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That's Norton dot com slash matto to save 25 percent off the Rachel Maddow Show weeknights at nine Eastern on MSNBC. Before I forget, I want to tell you that I'm going to be on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert tonight, if you want to watch, I'll be talking with Mr. Colbert about the new book I just wrote that published came out yesterday. That's called Man. I'll also talk with him, I imagine, about the long, slow end of our presidential election, the coronavirus vaccine and lots of other things.

That's tonight. Stephen Colbert. Also a little later on this hour, I will tell you how you can come to an online event with me about bag man, about the new book. If you are at all interested in that. I will have details on that a little later on. I'm supposed to have told you about that like every night for the past four nights. And I have forgotten every single one of those four nights. But I'm committed to tell you tonight, that's why I'm putting this little reminder here.

So I at least feel extra guilty if I forget later on. All right. But we are following a number of developing stories tonight, both in the world of legal and political news, but also when it comes to the pandemic. And let's start there first and foremost, just within the past hour, the covid tracking project has posted the latest numbers for our country for today and today. For the first time ever, the United States has had more than three thousand Americans die in one day from the coronavirus in the last twenty four hours.

Three thousand and fifty four Americans are known to have died from this disease. That's the largest number we've had ever. This puts the death toll just today on on par with some of the greatest tragedies in our nation's history. Events remembered for decades, generations for more than a century. And the terrorist attacks of 9/11 killed two thousand nine hundred and seventy seven people. The ninety six San Francisco earthquake and fire and immense conflagration that burned whole swaths of that city to the ground, brought that city to its knees that killed three thousand people.

I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. I can tell you that the 19 06 earthquake is very much alive still today. It changed that part of the country forever. It has never been forgotten. We lost more Americans just today, just today than we did in that catastrophe in 06. This week, we, of course, marked the anniversary of the nineteen forty one attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7th, nineteen forty one two thousand four hundred Americans killed in that surprise ambush attack by Japan.

Twenty four hundred dead on that date that still lives in infamy. Twenty four hundred Americans killed. More than three thousand Americans killed today. Which is just Wednesday now and what will tomorrow bring? Last night, we talked about the first patients in the UK being administered, the coronavirus vaccine manufactured by Pfizer today, Canada approved that same vaccine. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau saying Canada will start vaccinating people in urban areas and each of the 10 Canadian provinces starting at the beginning of next week.

Even still with that QuickStart, he says vaccinating a majority of the Canadian population is something they think will take until September of next year, against September of next year before they think they'll have most Canadians vaccinated. Now, for context, the population of Canada is under 40 million people. We've got nearly three hundred and thirty million people in this country. When do we expect to have the majority of our people vaccinated?

Well, it should start at least fairly soon. Tomorrow, something called the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee is going to meet and they're going to be publicly they're going to meet to give their recommendation to the FDA on the approval of the Fizer vaccine here in the US. Now, this advisory committee is an outside group of independent experts that advises the FDA on matters like this. And it's good that we've got that structure, at least in my opinion, knowing what I know about these things and I know a little bit about this part of the regulatory world, this is a good thing that there is an independent advisory board without going into too much detail about it.

You will recall that the FDA itself has come under all the same, you know, bizarre snake oil pressure that the CDC and all the other government agencies did from the quack's at the Trump White House over the course of this epidemic. It is good that the FDA calls on outside experts to help them make hard decisions about vaccine safety. I mean, you will recall that under the Trump administration, we got FDA approval and then FDA on approval of hydroxy chloroquine as a possible treatment for covid after President Trump saw segments about it on Fox News prime time about how it is definitely the cure.

So he leaned on the FDA to approve that as a treatment and they had to very quickly unapproved it when it became obvious through the scientific method that it wasn't actually helping. So it's good that it's not the FDA just making this decision on its own, given the way that they have been pressured by the Trump White House, just like the CDC has for vaccine safety. This will be a panel of outside experts, a panel of twenty three independent outside experts who are formed as an advisory group, specifically to advise the FDA on whether or not to give their approval for vaccines.

That is a good system. That is, they sound structure. And when that group meets tomorrow to hear the evidence and take questions and have their discussion and make their recommendations, the signs are good that they're going to say, yes, that this this vaccine should be approved. The head of the committee is a researcher at the University of Michigan. And today he said, quote, I would predict the likelihood of approval is high. But again, we'll all get to see it transparently ourselves.

