60 Minutes - 5/17/2020: Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Whistleblower, The Reckoning

Episode Date: May 18, 2020

In an interview with Scott Pelley, Fed Chair Jerome Powell says the Federal Reserve plans to weather the unprecedented economic crisis -- amid the coronavirus pandemic. A top government virologist tells Norah O'Donnell he was removed from his crucial role leading a unit fighting the pandemic because he spoke out against the administration's advocacy of a drug unproven to help Covid-19 patients. And Jon Wertheim looks at some of the possible changes spurred by the coronavirus pandemic' s profound effect on society. Those stories on this week's "60 Minutes." 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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has a fresh lineup. Pick any two breakfast items for $5. New four-piece French toast sticks, bacon or sausage wrap, English muffin sandwiches, value iced coffee, and more. Limited time only at participating Wendy's Taxes Extra. Jerome Powell is the chairman of the Federal Reserve. Some of the best economic analysts in the world report to you, and I wonder what they're telling you the height of unemployment will be. There will be more layoffs probably this month and next month. And your people are projecting what, 20 percent, 25 percent?

Those numbers sound about right for what the peak may be. How does the chairman imagine the country recovers from that? That's our story tonight. To me, he's nothing more than a really disgruntled, unhappy person. The president called you a disgruntled employee. I am not disgruntled. I am frustrated at a lack of leadership. I am frustrated at a lack of urgency. I'm frustrated at our inability to be heard as scientists. Those things frustrate me. The physical world still is in charge. I've spent, you know, 30 years trying to get people to understand that physics and chemistry matter, that you can't spin them. They don't negotiate. Looking back, Mother Earth was starting to clear her throat and make herself heard.

Bushfires, floods, droughts, and the highest temperatures since records began. And then a pandemic, bringing with it the tragic loss of 300,000 lives worldwide and to count them. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Nora O'Donnell. I'm John Dickerson.

I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door. A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply.

Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. Jerome Powell shook Washington, Wall Street, and the world this past week when he warned the pandemic crisis threatens lasting damage to American prosperity. As chairman of the Federal Reserve, Powell was among the most powerful people in the economy. He acted swiftly in the sharpest collapse since the Great Depression, but he fears Congress's initial $3 trillion bailout will not be enough to save a generation from low growth and stagnant incomes. We asked Chairman Powell how high unemployment will go and how long it will take to see a recovery. He spoke to us this past Wednesday after a blunt speech that gave markets a shove.

Mr. Chairman, I just got a push notification on my phone. Dow tanks more than 500 points in Wall Street sell-off after Fed chair warns economic recovery will be prolonged and bumpy. You knew that was coming. I've been watching the markets. Truth is, the markets have been watching him. His speech Wednesday was a warning and a prayer. He raised the specter of a prolonged recession and weak recovery if the federal government doesn't use all its power to support business and workers. I was really calling out a risk that I think is an important one for people to be cognizant of, the risk of longer-run damage to the economy. And really, the good news is that we have the tools to limit that longer-run damage by

continuing to provide support to households and businesses as we get through this. What metrics are you looking at here, hour by hour, day to day, to divine what the future is going to be? The thing that matters more than anything else is the medical metrics, frankly. It's the spread of the virus. The real-time economic data that we're seeing is just a function of how successful the social distancing measures are. So the data we'll see for this quarter, which ends in June, will be very, very bad. There'll be a big decline in economic activity, big increase in unemployment. So what we're really looking at is getting the medical data, which is not what we usually look at, taken care of so that the economic data can

start to recover. Congress has already spent $3 trillion on relief, but another $3 trillion passed Friday by House Democrats is a dead letter in the Senate amid a partisan debate over how much to borrow. We're in a rush. We're in a rush. Talk of slowing the economic response is among the reasons Powell is speaking tonight. He's a Republican appointed by President Trump. Congress has done a great deal and done it very quickly. There is no precedent in post-World War II American history that's even close to what Congress has done. And the question is, will it be enough? And I don't think we know the answer to that.

