The Daily Signal - Sen. Bill Frist, Who Anticipated Pandemic, Outlines Next Steps

Episode Date: April 28, 2020

In 2005, then-Sen. Bill Frist had a message for Americans: a pandemic was coming, likely out of Asia, and due to increasing global travel, it would likely affect the United States. Now Frist, a doctor himself, is looking at how and when America can safely reopen. One example of a locale doing it right, in his view? Nashville, Tennessee. Frist, a member of the National Coronavirus Recovery Commission, joins the podcast to talk about his 2005 prediction, what Nashville is doing, and more. We also cover these stories: President Trump tweets "why should the people and taxpayers of America be bailing out poorly run states ... ?" House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says that the next coronavirus relief bill will include a provision for vote by mail. Attorney General William Barr announces a new effort to ensure Americans' "civil liberties" aren't attacked during the pandemic. The Daily Signal podcast is available on Ricochet, Apple Podcasts, Pippa, Google Play, or Stitcher. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You can also leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at [e-mail]. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Tuesday, April 28th. I'm Virginia Allen. And I'm Rachel Dild Judas. Former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee joins me on today's podcast to talk about the Heritage Foundation's National Coronavirus Recovery Commission, its recommendations, and what the road to recovery for America looks like. Don't forget, if you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave a review or a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe. Now, onto our top news. President Trump made waves on Twitter Monday. As the conversation continues regarding state bailouts, the president tweeted, why should the people and taxpayers of America be bailing out poorly run states, like Illinois as example, and cities in all cases democratic run and managed, when most of the other states are not looking for bailout help?

I am open to discussing anything, but just asking. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says the next coronavirus relief bill will include a provision for vote by mail. Here's what she had to say during an interview with MSNBC. As we deal with the suffering that is going with us, the lives, the livelihood, economic livelihood, so important, as well as the life of our democracy. So in this next bill, we will be supporting vote by mail in a very important way. we think it's a health issue at this point. And I didn't want to leave this conversation without mentioning the importance of the life, the livelihood, the life of our people, the livelihood of themselves in our economy,

and the life of our democracy. Earlier this month, President Trump spoke out against mail-in-voting, tweeting, Republicans should fight very hard when it comes to statewide mail-in voting. Democrats are clamoring for it. Tremendous potential for voter fraud and for whatever reason, and doesn't work out well for Republicans. In an interview on Monday, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi

responded to a question asking her if she believed the financial aid established by the coronavirus relief package should be extended further into the future to aid businesses and individuals and whether or not a minimum wage guaranteed income should be established

for those affected by COVID-19. Here's what Pelosi had to say on MSNBC. Well, I think we should have extend the time. I really do. I always thought that was too short at time. I think we should extend the time. I think what you suggest makes all the sense in the world. And then again, as we go forward, let's see what works. What is operational and what needs other attention. Others have suggested a minimum income for a guaranteed income for people. Is that worthy of

attention now? Perhaps so. Because there are many more people than just in small business and hired by small business as important as that is to the vitality of our economy and other people who are not in the public sector, you know, meeting our needs in so many ways that may need some assistance as well. Attorney General William Barr is instructing government lawyers to make sure that religious liberty and other rights aren't violated during the coronavirus pandemic. In a new memo, Barr writes, I am directing each of our United States attorneys to also be on the lookout for state and local directives that could be violating the constitutional rights

and civil liberties of individual citizens. As the Department of Justice explained recently in guidance to states and localities taking steps to battle the pandemic, even in times of emergency, when reasonable and temporary restrictions are placed on rights, the First Amendment and federal statutory law prohibit discrimination against religious institutions and religious believers. He adds, the Constitution is not sustainable. in times of crisis. We must therefore be vigilant to ensure its protections are preserved at the same time that the public is protected. Well, if you love Tyson's chicken, you might want to go out and buy a package or two now because board chairman John Tyson says the food supply chain is breaking.

