60 Minutes - 3/22/2020: Stopping the Virus, The Economic Emergency, A Populist Movement

Episode Date: March 23, 2020

Scientists rush to develop a novel coronavirus vaccine; Then, Fed official uncertain how economy will fare during the coronavirus crisis; And, why Hungary is paying its citizens to start families. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. If we had a therapeutic agent that we knew worked, or if we had a vaccine that could help prevent the spread of this illness, then, you illness, then this would be something a little more controllable than what we have now. At the University of Nebraska Medical Center, one of the eerier scenes we have witnessed in recent weeks, cocooned inside that bubble called an isopod, a 36-year-old woman, unlucky to have been infected with this new coronavirus, but lucky to be here.

This facility was one of the first in the country built for outbreaks like this. Millions of people are going to lose their jobs, and that's what's so scary about this. Are the banks sound? They are right now. Neil Kashkari helped pull the nation out of our last economic crisis. Now with the Federal Reserve, he has a frank view of what must be done to save the economy from coronavirus. Having been at the front line of the 2008 financial crisis, and I saw how devastating that was, we did get through it. We will get through this crisis.

Right-wing populism is making a not-so-subtle comeback in Europe. We found an interesting example in Hungary, where a government program intends to stimulate birth rates by taking over fertility clinics, offering free treatments, giving cash loans, and even subsidizing minivans for young married couples who become new parents. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm John Wertheim.

I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. With the novel coronavirus extending its shadow of illness and death globally, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health are now slashing red tape to expedite research so promising vaccines and therapies can be developed as quickly as possible. To date, there is no proven medical way to stop this coronavirus, no treatment, no vaccine. The best defense has been tried and true public health measures,

social distancing, and hand washing. But the rapid spread of the deadly virus prompted medical researchers the world over to go on offense. Old medicines are being dusted off and repurposed. New vaccines are being developed in government and commercial labs. We went to Omaha, Nebraska, where one of those drugs is being tested on some of the sickest American patients. At the University of Nebraska Medical Center, one of the eerier scenes we've witnessed in recent weeks. Cocooned inside that bubble, called an isopod, a 36-year-old woman,

unlucky to have been infected with the new coronavirus, but lucky to be here. This facility was one of the first in the country built for outbreaks like this. Some of the sickest patients from the Diamond Princess cruise ship were taken there. Quarantined in Yokohama, Japan, more than 700 passengers and crew contracted the virus, including 67-year-old American Carl Goldman. He was quarantined here for a month. We had to talk to him through thick glass. When we landed in Omaha, more officials came on board with hazmat suits.

They unloaded me, put me on a stretcher. They were wheeling me through passageways that were deserted, then up an elevator and into a room that was set up as a biocontainment room. So they moved you to a biocontainment room? Yeah. Dr. Angela Hewlett is the medical director of the biocontainment unit, equipped to care for patients with highly contagious, dangerous diseases. Built in response to the 2001 anthrax scare, the unit is isolated from the rest of the medical center

with its own ventilation system, security access, and highly trained staff, about 100 nurses, therapists, critical care, and infectious disease doctors. How many patients can you treat at one time? We could actually accept up to probably eight patients in the biocontainment unit, totally dependent on how sick they are and how much equipment is required. How many facilities like this are there around the country? We have ten regional treatment centers with those capabilities.

Given the scope of this outbreak, that doesn't seem nearly enough. And when I see the isopods being used to bring people into this facility, that makes me think that this is pretty bad. If we had a therapeutic agent that we knew worked, or if we had a vaccine that could help prevent the spread of this illness, then, you know, then this would be something a little more controllable than what we have now. Researchers at the University of Nebraska Medical Center modeled a worst case scenario in the U.S. Over the course of a year, 96 million cases of COVID-19, 4.8 million hospitalizations, almost a half million deaths. Scientists hope the measures the country is taking will keep the worst from happening, but the urgency of this moment has medical researchers

all over the world racing to find some way to fight the killer virus. Last month, the National Institutes of Health tapped the Nebraska Medical Center to launch the first clinical trial in the U.S. of an antiviral drug, remdesivir, which is administered intravenously to treat patients who have already contracted the virus. It's being tested against a placebo. It was actually studied in Ebola, interestingly. It didn't work as well for Ebola. However, there have been some animal studies, as well as some studies in the lab that demonstrate that it worked fairly well against illnesses like SARS and MERS, which are also coronaviruses. How does the drug work?