It may well be that the Fed has to do more. It may be that Congress has to do more. As this period of time, that their skills atrophy a little bit and they lose contact with the workforce. Longer and deeper recessions tend to leave behind damage to people's careers. The small and medium-sized businesses that are so important to this country, if they have to go through a wave of avoidable insolvencies, you've lost something there that's more than just a few businesses. You know, it's really the job creation machine. Keeping people and businesses out of insolvency just for maybe three or six more months while the health authorities do what

they can do. We can buy time with that. I was speaking to a former official of the Federal Reserve who said V-shaped recovery, off the table. There's no chance. Well, I would say the main thing is to get back on the road to recovery. and I think that can happen relatively soon, likely to happen in the second half of the year. That's a reasonable expectation. After that, the path is going to depend on a range of things. It's very plausible that the economy will take some time to gather momentum. We spoke to Powell in the Federal Reserve boardroom. The Washington headquarters was otherwise silent,

its staff working from home. The building, dedicated in 1937 by FDR, was itself a Depression-era project to create construction jobs. The Fed is the source of all U.S. currency, and it regulates the economy by setting interest rates. In the Depression, it was given vast power to lend money in an emergency. It used that authority for the first time in the 2008 collapse, and for the second time nine weeks ago. Has the Fed done all it can do?

Well, there's a lot more we can do. We're not out of ammunition by a long shot. No, there's really no limit to what we can do with these lending programs that we have. In March, as the Dow collapsed 8,000 points and credit markets began to freeze, Powell called an emergency meeting on a Sunday. He cut interest rates to near zero, and in partnership with the Treasury, the Federal Reserve offered more than $3 trillion in lending to banks, businesses, cities, and states. With that assurance, the credit market's essential-to-daily business began to function again. Fair to say you simply flooded the system with money. Yes, we did. That's another way to think about it. We did.

Where does it come from? Do you just print it? We print it digitally. So we, you know, we as a central bank, we have the ability to create money digitally. And we do that by buying treasury bills or bonds or other government guaranteed securities. And that actually increases the money supply. We also print actual currency, and we distribute that to the Federal Reserve banks. But by law, Chairman Powell's Federal Reserve can only lend money that must be paid back.

Congress, he believes, should spend money to expand its historic bailout. After all, he says, this emergency is nothing like 2008. This is not because there was some inherent problem, a housing bubble or something like that, or the financial system in trouble. Nothing like that. The economy was fine. The financial system was fine. We're doing this to protect ourselves from the virus. And that means that when the virus outbreak is behind us, the economy should be able to recover substantially. And what sort of support, in your view, do you think the Congress would want to consider?

I don't give them advice on particular policies, but I would say, if I may, that policies that help businesses avoid avoidable insolvencies and that do the same for individuals. Keep workers in their homes, keep them paying their bills, keep families solvent. Among the options, extending the increase in unemployment benefits, which expires in July, and supporting local governments which are struggling with a collapse in tax revenue. Powell believes trillions in additional federal debt could be paid down over decades. The U.S. has been spending more than it's been taking in for some time, and that's something we're going to have to deal with. The time to do that is when the economy is strong, when unemployment is low, when economic activity is high, that's when you deal with that problem.

This is not the time to prioritize that concern. We have the ability to borrow at low rates. We have the ability to service that debt. And I would say this is the time when we can use that strength to our longer-run benefit. What economic reality do the American people need to be prepared for? Well, I would take a more optimistic cut at that if I could. And that is, this is a time of great suffering and difficulty. And it's come on us so quickly and with such force that you really can't put into words the pain people are feeling and the uncertainty they're realizing.

And it's going to take a while for us to get back. But I would just say this. In the long run, and even in the medium run, you wouldn't want to bet against the American economy. This economy will recover. It may take a while. It may take a period of time. It could stretch through the end of next year.

We really don't know. Can there be a recovery without a reasonably effective vaccine? Assuming there's not a second wave of the coronavirus, I think you'll see the economy recover steadily through the second half of this year. So for the economy to fully recover, people will have to be fully confident, and that may have to await the arrival of a vaccine. If an effective vaccine arrives, millions of doses are likely well over a year away. This month, President Trump pressed states to reopen without a vaccine or adequate testing.