In a full-page ad in the New York Times, Tyson warned that due to the company having to close a number of processing plants because of COVID-19, it's going to be hard to produce. and distribute their products. Tyson said in the ad that there will be limited supply of our products available in grocery stores until we are able to reopen our facilities that are currently closed. He added that in addition to meat shortages, this is a serious food waste issue. Farmers across the nation simply will not have anywhere to sell their livestock to be processed when they could have fed the nation. New Zealand says it has eliminated coronavirus in its country now that it has

one new case, four probable cases, and one new death per CNN. During a press conference, Ashley Bloomfield, New Zealand's Director General of Health, said per CNN that the low number does give us confidence that we've achieved our goal of elimination, which that never meant zero, but it does mean we know where our cases are coming from. And added, our goal is elimination, and again, that doesn't mean eradication, but it also means we get down to a small number of cases, so that we are able to stamp out any cases and any outbreak that might come out. On Monday, the Supreme Court refused to rule on the constitutionality of a highly debated New York City gun law. The hearing was controversial due to the fact that the law changed after the Supreme Court decided to hear the case.

The original law restricted the transportation of firearms outside city limits, even when licensed, locked, and unloaded, as reported per Fox News. as Samuel Alito issued a dissent on Monday, calling the constitutionality of the original law into question and discussed whether or not the case is actually moot, even though the law has been changed. Alito wrote, in some, the city's travel restriction burdened the very right recognized in Heller. History provides no support for restriction of this type. The city's public safety arguments were weak on their face, were not substantiated, in any way, and we're accepted below with no serious probing. And once we granted review in this case, the city's public safety concerns evaporated.

Now stay tuned for my conversation with former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who joins me to talk about the Heritage Foundation's National Coronavirus Recovery Commission. We need standard bearers in Washington, D.C. I'm so proud to work at the Heritage Foundation, where our mission is to have, sensible solutions to every issue that arises in this nation. The coronavirus is no exception. That's why the Heritage Foundation started the National Coronavirus Recovery Commission. The Commission's goal is to save lives, but also the livelihood of millions of Americans

impacted by this virus. To do this, the Commission has released several recommendations to help our nation's leaders navigate us through this crisis and move toward a recovery. Log on to www.com.com to track the commission's recommendations and to see what our recovery plan looks like. Again, that's www.com.com. I'm joined today on the Daily Signal podcast by former Senator Bill First of Tennessee, who sits on the Heritage Foundation's National Coronavirus

Recovery Commission. Senator Frist, it's great to have you on the Daily Signal podcast. It's great to be with you today. Thank you. Well, thank you so much for making the time and for being with us. We do appreciate it. To start off, Senator, can you tell us about the National Coronavirus Recovery Commission and your work on it? Well, the Commission is a fascinating group of people first that represent a great deal of diversity depth breadth from the consumer side, from the government side, from the nonprofit side, from the academic side, from the foundational side. And we've come together in over a period of four or five weeks, studying, participating, engaging on how we reopen the economy following and during this ongoing pandemic.

The ideas are rich. The ideas are bold. They are very practical. They're aimed at payers, at local communities, at states and the federal government as well. Well, something that the commission has recommended is a five-phase plan that you all have talked about and agreed on. Can you tell us about the recommendations in this five-phase plan? Yes, we've come up with really about 40 different recommendations, and the recommendations will be changing in time.

time. We're meeting on a regular basis. We're engaging each other. We have outside experts coming in. And just like this virus is constantly changing in our own communities and the repercussions that it is having devastating in so many ways to the economies and to individuals in public health. Our recommendations will be changing as well. It is a phased plan because we take certain dimensions. And the first we take, and it's not in chronological order, is to start this concept of opening. It starts as a concept and then goes to execution and implementation. How we do that.

And then the following recommendations come back and face the reality of where we are with the pandemic. At first we have to keep this cagey virus, which is intercepting in all aspects of our life. You've got to get it under some element of control. In our phases, we recognize that it's going to be a long time in coming before we have total control. control, but we have to move right now from what we call population mitigation. That is where everything is shut down on order of our governors, on the order of our executive branch and our federal government and on the order of our mayors. That's population mitigation.

