Lori Walsh: U.S. Senator John Thune is the senate majority whip, the second ranking Republican in the U.S. Senate. He recently returned to South Dakota after feeling flu like symptoms. Since then, he has tested negative for COVID-19 and he joins us now from Sioux Falls. Senator Thune, thanks for being here.
Senator Thune: Hey Lori, how are you?
Lori Walsh: I'm doing well. Tell us how you are feeling?
Senator Thune: I'm good. I'm good. We were trying to not take any chances last week. We had a member of the Senate who had tested positive and we'd all been around him and I hadn't been feeling well and so we figured the best thing to do would be to avoid contact with people and if I was going to quarantine somewhere I wanted to do it here in South Dakota, but you're right we took a test. Doctor asked us, thought it would be a good idea to do that which we did and we're negative, but want to do everything we can to help make sure that we do stop the spread here in South Dakota and across the country and get things back to normal, which I think is what everybody wants to see.
Lori Walsh: Tell us what measures you're taking now that you have the negative COVID-19 test but you're still feeling a little bit under the weather? What are you doing and for how long are you going to be doing it?
Senator Thune: Well I'm kind of like everybody else. Many just follow, practice the guidelines, social distancing. I'm interacting with my wife, I'm either operating out of an office at home. I have been in my office here in Sioux Falls a couple different times, but our staff here is social distancing. We've reduced significantly the number of personnel in our Sioux Falls office, our Washington office, they're all operating out of their homes remotely, teleworking. And we're all trying to abide by the rules in hopes that we can get this thing shut down and I was on a conference call just a few minutes ago with Dr. Fauci who said the only tool we have right now to stop this thing, or stop it spread at least, is social distancing and so that's why until we get the vaccine, until we have some therapies and things that treat this, we just all have to really practice the guidelines, and I know that's hard, and it's frustrating, so I've pretty much either been at my house, or like I said, occasionally here at the office.
Lori Walsh: You mentioned Dr. Fauci and he has expressed frustration, or he said he was perplexed by states like the state of South Dakota, really only a handful of states left, whose governor has not issued some kind of extensive mandate or shelter in place, or stay at home order. Governor Kristi Noem and her press conferences and her messages to the public has said this is mainly a personal responsibility issue that her conservative values say there're certain things she's not going to reach out and do. City mayors and municipalities have complained about that, asking for stronger guidance and other governors, including the governor of Florida have been slowly pressured into making those mandates come from the governor office. Are you in agreement with Governor Noem right now, especially after you've just gotten off the phone with Anthony Fauci?
Senator Thune: I don't see everything that she sees or that her team sees on a daily basis in terms of the data. Dr. Fauci said this this morning and it's true, that these models are all based on assumptions. And so you plug assumptions in, but those assumptions change as the data coming in changes and you have to react to that. And I think that the governor, cities across South Dakota, we haven't seen the incidents that they've seen in other places around the country but that doesn't mean that we won't. And I think you have to be prepared for the worst, pray for the best, prepare for the worst, and take the measures that are necessary to protect people and to make sure that we've done everything we can to stop the spread. And there is certain amount, there's no question about that, that falls on us as individuals to follow those rules, follow those guidelines.
Whether the state or the cities need to take more aggressive action, I think, is something that's got to be based on science, evidence, data, and in close consultation with the medical experts. I think that the systems that we have here in South Dakota, they've got great analytics, they're studying the data on a daily basis. And so my assumption is that our leaders here are responding to what they're seeing, but I guess the only thing I would say is again, if we want to get ahead of this thing, the only way that we can stop its spread, is to make sure that people are staying apart and some states have taken very aggressive measures on that and some are sort of continuing to evaluate as new information comes in.
Lori Walsh: Is Governor Noem working off of a different set of data points, or different modeling at the national level than the Coronavirus taskforce from the White House is, or do they have access to the same data?
Senator Thune: I think they have access probably to the same data through the CDC, the Center for Disease Control, but that's accumulating national data. The data locally here in South Dakota I think is probably going to come more from the healthcare providers and the testing that's being done and to make determinations about what the trend lines are.
What Dr. Fauci also said this morning on call was that it is a big country and different places are going to be impacted and affected differently and of course we're in a rural area and you get outside of Sioux Falls, for example in some of our larger communities and a lot of our rural areas and rural counties, people tend to be far apart anyway. If you get out in farm and ranch country where I'm from and the likelihood that this is going to really catch on or become very infectious probably is less so than it might be in a more populated area.
I do think that when you look at the data, yes you look at the national data, and you react to what the trends are happening there, but most of the trends nationally now are being driven by New York, California, states on the coast, which again does not mean that that isn't going to happen to us here and that's why we cannot let up, but I think that you do have to, because of the size of the country, the geography that we have, the distribution of our population, and make evaluations and decisions based on what you are seeing as the data becomes more available and you have better modeling with respect to your particular state or area. Yes, it's the big picture, but it's also I think in sort of a smaller sense, the picture that you have to deal with in front of you, and that's the people that you ultimately are responsible for and accountable to.
