GOVERNOR HOGAN: Good afternoon. Joining me today are Maryland’s first lady, my wife Yumi, and former U.S. Attorney for Maryland, Robert Hur.
Two weeks ago, the first lady and I gathered a number of leaders from the Asian-American community in Ellicott City, as we visited several businesses that were recently vandalized on Lunar New Year.
This COVID-19 pandemic has been a challenging time for all of us, but Asian-Americans have had to deal with an additional crisis: A sharp and alarming rise of racist rhetoric, vitriol, and harassment directed at them simply because of their race, ethnic background, or national origin. Nearly one third of all Asian-Americans say they have experienced some form of discrimination since the pandemic began. In Maryland, hate crimes targeting Asian-Americans have more than doubled since 2018, and rose by 150 percent nationwide in 2020. That hits close to home for me and my family. Like so many of their fellow Asian-Americans, my wife and our three daughters have had to contend with some of this throughout their lives. But in recent months, all across the country, we have seen hurtful words and gestures turn into villainization and violent attacks, many of which have gone unreported and unpunished, including attacks captured on video where witnesses failed to intervene and to help the victims, and social media challenges that actively encourage people to attack Asians.
Our Asian-American community is facing challenges worse than we’ve seen in decades, and I’ve been calling on more leaders across the country to speak out against this threat the way that my wife has. I’m very proud of the first lady’s courage and passion in condemning the attacks against our Asian-American community. But as I’ve been saying for weeks, words are not enough, which is why I immediately directed the Maryland State Police and all of our state law enforcement agencies to increase enhanced visibility patrols and to provide additional protection for members of the Asian community
We issued awareness bulletins in an effort to ensure the safety of Asian-owned businesses against further attacks, and we’ve been encouraging anyone who is a victim or has witnessed a hate crime to please come forward. All incidents can be reported by calling Maryland’s hate crimes hotline at 1-866-481-8361.
We’ve also been pushing law enforcement and prosecutors at every level of government to vigorously investigate all hate crime allegations and to prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law. Today we’re taking further action by announcing the creation of an Asian-American Hate Crimes Work Group, which will be composed of a wide-ranging group of experts and advocates across various disciplines, who will be tasked with developing strategies, recommendations, and additional actions that can be taken to address this rise in anti-Asian activity, to prevent acts of violence, and to support victims and witnesses. And I’m very pleased to announce today that former U.S. Attorney Robert Hur has agreed to serve as chairman of this work group.
In 2018, Rob was unanimously confirmed by the United States Senate to serve as the chief federal law enforcement officer for the District of Maryland. He spent the past three years focusing on cases involving public corruption, national security, and cyber-crimes, violent crime and gangs, fraud, and the opioid crisis. Our administration had the opportunity to work very closely with him on a number of important initiatives and to work with him on trying to address the violent crime and gun crimes in Baltimore City. Worked with him in providing funding so that they could hire additional prosecutors to investigate and prosecute federal firearms cases in federal court. Rob was widely credited with increasing diversity within the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and for strengthening relationships with law enforcement and other partners at the local, state, and federal levels. Prior to serving as U.S. Attorney, Rob was the Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General with the U.S. Department of Justice, where he assisted with oversight of all components of the department. He also served as an assistant U.S. Attorney in the District of Maryland where he prosecuted crimes including gang violence, firearms offenses, narcotics trafficking, and prior to that, he began his legal career as a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist.
Rob is a strong advocate for justice and for the Asian-American community. And I want to thank him for all his many years of service to the state and to the nation. We very much appreciate his willingness to share his significant expertise, knowledge, and leadership by spearheading this important effort. So at this time, I’d like to invite Rob to come up and say some remarks. Thank you.
ROBERT HUR: Well, thank you so much, Governor, for those very kind words, and good afternoon, everyone. As an Asian-American, I am so grateful to Governor Hogan and the first lady for focusing attention on the important issues of bias and violence against members of the Asian-American communities in our nation. And I am very thankful for the opportunity to be part of the solution. Conversations about subjects like race and racism can be extraordinarily awkward and difficult, but awkward and difficult and honest conversations are the only way to solve big and painful problems in our society.
I love this country, and all the promise that it holds for everyone. And that’s why it was such a privilege for me to serve as United States Attorney, and work to make our state safer and more just for all Marylanders.