It's a blunt instrument. It brings everything to a stop. It creates a psychology and a psyche of anxiousness, of uncertainty. And we moved through that with now a problem. about a week and a half ago of a peaking of the new cases of the virus. We're about a week and a half to where the new cases are beginning to become less and less each day. And as that has occurred, because we can't reopen the economy until we get the virus

under control, we do move from population mitigation to individual containment instead of all 350 million people hunkering down, be able to focus much more on. individuals, and we call that individual containment. A lot of people set up this false choice of it's either public health, save lives, fight the virus, versus the economy of opening up our states and opening up our small businesses and getting back to a normal life. And that's a false choice, and we talk about that in the committee. And the real choice we have today is looking at the unaffordable containment individual

containment of the population versus affordable containment, meaning, yes, it's going to be tough. It still has to, we still have to have to have containment that may be a more specific populations of specific individuals, and that's where the testing comes in and the tracing of individuals comes in. But a type of affordable containment to allow our economy to open back up to where unemployment, which is as high as 15% today and may go higher, we can get back down so much more. more normal levels over time.

And lastly, as we move through these phases, we understand that this is not a week, five-week process. This is a multiple months and probably year and probably a year and a half process until we get back to a normal and new normal. Well, something that the commission is recommending to President Trump is that they direct agencies not to enforce a lot of regulations against small businesses. what do you think this looks like moving forward? Well, the one thing that we do realize,

and I think the virus is devastating and cruel as it is, especially to vulnerable populations, where we do need to focus attention, is the fact that this country has been over-regulated, that these regulations, top-on regulations, topped on regulations, has stifled small business, make it next to impossible. That's an exaggeration, but next to impossible of even starting a small business today compared to what other countries allow what we've been able to do in the past. And these regulations piled upon regulations,

in the COVID emergency, have been to have been pushed aside with the expediency of being able to address the virus and with the economic pressures it has, that stripping away of regulations, I believe, is going to have to continue. We realize these regulations have become a burden, even pre-COVID, and that now that was begun to strip away some of those regulations, that process, even pre-COVID, had begun by the current administration, I think we'll accelerate that going forward in order to stimulate the economy. Still need regulations around safety and protection of individuals and protection of individual rights, but the excessive regulations on access to capital of the paperwork that is required in numerous documents that are filled out. We're re-looking at those, the

countries be looking at those, and some of those will have to be reinstated over time, but they certainly won't be reinstated to the point they were in the past. So I think what the COVID climate has done has accelerated a deregulatory process that was already underway pre-COVID by the current administration has accelerated that with a focus and understanding that appropriate regulation by our government is appropriate and is important, but not when it becomes a burden to stifle innovation and creativity and the greatness of America, which is emerges with imagination in the flow of capital. Well, you've tweeted about Nashville mayor John Cooper's four-phase approach to begin preparing for and systematically reopening.

And you've talked about how it's scientifically based and data-driven. Can you talk a little bit more about his approach and if you would recommend it for other areas? You specifically mentioned Mayor John Cooper in Nashville, a metropolitan area of about 750,000 people. So a typical mid-sized town, not on the East Coast and not on the West Coast, where so much a point. policy and the news is driven, but really mid-America, a functioning, active, vibrant community that, like so many others, has been devastated in many ways in the short term by the virus itself. What I have done in advising Mayor Cupert, and working with his really excellent staff of epidemiologists and physicians and members of the chamber in the business community, is taking

what we've generated at that level of the Heritage Foundation, our task force, our commission, and accelerated that and applied it to a city. As people will see, as they look at the recommendations from Heritage, we basically say that federal has a role, but probably a more important role is the states, and that ultimately in terms of execution and implementation, it's at the local level, the level of a community, of a zip code of a city. And so I took those principles, and those principles really are as follows.

As we move from population mitigation to individual containment, we need to be able to identify the enemy. The enemy is a virus. The virus affects vulnerable populations disproportionately to others. It knows no color. It does disproportionately affect to Latinos and African Americans and people low on the socioeconomic ladder. And therefore, we need to do special things for those people.

populations to protect and to promote to their overall well-being. So this heritage concept of getting it down to the local level is one that we applied in the city. Number two is testing. You've got to know the enemy, and the only way to know the enemy is to be able to test for it. And our country has failed miserably in the testing of identifying the virus, both the current test of the test to identify the current virus, the PCR, the polymer and shame reaction

test, as well as the anybody test, we have failed and we continue to fail, and we need to capture private enterprise and work in public-private partnerships to improve that, so we'll know that who has been infected. And so at the local level, we have promoted testing and contacts tracing, and that's where you identify somebody who is positive. You find the 10 contacts they've had with more than 10 to 15 minutes of contact. You call them, you tell them to self-quarantine, And if they can't self-quarantine because they're in a home with many, you know, 20 or 30 other people, a common home or they are homeless to be able to step up and provide them a place to quarantine. And that takes a public investment at that local level. So the testing is a big issue.

