60 Minutes - Coronavirus Changed Forever

Episode Date: May 25, 2020

"60 Minutes" is off this week. Gil Gross looks back at the past three months that have changed the world via the Coronavirus. This special Includes content from 60 Minutes and CBS News Radio specials on the pandemic, and offers analysis and insight into all the ways our world is changing. 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. 60 Minutes is off tonight. Coming up, the Coronavirus Memorial Day special, hosted by Gil Gross. CBS News will be back next week with a brand new edition of 60 Minutes. Why do fintechs like Float choose Visa? As a more trusted, more secure payments network, Visa provides scale expertise and innovative payment solutions. Learn more at visa.ca slash fintech. This is Coronavirus, changed forever from the CBS Audio Network. I'm Gil Gross. It seems that viruses like SARS-CoV-2 come out of nowhere.

That's what leads to rumors of them being man-made or part of some nefarious plot. In truth, we know exactly how these viruses get into our ecosystem. What we don't know until it happens is just exactly how and where these viruses get into our ecosystem. What we don't know until it happens is just exactly how and where these viruses, often existing in other animals harmlessly for thousands of years, cross over into humans, and most importantly, to know when it happens and be able to do something quickly. In 2004, for 60 Minutes, Scott Pelley went to Malaysia with virus hunters to find out exactly how they're trying to find these viruses in time. Virus hunters looking for the next big killer. They're finding that new viruses are leaping from animals into man in surprising ways. And there's no better example of that

than the search for the origin of Nipah, a bug so lethal they had to build a prison to hold it. That prison is a sophisticated biocontainment lab in northern Malaysia. The Malaysians never had one of these labs before, but they had to build this one to isolate some of the only live Nipah virus in captivity, collected during the only known outbreak. We went inside with government scientist Dr. Abdul Aziz. The main feature of this laboratory is the safety, what we call it, complete containment, meaning anything that comes in cannot go out. Complete containment.

Complete containment, 100% containment. Why 100% containment for Nipah virus? Well, consider this. SARS kills about 9% of all those it infects. Nipah kills 40%. They keep the virus-infected tissue to study Nipah, a virus that's probably been around for millions of years but apparently never killed a man until recently.

The lab is working on ways to identify any future outbreak quickly, because now that they've got it bottled up, they don't ever want to see what they saw in 1997. 97 was the year that out of nowhere people began to die. 265 people came down with terrible symptoms. Temperature, fever, headaches, but fairly quickly it went into a coma and unconsciousness and then people needing to be on ventilators. Dr. Hume-Field is an Australian virus expert who was alarmed by just how fast people were dying. You mean people would get something that looked like the flu and in 48 hours or so they'd be dead? Well in 48 hours or so they

could be in a coma and certainly within a couple more days they could be dead. 105 people were killed on the Malay Peninsula but fortunately for the virus, it turned out that all of the victims had one thing in common. They were all near pig farms. When Field and the green overalls went to the farms, he found a raging epidemic in the pigs. There would be this symptom associated with the disease in pigs, a barking cough, and it became known as a one-mile barking cough because you could hear it a mile away. People would know that the disease had arrived in their area, and they'd hear the cough, and they'd hear it coming closer and closer into their neighbours,

and then they'd know that they were going to be next. So within one area, really all of the farms would become infected? Absolutely. The Malaysians pumped clouds of poison into the pig farms to kill mosquitoes, a common carrier of viruses. But the disease just kept spreading. So with no idea of where the virus was coming from, Malaysia simply crushed every pig farm in the region and slaughtered all the pigs, more than a million of them.

That seemed to do the trick. Two years after Nipah emerged, it disappeared. But the mystery and the danger remain. That's not the end of the story. You don't know how the pigs got it. Absolutely. And that's the fundamental question. Where did the virus come from into the pigs? The hunt for the origin of Nipah virus carried us out onto the South China Sea, off the coast of the Malay Peninsula. We're heading to a volcanic island called Palau Tiaman,

west of Borneo. It's more than 150 miles from the outbreak on the mainland. Now, this island is not very developed, but there are a few small settlements along the coast. However, the interior of the island is just pure primary rainforest. Dr. John Epstein and Dr. Peter Daszak are virus hunters, traveling the remote corners of the earth for the Consortium for Conservation Medicine. That's a partnership of schools, including Harvard, Tufts, and Johns Hopkins, along with the U.S. Wildlife Health Center and the Wildlife Trust. It's an American program looking for viruses on the far side of the planet.

