On The Next Revolution with Steve Hilton, he discusses the importance of safely re-opening America amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Transcript
The virus has left death and devastation in its wake, but, as we’ve said since the beginning, this shut down costs lives too and here’s is the talk. More than one in ten Americans thrown out of work, higher taxes to come, businesses collapsing, mental health declining, poverty rising and with it life expectancy falling.
We hearing today but that was pushed back against the shutdown in early February. Of course their was and quite right too. The President’s instincts on this have been right all along. He’s the one that has to consider all the implications of any decision including the social, economic, and yes, public health devastation of a shut down. As the shutdown toll grows, so has the demand for a better, most sustainable antivirus plan. We’ve said it different ways, but it’s all the same thing. We open America safely, but soon. I’ve read the ideas that are out there for how we move out of shutdown, frankly, none of them makes sense, except the one put together by a world-renowned team of scientists and entrepreneurs that we’ll present to you tonight.
First let’s get the bad ideas out of the way. The central truth about current situation is that it’s not just, as I said a few weeks ago, that the cure is worse than the disease. This cure is not even a cure. The minute you lift the lockdown the virus starts spreading again, whether that May, June, July, August or Christmas. That’s the central flaw in the first bad idea for reopening. Lift the lockdown now but reapply it until we get a vaccine. MSNBC’s Zeke Emanuel talks about shut down 2.0, 3.0, 4.0. How about just no. Anyone pushing the recurring shutdown idea has no clue about how the economy actually works. Uncertainty is a killer for business, for consumers, for workers. We need to reopen and stay open. Another terrible idea is the one we told you about last week. Governments in Europe are looking at immunity passports or certificates for those who had Coronavirus. Our own Dr. Fauci said on Friday that immunity certificates, quote, might actually have some merit under certain circumstances. Again no, this has no merit under any circumstances. Of course, we respect Dr. Fauci’s medical expertise, but this is a policy idea that would be an Orwellian nightmare like the past laws they had in South Africa at the height of apartheid. Government antibody surveillance leading to antibody passes would create a class of serial positive elites and an incentive for people desperate for work to get infected. I hope no one in the White House is wasting one second on such a monstrous inhuman scheme. It would be totally unacceptable to the American people, let alone Trump supporters.
Another example of technocratic hubris is the plan being pushed by former FDA head, Scott Gottlieb. This is the one the establishment groupthink seems to be coalescing around, so that alone should make you suspicious of it. As part of a comically complicated scheme with different phases and benchmarks for different parts of the country, this plan would you mass virus testing, not antibody testing as Dr. Fauci puts it to identify, isolate contact trace everyone who gets the virus. But the latest data tells us that many millions of Americans have or will get the virus. The idea that the government can identify each of them, isolate them somewhere for a week, trace all their contacts. And now we know the Apple and Google a right behind it, ready to build a surveillance empires on the back of this crisis. Let’s call it the Gottlieb Apple Google plan or GAG for short. It’s a technocrat dream and America’s nightmare.
No, be effective, to bring certainty to the business, to maximize our chances of getting that big bounce back recovery working American so desperately need, the right plan to reopen America has to be safe, of course based on science, but it was so simple. That’s the plan will present to you now and here are the people to put it together. Stanford University professor of epidemiology, Dr. John Ioannidis, Stanford Associate Professor of Population Health, Eran Bendavid and joining us live tonight, Stanford University Professor of Medicine Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Biophysicist and Medical Investor Dr. Andrew Bogan, and entrepreneur and the founder of JetBlue, David Neeleman. We’ll talk with them in the moment, but the first, here are the key elements of their plan, and we should be clear that it’s intended to go into full effect May 1, after the current White House guidelines expire.
Step one, get accurate data about how wide spread and how deadly Coronavirus really is. The statistics we are seeing right now are totally wrong. They reflect the number test, not the real number of infections to get the real number. The Stanford team have just carried out the world’s first large-scale community antibody sample survey right here in the Bay area where I’m speaking to you from tonight. Santa Clara County, it was the first in the nation to identify community transmission of coronavirus, the official statistics claim there about 1,600 cases of coronavirus here. Based on early indication and similar testing elsewhere, the actual number could be much, much higher. That means coronavirus is much more contagious, but much less deadly, than we’ve been told.
So here’s recommendation one. Instead of pursuing government antibody surveillance for every American, the White House should immediately commission continuous community antibody sampling nationwide, so we get a true picture of the spread of this virus.
Second step, get accurate data about who is most vulnerable. Just saying the elderly and those with underlying health conditions is too vague. How old, which health conditions, how sever, how much virus were they exposed to? Taht is a huge part of the story. It’s why young people, like some of our healthcare heros have died, despite being in good health. Don’t waste time identifying, isolating, and contact tracing everyone who’s got the virus. The latest data shows that are multiple millions of them and the vast majority of them will be fine. Instead, put the effort into tracing the medical history of the people who so tragically died. Unbelievably, our hospitals are not correcting that data. So there’s the second recommendation. The White House should mandate the collection and publication of whats known as comorbidity data, detailed information about the health conditions of coronavirus fatalities. This is especially important. Now we know more about how this virus is transmitted. Early guidance was wrong and dangerous, focusing on surface transmission, hand washing, face touching and so on. We now know the virus can be passed on through airborn droplets that can be breathed in. so its likely that the shutdown’s actually hurts the most vulnerable. Infected asymptomatic people were sent back to multigenerational homes, into close quarters with the elderly family members. We need better data on infection rates better data on risk factors. That’s what the next few weeks should be about.
Then we go to step three in this science-based plan. Reopen America al at once not bit by bit, quarantine and protect the truly valuable. If we know that millions more Americans than we thought have already Coronavirus, we don’t need to shut down the economy just for lack of ventilators to take care of the truly vulnerable. With the information gathered in steps 1 and 2 of this plan, we can do a much better job of protecting them. Quarantine the most, not everyone, not even everyone over 65, just those with the specific health risks that have tragically killed thousands already. Keep them inside. Give them N95 masks and make sure no one comes within 6 feet of them. Make sure local health services contact and support them, mobilize food banks to help them. Impose much tighter controls in nursing homes and continue to build our reserves of ventilators and PPE to make sure we can cope with anything that comes down the line. Look it might be a while before we can fill up a football stadium, but the science-based plan we’ve outlined for you tonight is simple, it’s practical, and it is the best way to reopen America safely, but soon. If you like the sound of this plan and want to see it implemented, tell The President, tell your governor, tell everyone. Please follow us now @StevenHiltonx and @NextRevFNC and share the plan when we post it.
