RUSH TRANSCRIPT:
STELTER: "To still have shortages of ventilators and supplies. I say this is is a 9/11-level failure of the of the government. What does it call for? A 9/11 commission?"
GONSALVES: "First of all, it’s not a 9/11-level failure. It’s greater than that. As Andy said, it’s the greatest public health crisis in a hundred years. Think about that. Think of the death toll in Afghanistan and Iraq and Vietnam. If any of the projections hold true, most of the wars that we, in our lifetime, will be dwarfed by the death toll of this pandemic. We need a New Deal for public health. We need to scale up personal protective equipment. We’re in April now and we don’t have the vital tools that doctors and nurses and health care workers need to protect themselves. We don’t have the tests to diagnose people in the hospital let alone figure out who has been exposed and recovered from the disease. We’re still having conversations about how to get ventilators from Oregon to New York. You know, four months into this pandemic. And so, you know, we keep hearing stories in newspapers about the governors disagree or experts are concerned about remarks made by the presidents or his tone is changed and he’s greeting the epidemic with a new level of seriousness. We need to dig and find out why it’s failing and who is responsible. We are all now hearing people who have fallen ill with disease. We know people are getting sick and dying. 27 will get worst over the next weeks and months. If we don’t make a turn around quickly, it will drag on for months and not weeks. I think the media needs to change and stop giving the daily briefings live and stop running stories about the president’s misstatements. Running basic public health — and the way the stories are being told makes them controversial and so people don’t know what to do. This amplifies misinformation in a pandemic. If you don’t think it’s true, look at the states to refuse to put social distancing orders into place or states where the pre-Covid and daily travel hasn’t changed. These are largely states Republican governors. It’s not because these governors are watching Fox News 24/7. It’s because you’re giving equal time to misinformation on CNN or in the “New York Times.” We need to switch our coverage into emergency setting as Jay Rosen said. It means we have to ask this one fundamental question. Should we be amplifying misstatements of fact, outright lies, and on few indication of what we need to cause —"