 recording this session, which will be shared as a resource primarily in the campus community, but just so you know. And lastly, we have reserved time in the agenda for questions for Congressman Waxman. The question should be submitted view of the Q&A window near the bottom of your screen. Please note the questions submitted via the Q&A may be visible to others as well. In Mark Twain's often quoted line history doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes. We are reminded that while we often are captives of our time and the moments we live in, there's a fool's folly to declare no interest or no need to know what came before. Scientists, artists, craftswomen, scholars of all disciplines understand the necessity of building upon the lessons of the past, be they successes and or failures, and even some politicians understand this too. Tonight we're delighted to welcome Henry Waxman. Congressman Waxman served for 40 years in the House of Representatives, chairing some of the most powerful committees, including oversight, waste, fraud, and abuse, and leaving a legacy that among others included spearheading legislation that took on the tobacco lobby, championing the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990, being a primary architect of the Affordable Care Act, and of course why we're here tonight, sponsoring the Ryan White Cares Act, from whose lens, at a distance, we can better understand the role of government in public health outbreaks, including what approaches for better or worse are being repeated, which are rhyming, and perhaps considering where we might go from here. And joining Congressman Waxman in conversation, as Betsy mentioned, is Edward Fitzpatrick from the Boston Globe, and he will serve as tonight's interlocutor. So please welcome Henry and Ed. Thank you for inviting us, and this ought to be a great conversation. We'll have some time at the end for Q&A from the people tuning in tonight. And just to set the stage, I wanted to begin by just asking the Congressman if he could outline, for those not familiar, the role you played, the important role you played in addressing the AIDS epidemic, and if you could identify some of the lessons that could be drawn from that experience, as we face the coronavirus pandemic today. In 1981, there was a disease that was a particular cancer, very rare cancer, and it was affecting gay men. The center for disease control was keeping track of it, and it was multiplying geometrically. They didn't know what it was, and they were very worried about it. They said that there was some kind of acquired immune response from this disease, and that it was fatal. We heard about it. We didn't know what to make of it either, but I called the first hearing on this issue at the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Service Center, and we heard from gay men who were getting the disease. We heard from some of the medical people at UCLA who were treating patients with this disease. It was all very disturbing, and that was the very first time we heard of what later became AIDS, the acquired immune deficiency syndrome. We held a number of hearings in Washington. We tried to get as much information as we could, but the victims of this disease were stigmatized, rather than what we see now with COBRA, where people are so upset at the death of so many people. 200,000 now is our mark in the United States. There's a great deal of sympathy for them and their families, but when it came to AIDS, there was very little sympathy. People were afraid that they were going to catch the disease. They realized that it was gay men, and then HIV was also affecting drug users, IV drug users, and a little known fact was that patients in the United States were coming down with AIDS. No one could understand why that was the case, but those were the three groups that were getting the AIDS disease. As opposed to COVID, where it spreads very rapidly to anybody. We didn't know if that was going to be the case with AIDS. We were worried about it, and there were people who stirred the pot about it because they said, oh, these are gay men. We shouldn't worry about them. It's not going to affect others. And in fact, President Reagan wouldn't even say the word AIDS until the end of his term when Elizabeth Taylor went to see him and said, you've got to talk about this disease. You can't ignore it. You got to at least talk about it. And she went through a list of their friends from the motion picture industry that had died from AIDS, and then he made some mention of it after that. Well, we got involved because of that, and I wanted to introduce legislation right away to provide more money for research. But we couldn't get support for that. People didn't want to spend money on this disease. Let's not do it for this disease. Let's do it for any disease that happens to a lot of people and multiplies as rapidly as this disease is multiplying. We didn't talk about AIDS. So it was the ability for the health services in the United States to do something about a disease that suddenly appears. And then we got through. We tried to work on the legislation that became the Riot White Aids Act, and we didn't get that through until 1990. Now, realize 1981, we started hearing about the first cases. We passed a bill before 1990, but it was vetoed by Senator Jesse Helms, very, very right-wing senator from North Carolina. And he said, if you talk about this disease, you're only going to be encouraging men to engage in gay sex, and he didn't want to have anything to do with it. The act that ended up being passed was the Ryan