That meeting is tomorrow, starting tomorrow morning. And that meeting does mean that we will likely have a vaccine against coronavirus approved in the United States as of the time. I am talking to you tomorrow night. But even still, we will still likely have something on the order of three thousand more Americans dead tomorrow, if tomorrow is anything like today. Even in the best case scenario, it will be months and months and months before enough Americans are vaccinated to put a dent in the epidemic.

I mean, it does give us something to aim for, right? We can now say to ourselves and to each other. It's not forever. You just need to do everything you can to get you and your family through to the vaccine. Stay safe and stay uninfected for long enough to get you through to the vaccine. The sacrifices that we are making, economic, social, mental health and every other way, they are very, very difficult sacrifices, but they won't be forever.

Stay safe, keep you and your family uninfected and alive long enough to get through to the vaccine. It is good to know what the close bracket is on these parentheses, right? It is good to have even a glimpse, even an expectation of how this might someday end when we finally get there.

But it's going to be a long time till we're there. And meanwhile, right now, we are in the bottom lands in three thousand Americans dead in one day today. One in twenty two Americans have tested positive for coronavirus over one hundred thousand Americans hospitalized with coronavirus tonight and intensive care units filled to capacity and communities all across the country. We have an expert joining us tonight this hour to talk about the way that some communities in the United States are now diagnosing not just individual people that have the virus via individual testing.

Some communities are now using a direct and fairly simple way to diagnose the overall level of coronavirus infection in the whole community all at once. So we're going to talk tonight with that expert about what to do when a diagnostic tool like that, which shows you the level of infection in a whole community, what that community should do if that tool all of a sudden reveals a scary superhigh new spike in infections. That is what happened this past week in one major U.S. city.

They have a diagnostic tool that tells them how much coronavirus there is in the whole city all at once. It went off the charts within this past week. How is that city responding, knowing that even though all of those people whose infections are representative, that data may not know they're positive, the city now knows that that's what's coming. What do you do when you know the train is coming at you that fast? So we talking about that tonight, as I mentioned, there's also legal and political drama tonight, basically on all fronts.

The son of President elect Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, announced today that his, quote, tax affairs are being investigated by the US attorney, by the top federal prosecutor in the state of Delaware. Hunter Biden, you will recall, was the subject of a vociferous smear campaign by the president and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, some of which played a role in the president's impeachment. That smear campaign against Biden late in the campaign was joined by elected Republicans in both the House and the Senate.

None of that smear campaign raised against Hunter Biden by Republicans at all levels. None of that smear campaign was about Senator Biden's tax affairs, but that's what he says he is being investigated for now. CNN is reporting tonight that this investigation was live before the presidential election, that it essentially went dormant and the immediate lead up to the election because of that US Justice Department policy that says investigations related to candidates in their campaigns shouldn't be carried out in such a way that they might influence federal election in the immediate run up to those elections.

But now that the election's over, it appears that whatever Hunter, Hunter, Biden may be under scrutiny for financially or in his phrase, his tax, his his tax affairs, whatever that was, it went dormant around the time of the election, according to CNN's reporting. But it appears to have started back up on the other end of the legal spectrum. Forty eight states and territories and the federal government filed coordinated lawsuits today that have the aim basically of breaking up Facebook as an illegal monopoly.

Facebook has conducted itself in the public domain in such a way that it has alienated and enraged basically everyone all across the political spectrum, except for the trolls and fraudsters and bot network operators that have turned Facebook into a monetized disinformation and extremism goldmine. They love it. Everybody else is concerned. That said, even without a friend in the world, Facebook is a globe enveloping monopolistic behemoth with all the money in the world. And so we'll see if this antitrust effort against them registered as anything more than a fleabite for that giant concern.

I mean, it is rare for anything to bring together forty eight states and the federal government, particularly this iteration of our federal government. But if anything can do it, it's probably the predatory, gluttonous civil war, auto generating truth, erasing toxicity that is Facebook at one hacker way. And while we're on the subject of charming, healthy and lovely things, this came back in the news today, unexpectedly in August of this year, right after then candidate Joe Biden picked California Senator Kamala Harris to be his vice presidential running mate.