There is much in our country’s history that we can and should be proud of. There are also many shameful and painful episodes in our nation’s history in which people have been persecuted on the basis of what they look like, whom they love, or the faith they practice. And those shameful episodes include the recent and growing number of instances of bias-motivated crimes committed against Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders.
Now, the rise in hate-base incidents and crime against Asian-Americans is particularly painful to me, as I have dedicated much of my career to the service of our country. And I am now concerned for my parents’ safety and the safety of other members of my family on the basis of their physical appearance. And that is a fear that no one should have to have.
That’s how I felt as a member of law enforcement, as United States Attorney, and that’s how I continue to feel as an American.
Thank you. I look forward to doing the work that the Governor has asked me to take on.
With that, I’ll invite the good enough back.
GOVERNOR HOGAN: Thank you very much, Rob. With that, we’d be happy to take some questions.
SPEAKER: Can you elaborate a little on the work group or the task force, what kind of actions will be involved?
ROBERT HUR: I’d be happy to address that. What the Governor has in mind, and that I am looking forward to undertaking, is an effort to solicit as many opinions and viewpoints and perspectives on this issue as possible, so we’re going to be — we’re in the process of determining who is going to be on this particular work group, but we’re eager to solicit a diverse view, array of viewpoints, and honestly, I view the task at hand to be to be thoughtful and invite input. I know there are many people in the state who have expressed really, relief, to the Governor and the first lady, in their travels around the state recently, talking about this issue. Many people have suffered incidents of hate-based discrimination and violence, and those incidents go underreported. So we want to learn more about that, we want to hear views and perspectives, and in the end, I know the Governor is eager for us to develop a set of recommendations. As he said, it’s one thing to raise awareness and to speak out about the issue. It’s quite another, and he’s eager to receive recommendations for action about what he and other government officials can do to address this problem.
Yes, sir.
(Question off mic.)
ROBERT HUR: Great questions. So we’re still working through with the Governor and his team about the timeline. That’s another issue that we’re going to crack down on immediately, and get down to figuring out. In addition to the membership of the group. But you put your finger on a very important issue, which is, issues facing the Asian-American community in the state and the nation, they’re not operating in a vacuum, and as you said, you put your finger on one important issue, which is how the Asian-American communities are interacting with other communities in the state and in the nation. So that’s certainly something that we’re going to be mindful of, and again, we want to have thoughtful, candid, potentially awkward discussions about that subject, but that’s certainly part of the deliberation that we’re planning on engaging in.
SPEAKER: First Lady, can you talk about sort of, generally, what have the conversations been like with your family in this past three months, since what’s happened in Georgia and other — (off mic)?
YUMI HOGAN: I’ve heard from a lot of people, you know, my friends, who say that, some people, it’s back and forth, not only Korean Americans, Chinese Americans, and other, Filipino Americans, lots of, same as me, first generation, they didn’t used to have these things, but there’s a long history of attack. So we try to, now, we are saying, we have the same idea, to show this problem is we’re going to, in the future, the next generation, we don’t want to do that. And our grandkids’ generation, same. They’re born here, they’re third-generation, even some fourth-generation, you know so, same as all Americans.
GOVERNOR HOGAN: Thank you, honey.
You know, we have had these conversations a lot in our family, our three daughters are very concerned about our four grandkids, and we’ve had long conversations. We had a family Zoom with everybody where they were just pouring out, telling all the stories of things of all the things that happened to them throughout their lives. Our youngest daughter, her best friend’s mother was attacked at a gas station, and she was afraid to come visit us with our grandchild, with our granddaughter, and, you know, our middle daughter had a friend that was somebody she went to law school with here that was getting on a plane at BWI, as people were making racial slurs at her in front of her kids, talking about the China virus. I mentioned before, the first lady’s assistant, who doesn’t want to run anymore in Howard County because a car pulled over and scared her to death, cut her off and started screaming racist slurs at her. Her mother had a similar experience at the grocery store. These are conversations our daughters, saying much like the former U.S. Attorney said, he was worried about his parents. And our kids are worried about their mom. These are conversations that I think not everyone was aware of, the kinds of feeling, and Rob touched on it, when my wife and I were in Ellicott City visiting the businesses, like ten people came up to me and were pouring out the stories of the pretty violent things that happened to them. One woman that owned one of the restaurants said that she was attacked in the front parking lot and now all of her workers no longer go out the back door. Everybody has to leave together because they’re afraid. We had somebody else tell a story about their home being vandalized repeatedly. And, you know, many people of these people didn’t report crimes. They like they could open up finally. These were, a lot of times, were first-generation immigrants and weren’t sure anybody was going to do anything, and they weren’t sure how to go about reporting, or they just kind of kept it to themselves. Some of it is a cultural — you know, sour kids talked about how they were raised to assimilate and not make waves, and just work hard and don’t speak out. And we’re seeing younger people that are having the courage to speak out. We’re hoping some of these other folks will come forward, and we’re hoping a lot of those people will be able to talk with Rob and his team as they’re putting this together.