It inhibits replication of the virus, and so when a virus would normally try to reproduce itself, this drug inserts itself into that process and then stops viral replication, so it stops reproduction of the virus. This clinical trial is up and running in the middle of this outbreak. I will say this is the fastest clinical trial that I've ever seen come to fruition in this amount of time. Ordinarily, how long would it take to get a trial up and running? That can range from many months to years. The maker of the antiviral remdesivir, Gilead Sciences in California, is ramping up

production to provide multiple clinical trials in the U.S., Asia, and Europe. The U.S. Army also is testing the drug. With no proven treatments, hundreds of trials of different drugs are underway worldwide. Researchers in the U.S. and China are investigating whether the common anti-malarial drug, chloroquine, and related drugs might inhibit the virus. In New York, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals is testing a cocktail of antibodies to see if they can temporarily boost immune systems to fight the virus. Scripps Research in San Diego is using a robot to go through its extensive library of existing drugs, looking for antiviral compounds

to send to labs around the world to test if any combination might prove effective in combating the new coronavirus and quell the pandemic. I can't express to you the pressure that I personally feel under, and I think the whole scientific community feels under. There's a great deal of responsibility in working towards a solution for this outbreak literally as it's happening. Scottish-born Kate Broderick is senior vice president of research and development at Inovio Pharmaceuticals in San Diego. Employees are working against the

clock to create a vaccine to prevent people from ever getting the virus. Inovio is using DNA biotechnology, cutting-edge science that has yet to produce a marketable vaccine. How optimistic are you that this is the solution? I feel very confident in the technology that we've developed here at Inovio, and I feel very cautiously optimistic that our vaccine will be effective when we test it in the clinic. Inovio has already started testing its vaccine on animals and is expected to start human trials next month. The company's race to create a vaccine was triggered by this,

the genetic sequence of the new coronavirus. Chinese scientists posted it online just weeks after the outbreak was identified. All we need is that genetic code. So it's just a series of A's and T's and C's and G's that make up the blueprint to the virus. We use a computer algorithm to generate the design of the vaccine. So we plugged in the viral sequence and after three hours we had a fully designed vaccine on paper. And then after that the stages to manufacture it went straight into effect. Three hours? Yeah absolutely. Is that unusually fast? Certainly if

you're thinking of traditional vaccines they take months to years. These little parts of the virus using the genetic code Inovio scientists are able to zero in on the part of the deadly virus, these spikes that attach to human cells. They then recreate that bit of coronavirus DNA in the lab. The synthetic snippet of virus is grown inside bacteria. After sloshing around all night, there are thousands if not millions of copies of the synthetic DNA. Filtered and processed, it looks like this. The vaccine is made from this liquid. Then it's injected into the subject or the patient, and your own body is able to react

and mount what we call an immune response against that part of the virus. We don't feel like we get to choose when an epidemic happens. We just get to decide how we're going to respond. And what we've decided to do is try and use our platform to bring forward a safe and effective vaccine. Former emergency room doctor Stephen Hoag is president of Moderna, a Boston-area biotechnology company also working on a vaccine. We met Dr. Hogue shortly after the CDC recommended social distancing. Teaming up with the NIH, Moderna started human trials last week in Seattle, where the North American outbreak took hold. 45 healthy volunteers will receive

injections over six weeks and be monitored for a year to see if the vaccine is safe. Moderna started work on the vaccine as soon as China posted the virus genetic sequence online. So how long did it take you to go from getting this genetic information to actually having a vaccine ready for human trial? 25 days. It was released to the clinic within 42 days. Dr. Tony Fauci called it the, I think, the world indoor record. But it's definitely faster than we think anybody's done before. Moderna's process pushes the envelope of biotechnology.

Its scientists manipulate the genetic code to instruct cells what to do. In this case, trigger the body's immune system to fight the new coronavirus. Once you realize that you can essentially put a software-like program into a cell, the opportunities to address human disease are pretty broad. How did your relatively small biotech get to be the first one to go into human trials? Some of that is the advantage of the technology we're using. It allows us to move incredibly quickly when we have a pandemic situation like the one we're in. So you have never brought a vaccine to market using this technology?