White Care Act. Who was Ryan White? And how was the bill after him key to winning approval of that legislation? Ryan White was a teenage boy from Indiana who came down with AIDS, and he seemed to come down with this disease because of some surgical procedure that left him with the infection from HIV and AIDS. And there was a lot of sympathy because at first people didn't want to let him go to school. But the scientists were saying, he's not going to pass on this disease by simply being with other people. The disease was transmitted through sex or sharing needles and not by simply being in a classroom. So there was a lot of sympathy for Ryan White and what he was going through, and when we finally passed the bill, we had a senator from Indiana that we were trying to impress with Dan Coates, who just finished his term as the intelligence czar. I don't know the precise name for it. But people were worried about Dan Coates, but they thought if he named it after Ryan White, it would be very hard for him to vote against the bill. That wasn't my idea. It was Senator Hatch and other people in the Senate. So we named it the Ryan White AIDS Act. And the gay men who had the disease, which certainly were far more than Ryan White, wanted that done because Ryan White and his mother were working so actively to inform and educate the public about this disease. And Ryan White, by that time, had passed away from AIDS. I got a sense of the battle at that time from a political magazine article by Timothy Westmoreland who described the subcommittee proceedings that were going on as a rollercoaster from indifference to panic to indifference again. He said one day there would be no members of the AIDS hearing at all and just the chairman presiding. The next day there were so many cameras and networks had to band together to have a pool reporter one day. They'd be talking about one white blood cells. The next day Elizabeth Taylor was testifying. C. Everett Coop was saying things. And Westmoreland's point was that throughout the whole course of this process, you kept focused asking over and over what did the public health people say should be done next? So in what ways do we find ourselves in a similar situation with COVID-19? And are we asking that question? What did the public health people say should be done next? Well, we asked that over and over again dealing with AIDS. AIDS was the disease, but HIV we found out was a preliminary position that allowed AIDS to come in. And so the HIV and AIDS became closely tied together. There was a lot of concern about what was happening, but people were looking at it either terrified that they were going to get AIDS. There was one congressman named Dan Burton who went to the House barbershop with his own scissors and hairbrush because he didn't want to be using the one that the barber had. There were people acting very, very strange. There were those who were being telling interviewers that this is a disease that you could just catch by being in the same room. So that of course terrified people. But a lot of mistruths were being spread about the disease itself and people were very frightened. We had leadership from the health people in the Reagan administration, both the career people and his appointees. President Reagan wouldn't talk about the disease and the health people were restricted in what they could say by the political people in the administration. So I would ask them when they testified, in your medical judgment, because it was their personal medical judgment that I wanted, do you think we ought to do this or do you think we ought to do that? And then they were able to give us the testimony that the administration didn't want them to give. But the public paid a lot of attention when there was a suggestion that they are at risk. Then when there was not any suggestion that they were at risk, people didn't want to hear about it because it's only gay men and they didn't care about them. So there was a roller coaster ride about the attention that was being given to this epidemic. And I remember being told by one of the Sunday news shows, we want you on Sunday to talk about AIDS and HIV, but we only want you on it if it turns out that the actor, the famous actor whose name escapes me, Rock Hudson. If it turns out only if Rock Hudson has AIDS, at that point we didn't know. And which showed the way the press thought of the importance of the issue. Here were all these people dying from this disease, but they didn't want to pay attention to it unless Rock Hudson, the celebrity, had AIDS and was going to be killed by the disease which he eventually was. So then they had me on, but it just showed the fickleness of how this disease was treated by the press. So is there a lesson today can be drawn about that intersection of science and politics? Because it seems like you're saying a clash then and do you see it clashing with COVID? Because you know just today we had Senator Rand Paul in a hearing clashing with Dr. Anthony Fauci and and recently President Trump had contradicted Dr. Redfield, the director of the CDC, regarding the importance of wearing face masks and the timing of the vaccine. Well President Trump is looking at this issue from the perspective of his own self-interest in getting reelected and he didn't want to take responsibility to deal with the COVID-19. He said the state should deal with it and it's not a problem and it's going to go away. He made statements that were just not true and then when statements came out from the public health people, including people in this administration, his own administration, he