirus an uphill battle for free that thing is our teams host on contact. welcome chris always a pleasure to have you on i want to start i'm j

andame is deborah berger i've been a registered nurse for over 40 years and i'm president of national nurses united, the largest union of professional association of registered nurses in the country. as you all know, nurses are on the front lines of our health care system and at the same time, we are also scientists to understand well how infectious diseases spread, so we are uniquely positioned to recommend what we need to do at the ground level in our health care facilities to contain and stop the spread of covid-19. as union nurses, we have the freedom and protection to speak up on behalf of ourselves and our patients. protect theto health of our patients and the public, as well as our nurses and our colleagues. nurses are eager to take care of patients and make sure that our communities are safe, but we need the right staffing, equipment, supplies, communication, and training to do this safely. put simply, if we are not protected, our patients are at risk. this became clear at uc davis medical center in sacramento covid patient resulted in the quarantine of 124 hospital workers in

allison gulvaney, and deborah berger. >> let me thank everybody