No, we have not. Have not? We have not yet. The National Institutes of Health is collaborating with Moderna to accelerate the development of a coronavirus vaccine. They hope to start a second phase of human trials in a few months. The whole world is sort of watching and waiting. So if you find that this works, when will people be able to start getting vaccines? Well, if we're able to show there's a clear benefit, we're going to need to be able to make sure that it's accessible to everybody who needs it. And so

we've actually already started the investment to scale up supply into the millions of doses. But ultimately, what we really need to focus on is generating the clinical data that shows that the vaccine, in fact, does have a benefit, that it's safe and effective. This is the purest form. This is the purest form of the DNA. Kate Broderick of Inovio told us technology is accelerating vaccine development, but it's no match for people's expectations. What is the realistic timeline for this vaccine being administered to the public? We're hoping to have our vaccine tested

in what we call a large phase two trial by the end of the year, which would be potentially hundreds, if not thousands of subjects being treated. But to have it rolled out to the public is likely to take longer than that. So the best case scenario is more than a year anyway to speed up that process? Really, I have to say we're going as absolutely fast as we possibly can. With the number of people with the virus growing exponentially and deaths climbing inexorably, that timeline just doesn't seem fast enough. With so much human suffering, hospitals in the U.S., Europe, and Japan have given several hundred desperate patients

the experimental antiviral drug remdesivir for what is called compassionate use. That's the drug being studied in clinical trial at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. We want to make sure that we're not giving drugs to people that could have side effects. Now, I know you don't know who's getting the drug and who's getting the placebo, but from what you've observed of the patients who are in the trial, what have you seen? Well, so we have seen patients improve. You have. But it's hard to tell if they would have just gotten better on their own or if it was

due to the drug. And that's the reason that we really need to study this drug in this fashion. Director of the CDC, Dr. Robert Redfield, told Congress this month we should know in a matter of weeks whether remdesivir is effective. But until a proven treatment and vaccine are available to fight this pandemic, doctors and researchers will keep working at a fevered pitch. Is this like a race to get to a vaccine? Not really. How would you describe it? There's a lot of fear out there right now. And there is a competition, but it's not between the companies. It's between all of us and the virus. It's not us and them. It's us versus it.

And the only way we're going to beat the coronavirus is all working together. No one group, no one company can possibly expect to do this alone. is learning about history. I do that through storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling podcast chronicling the epic story of America, decade by decade. Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck, available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. The world economy has never shut down this fast. In the U.S., virus-related layoffs are expected to measure in the millions and soon. For insight into what's coming, we found someone with responsibilities over the economy now and who helped pull the U.S. out of the Great

Recession of 2008. That person is Neel Kashkari, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. In 2008, he was the Treasury official in charge of the $700 billion rescue of the financial system. We met Kashkari this past Thursday for an eye-opening look at the stock market freefall, the near freeze in the bond markets, and a prediction for this economic emergency. Millions of people are going to lose their jobs and that's what's so scary about this. Are we in a recession? If we're not right now, we will be soon. My

basic case scenario is we will at least have a mild recession, like after 9-11. The worst case would be we'd have a deep recession like the 2008 financial crisis. We just don't know right now. And what's keeping us from knowing with any certainty? Nobody knows how the virus is going to progress, how many Americans are going to get it, how effective is social distancing going to be, How long will it take the health care system to catch up? JEFFREY BROWN, The Washington Post, Nationwide, last week, there were almost 300,000 people filing first claims for unemployment benefits. JOHN BARR, The Washington Post, It could be five times that amount next week,

maybe more. JEFFREY BROWN, The Washington Post, Where is the bottom? JOHN BARR, The Washington Post, If this is a three-month shutdown, we will find the bottom pretty soon. If this is a year-long shutdown, this could be very damaging to the U.S. economy and most importantly to the American people. 46-year-old Neil Kashkari has been president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis since 2016. He's the son of Indian immigrants and literally a rocket scientist. As an engineer, he worked on NASA's spacecraft. After Horton Business School, he joined investment firm Goldman Sachs. In 2008, as Assistant Treasury Secretary,

Kashkari ran the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, known as TARP, that helped end the Great Recession. Kashkari was also the Republican nominee for Governor of California in 2014. Today, he is one of 12 Federal Reserve Regional Bank Presidents who oversee and support the nation's largest banks. I heard from a bank in our region, a well-to-do customer came in and said, I want to withdraw $600,000 of cash. Now, we can supply all the cash that the banks need to meet their customers' concerns, but it just speaks to the fear and the uncertainty that is rippling through the economy. Will the Federal Reserve ensure that banks have all the cash they need to satisfy whatever withdrawals may be coming? Yes.