Well, I feel about vaccines like I feel about tests. This is going to go away without a vaccine. It's going to go away, and we're not going to see it again, hopefully, after a period of time. Chairman Powell says vaccine development is highly uncertain, and until then, major industries will suffer. The parts that involve people being in the same place very close together, those parts of the economy will be challenged until people feel really safe again.

Sporting events, theaters. I would think those would be very difficult. Airlines? It'll be quite challenging for them. Lots of the rest of the economy, though, can move ahead, but we can't fully recover it because those other parts of the economy matter. We can't fully recover, though,

until people feel confident that they're safe. You are an enormous fan of the Washington Capitals. When do you think you're going to be comfortable going back to a game? You know, certainly no sooner than next season. Generally, public sporting events, public concerts and things like that, those will be among the last things that can be resumed. Most states are taking early steps to reopen, even though the U.S. lacks the testing capacity experts say is indispensable to success. If the economy reopens and the infection rate surges, what then? The government would have to reintroduce these

social distancing measures and that you would have another downturn, and that would be bad for confidence. So that's a risk we really want to avoid. You know, the virus hasn't gone away. The reason that cases have gone down and are declining is because people have been in their homes and not in their businesses and not out among crowds. Powell told us the economy will shrink dramatically in the second quarter, April, May, and June,

at an annualized rate of around 30 percent. This past week, the Labor Department reported a total of more than 35 million Americans had lost their jobs so far. The unemployment rate will be historic. And your people are projecting what, 20 percent, 25 percent? There are a range of perspectives, but those numbers sound about right for what the peak may be. 25 percent is the estimated height of unemployment during the Great Depression. Do you think history will look back on this time and call this the second Great Depression? No, I don't. I don't think that's a likely outcome at all. We had a very healthy economy two months ago.

Our financial system is strong. You have governments around the world and central banks around the world responding with great force and very quickly and staying at it. So I think all of those things point to what will be a, it's going to be a very sharp downturn. It should be a much shorter downturn than you would associate with the 1930s. You expect the third quarter to see growth. It's a reasonable expectation that there'll be growth in the second half of the year. I would say, though, we're not going to get back to where we were quickly. We won't get back to where we were by the end of the year. That's unlikely to happen.

In terms of the workforce, Mr. Chairman, who is getting hurt the worst by this downturn? The people who are getting hurt the worst are the most recently hired, the lowest paid people. It's women to an extraordinary extent. Of the people who were working in February, who were making less than $40,000 per year, almost 40% have lost their jobs in the last month or so. What gives you hope in this dark time? We have highly industrious people. We have the most dynamic economy in the world. And, you know, we're the home of so much of the great technology in the world. So in the long run, I would say the U.S. economy will recover. We'll get back to the place we were in February. We'll get to an

even better place than that. I'm highly confident of that. So I think we're going to need to help each other through this, and we will. Sometimes historic events suck. But what shouldn't suck 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. Dr. Rick Bright is the highest ranking government scientist to charge the federal government's response to the coronavirus pandemic has been slow and chaotic. He says it has prioritized politics over science and has cost people their lives. It has cost Dr. Bright his job. In April, he was removed from a top position in the Department of Health and Human Services and transferred to what he considers a position of less stature and responsibility. Dr. Bright has filed a whistleblower complaint running over 300 pages. President Trump has called

Rick Bright a disgruntled employee. In congressional testimony on Thursday, Bright claimed the government retaliated against him for telling the truth about the depth of the crisis. Our window of opportunity is closing. If we fail to improve our response now based on science, I fear the pandemic will get worse and be prolonged. Until a month ago, Dr. Rick Bright led BARDA, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, a federal agency to which Congress has handed more than $5 billion to fund vaccine development, new antiviral drugs, and badly needed medical supplies. What is BARDA's mission, and how does it fit in the response to a coronavirus like this? We focus on chemical threats, biological threats such as anthrax, nuclear threats, radiological threats, pandemic influenza, and emerging infectious diseases.

