as a writer, she taught me to defy genere boundaries and surrender to my obsessive passions. we remember both vicente fernandez and anne rice for their countless contributions. a brand-new hour of american voices begins right now. tonight, 48 hours since deadly tornadoes ripped across half a dozen states and the damage remains unimaginable, as the death toll continues to rise. at this hour, a total of 48 are confirmed dead. that number expected to rise, especially in kentucky, where the governor believes his state s death toll alone could exceed 100. homeland security secretary alejandro mayorkas was there today assessing damage. we ve lost fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, and others. but as the governor so poignantly and powerfully stated, we will get through this. we will grieve together. but we will also recover together. we take you to kentucky in a few minutes for an update there. and breaking news from capitol hill. the committee investiga
of us. i ll see you again tomorrow night. it s time for the last word with lawrence o donnell. i want to ask you and the audience for forgiveness for something i m going to do. haven t done it yet. i m going to do it. possibly as early as next week, and that is the last line of this show every night, which is a line i wrote myself, is the 11th hour with brian williams starts now. brian s not going to be doing it as of next week. i m going to say brian williams. i mean, someone else is going to be hosting. that name, i ll have them put the person s name in the teleprompter, i will memorize, ally velshi, whoever it is that s doing it, i m going to slip. you re going to tell you the mistake you re going to make. i just know how the brain is going to miss that every once in a while. the habit is so deep, so many years of saying it. i m going to miss him so much. yeah. that i kind of don t want it to be true. it will be a wishful state. and it s brian at 11. a wishful
true around the world is also true in the united states. the sacred right to vote, to vote freely. the right to have your vote counted is the threshold liberty for democracy, for every democracy. with it, anything is possible. without it, virtually nothing is possible. we have to come together and get it done. and we will. the united states will continue efforts to beat the pandemic, working with the world health organization, covax, and other partners to save lives, vaccinate the world against covid-19, and advance health security for everyone. we re leveraging our democratic partnerships like the g7 and the quad to amplify our shared capacity to produce and deliver vaccines and to help get shots in arms for everyone, everywhere. we re taking on the climate crisis with a seriousness and urgency, responding with moral clarity we re seeing coming from young people around the world. we re affirming the democratic values that are at the heart of our international system and whic
i didn t really understand before now, which is they can be defied, and they can be defied over time successfully if your game is just delay. and the reason why people like hillary clinton went and testified to a hostile republican-controlled congress is secretary clinton believed she had an obligation to, and she believed politically it s better for her to get out there and answer every single question about this. so she answered for hours and hours and hours on end. these people don t think there is any reason to answer any question about anything. no. and now we got this new strategy of them all pleading the fifth, including roger stone pleading the fifth, john eastman pleading the fifth, jeff clark pleading the fifth, presumably a lot of them will do that now. i mean, doesn t half of you think they re going to plead the fifth hoping to stretch this out long enough that this ends up getting to 2024 and then maybe trump gets back in and he pardons them? oh, sure, yeah.
we ll look at also what president vladimir putin does after his high-stakes call with president biden. and we ll be talking with russian chess legend and pro-democracy activist, garry kasparov. and turning now to that breaking news on the pandemic, the ceo of pfizer says the company s covid booster shot is effective in neutralizing the omicron variant for those who get the third shot. three doses against omicron are almost equivalent to the two doses effectiveness we had against the original variant. this is very good news. joining me now is nbc news correspondent, sam brock, as well as dr. nahid bhadelia, she is an infectious diseases physician and the medical director of the special pathogens unit at boston medical center. also an msnbc medical contributor. sam, what else are we learning out of pfizer this morning? reporter: jose, good morning. it does get a little bit confusing, but here is the essence of it. what scientists are measuring right now is antibody prod