This is the fundamental reason the Federal Reserve exists. We call it lender of last resort. This is literally why central banks exist. If everybody gets scared at the same time and they demand their money back, that's why the Federal Reserve is here, is to make sure that there's liquidity, that there's money to meet those demands. We will absolutely meet those demands. Is the Fed just going to print money?

That's literally what Congress has told us to do. That's the authority that they've given us, to print money and provide liquidity into the financial system. And that's how we do it. We create it electronically, and then we can also print it with the Treasury Department, print it so that you can get money out of your ATM. Are the banks sound? They are right now.

Now, we're hearing from big businesses across the country, including in Minnesota, that big businesses are drawing down their credit lines. They're borrowing money from the banks just because they're nervous. And if they're all drawing down these credit lines at the same time, it puts stress on the banking system. And that's where the Federal Reserve steps in to provide that liquidity to make sure that the banks have enough money to get out to their customers. The Dow has tumbled about 35 percent. But something else is wrong. Some investors lost confidence in bonds, which normally do well in troubled times.

The bond market finances government, corporations and, by extension, home buyers. And the stresses you're seeing in the bond market are what? Well, we were seeing stresses this week in the Treasury market and in the mortgage-backed security market, and that's why the Fed stepped in with this very aggressive action to provide liquidity to those markets. We saw stresses in the commercial paper market, which is another type of bond market,

and we're still seeing stresses in the municipal market, where state governments and cities fund themselves, and in the corporate bond market. So we're not out of the woods yet. And by stresses, you mean what? There's just a freezing up of new financings for corporations. That's something I'm very focused on. We need to get that market open again.

Because we don't want blue-chip American companies who have customers, who are operating. We don't want this virus to creep into their businesses because they're not able to raise money to meet their basic operational needs. We need them to keep running. Solid blue chip American companies are having trouble borrowing money. It's more expensive for them to borrow money. Say someone's saying, I'm going to go issue a billion dollars of debt to go fund my new factory, those aren't taking place right now. People are shunning U.S. Treasury bonds, which are always thought to be the safest possible investment. It is. Now, keep in mind, Treasury bond prices are still very high relative to history. They're just not quite as high as they were a few weeks ago. So they still are viewed as a very

safe investment, very attractive for a lot of people. But just this this fear of where the virus is going to go is leading people to say, I just want cash. And if that's cash under my mattress, or in my safe, I'll sleep better at night. What's it going to take to get the bond markets working again. I think a combination of factors. I think Congress taking bold action to say they're standing behind the U.S. economy, the trillion-dollar stimulus they're talking about, I think that'll help. I think continued actions from the Federal Reserve will help. And I think more confidence that the health care system is catching up to the crisis. This past Sunday, the Fed dropped interest rates nearly to zero. Then, every day last week it announced emergency lending programs. It pledged to spend at least $700 billion supporting mortgages, banks,

money market mutual funds, corporate bonds, and lending to central banks of other countries because the dollar is the currency of world trade. We are being very aggressive. And I think our chairman, Jay Powell, has learned from the experience of 2008. We're moving much faster than we moved in 2008. We're being more aggressive. Is there more we can do? Yes. Is there more we may end up doing? Yes. But I think we're being very aggressive. And I think that's the right thing. Can you characterize everything that the Fed has done this past week as essentially flooding the system with money? Yes, exactly. And there's no end to your ability to do that? There is no end to our ability to do that. What did we learn from 2008 when you were in the Treasury Department? And how is that being

applied today? There are two big mistakes when I look back at 2008 that we made that I think are relevant today. Number one, we were always too slow and too timid in responding to the crisis. The reason is we didn't know how bad it was going to get, and we didn't want to overreact. And it turned out it got really, really bad, and the right answer should have been overreacting to try to avoid the devastating recession that we ended up having. So today, whether it's healthcare policy makers, fiscal policy makers, which means Congress or the Federal Reserve, we should all be erring on the side of overreacting to try to avoid

the worst economic outcomes. And number two, in 2008 we tried to be very targeted in helping homeowners, only helping homeowners who needed a little bit of help, because a lot of Americans were angry at the thought of their neighbor getting a bailout for being irresponsible, or so they thought. So we tried to target our programs. It ended up we didn't help very many people.

