more than 529,000 americans have died, the highest death toll of any nation in the world and nearly 2,000 people in the united states are still dying each day. this isn t over. and the numbers don t tell the whole story. it is the lives interrupted, the families suddenly broken, so many people left to die and grief alone that really hit that does hit the hardest and cannot be forgotten. mothers and fathers and brothers, sisters and friends and coworkers, so many taken too soon. i know i m going to remember michelle, a nurse whose brother-in-law, sister-in-law and mother in law were all admitted to her hospital and she was the only person able to hold her mother-in-law edna s hand as she passed. unlike in a normal circumstance where you would be together gathering as a family, we ve all had to work through this separately. and there is also danielle lopez whose uncle was killed by the virus last summer. it just i m sorry, i m trying to even process that all that th
will walk through lahaina, the burn zone, or just fly over the scene, the fema administrator could not say but promises the president will stand with the people of maui and lend an ear to local leaders who are very concerned that the reopening plans, the rebuilding plans, anything going forward, won t include them as has been the case here for generations. the number of people in shelters is going down as more move to hotels around the island and off-island as well. and there s a lot more personnel. we re hearing there are now over 1,000 personnel here, both state and federal. that has been a big cry early on. mostly a citizen-led response. now seeing more of the official response, and they re trying to fold those folks in but meeting some resistance from the locals who have said, we set this up ourselves, you re a little too late. so a lot of raw emotions as you can imagine in a place with so many displaced, so many still missing this many days after the
joins us now chris i the hudson. christy, thank you very much for being here. did you expect to get this chummy of an exchange? we knew they were communicate, but they were effectively in cahoots, and the union was running the show. right. right. we were not surprised at all. by the fact that there was political maneuvering behind reopening plans. parents witnessed that firsthand back in 2021. but we were a little surprised to see just how chummy the relationship between the teachers union and the cdc was. i think most of us tend to think of the cdc as sort of the gold standard in using science-based, very fact-driven metrics to develop public policy, and these text messages read like friends making dinner plans. pete: yes. we used to think of them that way, but stuff like this and how they acted eroded that a long time ago. by the way, so randi weingarten didn t want us to see any of
it s not just the 1.1 million americans that died of covid. black children died at almost three times the rate of white children. 245,000 children were orphaned in america and members of my union died as well, gabriel gall was a 4th grade teacher pregnant with her second child when she died. we lost holly anne hoover, a nurse, anthony harrell, a school custodian and so many more. and this is what the aft did. when the strategic national stockpile unstocked, we bought $3 million of ppp for our nurses and for our teachers in schools. we ran vaccination clinics, virtual town halls for parents and educators and mental health experts together. we spent $5 million together on a back to school campaign to get people back to school. i think from developing reopening plans back to school fairs, door to door visits with