wanted to reject those statements and say that they weren't true. Fake news is what he would constantly say when he didn't like a story that was coming out. But it's ironic that Tony Fauci, I first met during the AIDS epidemic and he testified strictly on public health as did the people in the Reagan administration. But President Trump doesn't want to hear from the public health people because they will say things that are different than the fantasy world that President Trump is making up in order to protect his political interests in failing to deal with this disease and the COVID-19 disease and trying to stop it spread in the United States. Yeah as you know the United States coronavirus death toll just surpassed the 200,000 mark in there of 6.8 million people known to have it in the United States more than in any other country. In your view could the government have done more to limit those numbers and what if anything should we be doing going forward that we're not doing now? Of course the government could have done a lot more. The president didn't want to hear what was happening. I said it's all going to go away but the scientists were telling us people ought to put on masks and the scientists were telling us that we ought to keep our distance. We didn't know and we don't know today if we're going to get COVID-19 from somebody who has COVID-19 or as a carrier for COVID the virus COVID-19 and we see and they see no outward signs that they have this disease. They're people who could look perfectly normal but be a carrier for the disease. So we should have given more attention to this we should have listened to them and followed through with what they had to say but if you remember President Trump he didn't want to talk about wearing masks because that would that would look bad for him and he didn't want to wear a mask himself and he didn't want people to think that they were going to get this disease because it was going away and in time for his reelection so he just ignored the facts and even today when 200,000 200,000 people have died he said oh that was shows this great success of our efforts from this administration. He just says whatever comes into his brain and it has nothing to do with what reality is happening. Back in 1990 the Ryan White Care Act passed 90s ended up passing 95 to 4 with bipartisan support but did we have more bipartisan support to address AIDS then than we do with coronavirus now or do you see bipartisan support now? Well I think we have bipartisan support to deal with the COVID-19 epidemic. People have been very concerned about this disease. It is not stigmatized the way AIDS was stigmatized. There's not a fear of it although people are frightened if they get it and are frightened for their family and friends who might get it but it's not being treated the way AIDS was treated and if anything we couldn't get money for AIDS research and AIDS efforts. Now the government is throwing money at this COVID because they want to get a cure for it and so there's no lack of money that's going into dealing with it. There's just a lack of following through with strategies that would stop the transmission of this disease by getting people to be tested. We didn't have the tests available. We still don't have tests available in lots of parts of the country. People didn't know if they were infected. They couldn't take steps to stop the infection of others and they didn't follow the public health advisers who were saying wear masks. In fact the idea of wearing a mask became a partisan issue. It's hard to believe but Republicans would not wear masks because they said this is a fake disease. It's not a real issue and people want them to wear masks because they want to hurt President Trump's reelection. And Democrat was a positive scientist. Yeah it's not the politicians either. I was just reading about how the singer Anne Morrison described the British government as fascist trolleys because they want people to wear masks and follow other health protocols. How do you respond to that? The argument is seeing different countries from different people that this is big government telling us what to do and it's an issue of freedom. Well it's not an issue of freedom. We don't say you can drive as fast as you want. You can drive under the influence of alcohol. You can do whatever you want. There are rules and regulations by which people have to behave so that they're not hurting others. And to put on a mask is a small sacrifice to make to stop the transmission of this disease. I'm appalled at the attitude that so many people have which has been encouraged by President Trump in his statements that it's a fake disease and we shouldn't have to do all these things and freedom should mean that we don't have to do it if we don't want to. We don't tell people that I'm driving drunk and in a lot of other circumstances. You know part of our audience for college students and we've seen outbreaks of coronavirus on campuses in Rhode Island notably Providence College and the University of Rhode Island and the Providence Journal just today reported that the Bristol Police early this month broke up an off-campus house party filled with maskless Roger Williams students. So I wanted to ask what lessons can you impart? What's your message to today's college students? Well I think the most prudent thing to do is to listen to what's happening from the point of view of those who are scientists and following the disease and are making recommendations to stop the spread of this epidemic. There's another thing I just want to mention because a friend of mine