We would have been much better off if we had been much more generous in our support for homeowners, deserving and not deserving, we would have had a less serious crisis. So my advice to Congress, as they're designing their programs to help workers and help small businesses, err on being generous. When America gets back to work,

how long does it take to recover from this? You know, the economy can bounce back fairly quickly. It's the workers that take time. I mean, that's one of the other lessons from 2008. It took more than 10 years to put America fully back to work relative to where they were before the crisis. Ten years. And so that's what we have to try to avoid, having these mass layoffs. We can't have another 10-year recovery. The deadline for filing taxes, both personal and business,

has been postponed until July. This past week, the House and the Senate proposed trillion-dollar emergency spending plans. The bills envision sending government checks directly to households, expansion of unemployment insurance, corporate tax cuts, and relief for small business. Republicans and Democrats are haggling over the details. Well, what do the small businesses need? I think that they need forgivable loans. It's much better if we can keep small businesses to retain their workers than to lay them off. What do you mean by forgivable loans?

I've heard a proposal that if the government made a loan to a small business, if they retain their workers, the government would forgive the loan after a couple years, just to avoid the mass layoffs that we're starting to see right now. Sort of a bridge loan to get the local restaurant or the local mechanic through this period of time. That's right. And importantly, keeping their workers employed. That's much better, because once people are lost into the sidelines, it just takes a long time to get them back. The Federal Reserve System, as we know it today, was set up in the Great Depression

to regulate big banks, set interest rates, and be the source of all cash. That's why every bill in your pocket is inscribed Federal Reserve Note. The Fed's mandate is to provide the highest rate of employment with the lowest rate of inflation. But in 2008, it invoked its authority for the first time to take on the role of emergency first responder. If the current measures are not enough, what else can the Fed do? Well, we have very broad authorities with our emergency lending authorities that have to be done in concert with the Treasury Secretary. We have announced a couple of those measures this week on money markets and commercial

paper as an example. Some people have suggested that we should be providing more support directly to the corporate bond market, and I'm sympathetic with those views, and also the municipal market, making sure that states and cities are able to access the capital markets as well. So there's a range of things that the Federal Reserve could do. We're far from out of ammunition. BILL MOYERS Far from out of ammunition. Sunday the Federal Reserve lowered its benchmark interest rate to zero.

Can you go below zero? JOHN BARRON- In theory, we could. Some countries have. I don't think many of us, I don't think any of us on the committee think that's a particularly good idea. It creates other challenges for financial markets. But in the last crisis, we'd used something called quantitative easing, buying long-term bonds.

We've got a lot more experience on how to do that. It didn't trigger inflation. So there are other tools that we've used before that I think we could also use again and use again aggressively. States are facing an enormous surge in unemployment claims. Connecticut alone, which normally has a little over 2,000 claims a week, saw 72,000 last week. When the national number of new claims for unemployment is released on Thursday, it's expected to be in the millions. The Fed is now watching China and South Korea, where the outbreak appears to be subsiding.

What are you seeing in China? Well, China appears to be turning back on, and they are telling a very good story that they've got their arms around this, they don't have new cases. But if at the same time, they're saying lots of people had the disease with no symptoms. So unless you've tested everybody, how do you know that you've really got this under control? And as you relax the economic controls, does the virus simply flare back up again? We just don't know yet. To the person who is about to grab their car keys and go to the ATM and take out $3,000, you say what? You don't need to.

Your ATM is safe, your banks are safe, there's enough cash in the financial system, and there is an infinite amount of cash at the Federal Reserve. We will do whatever we need to do to make sure that there's enough cash in the banking system. Are you optimistic or pessimistic? Overall, I'm optimistic.

Having been at the front line of the 2008 financial crisis, and I saw how devastating that was, we did get through it. It was very painful for millions of Americans. We did get through it. We will get through this crisis. Just as Hungary sits in the middle of Europe, so too does it reside at the gravitational center of the right-wing populist movement, a worldwide shift impacting countries from

Poland to the Philippines. By today's definition, populism unlocks national pride and nostalgia while taking a hardline stance on immigration. But what does it look like on the ground? We went to Hungary to see populism in practice, examining a specific government program designed to stimulate birth rate in the face of a sharply declining population. The Hungarian government has taken over most private fertility clinics, offering free treatments and also gives away cash, loans, and even, get this, subsidies to buy minivans,

to young couples who become new parents. It's an effort to keep hungry Hungarian, as the slogan goes, but peel back the layers and it reveals something else entirely. Social engineering designed to yield only a certain kind of Hungarian baby. It's an almost relentlessly pleasant Saturday outside of Budapest. The Skansen Park has been transformed into a festival of good, clean, all-ages fun. Balloons and comic books and piggybacks. It's the annual celebration sponsored by Hungary's Association of Large Families.