Identify the enemy. But once you can do that, you can flatten the curve. It will not spread throughout the community itself. You can allow the restaurants to reopen. and you tell those restaurants, you still need to do the social distancing and the physical distancing. You need to have not that people sit at bars that are crowded. You need to have disposable menus. You set those guidelines in place.

We've been phased in over, we have four phases in Nashville. We phased them in over time so that at the end of about too much, you can be back to a near normal, at least a near normal in terms of the structure itself. Our heritage recommendations have been very important in shaping what we do locally in Nashville. And then the last thing, and maybe the most important, is that it goes in phases, every phase is two weeks long. If you don't meet certain criteria that are based on metrics and analytics and measurement, you fall back to the previous phase. You do not advance. And that is, it takes testing, it takes results.

we've been based on that testing and those results, you measure, measure, measure, and you can demonstrate that that virus is being contained. Remember, it's individual containment. And if you can individually contain it, you continue to open the economy and bring back the vibrancy and the dynamism of what we know our great capitalistic system can bring. And Senator First, actually, one of my next questions was about that contact tracing situation that we're talking about now is a potential option. How does that work when it comes to oversight?

Do public health officials review those different stipulations or practically in a community? Can you kind of talk us through how it would work? Yes, and it's a great question. It's one that a lot of people don't fully think through because it's easy for people like me and others to say that is the answer. Indeed, it is the answer. and it does not necessarily involve a lot of technology, although hopefully technology can apply as we know

who you've actually been in contact with for how long. Of course, that brings up privacy issues. But the contact tracing is a concept that goes back literally hundreds and hundreds of years, and it's no different. When you have a pathogen of virus, typically one person will give to three people or four people, and that's what this virus does.

If you have a certain amount of containment in isolation, that person either will give it to nobody or give it to one person. If you just give it to one person, the virus will eventually die out. So who do you do the containment? Right now, Massachusetts has led the way, and they are using untrained initially volunteers, but now paid, they are actually making phone calls to these 10 associated contacts

and telling them what to do. You can use technology to do that, but that takes the hiring of a lot of people. Remember, probably 5% of the overall population have had the virus today, and it may not go up to 10%, 20%, or 30%, so we're talking about a lot of people. Is it a government function?

Is it a private sector function? I've written a lot about this, and believe strongly it's got to be a joint public-private partnership. Our public health system has, been underfunded in the past. It doesn't have the experience at this point with the human capital or hiring or running such a complicated program. Thus, we need to have the public help, the leadership, that infrastructure. We need to partner with the private sector, with businesses, with companies, with private companies who actually do this, with the employers of themselves.

And that partnership will allow this tracing to go forward in a way that will be a successful population mitigation to individual containment, the public-private partnership is critical. I think if there is another fund coming out of Washington, D.C., we have to be very careful because we're grabbing up our deficit, and we're having up our debt, so we have to be very careful. I would argue, instead of these blunt instruments of just cash being sent out, which does have a role, does have a role, and I think we've done so much of that, that our next. round should be targeted with maybe five, maybe $10 billion. We're working on the figures themselves to hire 180,000.

Yes, it's 180,000 new people who will be doing this contact tracing over the next year. It's very targeted. It would actually help put a lot of people back to work in the short term. And we know, based on all the data, all the science, everything we know about these viruses, that that is the surest way to successfully, individually contain this virus and allow our economy to grow as quickly as possible. That is what I feel, and our heritage recommendations have not proposed to that yet, but I do feel as someone who has studied it and has been involved in SARS back in 2003 and anthrax and heavily involved with HIV AIDS. Based on my experience,

I think this targeted approach of hiring 1008s,000. 80,000 more people today to do the contact tracing is the quickest way to beat down this enemy device and allow our economy to resume. Well, some states like Colorado and Georgia are taking initial steps to reopen. I'm curious, what are your thoughts on what they're doing? I have talked to other states, and I've talked to our governor in Tennessee. And what I stress to them is what I stress to the mayor and what the mayor in Nashville is doing. And that is extensive testing, both the PCR to identify who is sick and who is not.

