Mask im not blaming them im just saying what happens theyre playing with the mask, so the mask is over, and theyre touching it. And then theyre touching the plate. Thats cant be good face masks, these face masks, are the most important powerful Public Health tool we have and i will continue to appeal for all americans, all individuals in our country, to embrace these Face Coverings i have said it, if we did it for 6, 8, 10, 12 weeks, we would bring this pandemic under control. These actually, we have Clear Scientific evidence they work. And they are our best defense. I might even go so far as to say that this face mask is more guaranteed to protect me against covid than when i take a covid vaccine. That is a strong endorsement, again, unnamed waiters versus the head of the cdc. And just last hour, hhs spokesman Michael Caputo announced he will be taking a leave of absence caputos departure follow s his promotion of a dangerous and baseless Conspiracy Theory over the weekend accusing cdc officials of sabotaging the countrys recovery from this pandemic in order to help get joe biden elected. Lets begin right there with the coronavirus. Here is more from that abc news town hall where the president struggled to defend his own response if you believe its the president s responsibility to protect america, why would you downplay a pandemic that is known to disproportionately harm lowincome families and minority communities . Yeah. Well, i didnt downplay it i actually in many ways i upplayed it in terms of action with me now from washington is Nbc News National Political reporter monica alba monica, the president was all over the place last night, and he really struggled to answer those questions from undecided voters how is the white house trying to do cleanup today well, theyre arguing, katy, that the president is trying to project this optimism that has been their defense for why he told bob woodward quite plainly that he always intended to downplay the virus, which is they say, not to create panic. They didnt want to send the country spiraling, worried six months ago, but just there, you had the president making this really surprising comment about how he has been upplaying the virus, if anything thats really just not true. We haveso many examples, so much tape we could roll of where he was doing exactly that. But it strikes me this is a president who isnt changing his strategy for the same reason he continues to make false claims about the pandemic hes extremely defensive, very dug in, and as you know so well, hes not somebody who is going to jump to apologies or en enumerate regrets. He was asked if there was anything he would kanj about the last six months and he said no, hes very pleased with his own administrations handling of the health crisis. On the issue of face masks there with the president indicating some people arent happy, he has made this claim all the time he references a group of people that then he really cant back up beyond that one example he gave with waiters. White House Press SecretaryKayleigh Mcenany just took questions on this and said that the president has always defended wearing a Face Covering that is simply not true. And the first few months of this pandemic, he resists it. He was urged by his own Public Health experts to set an example, to please wear a mask, and it took month for it to happen if you look to what he does every day on the campaign trail, hes not wearing mask. Hes even gathering hundreds, sometimes thousands of people together, now even on occasion indoors, katy, and those people are also not Wearing Masks following his example. He questions masks effectiveness last night on national television, the words came out of his mouth. We just heard it it is always remarkable when the white house tries to deny what we have seen and heard with our own eyes and ears. Monica, the whole evening was really interesting because the president so often avoids talking to regular voters on camera, especially undecided voters the only town hall i remember from the campaign other than the debates in 2016 was one town hall in New Hampshire with mostly friendly voters, but even there, he was struggling same thing last night. I want to play one other moment where he was talking about how the virus, again, as he says, would just go away it is going to disappear. Its going to disappear. It would go away without the vaccine, george, but its going to go away a lot faster with it. It would go away without the vaccine . Sure, over a period of time and many deaths and youre develop as going and that will happen that will all happen presumably, he didnt mean herd mentality he meant herd immunity does the white house have a response to that today yes, katy a very controversial experiment to assume that a large, maybe 60 to 80 of the population would have to become infected with coronavirus in order to achieve that herd immunity the white house is saying thats a strategy that has never been considered officially by the Coronavirus Task force, but we should point out that dr. Scott atlas, a newly appointed member to this group, who has been advising the president in a health capacity, was somebody who suggested this at some point. So thats likely why its rocketing around in the president s mind and hes throwing that out there as a possibility, but certainly nobody at the white house today, again, Kayleigh Mcenany was asked about