SPEAKER: Governor, based on what you said and the stories you heard, going around Howard County, for example, what kind of recommendations, what kind of actions are you hoping to get back from this work group?
GOVERNOR HOGAN: Well, you know, we’ve talked about some of the actions we’ve already taken with respect to all five state police agencies, sending out bulletins, working in conjunction with all our local county police and sheriffs’ departments, in coordination with the state police and others. We’re going to get input from prosecutors here in the state — obviously, Rob’s experience at the federal level and knowledge of hate crimes and the Justice Department. We haven’t said, here’s what we want you to come up with. We’re giving him free reign to help put together a really great group of folks.
I’m not one for, you know, work groups or commissions or committees or task forces that don’t do anything. So I have a predilection for action, like we did with the Equity Task Force headed up by General Birckhead, they’re taking action every day, they’re getting input from the community, but they’re acting on it every day. So I’m hoping we can find some recommendations from this group that we can act on right away that will make a difference.
SPEAKER: Governor, can you speak a little bit to the AAPI — is there some plan as far as making a law — (off mic)
GOVERNOR HOGAN: Yes, we’ve got a little more clarity, but I can share a few more details since we’ve had a number of conversations just today with White House officials who were back and forth with our team trying to sort of figure out what happened, and how we’re going to fix it. We have been notified — this is the bad news part — that the reduction we saw, reduction of about 80,000 doses of Johnson and Johnson in this coming week, that that’s going to continue, likely, for another couple of weeks. So that same pace of reduction, it would nearly be a quarter of a million fewer doses of vaccines. The good news is that we did 82,000 shots yesterday. We have the ability to do 100,000 or more, as soon as they get us those vaccines. All of our 3,000 points of distribution are really cranking them out, and people are excited to get these vaccines. We’re at 78 percent of the entire population over 65 has gotten the vaccine, and 48 percent of people over 18. So we’re making head way. We’ve built an incredible infrastructure that can deliver more vaccines. The last thing we want to hear about is getting less vaccines. We were hoping to ramp up as they were promising. They are committed to getting it fixed and we’re hoping to get by the end of May the doses they were promising, but it’s going to be later in May, rather than April. We were hoping with the infrastructure we built to be able to finish a huge chunk of this in April and May, and now it’s going to be a little slower in April than we can handle or we’re prepared for or they’ve been leading us to believe. Hopefully they can catch up in May. My understanding, I don’t have a lot of clarity about this, because they haven’t been that forthcoming and I think they’re sort of trying to figure out what happened, I think there are millions of Johnson and Johnson doses that are at the Emergent Bio Solutions facility that are good that can be used, but because of whatever the screwup was on the other batch, they need to get EUA to approve the facility, and I don’t know how long that’s going to take. But the good news is when they do that, if the FDA issues an EUA for that facility, they’ll potentially have millions of doses to ship out almost immediately. And we’re very close on a couple of others, including Novavax, the Maryland company that is very close to submitting their phase 3 trial information, and there’s talk that that’s possible to happen also somewhere around that end of April, beginning of May time frame.
SPEAKER: Governor, you heard a couple weeks ago, when you visited, about how they were a Maryland company, they were doing great things, this is going to be the shot in the arm that America needed. How much are you disgusted, perhaps, with the mess-up?