And for the first time, there's a mass wedding. Five couples embarking on marriage in front of hundreds of their closest friends. Katalin Novak, Hungary's Minister of State for Family and Youth Affairs, is on hand as well, spreading the government's message of clan and country. It is good to share their joy, she says, which is why the government protects the marriage of man and woman, and why we protect the families and children in Hungary. She spearheads what is termed the Family Protection Action Plan. This sweeping government program was unveiled last year at a cost of $2.5 billion. That's 5% of Hungary's GDP,

four times what the country spends on military. The plan offers couples who have three kids a subsidy to get one of these minivans. I mean, the car sounds nice, but two, three kids, I mean, I think that's all we can handle right now. I mean, even in imaginary terms. It's not just minivans they're offering. Almost like a prize list at an arcade, the mere promise to have one child

gets you a $30,000 loan. Rates are slashed after two kids and forgiven after three. Commit to having four kids or more? Mom doesn't have to pay income tax for life. Terms and conditions apply, and the plan isn't open to everyone. But it does address a huge problem that the country faces, a low birth rate and the hemorrhaging of people.

Hungary's population, now under 10 million, has declined for 37 straight years. It's a curious place, Hungary, a mix of Eastern and Western Europe. Its capital, Budapest, is a regal city divided by the Danube, Buda on one side and Pest on the other. It trades on its classic grandeur and nods to the past. Budapest has long been a city of sensual pleasures, and its thermal baths, taking the waters as it's called, has adjusted for the times. The place has a language and cuisine like no other, and for centuries Hungary has been a sort of territorial football, passed around among Turks and Germans, Habsburgs and Communists. After World War II, Hungary was part of the

Soviet Bloc. In 1989, Hungary set off a chain of events that brought down the Berlin Wall. In May, Hungary began cutting down the barbed wire, becoming the first East Bloc country with an open border. Hungary might have been the first country to puncture the Iron Curtain, but 30 years later it is at the vanguard of the European right. So much so that Hungarians we asked struggled to characterize the country's current form of government. Do you not feel you're living in a democracy right now?

Well, it's a tricky question, because law and regulation, it's a democratic country. Anna Donat is a Hungarian member of the European Parliament and a leader of the Momentum Party, a political upstart which opposes the government that's now been in power for 10 years. It would be too easy to say that it's a dictatorship. It's not. It's clearly not. We can say that it's an autocratic regime, but autocracy is a scale.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán certainly doesn't see himself as an autocrat. He popularized a term to describe his regime, illiberal democracy. You heard that right, illiberal democracy. It's a system governed by a forceful ruler with a public that won't, or can't, fall out of step. The European Union has deep concerns about Hungary's membership. It recently voted to sanction the country, accusing Orban of systematically rolling back democracy. And it has leveled charges that read like a sort of strongman's playbook, redrawing voting districts,

rewriting the constitution, restricting freedom of speech, and stacking the courts. Orban's policies, though, have been delivered not as brutally forceful blows, but as well-placed jabs, gradual, subtle, and arguably above the belt. Orban and his manipulative maneuvers provoke outrage among opponents, but also draw a measure of grudging respect. How do you describe Viktor Orban?

He's a genius in one hand. Genius. He's a political strategist. You take seriously his power. Well, actually you can feel it in your skin in everyday life in Hungary. You feel his power. There is a higher power, a big brother watching you everywhere, listening to what you are saying. Orban's creeping control is presented as reasonable public policy.

On the face of it, the family protection plan does make it easier for families to have kids. But it doesn't take much to shade into something darker. Just listen to the Speaker of Hungary's parliament at a conference last September. In Europe, those who propagate that having children is a private matter are serving the culture of death, he says. Countries with declining population are becoming houses of coffins and not cradles. That sounds very dystopian, very dramatic. Well, you're right.