Lori Walsh: What's your message to South Dakotan's who are feeling frustrated by being in a town where businesses, restaurant are closed, but then being able to just drive out to the lake, or drive out to a rural bar or restaurant and see the parking lot is packed and everybody congregated there? Speak a little bit to the people of South Dakota who are feeling the frustration and the tension of that confusion right now.
Senator Thune: It really is a tension and it's a hard thing to, I think to come to grips with because people obviously, and businesses, want to survive. You want to see them survive, but I think that the advice you have to give whether you live in a small town or a big town, is if you're gathering in big groups, you're taking a big risk and I think the message needs to be very clear that it doesn't matter where you live in South Dakota, you need to observe these basic rules. Wash regularly of course, avoid large gatherings and that's 10 or more, and make sure that you're keeping that six feet of distance between people when you go out in public and there are some small businesses where they can continue to operate because I think those rules... they don't have big congregations of people. But if you're a bar or restaurant or some place where people are coming in big groups, that's the high risk area. I just think that all South Dakotan's, no matter where you live, need to be observing this rules to make sure that this thing doesn't come to your neighborhood anytime soon.
Lori Walsh: We're hearing a lot lately about people saying... you even recently said it in an interview that this was hard to imagine, the way that this is spread and the way that it has come, but I want to ask you about that because there was dozens of novels and movies that are based on this same premise. There was a pandemic training when the Obama administration passed down to the Trump administration. There was a group of people that were eliminated from their jobs. Did America really suffer from a failure of imagination in this case regarding this pandemic?
Senator Thune: Well as you pointed out, there have been... Hollywood of course, movies like Contagion and others seem very prescient now based on what we're seeing here. I think that this threat has always been out there. But we haven't seen... we've been so healthy for so long. We deal with the usual seasonal things, but we have vaccines for most of those. You have to go back in the annals of history a long time to find a time where you had an epidemic. I think the Spanish flu wiped out they said about 675,000 Americans. It's just so unprecedented at least in our lifetime, but that's why you prepare. That's why you do the things ahead of time because those risks are out there and you got to do everything you can to mitigate that risk.
It strikes me at least on this particular incident, there are some lessons we have to learn and one is that we need to close wet markets. China should be ostracized from world community until they get rid of these wet markets where they've got these types of things that spread disease and something gets started like that. And I think another lesson out of this is we've got to come up with new solutions when it comes to supply chains. We depend upon other parts of the world that have been proven now to be unreliable when it comes to making pharmaceuticals available, making protective gear available, medical supplies, all those sorts of things that we've been getting because we shift a lot of that production outside the United States.
These are critical industries and we need to make sure that we're producing these things close to home so that when crisis hits, we can gear up quickly and the other thing I'll say which, to me, the thing I don't understand and I mentioned this this morning with Dr. Fauci, is until we have a vaccine which sounds like it's a ways out there. Maybe even early would be early next year, 2021. Well does that mean we're going to be living like this until 2021 because it will bleed our economy dry if we do.
What short of a vaccine can we be doing that could help us further win this battle in addition to social distancing? And I think one of those is having massive testing available. If you had a test that everybody could take, maybe even they could administer themselves, but that they could then through technology send to a physician, they could look at it. But you have to isolate the people who are sick. Quarantine them. When people who are well, and you determine you're well if you've taken a test, and everybody's good, then we can get people back to work and I think knowing whose carrying this, and that's the problem right now, there's asymptomatic people who are carrying it and we don't have enough testing out there, so we don't know whose got it and who has mild symptoms and all those sorts of things, but testing on a massive scale to me seems to be a solution, short of the vaccine, that could at least enable us to get back to some sense of normalcy.
That's my message to them is, let's gear up testing, because the only way we get the economy back on track is to get the healthcare crisis addressed and until we have that vaccine, we have to be able to determine who has it, who doesn't, and then the economy can begin to start opening up.
Lori Walsh: America got a slow start in that testing and I understand that now we've tested more people than the Republic of Korea, that was made clear in a White House press conference, but if the consensus is that the political will is there, the scientific consensus is, I think most South Dakotan's have figured this out. That if there was widespread testing for everybody that those people who test negative could be in the economy. Those people who have recovered could be in the world. Most of us if we call our doctors are not getting prioritized for testing. You're hearing those stories every day. What is the hold up?
Senator Thune: Yeah and that's the question. To me, if nothing else, right now that ought to be the singular focus of the administration is to get those labs geared up. Lord knows we've got the manufacturing capability, the technology in this country and now they're talking about Abbott labs having a test that you can administer and have a result immediately. We need to scale those up on a mass scale and make them available to people out there.