said well if you're going to talk to students today they might not even realize how gay men were discriminated against so bitterly in the early 1980s and of course it went on after that for quite a while it's only recently that we've stopped the discrimination but when people got aids they lost their jobs because you could be fired from your job and there's no protection for discrimination based on having a disease that came later in legislation passed on the disability act. They had no confidentiality protection if somebody heard that they had aids it can be told from one person to another and this person could not only lose their job but be shunned by others if you lost your job in the 1980s you lost your health insurance because most people had health insurance through their jobs so when you lost your job you lost your health insurance so the stigma of having aids was very very strong and that was the biggest fear people had they wouldn't come forward to know whether they had HIV or AIDS because they were so vulnerable now I don't think people are so vulnerable to know that they have COVID-19 and they'd like to know but the administration in charge that the president's administration has not provided sufficient tests so people could get tested and know whether they were infected with the disease that's improved a lot but there was a long period of time many many months where you just couldn't get that test because we didn't have sufficient tests for to know who had the virus it may well transmit it. Yeah what it wasn't at that point wasn't it true that Reagan's attorney general uh Surgeon General Siebert Koop um really provided a powerful rebuttal to the the the line of argument that AIDS was a lifestyle issue like at that time I think the conservative line was that AIDS is uh that his Koop's point to to that argument was that AIDS is not a no-fault disease you know and he insisted otherwise he he helped turn the debate didn't he? He was very courageous he was appointed by President Reagan to be the Surgeon General because he had campaigned around the country against abortions he was very strongly against abortion and Reagan's people said well let's make him Surgeon General but he looked at the problem from a health point of view and said we've got to do what is required by the evidence that the the evidence of what we learn about this disease and he was shunned by the conservatives the right wingers there was an event where he was being honored and I was one of a few members of Congress that showed up the Republicans unmasked stayed away now it's it was clearly really quite political the way they treated Dr. Koop but he would he would have none of it he once said I'm going to treat this like a health matter and I'm going to speak truth to power and he um he went on and I think became a real hero another person who was a real hero in the AIDS epidemic was Dr. Fauci he had just become head of the institute at the NIH and was very much in charge of AIDS and he talked about the scientific evidence and said we shouldn't follow every rumor that people started speaking about this disease because a lot of them were just not true and it would panic people he said let's stick to the science and he was a hero then as he's a hero now in dealing with uh uh cobra this uh this cobra disease yeah what do you have any today between Dr. Fauci and Senator Rand Paul you know Rand Paul was uh criticizing him for being too auditory to Governor Cuomo and he was drawing a compare he was talking about hurting him being saying you know you know sweetens had drawn a comparison to the numbers in Sweden any thoughts on that exchange today that just happened the scientists tell us to get hurt immunity which would mean so many people would have to have the cobra disease that uh more people won't get it because it will um not be effective anymore to be transmitted uh but Dr. Fauci and other scientists said to get there you'd have to have so many people die from the disease and that we shouldn't allow that to happen we should try to stop the spread of the disease through common sense things of wearing masks um and said and Senator Paul who's an optometrist or ophthalmologist disagreed and you can see his political thinking he wanted to disagree with that theory because he he wanted to scare people about the the disease and um it was his point of view from a political point of view not from a conventional scientific consensus which he cared he didn't care they know about and certainly if he knew about it ignored since you're an author of the Affordable Care Act I wanted to get your thoughts on the Trump administration and state attorney generals uh asking the Supreme Court to strike down the entire act is unconstitutional um you know what are the chances that you see of it being overturned and what's at stake well the Affordable Care Act was a very important piece of legislation to have been passed uh and in dealing with this medical crisis because it's it's allowing people to health insurance even if they've had a disability even if they've had a pre-existing condition of having COVID and uh one of the essential parts of the uh of the of the Affordable Care Act is you could not be discriminated against in getting insurance because of a pre-existing condition well if the ACA the Affordable Care Act is struck by the Supreme Court which none of us thought would happen after it's already survived other threats in the court but if if uh if it is thrown out people could be denied health insurance they wouldn't have access to purchase health insurance they'd be discriminated