this specifically, endorsing that or supporting it. You also had chief of staff mark meadows saying were hopeful for a vaccine and therapeutics thats how we want to combat the virus. Certainly not something where millions have to die in order to get infected and reach that level. Thats not something the white house is embracing even though you had the president of the United States suggesting it as a possibility. And again, on that issue of vaccines, the president making promises that will be hard to see if he can keep, that a vaccine could be developed in the next month or so his own Health Officials that you played there earlier at the top of your show saying a likely timeline is more early 2021. Once they have fda approval, theyll be able to fast track it and mobilize it as quickly as 24 hours once it does get on the road that seems far more likely for the end of the year, not before the election, though the president does continue to make that promise, putting that quite starkly into political terms monica alba, thank you so much and joining me now is dr. Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins center for health security. Doctor, i know we want to talk about the vaccine and all of the logistics behind getting it out there, but first, i do want you to take your chance to respond to what the president was saying last night about masks and about herd he said mentality, but again, herd immunity, presumably, is what he meant we know that we have data now that masks are preventing people who dont know theyre infected from spreading it. This has become a major way we get back to some semblance of normalcy if people wear Face Coverings theyre less likely to spread it this is something we need to be embracing and using and advocating, and the president needs to set an example. The idea we can get to herd immunity and not suffer horrible consequences in terms of deaths, disability, and hospitals being overrun is crazy to me because this isnt a disease that only causes mild illness. It clearly can put hospitals into crisis. Its killed hundreds of thousands of a its going to kill hundreds of thousands of americans. This isnt something we want to get herd immunity through natural infection. We want to get herd immunity through a vaccine. And those types of strategies cant be pursued without major amounts of death we heard from dr. Redfield about a vaccine, and he was saying it wont be until the second or Third Quarter of 2021, where we as a country can start to get back to normal. Lets put the vaccine on the most hopeful expedited timeline. Say there is one that gets approved in the next month what is the or maybe if you want to be more realistic, at the end of the year, but what is the first step logistically to start getting americans vaccinated who would be first and i guess just take it away. Explain it to us what will happen is youll have Priority Groups set so the acip, which is part of the cdc, as well as the National Academies of medicine will work on who is the Priority Group thats likely to be Health Care Workers and highrisk individuals. You may see the vaccine trickle out and go to those populations, maybe in the best case scenario, before the end of 2020 when you think about vaccinating the entire country, and remember, this is two doses that has this very complicated cold chain for many of the vaccines where you have to keep the virus very cold. Thats going to be well into 2021 before we get enough people vaccinated to say we have crossed to herd immunity its going to be an enormous logistical challenge its really important we prepare for this, thinking about where people are going to get vaccinated how we keep track of people who need their second dose all of that is enormous, and its something that we have to expect theyre going to be hiccups, problems. We saw that in 2009 h1n1 when supply and demand were not necessarily matched. I had got vaccinated after the peak had occurred in my area this is going to be very, very challenging. I think we can do it, but its going to take a lot of coordination hiccups might seem hopeful given our track record so far on this virus we never got a National Contact tracing system in place. Testing is still a problem across this country. Given that we havent got a handle on either of those two things, are we going to be prepared to roll out two to three different vaccines potentially that need two to three or one to two doses for each person . How do you identify who is most at risk . How are we even going to start to figure this out its going to be very challenging. What we have to do is start looking at how much vaccine we think were going to get how many are going to be in each batch, and then trying to decide among the Health Care Workers which Health Care Workers should get it first should it be places that are hot spots, high risk individuals in the Health Care Worker arena this is going to be something thats going to take a lot of time and needs a lot of transparency we have to get the public to trust this process, and the track report, as you said, has not been very good with any National Strategy with anything related to kooifrcovid19, but are doubts we are using mckesson, which gives me confidence, but we need strong leadership and a lot of transparency and a lot of public discussion about how were going to do this and expect this isnt going to be the easiest or the smoothest