He still speaks in the present tense, but Rick Bright isn't running BARDA anymore. The reasons trace back to the very first days of January, when he heard of a new coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China. When did you first realize that this virus might be different, that this was the big one? Well, having trained my entire life to recognize these outbreaks and recognize viruses, I have a PhD in virology. I knew that all of the signs for a pandemic were present. A novel virus infecting people, causing significant mortality, and spreading. So all the signs were there. It was just a matter of time before that virus then

jumped and left China and appeared in other countries. In early January, when you were concerned about this virus, were other government officials on alert? I believe my concerns were shared by other scientists in the government, and I believe the NIH was also moving very quickly to start some research and developing a vaccine and starting a clinical trial for an antiviral drug. What struck me, though, was my sense of urgency didn't seem to prevail across all of HHS. Bright says that lack of urgency started with the boss of his department, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar. He recalls a meeting Azar chaired on January 23rd to discuss the coronavirus. I was the only person in the room, however, that said,

we're going to need vaccines and diagnostics and drugs. It's going to take a while and we need to get started. You were the only one to raise that? Yes. In your complaint, you said that Secretary Azar was intent on downplaying this catastrophic threat. Why would he do that? No, I don't know why he would do that. President Trump was also downplaying the threat. Why would he do that? No, I don't know why he would do that. President Trump was also downplaying the threat. He said this at an event in Michigan on January 30th. We think we have it

very well under control. We have very little problem in this country at this moment, five. Remember, the entire leadership was focused on containment. There was a belief that we could contain this virus and keep it out of the United States. Containment doesn't work. Containment does buy time. It could slow. It very well could slow the spread. But while you're slowing the spread, you better be doing something in parallel to be prepared for when that virus breaks out. That was my job. Bright says he was well-equipped to do that job because

just five months before the new virus emerged, his and other key agencies had concluded an exercise titled Crimson Contagion, premised on the exact idea of a fast-spreading virus originating in China. What did Crimson Contagion teach you about fighting pandemics? What were the lessons? There were lessons about shortages on critical supplies, such as personal protective equipment, such as masks, N95 masks, gowns, goggles, and there were lessons about the need for funding. You had practiced this? We drilled. We'd practiced. We'd been through Ebola. We'd been through Zika. We'd been through H1N1. This was not a new thing for us. We knew exactly what to do. Bright says one big lesson from Crimson Contagion

was that the entire U.S. medical supply chain would be understocked and under stress for vaccines, testing, and personal protective equipment. I had industry manufacturers, industry reps sending me emails almost every day raising alarm bells that the supply chain was running dry, and that America and the world was in trouble. Mike Bowen was one of those people. He had been warning Rick Bright and BARDA for years. His small Texas company, Prestige Ameritech, is one of just a few that still makes surgical and N95 masks in the U.S. Over the last 15 years, he says, 90 percent of the manufacturing has shifted abroad, where masks are cheaper to make. How long have you been telling anyone who would listen that once

a pandemic hits that America would face a big problem. Since 2007, and for 13 years, we told the story that a pandemic was going to come, the mask supply was going to collapse, and foreign health officials were going to cut off masks to the United States. And that's exactly what happened. Bowen's factory near Fort Worth had several mass production lines sitting idle and on january 22nd he sent rick bright an email offering to reactivate those lines which could produce seven million masks a month but said he could only do it with government help mike bone was offering to ramp up production he's like i have the factory i can make more mass did you have the authority to say yes let's do it i did not masks. Did you have the authority to say, yes, let's do it?

I did not, not in Barta. I had the authority to push that need up into the right department in HHS, in our department. And I did so almost daily for a period of time. In fact, on January 25th, you wrote your colleagues that the mask situation seems to be of concern and we have been receiving warnings for over a week. How did they respond? Passively. They responded with a thank you for notification. We'll talk to the manufacturers ourselves and take appropriate action when it's needed. A day later, on January 26th, Mike Bowen was even more blunt in an email to you, saying this. The U.S. mass supply is at imminent risk.

Rick, I think we're in deep sh... He was exactly right. Mike Bowen saw this coming and was doing everything he could do to get the attention of the U.S. government to get us to act. Though it took nearly two months, the U.S. government finally did act, ordering 500 million masks. A push for that came from Peter Navarro, President Trump's director of trade and manufacturing policy, who has long been concerned about American industrial production shifting abroad, especially to China. President Bush didn't fix the problem of manufacturing like this going overseas.

