I am convinced of that. Welcome to our viewers all around the world and in the United States. It is thursday, april 23rd. The virus is the virus. Thats what dr. Fauci and sanjay gupta tells us. Coronavirus kills. Thats what the numbers tragically tell us. Factbased Public Health saves lives. Thats what history tells us. Politics doesnt change this. Politics cant change this. But there is new reporting this morning that the president is trying. The doctor in charge of the federal governments search for a vaccine says he was forced out of his job for questioning the use of hydroxychloroquine. That was the drug that the president has been hyping for weeks. Dr. Rick wright claims hes a victim of political retaliation and hes filing a whistleblower complaint. He says science, not politics or cronyism, has to lead the way. Now when asked about it, President Trump insisted he doesnt know who dr. Bright is. Were going to speak to his former boss in a moment who says she owes it to the country to speak out on his behalf. The president tried to get the director of the cdc to walk back his quote. Dr. Redfield said he was accurately quoted and moments later, dr. Fauci contradicted the president about pretty much the same thing. May not even well have coronavirus in the fall. I am convinced of that. So the latest models suggest that many states should wait to reopen until june. That includes georgia. The governor there does not want to wait. Ella lou gyms, hair salons, spas, tattoo parlors and more to reopen tomorrow. President trump claims he disagrees with governor brian kemps decision to do this so early. The president and Vice President called Governor Kemp this week to support and praise his decision to reopen. Why is the president now saying the opposite . Well get into that reporting. A new study on the effectiveness of the drug hi hydroxychloroqui hydroxychloroquine. Its the biggest study yet and the results are in. Why are researchers not showing it to the public days after they promised . We have a lot of new developments. Lets begin with joe jons live at the white house. Whats the latest there, joe. Reporter good morning, alisyn. The significance is that its apparently the latest example of the Trump Administration disregarding science and the experts. The Trump Administration getting rid of a veteran point man on vaccines. He says its because he wouldnt buy into an unproven treatment that, by the way, the president until recently has been pushing hard. While scientists race to find a coronavirus vaccine, one of the nations top experts say he was abruptly ousted from his position. He led the department of health and Human Services department. He was reassigned to a narrower position at the National Institutes of health tuesday. The reason, bright says in a statement was in response to my is insistence that the government invest the billions of dollars allocated by congress to address the covid19 pandemic into safe and scientifically vetted solutions and not in drugs, vaccines and other technologies that lack scientific merit. Adding, to combat this deadly virus, science, not politics or cronyism, has to lead the way. He claims his opposition to hydroxychloroquine contributed to his demotion. The drug typically used for malaria, lupus and Rheumatoid Arthritis has been heavily promoted by President Trump as a coronavirus treatment dee sight evidence that it helps at all. Guy says he was pushed out of a job. Maybe he was, maybe he wasnt. I have to hear the other side. I dont know who he is. This major shakeup as President Trump makes the Health Crisis political, dismissing the science from researchers. Trump had the cdc director try to clarify his warning of possible difficulties caused if a second coronavirus wave hits during flu season. I think its really important to emphasize what i didnt say. I didnt say that this was going to be worse. I said it was going to be more difficult and potentially complicated because well have flu and coronavirus circulated at the same time. Even after dr. Redfield reiterated he expects the virus later this year, the president made this bold prediction about the diseases potential resurgen resurgence. It wont be coming back in the form that it was. It will be coming back in smaller doses that we can contain. Experts leading efforts against the coronavirus are less optimistic. I think we are assured that the cdc what we are going to need in the fall so that we can stay in containment if potentially the virus comes back. We will have coronavirus in the fall. I am convinced of that. Bright said he will file a complaint with the Inspector General for the department of health and Human Services and ask the i. G. To investigate. By the way, senator chuck grassl grassley, a powerful republican wrote a letter earlier to the white house telling the president not to interfere with the work of i. G. John and alalisyn, back to you. Joe jons, thank you very much. Maggie haberman is here. A White House Correspondent for the New York Times who broke the story about dr. Rick bright. Also with us, former assistant secretary for the health and Human Services department and dr. Brights former boss. Dr. Nicole leury. Maggie, i want to start with you. To remind people of who he is. He did oversee barta, the office overseeing vaccine research. He was in that office since 2016. He said the transfer was over his skepticism of hydroxychloroqui hydroxychloroquine. You broke the story. Whats going on behind the scenes here and whats the white house response . Sure. So, john, its interesting. The white house actually said extremely little when i spoke to the the white house was saying that they didnt know a lot of what was going on here and were looking at hhs. At hhs officials have been saying on background, things that contradict dr. Brights claim, not specifically why he was transferred. They dont disagree he was transferred. Their argument is he was transferred because he was difficult to work with or had