against um it would it would be terrible to strike down the only access to health care coverage for uh people who needed desperately uh because of a pandemic that's going on now I wouldn't have thought that the Affordable Care Act was endangered because it was challenged in the court and Chief Justice Roberts said I'm not going to throw this out I'm not going to declare it unconstitutional he joined the four liberals deserted the four conservatives gave the fifth vote to keep it constitutional and his argument was it's constitutional because it's enforced through the tax code well one of the first things that the republicans did when Trump was elected and they had control of the house and the senate was to strike the tax provision that said that if you um if you don't get a health insurance you have to pay a tax penalty and they said no the penalty was struck the mandate to get insurance was struck therefore it couldn't be enforced and because Roberts relied on that uh the ACA was unconstitutional now if the court and that they had a district court take that point of view another district court that took a different point of view but that's what would have been the issue before the supreme court and they even scheduled an argument for the week after the presidential election before the supreme court now anybody looking at this would say uh they're they're not going to throw out the whole law based on such a technical point uh and none of us have been that concerned about this case they could say okay that it's not going to be enforced that way but nevertheless the law is intended to be enforced and people have to get a health insurance but not because there's a mandate in fact the mandate wouldn't be there but they'd want to get health insurance people by and large want to be covered they want to be protected well if we end up with a six to three republican conservative majority on the court even though the chief justice stopped the ACA from being struck down his vote won't make any difference there are enough conservative votes at that point to strike the law and they may well strike it then congress would have to re-enact it but we don't know what we would re-enact president trump and the republicans said we want to repeal the ACA and replace it but they have never come up with a replacement president trump said oh and of course everybody would be protected for pre-existing conditions but how does he say that if the law is no longer considered constitutional and that provision is no longer in the law it would be a very tough job to get another law passed but the court may say it's unconstitutional let congress try to fix it so we've got some questions in the chat but before we get to those just let me you mentioned in the supreme court I just want to get your thoughts about the president's plans he said he plans to name a new selection for the supreme court on saturday to fill the seat vacated by the death of uh justice ginsburg who do you expect them to choose is do you see any way for democrats to halt the confirmation what are your thoughts on that well it's we've we just look at it as the height of hypocrisy because when president obama had 11 months to go in his term he appointed a a a candidate for a justice on the supreme court to replace the death of the uh the justice that died and he said i'm doing this as the constitution says the president will appoint the senate will confirm or reject and the senate wouldn't even uh take up the nomination they said let's let the have let's let the people decide this issue when they elect the president in uh 2016 and then that new president will make the decision he just made that up there was nothing in the constitution that required him to wait and now that he he's faced with the opposite position that uh uh we have a new president that's going to be elected very very soon and uh the president has already been established to let the president make the selection of the of the vacancy for the court uh senator mcconnell said oh that's not a president we don't have to follow it our job is to uh is to move uh and decide on the nominee that the president places in front of us we can ignore everything that happened there are clips being shown on new shows of republican senators who said we have no right to fill this vacancy the next president should fill it when it came to the earlier vacancy but now they say we have a solemn obligation to fill the vacancy if the president sends a name to us now the president has said he's going to name a woman and there are two women on the circuit courts that are being considered uh both very very conservative fit with the with his philosophy and he wants to and he said he's going to make it an announcement and appoint one of them and he wants the senate to act on those on the appointment that he's going to make before the election well that's an extraordinarily short period of time there will not be adequate time to investigate this appointment it will just be rushed through by the republicans on a partisan basis because i don't see democrats voting for it there are two republican senators said they won't vote for it uh and uh but that's not enough to stop it the democrats don't have any bullets on this because the president appoints somebody and it's out for consideration uh then senator mcconnell is going to force the issue to be brought up the week before the election and with straight republican votes have that individual confirmed even though it was contrary to their actions and their opinions on how this should be treated uh and it will only