President Obama didn't, and neither has President Trump. Why is this so hard? It's actually not hard. It does take a strategy. It does take a commitment. It does take some investment as well. And again, it's not just about masks. You're telling me we've completely offshored our ability to respond to a pandemic. We have offshored a lot of our industry for critical supplies, critical health care supplies, and critical medicines to save money. In March, as hospitals were beginning to swell with critically ill COVID-19 patients, the search was on for any and all possible treatments.

Hydroxychloroquine, I don't know, it's looking like it's having some good results. I hope that that would be a phenomenal thing. The president began to tout the potential of a drug combination that he said in a tweet on March 21st had a real chance to be one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine. Did you ever think that hydroxychloroquine would be a game changer? No, never. And the limited data available told us that it could be dangerous. It could have negative side effects, and it could even lead to death. According to Bright's whistleblower complaint, on March 23rd, Dr. Bright received an urgent directive passed down from the White House to drop everything and make the drug widely available to the American public.

What was the reaction of your lead coronavirus scientist when you got this directive? We've got to drop everything. I believe his expression was at the time that, you know, we've been hit by a bus. Bright says his team tried to limit access to the drugs to hospital patients only, and he shared his concerns with a reporter. On April 21st, he was reassigned to what he considered a lesser role at the National Institutes of Health. You believe you were retaliated against because you raised concerns about hydroxychloroquine. Yes, I do. I believe my last-ditch effort to protect Americans from that drug was the final straw that they used and believed was essential to push me out.

HHS firmly disputes that, claiming in a statement that Bright's whistleblower complaint is filled with one-sided arguments and misinformation. And Secretary Alex Azar said it was Bright who made the request for an emergency use authorization, or EUA, for hydroxychloroquine. Dr. Bright literally signed the application for FDA authorization of it. Literally, he's the sponsor of it. I mean, you say you were retaliated against, but at the same time, you did sign the EUA. I was given a directive. I didn't have a choice other than to leave at that time. And I went along and signed that letter knowing that we had contained access to that drug. The American health care system is being taxed to the limit. As Rick Bright was testifying before Congress on Thursday,

President Trump weighed in. I'll tell you what, to me, I watched this guy for a little while this morning. To me, he's nothing more than a really disgruntled, unhappy person. The president called you a disgruntled employee. I am not disgruntled, unhappy person. The president called you a disgruntled employee. I am not disgruntled. I am frustrated at a lack of leadership. I am frustrated at a lack of urgency to get a head start on developing

life-saving tools for Americans. I'm frustrated at our inability to be heard as scientists. Those things frustrate me. Rick Bright knows he won't be BARDA's director again, but he says he will report to his new position at the NIH by the end of May and hopes to continue to speak out about the coronavirus pandemic. We don't yet have a national strategy to respond fully to this pandemic. The best scientists that we have in our government who are working really hard to try to figure this out aren't getting that clear, cohesive leadership, strategic plan message yet.

Until they get that, it's still going to be chaotic. It was precisely 100 years ago that, coming off the one-two punch of World War I and the Spanish flu, Warren Harding popularized a phrase and ran for president on the slogan, return to normalcy. He won the election, but there was no normalcy. There was a roaring and rambunctious decade that ended with a depression. The same principle applies today. We might speak achingly of our pre-COVID existences, but life has changed abruptly, profoundly, and irretrievably. We will instead go hurtling into a new era. The real reckoning of our age, maybe of our lifetimes, is not only whether we will prevail over the virus. It's whether our respect for science

and our collective will, so muscular during the crisis, will prevail when we reboot and rebuild. Let's start with a thought exercise. It's New Year's Eve heading into 2020, a number ironically associated with perfect vision and clarity. What's your response that night upon being told that soon there will be no live sports or concerts or Broadway shows. That Grand Central Station at rush hour will look like this. That toilet paper might be more valuable than crude oil. That by spring there will be food lines on the streets of New York. And more than 300,000 people worldwide will have died tragically.