And it's absolutely horrifying. And me as a young woman who just got married and want to start a family, I'm sorry, but I don't want to accept that my prime minister, my government, the state wants to tell me what kind of family and how I should start with. And they are actually blaming me that I'm 32 and how I should start with and they are actually blaming me that I'm 32 and I don't have a kid yet and he said that I'm supporting the culture of death whatever it means actually this makes us really really angry and she highlights a glaring irony in all this the same government that strenuously tries to boost population also goes to extraordinary lengths to keep non-Hungarians out. In 2015, hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants, most from the Middle East,

passed through Hungary. They were told they were not welcome to stay. We must state that we do not want to be diverse and do not want to be mixed, Orban said in a speech last year. We do not want our color, traditions, and national culture to be mixed with those of others. We do not want to be a diverse country. Peter Kreko, a social psychologist, is head of the Political Capital Institute, a Budapest think tank. He says that though Hungary is overwhelmingly white,

Orban paints migrants as the enemy, a threat to Hungary's homogeneity. The story is being that refugees and migrants are all around. They are stabbing the people. They are raping the women. They are killing everyone. There is no rule of law. How does this new family protection plan, how does that fit into Orbán's overall strategy? How does it fit in one sentence? We don't want migrants, we want Hungarian mothers to give birth to more children. This is how we want to solve the demographic crisis. For Prime Minister Orban, it reduces to a simple concept.

Procreation, not immigration. He did what President Trump promised to do. In 2015, Orban slammed Hungary's gates shut, building essentially a border wall, a $500 million fence, 180 miles miles long on the southern border with Serbia. Attention, attention. I'm warning you that you're at the Hungarian border. Laszlo Torotskai, the mayor of the small border town of Schottholm, was one of the loudest voices urging the Hungarian government to erect the fence. When he got his wish, he became something of a populist cult hero.

This is about preserving, we keep hearing, European values. What does that mean? The European culture, the European values are the classical music. Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, the European values. It goes beyond pleasures of the ear, though. He also objects to mixing tastes. The foods, the European foods, for example, the Doner kebab in Berlin, Budapest. I would like to eat the Doner kebab in Istanbul.

We're spending a half a billion dollars on a fence to keep out donor kebabs? You know, we need this border fence to preserve our safe country. In the same town, we found Shandor Nagy, who's part of the mayor's posse patrolling for migrants. You might think he would be precisely the kind of person to benefit from the family protection plan. After all, he and his wife moved from Budapest to raise their eight children in this pastoral paradise. But he's excluded. Not enough savings to qualify. This really helps families if they have enough capital and their own money, he says. But I think there are many families in the country who do not have their own basic capital,

and the plan cannot help them. And they are not alone. Other Hungarians have found themselves ineligible because they are gay, unmarried, divorced. Read the fine print and this becomes clear. The Family Protection Plan only seeks to protect what the government sees as the right kinds of families. Prime Minister Orban seldom speaks to Western media, but we did speak with Secretary of State Katalin Novak,

who says the plan is entirely consistent with Hungarian values. We even speak about not only preserving Western civilization, we also do say it openly that Christian culture we would like to preserve. That's the way of life in Europe, in Hungary, that we have a Christian way of life. When you hear your colleagues in government, including the prime minister, talk about ethnic homogeneity and the dangers of mixing blood and purity. Can you see how people perhaps don't hear echoes of some of Europe's darker chapters

in those remarks? It makes me upset, because I think that means that people who have this interpretation either don't really know what they are talking about or don't know Hungary. And you're saying there's no code in that? There's no code when we talk about keep Hungary Hungarian or pure Hungarians, and we talk in terms of purity, there's no message? But again, you say pure Hungarian. We don't say that. We say keep Hungary Hungarian. That's true. We say that.

While more than 100,000 couples have already taken advantage of the incentives, it's too early to tell whether the family protection plan will actually be effective. Whether it will cause the desired population bounce or deepen a rift in Hungary, much like the Danube cleaves Budapest. We at 60 Minutes, as is true of millions of Americans this week, find ourselves working under a patchwork of unusual and unaccustomed circumstances. After nearly 52 years originating from the CBS Broadcast Center, tonight we have arrived from living rooms and quarantined kitchen tables, improvised home edit suites, and from here, our temporary

studio at Bravo Media in Manhattan. Without the ingenuity, dedication, and experience of our 60 minutes technical and editorial staff, tonight's broadcast would not have been possible. They have our admiration, gratitude, and best wishes, as do our viewers and colleagues who are ill in this troubled time. I'm Bill Whitaker. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.