And if we're going to spend a couple trillion dollars, which we did last week with this bill that we passed, and a hundred billion a week before that, we're doing a lot of things to help rescue the economy. The best way to rescue the economy is to get ahead of this healthcare crisis and I would put money into developing and making those tests available to people free across the country. If we're going to spend money, that'd be a good way to spend it and so I'm sort of... I'm at a loss like a lot of people are to explain... and I know they're trying to fight this on multiple fronts, and I get that, and I know it's a multi headed monster that we're dealing with here, but to me job one ought to be getting these tests available on a mass scale so that people can figure out if they have it, if they don't and we can figure out those who do. And once you figure out those who do, then they can be dealt with in a way that helps them recover, get better, and then we'll have a lot more information too when we figure out who has it, and we can study them and look at the symptoms and make determinations and that adds data that's available to help us combat this disease longterm.
But this idea that we don't have tests to me, there's no good explanation for that and that's got to be solved and that was the message I delivered this morning.
Lori Walsh: And Senator Thune, not to put too fine a point on it, but when you look at the efforts in the Republic of Korea, or South Korea those were all federal efforts. They had the massive testing. Governor Kristi Noem said we can't do some of the draconian measures, but South Korea is not China. South Korea is not Iran. Speak a little bit to this comparison that says at some point another thing that worked well for them, was a strong federal response, not a patchwork of people making decisions here and there. Can you help us understand that more clearly?
Senator Thune: You can look at examples around the world of countries that got ahead of this and managed it better than others. Granted, populations are different, demographics are different, and some populations are more susceptible to this and to its impacts, but it does strike me that at least on a federal level... and granted we're a nation that was built on a principle of distributed power and not centralized power and a lot of those countries around the world and your examples of course, China and Iran are obvious authoritarian type governments. South Korea, a democracy, but was able to get ahead of this, but I think it takes really aggressive action at every level and the one thing in my view again... and I think part of it too is that everybody was slow on the uptake, didn't see it coming, although it was out there. People at the intelligence community and others were giving us warnings way back in January, but I think everybody was like, well we're not seeing much of this. I think this is may be over hyped or whatever.
Well, now we know it's not, and so now the response needs to be on a scale with the problem that we have in front of us and this is where I think the federal government, on the issue of testing for example, has got to take stronger steps on developing vaccines.
There are a number of companies out there who are developing those, getting them to the test process as quickly as possible and getting something that we can scale up and make commercially available in as near a time frame as possible is the best way to defeat and beat this.
But I think we got to learn from other countries. I think you have to take it to heart, countries that have done things well. Figure out what worked there. We had a few examples ahead of us, and we shouldn't think that because these are countries around the world that maybe don't have the size and scale, the economic power of the United States that we can't learn lessons, because as we discover, this is a very invisible war. This is an invisible enemy that strikes without discriminating and we just have to... this isn't something where simply the American military power for example is going to solve it. This is something where we've got to use our brain power, the fire power that we have in our manufacturing sector and obviously we've got to have leadership at every level that recognizes the problem for what it is and is willing to take the necessary steps to defeat it. But I get your point and I think that we have to learn lessons from those who have had experience with this before that we did.
Lori Walsh: You mentioned... and last question because I know you have to go, but you mentioned supply chains and really what do we do differently going forward and then you mentioned the U.S. military and I'm wondering, do we need to be thinking about our healthcare infrastructure from a funding perspective in similar ways that we think about military readiness, that maybe we did not before?
Senator Thune: I think you do, Lori, and the thing that strikes me about this whole experience that we've had is how easy it would be to introduce a biological weapon into a country and just see the kind of havoc that it wrecks. This is organic, we believe at least, organic and it kind of swept the globe and everybody's experiencing it, but I think that what this has taught us is that this sort of an agent introduced into a population could do enormous damage and that it needs to be in our entire infrastructure and how we prepare and fight threats that we face around the world. This needs to be part of that calculation and I think that, yes the military has got to be a part of that. We've got to do things strategically about the threat matrix that goes just beyond nuclear weapons and China and Iran, but all the other types of threats out there that could endanger the American people and we have to in a very systematic way I think gear up all our assets and resources to make sure that we're preparing for these types of worst case scenarios.
Hopefully there are a lot of lessons learned from this. Clearly, I think mistakes have been made, but hopefully we will get better and as the data continues to inform the decision making, we'll make good decisions going forward in a way hopefully that will get this thing slowed down, stopped, and eventually defeated, but I think there are things that we can be doing that could make that happen more quickly.
Lori Walsh: U.S. Senator John Thune, we appreciate your time and I hope you feel 100 percent better soon.
Senator Thune: Hey, thanks Lori, you too. Stay healthy. Good to be with you.
Lori Walsh: Thanks.