You might remember this, the the once great magazine, Newsweek inexplicably published a totally self serious, apparently not satirical column essay basically that claimed that Senator Harris was ineligible to be vice president because secretly she wasn't a real US citizen. What nice going, Newsweek, the argument immediately then spewed out of the mouth of the president of the United States after Newsweek published that the president almost immediately started parroting the line as if it had been conveyed to him in the most credible terms.

He told reporters, quote, I heard today that she doesn't meet the requirements to be vice president. Oh, he heard this today when he was browsing through Newsweek. Oh, I see where he heard that from is this article written by this guy, John Eastman, who wrote this up is down. Black is white. Constitution Doesn't Exist column which Newsweek published, which claimed that Senator Harris was secretly foreign. And therefore, not only could she not be vice president, it's been claimed that she should be stripped of her seat in the United States Senate to this guy.

Eastman is a legal eagle who goes on right wing talk radio like the Hugh Hewitt Show and stuff. And in his infinite legal wisdom, he has decided to sort of wage this public campaign to say that being born in the United States doesn't make you a US citizen. His whole public shtick is if your parents were immigrants, then you're not really American. Again, this is totally contrary to centuries of lived experience of what it is to be America. It's also totally contrary to what the plain language is in the Constitution.

But it sounds awesome if you're trying to disqualify candidates for public office that you don't like for other reasons. Right. This reasoning would, of course, mean that maybe Barack Obama was secretly foreign, too. And so he wasn't really a legitimate president at all. Where did we hear that? For the foremost proponent of that theory during the Obama presidency is the current president of the United States, Donald Trump. But Eastman advanced this theory for Kamala Harris, too, because her parents were immigrants, even though she was born in Oakland, California.

Now, it should be noted about this guy, and it isn't often enough noted about this guy that Mr. Eastman, the gentleman who advanced this cockamamie theory about Senator Kamala Harris in 2010, which then ran immediately to the White House and the president started pitching it to Eastman himself, ran for attorney general in California in the year 2010. He never became attorney general of California. He lost. In twenty ten in the primary to the guy who ended up losing in the general election, to Kamala Harris, who was the attorney general of the state of California.

So there may be some sore loser ism going on here. But, you know, sure, that didn't have any impact on his thinking whatsoever. Anyway, the way this worked out is that even President Trump eventually dropped this ridiculous line. Kamala Harris was born in Oakland, California. She's a US citizen. She's not going to get stripped of her Senate seat and she's eligible to be vice president of the United States. President Trump floated this, maybe thought he might be able to pursue this along the same lines as he pursued it against President Obama.

It didn't float well. He stopped trying to use that against her fairly quickly and never mentioned it again. The other way this worked out is that Newsweek had to apologize for having run this nonsense that initially tried to defend it. But then eventually they had to just say they were sorry and the whole thing died away. Kamala Harris was elected vice president of the United States. She will be sworn in soon as vice president of the United States. The quack legal radio commentator guy who tried to get this idea into the bloodstream that Senator Harris is secretly not a citizen.

He melted back into obscurity. We'll never hear from that guy again until today. Guess where that guy turned up today? He's the Trump campaign's new lawyer. He's the lawyer who filed the brief today seeking to have the Trump campaign intervene so you can have Donald Trump intervene in the Supreme Court lawsuit that we covered here last night. This is the Supreme Court lawsuit brought by the Texas attorney general, which seeks on behalf of the people of Texas to flip the election results in a whole bunch of other states to do throw out the election results and just enough swing states that voted for Joe Biden that Donald Trump should be declared the winner instead of Biden.

The Kamala Harris birther guy who Newsweek magazine had to apologize for. He is now the lawyer representing Donald Trump, seeking to join this lawsuit in the United States Supreme Court. President Trump is now telling his supporters that this lawsuit is the big one. This is the one that's going to get him the presidency. This is the one that's going to overturn the election. This is the case brought by the attorney general of the state of the state of Texas who really might be doing this because he reportedly himself is under FBI investigation for abusing his office in Texas.