And I'd start with everybody in a hospital should be tested because they're the ones, you know, all the people who are pushing the carts around and the doctors and the nurses because they're on the front line. They have all of the people running nursing homes and delivering the food should be tested. And they're not today. And it's sort of obvious that those sort of places should begin and begin testing. That they need to test extensively, the PCR test as well as the antibody. test, they ought to immediately set up the metrics about when they would open and expand the economy and when they would close the economy.

If a second wave comes in, as it does in the fall, as it does for most of these pandemics, if you look over the last 10 pandemics in this country, you need to be able to tighten up. So it'll be like an accordion opening. And then if the metrics and the measurements based on the testing show, now the virus is getting out of control and it's beginning that growth and then that goes to that exponential growth, we have to close that accordion down based on those metrics and that data. And so if that's built in at the state level and if that's built in at the local level of a city or county, we can successfully get this economy back. So to answer your question, I've not talked to those

two governors, but I would encourage them strongly to use metrics, say they're going to use metrics, say they're going to use the analytics and use that data. What is your perspective on some situations we've seen that happened recently over Easter? I know one situation that happened was in Mississippi where some churchgoers were ticketed $500 after they attended a drive-in outdoor church service in their cars. Would you say some cities are abusing their power in these times? You know, I can't, I'm just not familiar enough with it and what they're doing. I think overall the churches, the mosque,

have responded well as individuals. The individual sort of engagement in how people have used it in terms of compensation of either participating or not participating, I haven't really studied enough to know or to comment on that intelligently. You mentioned earlier your experience in medicine and as a surgeon as well. How has that impacted your perspective on the coronavirus pandemic? Well, it's really interesting. When I was, I did 20 years of medicine and my 10 years of heart at lump transplant. I did hundreds of heart transplants at lung transplants. And that's what I did before getting into the policy world and in the business world. And the number one enemy that I had, my, my sort of antagonist, the thing that would beat me down or I would beat it down is the virus.

And that's because I gave my heart transplant recipients after I transplanted the heart. I gave them drugs to push their immune system down. And when the immune system gets pushed down, these viruses take advantage of that and invade the body. They invade the heart. And my patients would have to fight infections. So the virus has been an enemy of mine for a long time. When I went to the United States Senate, I became very involved with President Bush. And we were fighting another virus at that time.

It was called HIV. And we know it well. But remember, at the time that we passed a large presidential emergency plan, President Bush, and I was running at the Senate at that time, there were three million people a year dying every year of that virus. Under President Bush's leadership, and it was bipartisan all the way, both sides of working together. But under President Bush's leadership and me as majority leader at the time, and at that time, the House was Republican, but again, it was bipartisan. We put a global, who we reached out around the world as well as here at home,

and we established PEPFAR, we invested $15 billion. And that particular legislation has left 20 million people alive, 20 million people alive today, who would definitely have died if the United States and the American people, and American taxpayer had not acted. So I think of that a lot. And then in 2005, I wrote a paper that I ended up giving 20 different speeches around the country. And the paper you can find in the American Mind today at the Claremont Institute, called the American Mind, the Claremont Institute, because they republished it about a month ago.

But it argued for a Manhattan project. It actually said a greater than a Manhattan project to fight. the inevitable pandemic that will come sometime in the next 15 to 20 years, likely out of Asia, because of the congestion there and the markets there, made possible because you have airplanes and you have such a small interconnected world. But I predicted accurately that this would come out of Asia, and that was in 2005. I gave that speech, and even though I was a majority leader and was on the Finance Committee and the public and the health committee.

I was unsuccessful at the time in passing that project. But there we looked at vaccines to speed up vaccines. Oh, I wish we'd done that today. Instead of waiting a year and a half, we could probably do it in six months. We said invest in the R&D research and development around viruses and the modeling. And again, if we'd only done that then, we'd be, have been prepared today. I said we'd need to heavily invest in our stock. to fight these viruses in the future.