What do you say to somebody when they're saying to themselves, look, I'm not a pig farmer in Malaysia? Why should I worry? We never had monkeypox in America. We don't even have monkeys in America. How do these diseases pass into a place that seems to be completely unrelated? With the increase in global travel, with the increase in trade, with the increase in human activities all over the world, the world's becoming a very small place.

So just because there may not be Nipah virus in America right now doesn't mean that a similar virus can't emerge there or that other unknown diseases can't pass from wildlife into people in America. And they're exploring places like this because most new viruses infecting man are coming from the wild. In fact, almost 75% of the emerging diseases in humans actually come from animals, wildlife or domestic animals. So normally you need to go to those wildlife species and look for the virus there.

They've come to look at Tiamat Island because they suspect that they will find the animal that first carried Nipah, the original source of the virus. Daszak told us that if this kind of work was done decades ago, it might have changed the history of AIDS. With HIV, we're looking at a virus that emerged from chimpanzees in Africa sometime in the last century. That virus emerged into one single person hunting chimpanzees. It was a single-person event. Wouldn't it be amazing to go back there in time and to see that virus actually emerge and say, hey, wait a minute, don't butcher that animal. You're going to have a virus that then goes on to kill 40 million people.

And that's what you're hoping to prevent. Exactly that. We're looking for really the next HIV, the next SARS. Their search for the origin of Nipah is based on a hunch. Nipah is similar to a virus found in giant Australian bats. There's a similar bat called a flying fox here on Tiamat, and Epstein is here to catch them to see if they have the virus. When you step onto an island like this, how do you go about finding bats? Well, you have to look for a certain key thing.

One, oftentimes you can hear them from a distance. So you listen carefully for the sounds of the colony. How big are the colonies? Well, it really depends on the species and the geography. In Australia, the colonies can get upwards of tens of thousands of animals. The ones we're seeing here on the island are considerably smaller. The one that we found here so far is about 600 to 800 animals, maybe 1,000. We didn't find one on this hike.

But down the coast, near the beach, there they were, flying foxes, sleeping, shrouded in their three-foot wings. They hang out all day and fly only at night to hunt for food, tropical fruit like mangoes. They return at daybreak. Epstein planned to catch them by throwing up a detour on their commute. He raised an almost invisible black mesh, strung up like a too tall volleyball net. Here we go. Ready? Here we go. Bring it down. Come on. Careful. Where is it? Here. Get the net up, please. Okay. Where's the other one? This one's pretty tangled. Bagging bats turned out to be the easy part. The hardest part is uncatching them.

It is. Yeah. They do get tangled up, but none of them get hurt in this netting process. We've not had any injuries in the netting process. We've not lost any bats at any time, so it's a very safe procedure, never. Safe for the bat, but there's nothing the flying fox would have liked more than to take a bite out of Epstein. Net up. Once he's caught ten or so, he waits for sunrise and does it all again.

What do you have? So this is a young male island flying fox. He's probably about a year old. He's in very good condition. And you can see, you know, they're called flying foxes because their heads really do look like a little fox with wings. I want you to take a look at this wing here. Dr. Sohyati, if you could just extend that wing. Now, the wing is actually the entire hand. You can see the arm here, and then the bony structure

through the wing are the fingers. This is incredibly thin. It's a very thin, almost leathery membrane that extends throughout the whole wing, down to their legs, as you can see. And it's what they use for flight. Epstein anesthetizes the bat. He takes tiny pieces of the wing and some blood, and then he swabs around those needle-like teeth. And what does the swab in the mouth tell you? One of the places that we believe that we actually know Nipah virus is present is in the saliva. We found it on a piece of fruit that was