GOVERNOR HOGAN: Well, it’s very frustrating. We still don’t really know how it happened. We haven’t gotten a lot of detail, but obviously a huge problem. The other thing we’re concerned about is now there are stories coming out that the federal government was aware for months but didn’t tell anybody. They were telling us as late as last week, the White House, Dr. Fauci, everybody in the supply chain saying there would be no disruption. Then, whoops, you’re going to be 250,000 short for the next few weeks. So it’s very frustrating. I know everybody is trying to do their best to fix the problem. I still don’t know what the problem was. But hopefully they’ll get it fixed and be able to start shipping out of that facility, and hopefully with the other Maryland company with the new vaccine we’ll be able to crank things out even faster.
(Question off mic.)
— in city schools, and continue to say that they are underfunded, and with COVID, what do you think is the reason behind —
GOVERNOR HOGAN: I think it’s all just pure politics. Look. We’ve record funded the Baltimore City schools seven years in a row. We’ve invested more than the legislative formulas called for. They’re the 5th highest funded school system in America. We record funded them again in this budget. And we have no control what soever over the Baltimore schools other than providing the money. Baltimore City Council, an average jurisdiction invests 50 percent in education. Prince George’s invests 50 percent. In Baltimore City, it’s about 10 percent that they invest. All the rest is paid for by the state. It’s not a funding problem. It’s a leadership problem. And it’s failures at the city council, at the school superintendent, and the Board of Education. So I don’t have much more to say other than it would be easy to criticize somebody who has nothing to do with it, but I think they ought to look closer to home to find out where the problem lies.
SPEAKER: Based on the information you’re getting from the federal government, who repeatedly told you you would get more, and you think they may have known something about Johnson and Johnson, what’s your confidence in the information you’re getting from federal government officials?
GOVERNOR HOGAN: Let me say, I’m not trying to be critical, I’m simply trying to explain what happened. I’ll give the White House team credit, the head of the coronavirus task force, Jeff Zients, called me on Easter Sunday to talk about how to work on problems, to give us a heads up on things that were happening. We have meetings every week with the staff, with the all the governors. But I think it just caught them all by surprise and internally they might not even know answers to what the problem is, so I’m just going to give them the benefit of the doubt that it’s going to get fixed. I know they’re all working hard on it. It’s going to take longer than we had hoped. We had thought it was going to get fixed a week later, but now it’s like, at least three weeks later. But, you know, they’re trying. We’re all — it is a — look, this is the largest peacetime undertaking in our nation’s history. The fact that we’ve done, you know, three and a quarter million vaccines in Maryland, you know, we’re tied for second in the country on our equity efforts. We’re third in the country on the rate of vaccinations. It wouldn’t happen without this federal, state, and local partnership. But there’s no question there’s been some issues and problems. I mean, it’s not the only issue we’re having, that we’ve been working for months to try to fix a data problem, which, I don’t know if we’ve really talked about much, but it’s important, because there’s been a lot of, like, breathless coverage about where Maryland ranked on our percentage of doses utilized. The numbers were completely wrong, and it’s a mistake by the federal government. I think we mentioned this about a month and a half ago, but people continue to report it. The federal government admitted that it’s an issue on their end, but they just haven’t been able to fix it. So we’ve been administering the doses that we’re in charge of at more than 100 percent, which would put us at number one in the country, I would imagine. 112 percent, 128 percent. We’re getting five or six doses out of a vial, extra doses. All the ones we get, we’re utilizing. But they’re allocating hundreds of thousands of doses to us that don’t ever come to us, that go to five federal agencies, and they’re administering them at about 44 percent. So that 44 percent drags our numbers down from 100 down to about 70. And we’re trying to get them to fix that problem, but we’re leading in almost every single category: The total number of shots, the percentage of shots, the percentage of different groups vaccinated or having gotten one shot. The one we’re missing is, they’re saying, one CDC chart keeps saying that we have a bunch of doses that we actually don’t have. They’re sitting at the Department of Defense, at NIH, at Walter Reed, and we have no knowledge of them or when they’re going to use them or why they have such a stockpile. But it has nothing to do with us. So there’s communication problems and issues, and glitches that have to be fixed, but we’re working with them almost every day to try to fix all that.
SPEAKER: Last question.
(Question off mic.)
SPEAKER: COVID spreaders are ticking up again — is there a threshold that that can’t be stopped where you might have to reconsider recommending new restrictions?