This whole lawsuit may very well be Ken Paxton's effort to try to get Trump's attention so he can get himself a pardon because he believes he's under FBI investigation. But this lawsuit is patently, patently insane. This is Texas suing Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin and Michigan over how those other states conducted their elections. Now, why does Texas have anything to say about that? Excellent question. Nevertheless, Texas wants the Supreme Court to throw out the election results from all those states and delay the Electoral College vote next week indefinitely.

Throw out all the Electoral College votes from those four states, that would, of course, be just enough Electoral College votes thrown out to declare that Joe Biden didn't really win the election. Still alive issue might get re-elected. Now, whether or not you're a lawyer, whether or not you follow Supreme Court jurisprudence, this is as dumb as you think it is. Don't overthink it. States don't get to sue other states for how those other states voted.

It just doesn't work that way. And and, you know, I'm not a lawyer. You don't have to take it from me. You could also take it from Texas senior Republican US Senator John Cornyn, who told reporters about this effort today, quote, I frankly struggle to understand the legal theory of it. Why would a state, even such a great state as Texas, have a Say-So on how other states administer their elections? Why, indeed, Senator Cornyn, why indeed, Utah Republican Senator Mitt Romney put a finer point on it tonight in these comments this evening to NBC News.

And it's is simply madness, which is the idea of supplanting the vote of the people with partisan legislators is is so completely out of our national character that it's simply a matter of course, the president has a right to challenge results in court to have recounts. But this this effort to subvert the vote of the people is is dangerous and destructive in the course of democracy. Dangerous and destructive to the cause of democracy, it's madness, it's madness, it's mad.

So that's the Texas case brought to the Supreme Court, which President Trump is using the Kamala Harris birther lawyer, to get himself involved in that case. And that's crazy enough. But now 17 other Republican controlled states have also joined this lawsuit. They all have attorneys general who might need a federal party. Are you all just getting on board? Because this is what we get on board now, 17 Republican controlled states have now joined this effort. Alongside Texas and alongside President Trump to have the election results thrown out from all the swing states that voted for Biden, 17 states Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia.

They're all joining this Texas effort to literally just try to get the conservative justices on the Supreme Court to throw out the election results that say Biden won and instead say Trump won. Their stated reasoning can basically be boiled down to something seems fishy to us. You ought to look into this. As of today, all 50 US states have certified their election results, the certified results from all 50 states show that Joe Biden got three hundred and six electoral votes.

He won by a very large, comfortable margin. He only needed two hundred and seventy electoral votes to win. He got three hundred and six. Every state is certified. It's over on earth. One here. It's over. But now 18 red states are fully on board with trying to get the Supreme Court to throw out that result and declare Trump the winner anyway. You know, over three thousand Americans died from coronavirus today in one day. The vaccine approval meeting for our country is tomorrow.

Whether or not we have the wherewithal as a country to get together the number of vaccine doses we are going to need since apparently the Trump White House told the vaccine companies we didn't need too many, whether or not we as a country are going to have the wherewithal to run a vaccine administration program that can vaccinate three hundred plus million people and anywhere near the time needed to save hundreds of thousands of American lives that are on the line that starts now. That work needs to be done.

Now, that is not something and we need to wonder about. That's something we need to start doing. This vaccine can start going into American arms tomorrow. We've got stuff to do, I mean, in Congress today, they decided they would fund the government for one more week because otherwise the government was going to run out of money and shut down and they can't agree on what they're going to do for new covid relief if they're going to do anything.

Eleven months into this disaster, buy us another week.

We can't figure out what to do. Three thousand Americans dead today. The vaccine approval starts likely tomorrow. No covid relief in how many months now? I mean, there is stuff to do. There is stuff to do. But this is what we're doing. Instead, follow the lead of the Camela Harris birther guy, 18 states and the president saying, no, no, no, we're going to try to get this election overturned. Supreme Court will do it.

This is what we're working on. This is what the Republican Party is working on now. Joining us now is Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro. Pennsylvania is, of course, one of the states being sued by Texas and 17 other Republican controlled states that are trying to have Pennsylvania's election results thrown out. Attorney General Shapiro, I really appreciate you taking the time to join us this evening. Thanks for being here.

Good to be with you, Rachel. I'm I apologize for being a little head up a little. I have some personal emotion.

You set it up.

Let me ask you, OK, tell tell me if I got any of it wrong or if I put the wrong emphasis on any of this.