exacerbate the very nasty partisan move that the congress and the white house has has been in failing to work together uh since trump became president even before but it got so much worse during this trump administration in working with the democrats so we've got some questions from our our viewers uh let me ask a few of those uh how long did acute miscommunication and political denial last at the beginning of of the aides epidemic compared to the beginning of covid oh she's she said all relative of course the advent of internet speeds are both in misinformation but also dissemination of public health guidance so how does that compare well we had information readily available with the aides epidemic uh there was at first extensively covered and people knew how it was transmitted there were some outliers who were saying that you could get it there was one woman said she got it from a dentist treatment but that just didn't hold up we held a hearing on it her testimony did not hold up but we knew very early and people generally accepted it whether they were democrats or republicans that this disease was affecting gay men and people who had blood transfusions or people who were sharing needles for uh uh illicit drugs and nobody else was really in harm's way so we knew the information about aides the only objection that we had were from right wingers like senator helms who said if you try to educate people about how not to transmit the disease uh it won't discourage gay men from engaging in gay sex and so we won't want to tell them how it's transmitted we'll keep that a secret from them as if they weren't going to engage in gay sex anyway or share needles or do anything else it was a ridiculous position but finally uh president reagan came around the republicans were coming around it wasn't a partisan issue we had strong republican support uh as well as democratic support who wanted to follow what the health people were telling us except for those few right wingers like bill danahmeyer who was a congressman from like sorry to say california and senator helms but uh others came around and uh supported the ryan white act when we had it before us one other question a number of grassroots organizations such as rod island project aides provided essential valid information to anyone in the community can similar grassroots organizations provide information where the government has failed us well the grassroots organization can supply information where people have not gotten that story from the government although the government is being up to date now uh they've been embarrassed uh with some of the statements they've made have turned out not to be true but by and large we've get it we're getting the right information from the government and from the health groups what we're getting pushback is from uh the some of the right wing groups and the president of the united states who's a significant player because he's the president of the united states and a lot of people believe what he has to say thinking he knows what he's talking about even though he's clearly not does he may know what he certainly does know in my view what he's saying but he doesn't care how misleading and harmful what he's saying may be to this spread of this disease and how many people will die as a result of his is knowing in this spread of misinformation in your opinion would more government action have been taken to control COVID if it was stigmatized would that type of fear have been more effective in a sense than the fear of simply contracting COVID I don't think it would have made any difference the fear was not fear of the disease the fear was the fear of the president Trump might pay a price at the in the election because he didn't want to acknowledge this disease if he acknowledged the disease he had to acknowledge that he didn't do things to stop it the only thing he's ever said he did was stop people from coming in from China well give me a break the transmission of the disease came in from Europe as well as from Asia and it was being transmitted just by being in the same place they didn't know that they should avoid getting together with people who might be able to spread COVID-19 and so if if it were stigmatized thank goodness it wasn't because our job would be harder but the job that the president should have taken on as the leader of this country he failed us miserably and many people have died unnecessarily because of it question one of the screen was tied to the funding associated with the ryan white cares act was the requirement that states adopt laws that criminalized intentional transmission of hiv how did that stipulation end up in the act because it ended up undermining public health prevention efforts i don't recall that provision i may be wrong but i don't recall a provision that's the only way that states and local governments were going to get money to combat this disease or the federal government was going to be able to spend money at the federal level if they made that statement it wasn't certainly given any credence in the way the disease was handled we gave a lot of money to local governments because the local governments were the ones who were handling the the the epidemic and giving the treatments the federal government provided a lot of legislation to do it and federal dollars for especially for research but what was being done under the ryan white act was supported by almost everybody except those who didn't want to even talk about the spread of the hiv aids the biggest fight we had was from right wingers who didn't want people to know that if they