GOVERNOR HOGAN: Yeah, it’s, we’re watching that every day. We have really big teams of really smart virologists and epidemiologists and public health doctors and teams that are looking at the data and tracking what’s happening around the country and looking at every metric. We are concerned about the variants. We’re sequencing variants at the highest level of any state in the country. We’ve identified a number of different variants. Most of them are the New York variant, or the U.K. variant — which is a mutation of the U.K. variant. Some are smaller numbers — South African or Brazilian. But we’re concerned. If you look at a map, all of the states to the north of us are in the red zone. We are not. We’re still holding the lane, as the — right, it’s at the, you know, the Mason-Dixon Line, we’re holding them off, but it’s coming. And if you look at Maryland, the three hot counties are the ones that border Pennsylvania. I mine, it’s like Pennsylvania completely lit up in every county. And if you look at Baltimore County, Baltimore City, where we have our highest numbers, it’s coming. So we are in a race between variants and vaccines. And, you know, that’s why we did 82,000 shots yesterday. It’s why we signed up 100,000 people on our mass vax website yesterday. And we’ve done 650,000. It’s why this week I opened up two more mass vax sites and I’m opening two more next week. And we’re going to keep — you know, there are thousands of people working around the clock to do millions of vaccines. And at the same time, those variants are spreading. Most of it is being traced to, you know, it’s popping up in regions as it has throughout this crisis. It goes from one part of the country to the other. Now the entire Northeast is lit up, and we’re the only ones who aren’t. So we don’t have a magic wall that’s going to keep it out. But we can try to defeat it by getting everybody vaccinated, and that’s what we’re going to focus on.
Thank you.
(End of transcript).
Two weeks ago, the first lady and I gathered a number of leaders from the Asian-American community in Ellicott City, as we visited several businesses that were recently vandalized on Lunar New Year.
This COVID-19 pandemic has been a challenging time for all of us, but Asian-Americans have had to deal with an additional crisis: A sharp and alarming rise of racist rhetoric, vitriol, and harassment directed at them simply because of their race, ethnic background, or national origin. Nearly one third of all Asian-Americans say they have experienced some form of discrimination since the pandemic began. In Maryland, hate crimes targeting Asian-Americans have more than doubled since 2018, and rose by 150 percent nationwide in 2020. That hits close to home for me and my family. Like so many of their fellow Asian-Americans, my wife and our three daughters have had to contend with some of this throughout their lives. But in recent months, all across the country, we have seen hurtful words and gestures turn into villainization and violent attacks, many of which have gone unreported and unpunished, including attacks captured on video where witnesses failed to intervene and to help the victims, and social media challenges that actively encourage people to attack Asians.
Our Asian-American community is facing challenges worse than we’ve seen in decades, and I’ve been calling on more leaders across the country to speak out against this threat the way that my wife has. I’m very proud of the first lady’s courage and passion in condemning the attacks against our Asian-American community. But as I’ve been saying for weeks, words are not enough, which is why I immediately directed the Maryland State Police and all of our state law enforcement agencies to increase enhanced visibility patrols and to provide additional protection for members of the Asian community
We issued awareness bulletins in an effort to ensure the safety of Asian-owned businesses against further attacks, and we’ve been encouraging anyone who is a victim or has witnessed a hate crime to please come forward. All incidents can be reported by calling Maryland’s hate crimes hotline at 1-866-481-8361.
We’ve also been pushing law enforcement and prosecutors at every level of government to vigorously investigate all hate crime allegations and to prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law. Today we’re taking further action by announcing the creation of an Asian-American Hate Crimes Work Group, which will be composed of a wide-ranging group of experts and advocates across various disciplines, who will be tasked with developing strategies, recommendations, and additional actions that can be taken to address this rise in anti-Asian activity, to prevent acts of violence, and to support victims and witnesses. And I’m very pleased to announce today that former U.S. Attorney Robert Hur has agreed to serve as chairman of this work group.