No, I mean, I was going to use a more diplomatic phrase, like uniquely unserious to describe the lawsuit. I think you just went with dumb and stupid. I'll adopt your terms.

It really is. And it is based on this this lawsuit based on debunked tweets and conspiracy theories, lies that haven't held up in court. And now we find ourselves with the president and some of these attorneys general trying to spin their wheels and thwart the will of the people and at least four states.

You and your fellow attorneys general from Michigan and Wisconsin issued a statement after this lawsuit was filed, calling it an insignificant attempt, he said these insignificant attempts to disregard the will of the people in our states mislead the public and tear at the fabric of our Constitution. And that's that's exactly where I'm at with this story. I both believe that this is insignificant and frivolous and forgive me, but sort of dumb and also that it's dangerous because it is making a mockery of the idea of the democratic process, by the way, that we settle things in this country and making a mockery of the idea that the court should be should be called upon to to decide legitimate differences that require judicial intervention rather than just partisan power.

You know, Rachel, I would I would just say they're attempting to make a mockery of it, you know, for the last four years, the United States is attacked every institution in including the courts. But what we have seen throughout this process, a process that began in Pennsylvania before Election Day and has gone on since, is that the courts have held federal courts and state courts, justices and judges that were appointed by Republicans and Democrats who were elected as Republicans or Democrats.

They have abided by the rule of law.

And law enforcement officials like me have stood up and said, look, we're going to root out any type of voter fraud. We haven't seen any and we're going to stand up to the attacks on our system. We have weathered that.

It is, of course, sad that we have a president of the United States who is attempting to sow doubt and in some people's minds has succeeded. It is sad that we have this lawsuit filed by the attorney general of Texas. And I will tell you, Rachel, it's especially sad for me that 17 other attorneys general have gone along with this process. By the way, some attorneys general that I've worked with, you talked about it a few moments ago, the Facebook lawsuit that we filed today.

And we've worked constructively in the past. I don't know whether to call a surgeon to try and repair the spines of some of these individuals or a psychiatrist who examined their heads. But something's wrong. They are afraid of something. And it is up to us to continue to speak truth and it is up to the courts to continue to do what they've been doing, which is to follow the law. And here's what I know to be true. On Monday, the Electoral College will meet and they will issue three hundred and six votes for Joe Biden and he will be sworn in as the next president, United States on January the 20th.

Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, I did not expect to be talking to you about this kind of a challenge or if it was if I was it, I thought it would be one wingnut state trying to do this. But with 18 states on board, it is just just a remarkable turn. Sir, thank you very much for your time this evening. Keep us apprised. I sure will. Thanks for having me. Stay safe and healthy. Thank you.

And we'll do all right. As a matter of cable news responsibility, I want to prep you for our next block. It is a serious topic, a serious discussion. And it's also about toilets. So get your giggles out over the commercial break about me talking toilets. You got to get your giggles out now. Me too. And then come back ready for some serious toilet talk. We all know how easy it is to run out of space on your phone.

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Grab what you love. It was February twenty seventh when the Netherlands found its first case of coronavirus, February twenty seven. That was a recent traveler in the Netherlands who had just come from Italy. Soon after that first confirmed case, Dutch officials spread out all over the country, conducting widespread testing to try to find and then quickly snuff out the virus before it spread too quickly in that country. But in the Netherlands, way back in February, they were not just looking for cases by sticking big, long cutups up individual people's noses.

They were also looking in the sewers because of a person infected with covid doesn't just shed the virus when they sneeze or when they cough. If you have covered and then you go to the bathroom, there will also be traces of the virus in your wastewater that you flushed down the drain. And so back at the at the onset of the pandemic, actually, even before they turned up that first confirmed case in that one traveler in the Netherlands, Dutch researchers had already started collecting wastewater samples to see if the virus was already present and silently spreading in their country.

Turns out soon after they had their first known confirmed case, they realized through wastewater sampling that the Netherlands had more than just that one person infected. They started testing the wastewater in remote towns that had no confirmed cases of covid, where no one, no one individual had tested positive. But in those remote towns, with zero positive cases on record, they found traces of covid in the sewers covid was there. There were people in those towns who were using the sewage system who were infected.