And as we all know, whether it's protective equipment or whether it is the antiviral agents or whether it is the ventilators, we under-investimated grossly in what our stockpiles would require. So my past has been heavily involved in fighting viruses as a doctor, as a policy leader, I did my best, although I failed in the Manhattan Project. to fight pandemics in 2005. And this time around, I am very hopeful, and I'm just a private citizen now. Not just a private, I'm a private citizen now, and I'm not in government, and I'm not doing heart transplants. But I do want to be a loud voice to articulate that pandemic will come back.

Even after we get through this, these viruses are for their own survival. they can move faster than we can. And our immune systems are not immune. They're not active against all viruses. And we will have another pandemic for sure, for sure, unless we, in the pandemic, we can eliminate if we get better prepared. This time we were flat-footed. We were not prepared, even though all the warning signs were there.

Well, something else that comes along with this pandemic is the economic tool that we've seen. what is your perspective on that piece and how do you think we should respond as a country to help people get back to work? Yes, you know, it's great at the Heritage Committee and this great resource of diverse people in our committee, we talk a lot about the economic cost. The great lockdown has caused the worst recession since the Great Depression, I believe. I believe we're going to see that. We're going to feel that.

And I think it's going to be far worse than the global financial crisis. I'm thinking globally now overall. Our global economy is going to shrink by 3%. If the pandemic fails to recede in the second half of this year, we just don't know. A lot of people are modeling that it won't, but these viruses are just so unpredictable. If it fails to recede, the global economy is going to shrink by another three percent. Unemployment in America, 24 million people in the last four weeks had filed for unemployment. Right now, unemployment is 15 percent. It's probably real true unemployment is higher

than that. Yes, at the Great Depression, it was up to 25 percent, but the difference is that the pandemic we're seeing today, you know, it hit, and it hit quickly, and people, the economy was buzzing and doing well, then all of a sudden they're unemployed. Hotels in Nashville, Tennessee, They've gone from 87% occupancy to the day that's around 7 to 8%, all of those people that are out at work. And we may see unemployment above 30% in the second quarter, at least some predictions by another Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis has predicted that. The responses by government have been, all in all, I would give a B plus to A. If you look at finance ministries and central banks all over the world, they have done sort of their utmost to help people for this economic shock. And most people in the U.S. have used these tools from the financial crisis of 2009, the quantitative easing, which is the purchases of all kinds of assets by central banks, has occurred in huge quantities.

And to be honest with you, just as inside, it's almost too big. It's sort of threatening with the Fed Reserve balance sheet, I think it went from $4 trillion to about $6 trillion. But the quantitative easing is working, and I believe it's a positive thing. Secondly, the deficit financing, the CARES Act, which is sort of a general purpose bailout of checks to everyone. It's not a stimulus bill. There's nothing to stimulate. It's, you know, $2 trillion and then another half a trillion last week. but we have this federal deficit.

It was expected to be 5% of GDP for 2020, three months ago, four months ago. And it looks like it's going to be up to 15%. Not just in the United States. The UK is a public sector, has net borrowing as well, large with public debt above 100% of GDP. But the world, the public debt is soaring. Again, the stimulus, it's a little bit like,

When I'm a heart surgeon and somebody comes in in shock, we typically, the person we give them is just sugar water. And the sugar water, yes, it keeps the heart going, but it doesn't have any of the nutrients that, like, oxidated blood would have to sort of get them back to life. So we're kind of pumping money in to keep things going, but we're really not stimulating the economy of itself. I'm not, I can't look into the crystal ball with predictions of a lot of, not a lot of people. a lot of economists, if you listen to them, think that that will turn the corner in the second half of this year. And I'm not quite that optimistic. But so far, I would give our government a strong B plus or A in the response today. Again, I'm worried about the deficit in debt. Well, lastly, Senator, first, we've seen people in some states like Michigan have protested the

lockdown. I wanted to know what your thoughts on the protests have been. And also, if there's anything you would like to tell those protesters, what would that be? Well, protesting is a part of America, and it's a great part of America. And I have a little bit different perspective because having been in Washington for 12 years, and I have been a majority leader, I look at protests through the lens of its freedom of speech. It gives people pause. It sometimes focuses you in the right direction. So I tend to say protests are okay.