shared needles they could get the disease which made no sense or that if they were engaged in gay sex they could get this disease it was ridiculous to try to withhold that information it was important information for people to have um i i think there's a lot of emphasis on focus of academic work on climate change and that so before you go i wanted you to address uh how that ties in with the wildfires that we see in your home state it's pretty clear and the reporters who talk about the wildfires make it especially obvious that what we're seeing in the wild temperatures and and fires and floods all these things that are strange things are happening in our climate are tied to climate change it's and we fail to do anything about climate change uh again another case where the people in government especially the president doesn't care what the scientists have to say president trump campaigned against the idea that climate change was a reality so this is this is this is fake news and he denounced it and didn't want to do anything except when he became president he eased up on all of the things that the environmental protection agency had been doing to stop making this problem worse uh he repealed a lot of the provisions and uh and and it is it's more difficult to deal with climate change now that he's president and it's not giving any leadership and in fact is giving leadership contrary to to containing uh the the carbon emissions that are causing the the warming of our planet and the harm by our climate all around the world uh look let me just say something unequivocally uh we could survive four years of president trump and the climate change issue if we get busy doing something starting immediately come january but if president trump is reelected uh we will face a situation where the climate change issue will get worse because the emissions go up into the air they don't disappear they stay there in the atmosphere they add are additive to the other climate change emissions that are there and we won't be able to do anything about it you can't get rid of those emissions our only strategy has to be to stop adding to it until we have some scientific way to do something that we would reduce the carbon emissions that are stored there but i don't see any leadership from a president trump in the next four years and i think it's just going to be too late for us we're going to have to learn to adapt to climate change and the harm that it will bring we don't know quite how to adapt to it except people are going to have to move and not live in certain areas uh they're going to be people who are going to have to pick up and not only move but try to relocate to some other area there's going to be tremendous tremendous damage that's going to be done to uh this this planet and it's you have to ask why would we take a risk on the only planet where we live on allowing climate change to be uh to be added to and to become uh more harm and a threat to our life on this planet very good to ask you about one more issue before we let you go i know you've weighed in over the years about net neutrality and i was wondering if you see any prospects of congress addressing that in the near future yeah i have been a strong advocate for net neutrality that neutrality would say that that on the internet the the those who are controlling the internet like the service providers cable or broadcasters and others couldn't discriminate on the kinds of shows that would be available to consumers by adding barriers to them getting those shows and uh we wanted legislation to be passed i authored legislation to provide for net neutrality it didn't pass but the FCC adopted net neutrality rules but when president trump got elected the new FCC repealed those rules those repeals were challenged uh in the courts and the rules can be reestablished if we get a new FCC with a new president but if this issue uh goes before the the the trump appointees even if they're new appointees they're not going to do anything about net neutrality and we're going to find that uh there's going to be a lot of discrimination of what we are allowed to see on on the internet and what will be permitted to us to be transmitted to the public uh through the internet itself very good well thank you very much congressman for this discussion tonight i think we've covered a lot of ground and i will turn it over to that's an atom uh to conclude good thank you i'll just add thanks thanks to both of you for an informative talk and discussion and given obviously everybody much to think about um i also would be remiss to not recommend the book by congressman waxman to you guys report um which really looks at some of the signature legislation he writes about the signature legislation and really what it took much in the same way we heard a little about the the ryan white act the the process the often slow process um and the and and i believe the the book makes the case that it is a slow process um legislating is a slow process to to to get it right i'd like to thank you both as well um henry um one of my best friends died died of aids when i was had my first job after college in 1980 1980 and um so the aids epidemic is really near and dear to my heart and i appreciate the service that you gave and still give to this country for all your years in in the congress thank you thank you very much and it's so great to see you take care give a virtual round of applause thank you and thanks everybody for coming and attending tonight through your wi-fi problems and everything else yes good night everybody thank you to all for coming tonight