But nobody in those towns knew anyone that was infected. They were able to figure out that covid was spreading up to six days before anybody actually started developing symptoms and went to go get an individual test. Now, we covered this on the show earlier this year when researchers started doing this kind of wastewater testing here in the US. We talked to a Stanford professor who's who's doing this kind of testing in California. She told us that testing for covid in wastewater was an easy and pretty cheap way to predict where a covert outbreak might be lurking just beneath the surface, even if individual people with the virus didn't yet know that they had it.

That's the idea behind this kind of testing. You want to catch an outbreak of covid before things get bad. So officials can work on local targeted measures to try to identify people who've got the virus and stop the spread since since covid spreads quietly in asymptomatically. At first, in many cases, the first signs of an outbreak might actually show up in the sewage before they pop up at the doctor's office. So this kind of testing can help a community get a jump on mitigation before the virus gets out of control.

That method worked in those remote areas of the Netherlands. They would find a remote town that showed showed traces of covid in the sewage system. They would then get testing into that town, find people who were infected and didn't know they were, do contact tracing and try to tamp down those outbreaks before they spread. It worked in those remote towns in the Netherlands. It worked in some cases here to.

This is data collected from a company called Bio Bot, which was testing wastewater in Delaware back in May in Newcastle County, Delaware. See the light blue line?

That's the number of confirmed covid cases in the county confirmed by traditional testing people who already had the virus. You see that big spike sort of toward the end of the month back in May 20, 20. But look at the dark blue line. The dark blue line is the results of wastewater tests, the concentrated amount of virus they found in the sewers in Newcastle County, Delaware. The amount of virus in the wastewater directly tracks with the directly predicted the cases going up in that one.

Delaware County predicted the spike a full week before any sick people started getting tested and turning up positive. But it's kind of gross to think about testing wastewater. It might even make you laugh to talk about it. It makes me giggle every time I think about it. But also, this is super rational, cheap, effective, and it's the only way to sort of see into the future in in in individual communities. This kind of testing works. It helps you spot and prepare for and mitigate a Kofod outbreak before you even know it's there.

I can give you an early warning. One U.S. city was just found in this past week when it turns out an absolute tidal wave of virus is approaching your shores. This kind of testing within the past week in one major U.S. city just revealed a huge, huge, unforeseen new spike in cases bigger than anything they have dealt with in the pandemic thus far thus far. What do they do with that information in that city now that they know what is coming because they can see it in their waste water before they can see it in their test results.

That story is next. Stay with us. Hi, I'm Trevor Noah of The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, which is also a podcast. Did you miss last night's episode?

Catch up with The Daily Show with Trevor Noah is Ed.. It's everything you love about The Daily Show except for the dimples. But we are working on technology to make an audio version of those, too. You can listen to the podcast Monday to Friday Mornings Everywhere podcasts are available. Daily Show with Trevor Noah is Ed.. Subscribe now. They call it Deer Island, but it's actually a little peninsula that's about one hundred and eighty five acres sticks out into the Inner Harbor in in Boston, in Boston Harbor in Massachusetts and Deer Island sounds sort of pretty and bucolic.

But as you can see, what it really is is a giant industrial plant. Specifically, it's a giant wastewater treatment plant. Deer Island cleans the water for the entire city of Boston, as well as 40 or so communities in the greater Boston area. And it is one of the places in the United States that's been doing wastewater testing for covid throughout the whole pandemic. And so you can see on this chart how much virus they have been finding in the wastewater processed at Deer Island since all the way back in June.

And you can see the trend line. The red line is the southern samples. The blue line is northern samples. That's just geographic determinants in terms of these communities around Boston that this is testing, the trend line matches what we know about how covid has spread this year. That was that that bad peak in the spring and early summer. Right. And then there was a little bit of a lull in July and August and then there was a big uptick in October.

That's the kind of red flag you're looking for with this kind of testing, a signal that there is something wrong here. There's cause for concern. I remember I actually tweeted about that uptick at the time as a kind of heads up. You know, look at that upsurge in the Boston area. That was October.

Well, look at it now. For the northern and southern areas of greater Boston, look. The amount of virus in the water is now trending near six hundred copies per milliliter. I don't know what that means in the as an absolute value, but that's up from about 100 copies per milliliter in the spring and about it's about a five hundred percent increase since the bad surge in late spring. This data from testing the wastewater, it's a little bit like looking into a crystal ball.