What's different about today and what I don't have a full understanding of is how much of these protests are being instigated by some of the various originating entities, whether it's people overseas, Russia, you know, splinter groups here in the country. So what I do is say back, okay, there are two sides. that are oversimplified to hear rush ahead and open the economy is one side versus the public health, keep everything locked down. Somewhere in there, the balancing act has to be done because keeping the economy close kills people. It takes away their livelihood, their spirit, their hope, their imagination, food on the table, unable to buy prescription drugs. So there's a cost to that. But to balance that, what's what the cost of opening up and becoming less restrictive on the public health,

the physical distancing, the keeping people separated and the lockdown there. Because we know as we lift those restrictions, people are going to die. They're going to die. The virus kills. We've seen that. It has a fatality rate of 5%. Probably more, it's probably a lot less than that. but if you today say confirmed cases versus, you know, and the people who've actually died, it's 5.4%.

And therefore, it's a balancing act. And that's the way I view to protest. And so for the protesters themselves, I said, you know, this is your right as an American to protest. But do recognize that on the public help, all of the data shows that when we lose some restrictions, you are killing people. people will die and what we need to do is open up at a pace where we minimize those fatalities we maximize well-being and therefore we we do it at a pace and nobody knows exactly what that pace is but we will know and let me let me let me we will know as we get the data which comes back to why i think the metrics are important which requires the testing and we can't have people

in washington dc going on every night and saying we have adequate test because i can tell you as a doctor, as a performer policymaker, as somebody who's on the ground, we do not have the test. Let me just mention, because I know what that I want to wrap things up here, there are unknowns at we speak that as people come back and listen to our discussion two weeks from now or a month from now, hopefully we won't call them this, but I call them the known unknowns. And that's what makes this tension there and the protest there,

and the challenge that governors and policymakers have is what we talk about in our heritage, the foundation task force meetings, commission meetings. Number one, how many infected people do we have today without symptoms? Because this virus, like almost all others, causing pandemics, is unusual, and that it causes infections even when you feel healthy and you have no symptoms. That's why we needed testing. Number two, what is the true infection fatality rate? I said there's more childhood rate of 5.4%.

I don't believe it's that high, really, but if you look at the numbers so far, because of inadequate testing it is. But we don't know if you have that virus, what the likelihood of you die actually is today. It's a known unknown. We will know it with more testing. Number three, the immunity.

How long does the immunity last post-infection? We don't know that. We don't know there's a report out of China last week that basically says, it came through the World Health Organization, that basically says that this virus may not cause very much immunity. And it may not give you much more than a few days of immunity. But I'm not sure.

I don't agree or disagree with that. But we just don't know. Is it weeks? Is it months? Is it years? Three, how seasonal is it? Does it have a seasonality to it? Will the virus receive as spring turns to summer?

We don't know. And number five, what are the impacts on the heart and the lung, long term? And the neurological damage. the report last week that young people are having strokes after having had the virus when they're 20 and 30 and 40 years of age. And it has a direct impact on the heart long term we don't know. And lastly, which does have a huge economic impact and everything we've talked about in terms of opening and closing like an accordion, will there be a second wave as there are with most pandemics? That is, in the fall, will there be another surge in the virus itself? And I mention those known unknowns because every day that goes by, we come closer to making those known knowns.

We don't have it yet, and that's why we need to be flexible. We need to be flexible in our recommendations. If a recommendation doesn't seem to be working out, we need to be humble enough to back it up and put new recommendations out there if that's what the data, and that's what the science shows. The long term, we're going to be okay with all this. it's going to be a huge insult to families and too much of death, too much destruction, the economy badly damaged. But with the American spirit, ingenuity and creativity, we're going to get through this and we're going to win this battle. Well, Senator Frist, thank you so much for joining the Daily Signal podcast and for unpacking all of this with us today. We really do appreciate it.

Thank you very much. It's great to be with you. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks for listening to The Daily Signal Podcast. We do appreciate your patience as we record remotely during these weeks. Please be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or Spotify. And please leave us a review or a rating on Apple Podcasts and give us your feedback. Stay healthy and we will be back with you all tomorrow. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation.

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