being eaten by a bat. We actually found real virus. They found real Nipah virus in a piece of fruit that had been chewed up by a flying fox. And that piece of fruit may well be the missing link in the mystery of how a bat virus came to kill more than 100 people. 150 miles away from Tiamat, this is where the first infections happened. Notice the fruit trees over the pig pens. What obviously happened here was fruit bats were feeding in these trees and somehow dropping bits of fruit into the pig pens. The pigs would eat them and then get infected. That's what we think happened here. The bats don't seem to carry enough virus to infect people,

but the pigs became virus incubators, amplifying the virus billions of times and then coughing and sneezing on the farmers. Nipah has probably been around for millions of years, so why didn't this happen before? Because the bats are on the move today, chased out of their natural habitat by man. Because of forest fires?

Yeah, forest fires and deforestation, slash and burn agriculture. And fruit bats were seen here for the first time in many years. And obviously, if you're a fruit bat, you see a very healthy mango tree, you'll just come down and start feeding. On Tiamin, Epstein netted 72 bats in all. Of those, four tested positive for Nipah exposure. That's a little over 5%. They found the source and the path of the pathogen, from a tiny number of bats to pigs to man. When we talk about wildlife diseases that jump into humans, it's a universal story. It doesn't just happen in Malaysia with Nipah virus.

It happens in China. It happens in North America. And by understanding some of the ecological factors that drive disease emergence, some of the factors like human activities that bring people closer to wildlife, that place stress on wildlife, that make it more likely for these diseases to jump into humans. And we hope to be able to apply these principles in general to other diseases and prevent future outbreaks. And with a little knowledge, the virus hunters say the solution can be simple. Malaysian farmers are simply warned not to plant mangoes next to pigs anymore. The Nipah outbreak ended in 1999, but since then SARS has come to Asia and Canada,

and in the U.S. people have been infected for the first time by monkeypox from Africa. Peter Daszak says that other viruses still undiscovered are waiting as man presses into the last wild places on Earth. What worries me the most is that we're going to miss the next emerging disease, that we're going to suddenly find a SARS virus that moves from one part of the planet to another, wiping out people as it moves along. Something more lethal than SARS is what worries you.

Like Nipah virus, something with 40% of the people get infected die. That's something to be keeping you awake at night. Scott Pelley, 16 years ago on 60 Minutes. In the book and movies of War of the Worlds, the Martians die of the common cold germ, often another type of coronavirus that's not fatal to humans. The species transfer theory is the same, only this time, we're the Martians. This is Coronavirus Changed Forever from the CBS Audio Network. Welcome back to the CBS special, Coronavirus Changed Forever. Larry Brilliant is one of the world's foremost pandemic experts who was instrumental in the eradication of smallpox. He appeared on the Soul of the Nation podcast to explain how the coronavirus compares to other pandemics we've experienced.

I'll start with a pandemic I did not live through, which was 1918. I'm old, but not that old. That was what's called the Spanish flu. It's not fair to Spain. But let's call that the great influenza. That killed somewhere between 30 and 100 million people. It's almost unthinkable that today would be maybe as much as 300 million people dying. This is not that. This is not the zombie apocalypse. This is not a mass extinction event. But it is going to be worse than the other three influenza pandemics

we've had in this century. 1957, an influenza pandemic that killed one million people. 1968, an influenza pandemic that's called the Asian flu because it began in Asia. Like this one, I think it had a tremendously negative effect on stock markets and people's livelihoods. So most of the people in the financial world know that one. And in 2008, the swine flu. And that was a pandemic that the virus circulated in the world and infected more than 2 billion people, but it didn't have the lethality that was feared. So we escaped by the turn of a roulette wheel on the genome of the virus. So if I placed it in perspective, COVID is less than we had in 1918, but more than we had in the Asian flu of 68 and the pandemic of