confrontational management style. This had been in the works for months and abruptly came to a head now. That could be true. If there is an i. G. Investigation, i think that will all be looked at. I think, john, the timing is going to raise a lot of questions. Getting rid of somebody like dr. Bright in the middle of a pandemic, while youre still trying to find a therapeutic thats effective and a vaccine beyond that. Well know more in the coming days and it could be more complicated than the situation dr. Bright is complaining about or describing. But its remarkable that dr. Bright, again, is on the record saying all of this. We have not heard the same from hhs so far. Great point. He didnt do this off the record of the he used his name. Hes being as direct as he possibly can. Maggie, you pointed out that is often unusual for people in the administration. What he says, doctor is that this is about hydroxychloroquine. He wasnt willing to, you know, be as bullish and as fund it as much as the president wanted. He wanted to follow science. Ill read piece 16. Part of his statement. He says specifically and contemporaco contrary, i limited the use of the hydroxychloroquine which clearly lacks scientific merit. Thats why he says he lost his job and was transferred. But you hired dr. Bright years a ago. Tell us about him and his tenure there. Dr. Bright is a strong scientist. Hes a visionary leader. Hes able to make decisions. He gets things done. He believes and he stands on strong science. I think this was about something larger than hydroxychloroquine. I think it is really about listening to scientific opinions, scientific perspectives and standing up for strong science. Its interesting you say that. Obviously, this happened during the same time period where we saw the president on stage, more or less forcing dr. Redfield to try to walk back a statement he made that dealing with coronavirus in the fall could be more difficult. He did. He said he was accurately quoted. Maggie, the thing is, the virus doesnt care. The virus doesnt care what the president thinks about hydroxychloroquine. The virus only cares whether it works or doesnt. The virus doesnt care whether the president thinks its coming back in the fall. The virus is going to come back in the fall on its own accord. It just seems that we see ex examples of the president trying to push around science, essentially. I think thats right. Look, to the Doctors Point a second ago, our understanding is that this is part of a larger series of complaints. The specific incident that dr. Bright was talking about was related to the hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine and whether fda standards were going to be changed too much to make it up safe to prescribe broadly before it was tested on coronavirus cases which is not what its intended for obviously. But whether this is a pattern and culture created throughout the last couple of years. To your point, the president has a history of trying to will things into reality. A former adviser described it to me as his way of magical thinking. That was their term, not mine. Basically trying to make this reality come into existence. Hes done it with small protest that is cropped up around the country where hes trying to make them into something bigger and so far hasnt been successful. Hes not going to be able to make an antimalarial drug for covid just by talking about it. Is there more research to do . Im sure thats true. Were new into this. His concern as he put it, is that he wanted a certain set of criteria to be followed. Not to the idea he objected to in the first place. He objected to the speed in which it was being done and the regulations and standards put in place. Maggie, Something Else about your reporting and got my attention from dr. Brights statement. At least twice he mentions, quote, political connections to hydroxychloroquine. Ill read one portion. He said i will request that the Inspector General of hhs of the department of health and Human Services to Fund Companies with political connections as well as efforts that lack scientific merit. What are the political connections hes talking about . Hes not being specific in that statement. If i had to guess, it certainly sound as if hes talking about something broader than this incident. It relates in part to the fact there was an effort by the president to create a platform. It ultimately did go ahead in some fashion through the tech firm oracle where there are some influential political people who support the president or have worked with the president before, that this was coming at their suggestion. Again, i dont want to speak beyond what i actually know. We dont know what the details of those are. I assume thats what hes talking about. Dr. Lurie, i think what america should care about is whether or not this action makes them more or less safe. What is the impact of midpandemic, maybe even at the beginning of a pandemic, removing someone like dr. Bright from the job that he was doing . Well, first of all, i think that you need to let him execute what was a very good strategy to develop vaccines and to develop therapeutic. Once you have them, the public needs confidence that they were developed appropriately and that theyre safe. When this is going on, its hard for the public to have confidence. Thirdly, we can only get there with an appropriate investment of funds. The funds given to us are taxpayer money, not somebodys piggy bank to do what they want to with the projects. They need to be scientifically vetted before they go forward so you know at the end of the day you end up with something thats going to be effective or can do its job for the american people. Dr. Lurie, when someone speaks out against the administration and leaves in this sort of abrupt fashion, often we see their reputation besmirched somehow. We see people at hhs around dr. Bright start to go say this isnt the first time that he clashed with colleagues. So because you