Looking back, Mother Earth was starting to clear her throat and make herself heard. Australian bushfires were ravaging the continent. Earth had registered its highest temperatures since records began. Icebergs and glaciers melted, popsicles in the sun. There were floods and droughts and swarms of locusts descending on Africa. Bill McKibben was one of the early climate change whistleblowers, so to speak. Ever since, he has been issuing warnings on the dangers of ignoring science. One of the things that's so important here, I think, is that we're being reminded

that physical reality is real. What do you mean by that? We tend to forget that the physical world still is in charge. I've spent, you know, 30 years trying to get people to understand that physics and chemistry matter, that you can't spin them. They don't negotiate. They're not going to compromise with you. You have to do what they say. Same goes for biology. On New Year's Eve, a Chinese government website made quiet reference to pneumonia of an unknown cause clustered near a market in Wuhan. It was, of course, the coronavirus. Biology just doesn't care.

It doesn't care that it's causing a recession. It's not going to back off because it's an election year. It just doesn't give a fig about any of that. So you have to respect that. And that's hard for us because we're kind of used to a world where we run everything that there is to run. Yet by May, half the planet's population would be on lockdown, including Frank Snowden, a professor emeritus of history at Yale. Only months earlier, he'd published a book titled

Epidemics and Society, From the Black Death to the Present. You've seen this movie before. I've seen parts of the movie, other parts have changed. The science is very different, but yes, the plot is similar. This semester, while on a research trip in Rome, the professor came into contact with subject matter quite literally. He contracted COVID-19 and was quarantined. He couldn't help but notice that the methods used today to contain the virus were all too familiar, from the bubonic plague of the 1300s to the cholera pandemic of the 1800s. Our public health methods were built on the plague precedents. And so they had quarantine, they had social distancing, they had lockdowns. Doctors actually wore PPE, and what they had was a mask. We know about that. Theirs was

differently shaped. It had a long beak, and they put sweet-smelling herbs in it to keep the foul odors away. But in addition, they carried a long rod or verger, and the doctor would physically keep people at a distance. He says there's comfort in history. We've been here before. And the real source of optimism might come from knowing that the aftermath of plagues has consistently brought about some of the great transformations, leaving societies looking radically different. Order comes from chaos. You say it's not all doom and gloom. What are some other specific advancements that have come out of plagues? They introduced sewer systems, toilets. They

set housing regulations, paved streets. So the hygiene of modern cities that we see today was built in large part on the sanitary measures that grew out of the terrible experience of Asiatic cholera. You're talking about real enhancements that we've enjoyed for centuries that have sprung from plagues. Yes, that's absolutely correct. But before we advance, we must survive. Survive what is being termed the war, an analogy used to help us conceive of the inconceivable. Weapons, armor, provisions, casualties, emergency medics, valor on the front lines. But leave it to a novelist to pick apart flawed imagery.

Arundhati Roy lives in Delhi, where she's written a defining account of the COVID crisis for the Financial Times. You wrote that this virus has mocked immigration controls, biometrics, border surveillance. What did you mean by that? Well, I just meant that, you know, the world has spent so much time guarding its borders against the outsider or the enemy, you know. And somehow it has attacked the most powerful countries in the world in the most tragically powerful way. No defense budget can repel this. No defense budget. They refer to it as a war. But if it were a war, then nobody would be better prepared than the United States.

You know, if it were that you needed nuclear missiles or depleted uranium or bunker busters or tanks or submarines or whatever it is. There would be plenty, but there aren't swabs, there aren't gloves, there aren't masks, there isn't medicine. And these microbes are no conventional enemy. They outnumber us, they mutate, they travel undetected, indifferent to what country we come from, the size of our social media following, or our net worth. So it is that coronavirus has consigned athletes, the alphas of our society, to their basements and yards, freezing their careers.

It has grounded concert tours, the air now wallpapered by different musical acts, some less famous, all less mobile. Coronavirus has exposed fissures in our society. Cities, of course, are particularly hard hit. Their hum and thrums silent, their beating hearts no longer pulsing with life. The poor are bearing the brunt, suffering and dying disproportionately. Social distancing, never mind Zoom conferencing, is an impossible luxury to many. Different places experience this horror differently. Different ages, too. An entire generation of students sits in a kind of virtual detention, no fault of their own, unsure when and how they will graduate or restart school. Time and space have unraveled for us all.