57. To hear the full interview with Larry Brilliant, find the Soul of the Nation on your favorite podcast app. Now here's the host of the Soul of the Nation, the Reverend Jim Wallace, the founder of Sojourners, an American Christian social justice group. Good to talk to you. How are you? I'm good. I love the title, Changed Forever. We won't be the same after this. So how we act now, how we care for each other will maybe shape how we are after this going forward. I love that title. Well, along those lines, you're a member of the Circle of Protection. This is really a broad gathering coalition of faith leaders, institutions that has been working for more than 10 years to protect low-income people, poor people, hungry people, particularly in terms of budget processes and all the stuff in Washington

that goes on where the ones Jesus called the least of these. He said, I was hungry. I was thirsty. I was naked. I was sick. I was a stranger. That word means immigrant. I was in prison. And the way you treat them is how you treat me. Well, that text of Matthew 25 is almost absent in this town of Washington, D.C., where the least of these are often the least important, and the most powerful are the most important. So we, the Roman Catholic bishops, the National Association of Evangelicals, the National Council of Churches, all the denominations, we're very diverse theologically and politically, but we are together now for 10 years committed to protecting the poor and the vulnerable in our government's processes about

budgets and spending and all the rest. It's a big job. Speaking of spending, you've said the federal budget is a moral document. Indeed. Tell us what you mean by that and how it applies to the stimulus packages. Sure. Well, a budget is indeed a moral document that reveals our priorities, whether it's a family budget or a little church budget or organizational budget or a federal budget for states and localities. Who's important? What's important? Who are we looking after? Who are we taking care of? Who matters to us and who doesn't? A budget reveals our moral priorities and moral choices. And I would go so far as to say that from a religious point of view, a biblical point of view, certainly, kings and rulers are judged not by their gross national product or their military firepower or how much their popular culture is envied, but how they treat the poor and most vulnerable, how those on the bottom are faring, is always the biblical test of those who govern.

Jim Wallace, the founder of Sojourners and the host of the Soul of the Nation podcast. Thank you for being with us. Blessing to be with you. This is Coronavirus Changed Forever from the CBS Audio Network. Welcome back to the CBS special Coronavirus Changed Forever. One of the problems that we're dealing with is feeding people. It's normally a problem we deal with, but millions of kids, of course, get fed at school lunches. But there's no school. So, what's going on? Billy Shore is founder and chief executive officer of Share Our Strength. It's a national nonprofit ending childhood hunger in America. And its campaign, No Kid Hungry, has gone into action here to help

solve this problem. Billy, thank you for being with us. Thanks, Gil. Thanks so much for having me. So kids get lunch at school, no school, no lunch. How big a problem is this and how do we deal with it? Well, school children have never faced a situation like we're in now. I guess none of us have, but school children are in some ways even more vulnerable than others. We've got about 50 million kids in public school in this country, and all those schools are closed, and most private schools as well. But public school kids in particular are more likely to be part of the school breakfast or the school lunch program, and those meals are no longer available to them. Their bodies are still growing.

They still have the need for the nutrition. And so we've had to create a really almost like an alternate universe, thousands and thousands of alternate sites where kids can safely get the meals that they used to get in school. And that's, as you can imagine, a very hard thing to do. The kids can't come to the sites themselves. Social distancing makes it quite a challenge. But of all the issues that we face with coronavirus, this is the most solvable because we have the food in this country. The amazing thing is how quickly some people have taken action. Yeah, it's quite miraculous, actually. It reminds me of during World War II when there was the

rescue of all the British troops at Dunkirk and thousands of small fishing boats went to get them when the British Army or Navy could not, you know, there's been this grassroots surge of individuals, some from the school districts themselves, some from food banks, some from YMCAs, some from other community organizations that have set up sites where these meals can be distributed. So when Share Our Strength first looked at this through the lens of its No Kid Hungry campaign, we were thinking that how would we ever set up all these sites and get the food there? The sites literally set themselves up. Our job now is to supply them, to fund them, to make sure that they have the equipment that they need. So No Kid Hungry now, Billy, has sent

$8.9 million in emergency relief to hundreds of schools and community groups across all 50 states, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia. That's helping them serve an estimated 3.3 million meals a day during this crisis. And we're talking here about millions of kids who have now missed hundreds of millions of meals. It's a huge number. And we're basically taking the number of kids who get these school meals and, you know, multiplying it by the number of days that they're out of school. So it adds up pretty quickly. Now, fortunately, I think a lot of families are able to, you know, make things work for a few days. And so we had those few days to get these alternate sites set up. We're seeing the participation rates in these sites, even notwithstanding all of the obstacles created by social distancing and health concerns. We're seeing the participation rates increase considerably.