know him, because you hired him, are you surprised that hes willing to risk his career and reputation to do this . To make this statement . You know, the last question i asked dr. Bright before i hired him is whether he thought that he was tough enough to resist political pressure to use taxpayer money for things he thought were inappropriate, whether they came from a senator or a lobbyist, whether they came from somewhere else. And he said yes, he was. So this doesnt surprise me at all. Hes a person of incredibly high integrity. Dr. Lurie, that is really helpful to get your personal take on who this man is and maggie, thank you so much for all of your reporting as always. Be sure to join Anderson Cooper and dr. Sanjay gupta tonight for a global town hall. Their guests will include the fda commissioner, new yorks governor and singer songwriter alicia keys will debut her song for the heroes of the pandemic. Join us for facts and fears tonight. Only on cnn tonight. We are learning new details about the First American to die of coronavirus. This was in early february. Much earlier than we had previously known. Well tell you about her and what some states are now doing to figure out when their first cases were. Its totally normal to have constipation with belly pain, straining, and bloating, again and again. No way. More exercise. More water. And more fiber is the only way to manage it. Is it . Maybe you think. Its occasional constipation. Maybe its not. It could be a chronic medical condition called ibsc, and time to say yesss to linzess. Linzess works differently than laxatives. It helps relieve belly pain and lets you have more frequent and complete bowel movements. Do not give linzess to children less than six and it should not be given to children six to less than 18, it may harm them. Do not take linzess if you have a bowel blockage. Get immediate help if you develop unusual or severe stomach pain, especially with bloody or black stools. The most common side effect is diarrhea, sometimes severe. If its severe, stop taking linzess and call your doctor right away. Other side effects include gas, stomach area pain, and swelling. Change your thinking to ibsc. If your constipation and belly pain keeps coming back, tell your doctor and say yesss to linzess. Thweve never seen it look quite like this, tell your doctor but theres no mistaking it. And its our job to protect it. Because the best people to fight for our communities are those within them. So, if youve just bought a volkswagen or were thinking of buying sometime soon, were here to help with the Community Driven promise. We have new details about the death of a california woman in early february. Now believed to be the first coronavirus fatality in the u. S. This is much earlier than what researchers had previously known. Cnns dan simon is live in San Francisco with the latest. What have we learned about her, dan . Reporter hi, alisyn. This further highlights how much the world has really changed in the last couple of months and how much we now know about the virus. Were talking about 57yearold patricia dowd. When she died suddenly on february 6th, her family just assumed that she had a heart attack. But now they know the truth, that she did in fact have the virus. They are shocked according to dowds brother, who spoke with cnn. This is somebody who is active, did not smoke, was seemingly healthy. No underlying conditions. But according to the l. A. Times, she had some flulike conditions in january. Then she seemed to recover. She was working from home and actually taking calls from colleagues the morning she died. Now, her brother says she was a frequent world traveler because of her job. She worked for a Semi Conductor company. He doesnt know exactly where she traveled in the days and weeks lead to go her death. Santa clara authorities believe she got the virus from Community Spread. The bottom line here what her case shows and what weve been reporting is that the virus had been in the country, specifically in Santa Clara County longer than anybody previously thought. John and alisyn. Really interesting, dan. Thank you very much. So some states are retracing their coronavirus time lines after the discovery of that first death, which was february 6th. Joining us now to talk about this and more, we have dr. Colleen craft, the associate chief medical officer at emery hospital and a senior scholar at johns hopkins. Dr. Kraft, some states want to retrace their time lines. How will they do that . How are they going to figure out if people who passed away in february actually died of coronavirus but we just dont know that . Yeah. Many of us rounding in the hospital, especially during february, are going back through our paces and look to go see if there were things that sin droem i cannily looked like coronavirus, like covid19. Some of this will have to be a clinical suspicion. As i said yesterday, we had an individual that we strongly suspected did have severe covid in february. But in testing her serologies 2 1 2 months later, they were negative. It doesnt show that she had been exposed to covid19. But indeed, we do think there probably were people in our hospital during that time. What does it mean for us now . How does it change our understanding of this virus and the pandemic that it was here earlier and killing earlier than we thought . I think that one of the things that it tells us is that we you know, we have a lot of Community Transmission that was really unknown. Our efforts in the beginning to sort of contain and mitigate, it was definitely out of the bag at that point. So dr. Watson, that leads us to where we are now, right . Were trying to retroactively, basically trace the first cases at the same time that i know youre involved with and now new yorks governor and new jersey and connecticut, moving forward Contact Tracing. Tell us what this is going to look like. Now that Governor Cuomo announced theyre going to engage in this ambitious future Con