In 2018, Rob was unanimously confirmed by the United States Senate to serve as the chief federal law enforcement officer for the District of Maryland. He spent the past three years focusing on cases involving public corruption, national security, and cyber-crimes, violent crime and gangs, fraud, and the opioid crisis. Our administration had the opportunity to work very closely with him on a number of important initiatives and to work with him on trying to address the violent crime and gun crimes in Baltimore City. Worked with him in providing funding so that they could hire additional prosecutors to investigate and prosecute federal firearms cases in federal court. Rob was widely credited with increasing diversity within the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and for strengthening relationships with law enforcement and other partners at the local, state, and federal levels. Prior to serving as U.S. Attorney, Rob was the Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General with the U.S. Department of Justice, where he assisted with oversight of all components of the department. He also served as an assistant U.S. Attorney in the District of Maryland where he prosecuted crimes including gang violence, firearms offenses, narcotics trafficking, and prior to that, he began his legal career as a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist.
Rob is a strong advocate for justice and for the Asian-American community. And I want to thank him for all his many years of service to the state and to the nation. We very much appreciate his willingness to share his significant expertise, knowledge, and leadership by spearheading this important effort. So at this time, I’d like to invite Rob to come up and say some remarks. Thank you.
ROBERT HUR: Well, thank you so much, Governor, for those very kind words, and good afternoon, everyone. As an Asian-American, I am so grateful to Governor Hogan and the first lady for focusing attention on the important issues of bias and violence against members of the Asian-American communities in our nation. And I am very thankful for the opportunity to be part of the solution. Conversations about subjects like race and racism can be extraordinarily awkward and difficult, but awkward and difficult and honest conversations are the only way to solve big and painful problems in our society.
I love this country, and all the promise that it holds for everyone. And that’s why it was such a privilege for me to serve as United States Attorney, and work to make our state safer and more just for all Marylanders.
There is much in our country’s history that we can and should be proud of. There are also many shameful and painful episodes in our nation’s history in which people have been persecuted on the basis of what they look like, whom they love, or the faith they practice. And those shameful episodes include the recent and growing number of instances of bias-motivated crimes committed against Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders.
Now, the rise in hate-base incidents and crime against Asian-Americans is particularly painful to me, as I have dedicated much of my career to the service of our country. And I am now concerned for my parents’ safety and the safety of other members of my family on the basis of their physical appearance. And that is a fear that no one should have to have.
That’s how I felt as a member of law enforcement, as United States Attorney, and that’s how I continue to feel as an American.
Thank you. I look forward to doing the work that the Governor has asked me to take on.
With that, I’ll invite the good enough back.
GOVERNOR HOGAN: Thank you very much, Rob. With that, we’d be happy to take some questions.
SPEAKER: Can you elaborate a little on the work group or the task force, what kind of actions will be involved?
ROBERT HUR: I’d be happy to address that. What the Governor has in mind, and that I am looking forward to undertaking, is an effort to solicit as many opinions and viewpoints and perspectives on this issue as possible, so we’re going to be — we’re in the process of determining who is going to be on this particular work group, but we’re eager to solicit a diverse view, array of viewpoints, and honestly, I view the task at hand to be to be thoughtful and invite input. I know there are many people in the state who have expressed really, relief, to the Governor and the first lady, in their travels around the state recently, talking about this issue. Many people have suffered incidents of hate-based discrimination and violence, and those incidents go underreported. So we want to learn more about that, we want to hear views and perspectives, and in the end, I know the Governor is eager for us to develop a set of recommendations. As he said, it’s one thing to raise awareness and to speak out about the issue. It’s quite another, and he’s eager to receive recommendations for action about what he and other government officials can do to address this problem.
Yes, sir.
(Question off mic.)
ROBERT HUR: Great questions. So we’re still working through with the Governor and his team about the timeline. That’s another issue that we’re going to crack down on immediately, and get down to figuring out. In addition to the membership of the group. But you put your finger on a very important issue, which is, issues facing the Asian-American community in the state and the nation, they’re not operating in a vacuum, and as you said, you put your finger on one important issue, which is how the Asian-American communities are interacting with other communities in the state and in the nation. So that’s certainly something that we’re going to be mindful of, and again, we want to have thoughtful, candid, potentially awkward discussions about that subject, but that’s certainly part of the deliberation that we’re planning on engaging in.
SPEAKER: First Lady, can you talk about sort of, generally, what have the conversations been like with your family in this past three months, since what’s happened in Georgia and other — (off mic)?