And Arundhati Roy has some analogies. Right now it feels as though we have no present. You know, we have a past and we have a future. And right now we're in some sort of transit lounge and there isn't any connection between the past and the future. We should not be trying to stitch them together without thinking about that rupture, you know. And that rupture is not just one of production and consumption and all that, you know. It's, I think, the most profound thing is the rupture

of the idea of touch, you know, the idea of proximity, all these things will become so laden with risk and fear for a long, long time. If microbes have the ability to create a rupture in the lives of billions, we humans have our own powers and evolutionary advantages, our intelligence, empathy, and our ability to cooperate. It's hard to conceive of another time in human history when, worldwide, the best minds of our generation were all fixated on solving the same riddle, scribbling on the same blackboard, sharing data, and sharing screens. And it is precisely this spirit that will determine how the aftermath of COVID-19 transforms us and shapes our future. Do we reimagine health care now that we've seen how easily systems stress and lock out so

many? And what about the gulfs between rich and poor? Maybe the biggest decision of all, now that the planet has essentially hissed, I will not be ignored, how do we confront the climate emergency? It's been the life work of the environmentalist Bill McKibben, who's also a distinguished scholar at Middlebury College. You see a real way to use this catastrophe as opportunity. What choice does one have, really, in a crisis but to try and make something useful of it. I mean, the dumbest thing to do would just be to set up all the pins in the bowling alley one more time exactly the same way. Here we are where Robert Frost, you know, lived for the last 40 years of his life in the woods of Vermont,

wrote many of his great poems. Maybe his most famous poem is about the two roads diverging in the wood, you know. Maybe it's sort of time to think about taking the slightly less traveled one. What does the less traveled road look like here? We've spent the last 7,500 years really fixated in our country and increasingly around the world on economic growth as the reason for all being. And, you know, for the most part, that's, at least for a while, that worked out pretty well.

A lot of people were pulled out of poverty, whatever else. But we've begun to sense the limits of that, too. That's why the temperature keeps rising. Look no further than what's happened during the crisis. The shutdown to industry has offered a glimpse of what collective response can look like. Arundhati Roy's India is home to 17 of the world's 25 most polluted cities, and not coincidentally, the world's fastest growing major economy. What is it normally like in Delhi?

Well, normally it is dystopian, you know, especially in the winter months. Sometimes that smog is not just outside your house, it's inside your house, inside the rooms, you know. So that's how terrible Delhi is. And suddenly we are just seeing blue skies. And it's like this from Shanghai to Secaucus. By circumstance and not design, a glimpse of life with fewer fossil fuels. And already the clean and quiet surroundings have found favor with wildlife. What does that tell you about the Earth's ability to

rebound and snap back? Well, maybe we still have a window to take a step back. And if we do, maybe the Earth will meet us halfway. And when people say, we need to get this economy restarted, we need to jump back on planes. This climate change, that can wait. What do you say? Well, it obviously can't wait. You've got to pay attention to reality or else you end up getting bit by it and bit pretty hard. Okay. You're saying flatten another curve. Flatten another curve. Flatten the carbon curve too. And if we did that, then people might look back in 50 years at this time and thank us, you know, instead of curse us, because those are the two possibilities. This was supposed to be the last broadcast of our season, but seasons are jumbled in the age

of COVID-19. Spring has been taken and summer is thinning. If there is baseball, the season will be shorter and with no fans. The boardwalk might look a little more like it does in winter. It's just one of the ways time has come untethered. Days smear into days when for many the commute is just across the living room. Weekends lose their shape. Every day seems to be Tuesday. But there are still 60 minutes in an hour, and for one more month, 60 minutes on Sunday night. We'll have new shows in June.

Grateful to stay a part of your routine a little longer. We'll still hope, though, to get back to losing track of time for the usual reasons you do during summer. To watch a sunset. Or swim a little longer at the lake. Or stay out on the stoop to watch the kids who called us there with their laughter. I'm John Dickerson. Next week, CBS will present the movie Titanic.

But we'll be back in two weeks with a new edition of 60 Minutes.