It tells us what's coming in the next week or so as the people we know from this data are infected, start to get symptoms, start to test positive and then start to need care. So, I mean, diagnostically, it's kind of neat to know what's coming right, to know who is infected before they know they're infected. But epidemiologically, it is a little bit terrifying. I mean, what do you do if you are Massachusets? What do you do if you are the greater Boston area when you've got this information now, when you know that this tidal wave is about to come crashing down?

Joining us now is Dr. David Haymer. He's a professor of global health and medicine at the Boston University School of Public Health and School of Medicine. He's been studying these latest figures out of Deer Island. Dr. Haymer, it's a real pleasure to have you with us tonight. Thanks for making time.

My pleasure, Rachel. Thanks for having me. So I'm no expert in this stuff, I'm just a layman who is interested in it like like anybody else and a Massachusetts resident who's interested in it personally for that reason. To let me just ask you if I've explained any of this wrong or if I'm putting the emphasis on any any wrong parts of this. No, I think you've done a great job explaining it. I mean, we've been learning use waste water.

They're actually examples going back to previous decades where it's been used to predict cholera outbreaks, for example, by looking at waste water and seeing if there is vibrio cholera in the waste water and then and then knowing that it's circulating in the community before an actual outbreak occurs. But this is a more modern use with much better technology. And as you stay the course, the rapid rise in the greater Boston area is extremely worrisome.

What is the right response once you have the benefit of that new technology and that pretty precise data, once you get a warning like this that this is what's coming, I mean, seeing the size of that spike, it's scary. And it tells me what's going to happen in eastern Massachusetts over the next few days, in the next couple of weeks. But how do you respond to it? How can you use this in a way that might help? Well, I think I think the time to use it is early when it's starting to rise and not letting it go up too far.

I mean, I think the issue now is we need to intensify control measures. And Governor Charlie Baker has done that just a little bit in the last few days by trying to restrict the size of gatherings and the number of people in restaurants or fancy restaurants. But we may need to cut down even further. I mean, if we compare what we're doing to, say, Montreal and Canada with similar numbers, everybody's at home and can't go out. I mean, it's really shut down.

So there's different levels of intensity. And I think everybody wants to keep the economy open. But right now, we have a pretty high risk situation and at least in the Boston area and actually we don't have wastewater collection like this going on in other parts of the state. But but the proportions of positive tests in other parts of the state are quite worrisome. Would you suggest that other parts of the country that have the opportunity to do testing like this and aren't doing it, would you suggest this as a cost effective public health monitoring tool?

I feel like the advantage to this data. Part of the advantage here is that you don't actually need to be a real expert to understand what this means. Once you can get over sort of the giggle factor for the fact that we're talking about sewage and measuring it that way. I do think that people can look at graphs like we're seeing out of the greater Boston area right now and understand, oh, man, look what's coming. It feels like even just for a public awareness in terms of that sort of a payoff, this is something we ought to be doing more of in this country.

No, I agree with that and actually there are a number of different projects, both municipal and then at the university level and different parts of the country that have been doing this in Arizona, University of California, San Diego, they use this to try and identify sort of soci, you know, sort of the spots on campus where there's a an outbreak or an impending outbreak, and then they can go in and intensify control measures, do more testing, identify who's who's infected, isolate them, quarantine their contacts and try and limit spread.

So I think it can be done both at a large scale like a city, but even better yet, at a smaller scale, a building like, for example, if you were to do it, test the sort of the wastewater coming out of a skilled nursing facility. You did that for every skilled nursing facility you could identify early in outbreak and come in and try and control it before it ravaged that center.

For example, there's really hundreds of very practical advice. Dr. David Haima, professor of global health and medicine at Boston University, I feel like it's rare when we're we're able to talk about something that is comprehensible to the average person and practicable and applicable for policymakers and in short order. This is one of those things. Thanks for helping us understand it, for making it so clear.

My pleasure. Good evening. Thanks. All right.

The 20th Amendment to the US Constitution specifies that the term of each elected president of the United States begins at noon on January 20th of the year following the election. Democratic consultant Ben Trivett points out on Twitter tonight. That means that as of this hour, as of this hour, right now, we are nine hundred and ninety nine hours away from a new president.