YUMI HOGAN: I’ve heard from a lot of people, you know, my friends, who say that, some people, it’s back and forth, not only Korean Americans, Chinese Americans, and other, Filipino Americans, lots of, same as me, first generation, they didn’t used to have these things, but there’s a long history of attack. So we try to, now, we are saying, we have the same idea, to show this problem is we’re going to, in the future, the next generation, we don’t want to do that. And our grandkids’ generation, same. They’re born here, they’re third-generation, even some fourth-generation, you know so, same as all Americans.
GOVERNOR HOGAN: Thank you, honey.
You know, we have had these conversations a lot in our family, our three daughters are very concerned about our four grandkids, and we’ve had long conversations. We had a family Zoom with everybody where they were just pouring out, telling all the stories of things of all the things that happened to them throughout their lives. Our youngest daughter, her best friend’s mother was attacked at a gas station, and she was afraid to come visit us with our grandchild, with our granddaughter, and, you know, our middle daughter had a friend that was somebody she went to law school with here that was getting on a plane at BWI, as people were making racial slurs at her in front of her kids, talking about the China virus. I mentioned before, the first lady’s assistant, who doesn’t want to run anymore in Howard County because a car pulled over and scared her to death, cut her off and started screaming racist slurs at her. Her mother had a similar experience at the grocery store. These are conversations our daughters, saying much like the former U.S. Attorney said, he was worried about his parents. And our kids are worried about their mom. These are conversations that I think not everyone was aware of, the kinds of feeling, and Rob touched on it, when my wife and I were in Ellicott City visiting the businesses, like ten people came up to me and were pouring out the stories of the pretty violent things that happened to them. One woman that owned one of the restaurants said that she was attacked in the front parking lot and now all of her workers no longer go out the back door. Everybody has to leave together because they’re afraid. We had somebody else tell a story about their home being vandalized repeatedly. And, you know, many people of these people didn’t report crimes. They like they could open up finally. These were, a lot of times, were first-generation immigrants and weren’t sure anybody was going to do anything, and they weren’t sure how to go about reporting, or they just kind of kept it to themselves. Some of it is a cultural — you know, sour kids talked about how they were raised to assimilate and not make waves, and just work hard and don’t speak out. And we’re seeing younger people that are having the courage to speak out. We’re hoping some of these other folks will come forward, and we’re hoping a lot of those people will be able to talk with Rob and his team as they’re putting this together.
SPEAKER: Governor, based on what you said and the stories you heard, going around Howard County, for example, what kind of recommendations, what kind of actions are you hoping to get back from this work group?
GOVERNOR HOGAN: Well, you know, we’ve talked about some of the actions we’ve already taken with respect to all five state police agencies, sending out bulletins, working in conjunction with all our local county police and sheriffs’ departments, in coordination with the state police and others. We’re going to get input from prosecutors here in the state — obviously, Rob’s experience at the federal level and knowledge of hate crimes and the Justice Department. We haven’t said, here’s what we want you to come up with. We’re giving him free reign to help put together a really great group of folks.
I’m not one for, you know, work groups or commissions or committees or task forces that don’t do anything. So I have a predilection for action, like we did with the Equity Task Force headed up by General Birckhead, they’re taking action every day, they’re getting input from the community, but they’re acting on it every day. So I’m hoping we can find some recommendations from this group that we can act on right away that will make a difference.
