and will he or won t he play? that s still a question for novak djokovic and the australian open, why his travel documents are now taking center court. thanks for being here, everyone. let s begin this hour with the cdc director, dr. rochelle we wa len ski and dr. anthony fauci facing congress. the top republican on the committee set the tone early when senator bird said today is going to be a tough hearing. the senate committee has just started grilling officials about the federal response to the resurgent pandemic and the confusing messaging coming from the cdc on things like testing, face masks, and isolation guidelines. this also comes as the united states shattered another pandemic record. more than 145,000 americans are currently hospitalized with the coronavirus. the vast majority of them unvaccinated. the previous high was set one year, a year ago, and this number more than doubling since christmas.
people know that this is a guy who just thought he was going to saupter into their country unvaccinated, a country that s been hit so hard by covid and has been so diligent, its citizens, so diligent to do the right thing while this guy walks right in having done so many wrong things. i ve heard from well, we heard from james blake this also last night as well as the well, the main rival now for djokovic, rafael nadal at this tournament, both saying that the best thing for the sport is always to have the best players playing, the best players on the court, and i i m wondering though if this is going to, despite, leave some kind of a black mark on the tournament, the sport, the player, kind of all in. oh, for sure. this is i don t know that you can handle anything in covid well. this is all new territory for government officials, for everyone, but certainly there have been mistakes and missteps by the australians apparently, and it has not been a good look for anyone, and, y
other hand, i think can be pumped out a lot more quickly. it would be very helpful to get allocations of that, really geared up. we had 16 doses of that last week, and that was gone very quickly. so nationally, the country, as i said at the top of the show, has topped the all time pandemic high for covid hospitalizations and those who are sick enough with covid to need hospital care are by and large still people who are unvaccinated. what does it look like, you talked about the stresses of course on the staff, and just the exhaustion with being this far into the pandemic, and not having treatment, but is that still part of the big story here, which is yes, hospitalizations are really high, and part of it is people are testing positive when they re in the hospital for other reasons. but those who need treatment for covid, there s still the unvaccinated. that s absolutely true. i do want to come back to your point about this incidental covid detection, and that s because we re screen
attacks on you and your family. on social media i follow many of trump s advisors and family members and they make a sport out of attacking you personally. some of the most vicious, hateful, ugly ways that are possible. they do it because it gets clicks. they don t do it because they re legitimately engaged in an honest debate about the science surrounding covid. those people attack you because it gave them political followers. so i appreciate the fact that you re willing to stand up for yourself and for your colleagues who have been dragged into the political muck, not because those that follow president trump are interested in an honest science based debate about how to attack covid, but because they see political opportunity. so thank you, dr. fauci, for
coronavirus vaccine. that s so important, because we can t keep, you know, sort of dealing with variant after variant after variant, and the universal vaccine would work on all of them, they ve been trying to do that for flu for many, many years, and that hasn t happened. hopefully it could happen with coronavirus. and also, kate, what we re expecting now is for the senators to grill hhs, the department of health and human services, and the fda, about why we are experiencing a shortage of home tests two years into the pandemic. kate? elizabeth, thanks so much. we will be sticking close to this and bring you all of the big moments as there are some tough questions coming at these officials. appreciate it, elizabeth. let s focus in right now though on chicago where hundreds of thousands of students are expected to return to class tomorrow. the school district and teachers union reaching a tentative deal overnight, on these safety protocols, that had been keeping everyone out of class