type of thing that we have seen. We also have a long way to go to build back trust among the American Public. Just an nbc News Survey Monkey poll before you know, will you and your family get a covid19 vaccine when it becomes widely available. Yes, 39 no, 23 . Not sure, 36 . Those numbers are not good if you want to inoculate the entire population and get us back to normal for now, dr. Adalja, thank you for joining us i know well be discussing this topic more and more as we get farther along in this process. But thank you for now. And we are waiting to hear from Vice President joe biden who is scheduled to take the podium shortly this afternoon, he received a briefing from Public Health advisers his remarks are expected to focus on Vaccine Development and he will likely address how his administration, if he were to win, would manage production and distribution of an effective vaccine. Joining me now by phone from wilmington, delaware, is nbc news correspondent mike memoli i imagine the campaign is acknowledging what a tough position any administration will be in once this is developed and started to roll and the rollout begins especially when a number of people in this country do not trust it how is the campaign discussing tackling that and Building Back the trust they need to protect the American Public . Really at the heart of what the formal Vice President is going to be speaking about here. Also, the contrast between President Trump and the former Vice President as it relates to this issue on the vaccine. The president clearly bullish, clearly trying to build expectations that there could be a vaccine available, as he puts it, by the magical date of election day, but as part of this days events, the former Vice President got a briefing from his own team of medical experts. One of them, dr. David kessler, the former fda commissioner, said that even if were lucky that a vaccine is given a green light, its still not something thats going to be distributed likely between now and january, that this is realistically something that the public can expect for later on. This has also been a contrast with the Trump Campaign in that they have been accusing the former Vice President of engaging in almost antivaxer type language because hes been trying to be more measured in his tone with the country about whether we should be expecting a vaccine sooner rather than later. The Biden Campaign really pushing back on this forcefully, and what we should expect to hear from biden in his remarks here is illustrating what he says are the obligations on the administration to answer several key questions to the country in order to give the country confidence that a vaccine is something that is being given and being judged by the science and not the politics they want to know what the criteria will be for insuring that the vaccine meets all of the scientific standards for safety they want to know kind of independent validation what there will be on the decision to green light a vaccine, and of course, whether or not that vaccine is going to be free and available to the public, katy. Mike memoli, mike, thank you very much. Were going to look forward to that and go there once it begins if you follow politics, you know the name peter strzok the former fbi agent is one of the president s goto targets. Hes going to join me live as a Senate Committee seeks to breathe new life into an investigation into spying on the Trump Campaign investigator the investigators plus, the latest from california which now has the worst air quality in the world, and as wildfires rage across the west, americans are returning home to find theres nothing left first up, though, Hurricane Sally has made landfall in alabama as a category 2 storm. She is still crawling at 2 miles an hour, and the storm is creating the conditions for lifethreatening floods and a lot of high and heavy winds. Our reporters are there. Stay with us im greg, im 68 years old. I do motivational speaking in addition to the substitute teaching. I honestly feel that thats my calling to give back to younger people. I think most adults will start realizing that they dont recall things as quickly as they used to or they dont remember things as vividly as they once did. Ive been taking prevagen for about three years now. 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Breaking news from the gulf coast, which is getting lashed by a destrukctive slowmoving hurricane. Sally is moving across alabama and florida at 2 Miles Per Hour. The storm could dump as much as three feet of rain and lead to catastrophic flooding and lifethreatening conditions, according to the National Hurricane center the winds are a problem as well, sustained winds of up to 80 Miles Per Hour have uprooted trees and blown through buildings. Joining me now, today show cohost al roker, from alabama, mooe chris jansing, and sam brock sam, were going to begin with you and cross our fingers your signal holds i see youre taking some hits. What can you tell us about what youre experiencing right now in florida . Yeah, katy, it was brutal this morning, but for the people of pensacola right now, it is literally conditions, on my left side is a reminder of what were looking at the wind surges, this entire parking lot was covered. You can still see several feet of water here. Some cars that were swallowed up earlier, but then, as you start to move away, you c