We talked to a partner of ours who runs many of the YMCA's sites, and they've seen a dramatic increase day on day. Now, you've been talking with people on your podcast, Add Passion and Stir, who are taking part in this effort. We spoke with Stacey McDaniel, who runs the nutrition services for the YMCA's. She's their anti-hunger nutrition expert. And she told us that from one day to the next, they've seen this really significant increase in families coming to get meals for their kids. We know the need just keeps growing. We had a mother who was actually, the irony of this story is actually pretty gut-wrenching, but it's the Granite YMCA

in New Hampshire. And the schools, God bless our school nutrition workers. They have never worked so hard in their lives. I think they're so underappreciated. But here's to say they are true hunger heroes stepping up right now all across this country. But, you know, schools are able to offer lunches at a designated time. This mother works in a grocery store and her pantry is barren. She wasn't able to make it in time. She had to work during that service. She was able to connect that night at a YMCA supper site and get dinner and a bag of groceries. She was in tears.

She was talking about the extreme need that they're in and on top of not having enough to typically get your month's worth of groceries. Now you're dealing with food shortages. We had a mom with a seven-year-old autistic son. She had been to five grocery stores trying to just get basic necessities and things were sold out. So the problem is just compounding as this time goes on. We know that the need is extremely high. Families are struggling. We've had so many moms that have been laid off from their jobs and they need help. That need is only growing. We also on Add Passion and Stir spoke to Jennifer LaBar. She runs food and nutrition services for the San Francisco Unified School District.

Just thinking about my community in Northern California alone, Clovis Unified are using their bus drivers to take food out to the rural communities. And it gives me so much joy and so much hope that we're all pulling together and doing this wonderful work. The heroes really are food service workers who are in the field, and they're doing this every day, and they're putting these bags together and interacting with the families. And it's so great because employees are recognizing all the children, and now they're getting to meet the parents. And so we're finding joy in the midst of this chaos, in the midst of this sadness. And so people are finding these connections, and it's possible, and good things are happening. So how do you do this? I'm a local agency, let's say, and this all sounds great,

but I don't know who to go to or how to access these grants. Well, we're in the business of making sure that school districts and emergency food providers, principally food banks, have the resources they need to feed kids during this very, very difficult time. And so we have a grant making process. Anybody can go to our website, NoKidithungry.org, find out how to apply for a grant. We're literally making hundreds of them and supporting communities all across the country. And those grants can be used to buy food. They can be used to buy supplies. They can be used to increase awareness for families. We're turning them around really fast, faster than we ever have before, literally within two or three or four days of getting the application. The good news here

is we have witnessed an absolutely astonishing display of generosity. We've had 29,000 Americans make donations to this work, to the No Kid Hungry campaign on our website. And 92% of them are new first-time donors who have not been involved with our organization before. I think people see this as a solvable problem. They see kids as the most vulnerable. They know that they can make a direct difference and have a direct impact. Okay, let's talk about individuals, not agencies now. What can they do? I think the best way to feed hungry kids right now is to go to nokidhungry.org,

to go to our donate page or our coronavirus response page and find a way that you can either donate or volunteer or we might be asking you to write to your member of the House or the Senate. There's lots of ways for individuals to get involved here, but the impact is direct. It's fast. Once you contribute to us, you get notes about where that money went, what grants were made with it. And I think people will find out that, you know, this is a part of the coronavirus tragedy that we can actually address and solve. Billy Shore, founder and chief executive officer of Share Our Strength and the No Kid Hungry campaign, which is getting these meals to kids all across the country. Billy, thank you for being with us.