But who's counting? We'll be right back. All right, I'm not going to forget to tell you this, I keep forgetting without ever really setting out to become a person who writes books. I have now written three of them. The third one is this book bag man that is now officially out. It's got published yesterday. So it's it's now out there. This one is not as much of a policy thing as my previous books. The first one was Dreft, which is about the US military.

The second one was called Blow-Out, which is about the oil and gas industry. This is not that heavy. It's a lot shorter than either of those four one. But it's also like sort of more of a true crime romp about Nixon's vice president, who was a total crook and got caught, including got caught taking cash bribes in the White House. He got run out of office for it. The book builds on the podcast that I did on this same subject with the same name Bagman last year.

But here's the thing I need to tell you. If you are interested in this, if by any chance you want to hear me talk about it, I'm not going to talk about it any more here on the TV show. But if you're interested, here's the thing you can do. There's no book tour because there's a pandemic. I am doing a grand total of two events that you can sign up for. You basically pay the cost of the book.

You get the book shipped to you. But then you can also go to an online event where I'm going to talk about the book. I'm only doing two of them. The first one is with Magic City Books in Tulsa, Oklahoma. That one is an online event this weekend. That's Sunday night. And then the second one is with the Striker Center in New York on Tuesday, a week from yesterday, Tuesday, December 15th. And that one's going to be me and presidential historian Michael Beschloss.

So I'm not doing a book tour. I'm only doing these two events December 13th, the Sunday and December 15th this Tuesday. And I just realized that because I keep putting off talking about this, I have been remiss in not mentioning this before now because timing matters timing wise, because the book has to be shipped to you because it isn't like a book event. When you turn up in the hands, you the book, you kind of need to go ahead now and sign up for one of these if you are interested in order to for you to have enough time for the book to get to you on time ahead of the event.

Anyway, I'm sorry I didn't mention this before. Now I'm a terrible person, but the thirteenth and the fifteenth are the two events if you want to sign up for either of those, both of which include getting shipped a book. All the details are online at MSNBC, Dotcom Pakman. OK, again, I'm sorry I didn't mention it before. I'm terrible at this. And one final thing. This is also your last and only reminder that I'm going to be a guest on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert tonight to talk about the new book, among other things.

That's at eleven thirty five PM Eastern tonight on CBS. OK, that's done enough. Sorry. As I mentioned at the top of the show, the advisory panel that tells the FDA whether or not they should approve the first coronavirus vaccine in the United States, that advisory board meeting is happening tomorrow and they're going to make their recommendation to the FDA tomorrow. Now, that advisory group has already published like 50 plus page briefing document on the Pfizer vaccine. They've said the vaccine is, in their estimation, safe and effective.

They describe it as having only minimal and tolerable side effects. By all accounts, it looks like they are likely to recommend to the FDA that the vaccine should be approved. But this is a very big deal. And this meeting tomorrow, if the advisory board that's going to make the decision, it's a public meeting, the presentation of the evidence is public. The expert discussion about it is public. The Q&A about it is public and ultimately their recommendation to the FDA.

They will come to that and vote on it all at a public meeting. And we're going to have live coverage of that starting here tomorrow at 9:00 a.m. Eastern here on MSNBC. It's going to be a big historic thing. You might want to watch that live when it happens.

The Rachel Maddow Show weeknights at 9:00 Eastern on MSNBC.

Hi, it's MSNBC's Ali Velshi. You know, these days there's just so much news to wrap your head around. It's hard to know what's most important. That's why we're updating MSNBC dot com with a special feature on our homepage called MSNBC Daily. It's a place where you'll find the same type of expert analysis you're used to getting on TV. But now with a new written perspective section all neatly organized in one place so you can go beyond the headlines and get a deeper understanding of the stories that matter most.

You'll find perspectives written by people uniquely qualified to write them.

People you're familiar with from our network, like Barbara McQuade writing about legal matters. Dr. Kavita Patel weighing in on public health. Liz Plank giving her take on women's rights and gender issues. And I'm excited to share that. I'll be writing some pieces of my own. So visit MSNBC Dotcom today and look for our new feature, MSNBC Daily.