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president ashraf ghani who posted a statement in exile now in the united arab emirates saying that he had to flee to avoid more bloodshed in his homeland. we re also watching the white house where president biden is scheduled to speak about the pandemic response in about 90 minutes from now, and just hours after his administration unveiled a plan to offer a vaccine booster shot starting the third week of september. this has hospitals in hard-hit areas continue to struggle with the rising number of cases, particularly those among people who remain unvaccinated, but as you can imagine we begin this hour in afghanistan, and here to start things off for us peter baker, new york times white house correspondent and an msnbc political analyst. we should note that peter was also first american newspaper journalist to report from afghanistan after 9/11. kevin barren is with us, the executive editor of defense. great to have you both with us. peter, let s start with you about ....
taxis off. there are people holding onto the aircraft, as it takes off. and as it flies away. at least two people were seen falling several hundred feet from one of the planes. sickening. haunting, as well. this photo posted on the website defense one. about 640 people, according to defense one, on an aircraft designed to carry 102 troops. afghans, desperate to leave. right now, according to the pentagon, there are about 2,500 u.s. troops securing the airport. late today, the president said their number will rise to as many as 6,000 but only to secure the evacuation. before that, in words laying blame squarely on our former ally, the president justified his decision to end all-military involvement. so, i m left, again, to ask of those who argue that we should stay, how many more generations of americans daughters and sons would you have me send to fight afghan afghanistan s civil war? when afghan troops will not. how many more lives, american lives, is it worth? ....
gupta. good morning to you. that there is going to be a lot of people, myself included, fully vaccinated and questioning why do we need a third booster shot. you could explain it to everyone? well i think you re asking a very fair question. especially given that just a couple of weeks ago the message seemed to be you re not going to need booster shots this will probably just be for people with weakened immune systems that couldn t generate the proper immune response initially. it is a very fair question. and i will preface this by saying the mass majority of severe disease is still occurring among half of the country that is not vaccinated. so people that are vaccinated, they have really good protection. let me show you what is driving this data that we re seeing here. this was basically looking at vaccine effectiveness against any kind of infection. breakthrough infections and just getting surveillance screening, they did see waning of the vic effectiveness overall. ....
flooding the airport. some dying in the process. bill: the pentagon will brief in 60 minutes and well oh he carry that live. it will work to fly out as many as possible over the coming weeks. that is going to be a proper cities. process. the taliban formed a barrier around the airport, not letting anybody inside a certain area of the perimeter. dana: look at this photo here. more than 600 people crammed into an american airplane headed for qatar. they were told the flight crew let them remain on board. bill: the biden administration arguing it was inevitable. republicans calling that argument absurd. it goes to show how full of crap the administration really are. they are trying to play it both ways. they re trying to say we knew they weren t going to be able to protect things and that s why we were getting out. didn t matter if we stayed a month or year. they didn t care and we see the consequences. we didn t blame them we dealt with them and confronted t ....
because of the drawdown, in order to draw down by the end o august in we were nothing, but honest about the speed with which we had to do that because speed is safety. we wanted to make sure we did this quickly ended drawdown means a drawdown it s not just about boots on the ground it s about capabilities in resources in the region as we wrapped up our combat missions in afghanistan which meant we had fewer airplanes, fewer strike capabilities in the region as w continue to draw down. again, we were transparent abou the fact that we would conduct air strikes in support of the afghans where in when feasible cognizant of the fact that it wouldn t be feasible on every day in in every place. but, the afghan air force is indigenous in they are in a country. and they did maintain their presence. there were days where they flew easily twice as many strikes as we did they were able to often get on scene quicker because they were already there and because they had connections to ....