Thanks. Thanks for having me. This is Coronavirus Changed Forever from the CBS Audio Network. 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 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. Welcome back to the CBS special Coronavirus Changed Forever. I'm Gil Gross. We're joined by Lori Garrett, Pulitzer Prize-winning health and science writer, author of The Coming Plague, Betrayal of Trust, The Collapse of Global Public Health, and Ebola, Story of an Outbreak. All of those books and decades of her reporting, of course,

bear on what's going on now. Laurie, good to talk to you. How are you? Hi, Gil. Let's start with how we got here, because there's a couple of things that happen here. One is the lack of preparation, and another is the confluence of politics. Despite, in China and the United States, two seemingly different governments, a communist government in China, a conservative Republican government in the United States, two seemingly different governments, a communist government in China, a conservative Republican government in the United States, and yet many of the same things playing out. And let's start in China. Do we have a handle on how all this got started yet? I think we do, though we can trace it all the way back to mid-November with a definite case in Wuhan. And we'll probably never know what animal was

the intermediary between a bat and the first human case. So there's always going to be some uncertainty about the absolute origins, but we do know it was in circulation in Wuhan, starting in roughly about a week before our Thanksgiving and escalating as Christmas approached. And then in the week between Christmas and New Year's, using American holidays, not Chinese to explain it, it surged silently inside Wuhan. And I say silently, not to mean that the officials were unaware of it, or doctors were unaware, but the world was largely kept in the dark. And it wasn't officially announced by Chinese authorities in Wuhan until December 31st, a day after physicians led by Li Wenliang posted word to each other online that there was this new, very SARS-like pneumonia in circulation

and were reprimanded for doing so. Were told to sign statements calling themselves rumor mongers and liars. And Li Wenliang, of course, went on to unfortunately get infected with COVID-19 in his work as a physician treating the disease and die of it, becoming quite a national hero inside China. The Chinese government, their initial reaction, as you pointed out, was not only to have doctors punished, but had journalists arrested and kept tamping down the severity of what was going on. And was that all politics? I mean, there didn't seem to be any health reason for it. What you can see is that there were a couple things going on.

One was the way the Chinese Communist Party has been structured under Xi Jinping's leadership is that everything answers to him and everything is a reward system based on giving the leader the information the leader wants to hear. And what the leader, of course, wanted to hear in the judgment of local officials was nothing but good news. Never relay up the chain that there's a catastrophe because then you're going to pay a price as the leader for doing so. And so Wuhan authorities, both the official government authorities and the Communist Party, were conveying information up the food chain that said, we've got this under control. It's really no big deal. And it's all about this animal market.

And we've shut the market down. And now that it's shut down, there's really nothing to look at behind this curtain. Pay no attention to the man pulling the levers. You know, very wizard of eyes. But obviously, some very different information was simultaneously getting up the food chain. And part of it was the result of a special committee put together of scientists from the China CDC headquarters in Beijing, from Hong Kong University in Hong Kong and from Guangzhou, who went in and looked at the situation and reported back, no, this is not just about the animal market. The market's closed, and there's human-to-human transmission, and this thing is out of control, and it's incredibly dangerous.

We know that that got all the way to the fearless leader, Xi Jinping, by January 7th, because on that day, he gave a speech to the state committee, which is essentially talking to the Politburo, saying, I'm stepping in here. There's something serious going on. I'm taking command. So it's almost unheard of for a head of state to take command of what allegedly is a small outbreak of a public health problem in one city and one locality in the country. So he obviously knew by then that this was much bigger than was being officially reported to the World Health Organization then or to anybody outside of Wuhan. Here in the United States, the initial reaction is also to minimize it. Viruses have no particular politics that any of us know of. But treating it as a political question rather than that as what do we do in terms of health.

And so we had that mirrored and it cost valuable time in doing something about this virus. You can see what Washington knew and what they were willing to do. And we now know that the intelligence community was already firing up alarms up the food chain in Washington, trying to bring to our fearless leader, Donald Trump, awareness that there was a potential catastrophe looming in China that could affect us. We also know that Trump was really not particularly personally interested in it and that there wasn't a lot of concern inside the White House for quite a while. We're now aware that the first case that came to the United States started departing Wuhan on January 10th. And he arrives at Seattle SeaTac Airport and goes through airport clearance and then heads home to Sonomish County,

which, as we all know now, became the first real focal point of spread of the disease inside the United States. And his infection and the fact that COVID-19 was there becomes well known on January 21st. Well, the point of this timeline is that this all precedes the moment when Donald Trump orders that we lift the drawbridge, fill the moat, and protect Castle America by doing airplane shutdowns and airport screening and trying to keep the virus out by imagining that it can't swim the moat, climb the walls and come into the castle. But of course, it didn't work. And though Trump continues to credit himself with buying time for the American people by following this practice of shutting down airport access and limiting the movement of travelers into America, the truth of the matter is it was already here,

and we now can work backwards in other locations and see it was already spreading in the United States, human to human, inside of places like nursing homes and inside of hospitals before we pulled up the drawbridge. And it's pretty clear that if it did buy us time, if indeed it did maybe slow things down by two weeks, which is what some modelers say, well, we didn't do anything during those two weeks that would have made us better prepared for the onslaught. There was no sudden, let's get some ventilators, let's make sure we got test kits that work, let's figure out an infrastructure and a strategic plan. None of that was done. And none of that was done until we already had full-blown outbreaks in multiple locations across America. In the decades that you and I have been talking about public health and disease, there's been a common theme across the years, across different administrations,

across different governments around the world, And this is this lack of preparation. And in some ways, it reminds me of, you know, the failure for governments, again, all around the world to spend on infrastructure, because, you know, people want to spend money to put up new things, not take care of old things. And then the bridge falls down and people die and people start talking about infrastructure again. And public health and dealing with viruses and plagues and such, it seems to be similar, that it's not going on now. It's not important, which leaves us completely unprepared or largely unprepared when it shows up. Gil, you and I have had this conversation for a couple of decades, and I was writing this starting in the 1980s. And it's very clear that we have a pattern with public health

spending generally, and with pandemic and epidemic preparedness specifically, that reflects a roller coaster cycle of concern by politicians. This is universal. It's every kind of political system. It's not just America, it's everywhere. We get all revved up and worried when we've just had or we're in the middle of an epidemic. And then we just lose interest and the money starts disappearing the further away you get from that epidemic. And we've seen this cycle play out over and over and over. And the problem specifically for public health spending, as I showed in my book, Betrayal of Trust, is that it really reflects that moment when

public health is most successful. That's when they cut the budget because public health is a negative. When it's working, there's no data because there's nobody getting unusually ill. There's no unusual outbreaks. There's no sudden surge in mortality in a hospital. So the data says no problem. And while the same is true for the fire department, and when the fire department comes and says, we are happy to report that no one died in a fire in this city in the last week, the mayor doesn't say, oh, good, then we don't need the fire department. We can cut the budget.

But that's because everybody's afraid of fire they see it they hear the sirens and rich and poor alike die in fires but with public health when the public health officer comes to the mayor and says i'm happy to report there's been no unusual outbreaks there's no food contamination and the water remains safe to drink the mayor says oh good then we don't need to spend as much as we're spending on you. Let's cut your budget by 10%. And that, unfortunately, is the pattern we see all over the world. Lori, thank you for your time. Thanks, Gil, and stay safe, everybody.

This is Coronavirus, Change Forever from the CBS Audio Network. Wendy's most important deal of the day has a fresh lineup. Pick any two breakfast items for $4. New four-piece French toast sticks, bacon or sausage wrap, biscuit or English muffin sandwiches, small hot coffee, and more. Limited time only at participating Wendy's Taxes Extra. Welcome back to Coronavirus Changed Forever from the CBS Audio Network. I'm Gil Gross. Among the groups that speak for American veterans and what they're going through right now is the nearly two million member strong American Legion. Bill Oxford is the Legion's national commander with 34 years of military service from Vietnam to the National Guard to retiring in the reserves as a colonel.

He's been a longtime member of the American Legion, even serving as public address announcer for games played by the baseball team, sponsored by Post 29 in Lenore, North Carolina. Bill, it's good to have you with us. How are you? Thank you, Gil. It's an honor, privilege to be here, and truly an honor to be able to represent the, like you mentioned, two million Legionnaires scattered around the world. We're going to get to Memorial Day in a moment. I want to spend some time, though, first talking with you about what members of the American Legion have been doing during the COVID we have had to close many Legion posts and enforce our social distancing, but we have been able to do a lot of digital communications with all of the social media characteristics, I guess, out there using Skype, Zoom, telephones,

and those kinds of communications, but we still try to maintain contact and make sure, and I hope I'll get a chance to talk about our buddy check program in a few minutes. But when we think about that, we try to stay in contact and still provide the necessary services that the American Legion does and the things we offer. Well, since you hope to talk about that program, let's do it right now. Tell me about it. Okay. I'm sure many folks have heard the term battle buddies going back to the World Wars. The battle buddy system was just a way for individuals to maintain contact, keeping contact with their buddies, their battle buddies. So we started a program a few years ago, I guess, called the Buddy Checks. And our Buddy Check program is about maintaining that contact, calling and checking on your buddies.

How are you doing? Is there anything you need? Anything I can help with? Any issues you're facing? So that's just a way that we we used to maintain contact with other Legionnaires. And we've we've had great success as we as we conduct those buddy checks. We found out people who needed transportation to medical appointments. We found out people who needed groceries picked up. We found people who needed prescriptions picked up. We found legionnaires who were not able to get their trash cans moved from the street back to the house. So those kinds of contacts we've been able to maintain and just use the buddy check program to check up on our buddies

and make sure if there's anything they need, we can help them get it and provide it for them. I mentioned things about making masks. I know people have been associated with the American Legion, have been doing things like making masks for those serving on the Ronald Reagan. Absolutely. That's just one of the things. We've got Legion posts all across the country, even though the posts are closed, still providing storage for food drives, still providing meals for first responders or EMTs, still collecting and delivering medical supplies. And some posts are constructing those mascots you're talking about. But that's a little bit about who the Legion is, what we do, and the services we try to provide.

We want to be a servant to our military, our first responders, and our Legionnaires. So it's just a way for us to reach out and help and provide a service. One of the things that I know the American Legion is very, very aware of is some of the people most at risk because of age and other conditions from COVID-19 have been veterans of World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. We've seen situations like a New Jersey veteran's home in Paramus. It's a state-run home for former members of the military, but there's been more than 70 deaths there linked to the virus. How are veterans doing, and what can people do to help? Well, I think the buddy check on them, call and find out how they're doing, and find out if there's anything we can help with, we can provide.

But when we think about veterans in general, they do face the social system that we're in now with isolation, sometimes the depression. Sometimes they're concerned about the toxic exposure that they've been to over the years. And you mentioned Vietnam. that's Agent Orange. And sometimes the burn pits from the Iraq and Afghanistan vets, some of the wounds that they faced, those are the issues that they continue to face. But the isolationism is a mental health issue that we continue to try to address and make sure those folks realize we're still here. We still care about you. We want to help. What can we do to help? You have said several times that health care workers are our infantry in the coronavirus war. And I know among the people that you've talked about is the woman who won the 2018 American Legion Patriot Award,

and that was Diane Carlson Evans, who had to heal from her own PTSD after being a Vietnam War combat nurse. Can you tell us about some of the things you've learned from her and others? Well, the PTSD that you mentioned, that's a chronic illness that many veterans face. But the isolationism, the way they feel about things, the ability to help and provide a service, that's therapeutic for some of those folks. So as we are able to let those people with PTSD and the other depression and healthcare issues, we want them to know we're with you, we're still supporting you. And if there's anything we can do to help, they know that we are there for them. But that award, it was a real honor for us to

be able to present that to her. It was well deserved, well earned. But thank you for bringing that up. And then during the Spanish flu epidemic, last time we really faced something quite like this, there were 16,000 U.S. soldiers in France that were killed by the flu in World War I and another 30,000 American service members stateside who could have isolated in their homes but decided they had a job to do and were on a mission to serve. Well, Gil, when you think about when we raised our right hand and took the oath to protect and defend this country, we volunteered to serve. In many cases, lots of veterans, they don't get to serve in the job they thought they were going to do, but they still felt the

responsibility to serve and do what they were asked to do. So I think when we think about volunteerism, that's what the American Legion is about, just doing what we have to do, what we need to do, what we can do to promote and support our country. American Legion Commander Bill Oxford. This is the Coronavirus Special from the CBS Audio Network.