SPEAKER: Governor, can you speak a little bit to the AAPI — is there some plan as far as making a law — (off mic)
GOVERNOR HOGAN: Yes, we’ve got a little more clarity, but I can share a few more details since we’ve had a number of conversations just today with White House officials who were back and forth with our team trying to sort of figure out what happened, and how we’re going to fix it. We have been notified — this is the bad news part — that the reduction we saw, reduction of about 80,000 doses of Johnson and Johnson in this coming week, that that’s going to continue, likely, for another couple of weeks. So that same pace of reduction, it would nearly be a quarter of a million fewer doses of vaccines. The good news is that we did 82,000 shots yesterday. We have the ability to do 100,000 or more, as soon as they get us those vaccines. All of our 3,000 points of distribution are really cranking them out, and people are excited to get these vaccines. We’re at 78 percent of the entire population over 65 has gotten the vaccine, and 48 percent of people over 18. So we’re making head way. We’ve built an incredible infrastructure that can deliver more vaccines. The last thing we want to hear about is getting less vaccines. We were hoping to ramp up as they were promising. They are committed to getting it fixed and we’re hoping to get by the end of May the doses they were promising, but it’s going to be later in May, rather than April. We were hoping with the infrastructure we built to be able to finish a huge chunk of this in April and May, and now it’s going to be a little slower in April than we can handle or we’re prepared for or they’ve been leading us to believe. Hopefully they can catch up in May. My understanding, I don’t have a lot of clarity about this, because they haven’t been that forthcoming and I think they’re sort of trying to figure out what happened, I think there are millions of Johnson and Johnson doses that are at the Emergent Bio Solutions facility that are good that can be used, but because of whatever the screwup was on the other batch, they need to get EUA to approve the facility, and I don’t know how long that’s going to take. But the good news is when they do that, if the FDA issues an EUA for that facility, they’ll potentially have millions of doses to ship out almost immediately. And we’re very close on a couple of others, including Novavax, the Maryland company that is very close to submitting their phase 3 trial information, and there’s talk that that’s possible to happen also somewhere around that end of April, beginning of May time frame.
SPEAKER: Governor, you heard a couple weeks ago, when you visited, about how they were a Maryland company, they were doing great things, this is going to be the shot in the arm that America needed. How much are you disgusted, perhaps, with the mess-up?
GOVERNOR HOGAN: Well, it’s very frustrating. We still don’t really know how it happened. We haven’t gotten a lot of detail, but obviously a huge problem. The other thing we’re concerned about is now there are stories coming out that the federal government was aware for months but didn’t tell anybody. They were telling us as late as last week, the White House, Dr. Fauci, everybody in the supply chain saying there would be no disruption. Then, whoops, you’re going to be 250,000 short for the next few weeks. So it’s very frustrating. I know everybody is trying to do their best to fix the problem. I still don’t know what the problem was. But hopefully they’ll get it fixed and be able to start shipping out of that facility, and hopefully with the other Maryland company with the new vaccine we’ll be able to crank things out even faster.
(Question off mic.)
— in city schools, and continue to say that they are underfunded, and with COVID, what do you think is the reason behind —
GOVERNOR HOGAN: I think it’s all just pure politics. Look. We’ve record funded the Baltimore City schools seven years in a row. We’ve invested more than the legislative formulas called for. They’re the 5th highest funded school system in America. We record funded them again in this budget. And we have no control what soever over the Baltimore schools other than providing the money. Baltimore City Council, an average jurisdiction invests 50 percent in education. Prince George’s invests 50 percent. In Baltimore City, it’s about 10 percent that they invest. All the rest is paid for by the state. It’s not a funding problem. It’s a leadership problem. And it’s failures at the city council, at the school superintendent, and the Board of Education. So I don’t have much more to say other than it would be easy to criticize somebody who has nothing to do with it, but I think they ought to look closer to home to find out where the problem lies.
SPEAKER: Based on the information you’re getting from the federal government, who repeatedly told you you would get more, and you think they may have known something about Johnson and Johnson, what’s your confidence in the information you’re getting from federal government officials?
GOVERNOR HOGAN: Let me say, I’m not trying to be critical, I’m simply trying to explain what happened. I’ll give the White House team credit, the head of the coronavirus task force, Jeff Zients, called me on Easter Sunday to talk about how to work on problems, to give us a heads up on things that were happening. We have meetings every week with the staff, with the all the governors. But I think it just caught them all by surprise and internally they might not even know answers to what the problem is, so I’m just going to give them the benefit of the doubt that it’s going to get fixed. I know they’re all working hard on it. It’s going to take longer than we had hoped. We had thought it was going to get fixed a week later, but now it’s like, at least three weeks later. But, you know, they’re trying. We’re all — it is a — look, this is the largest peacetime undertaking in our nation’s history. The fact that we’ve done, you know, three and a quarter million vaccines in Maryland, you know, we’re tied for second in the country on our equity efforts. We’re third in the country on the rate of vaccinations. It wouldn’t happen without this federal, state, and local partnership. But there’s no question there’s been some issues and problems. I mean, it’s not the only issue we’re having, that we’ve been working for months to try to fix a data problem, which, I don’t know if we’ve really talked about much, but it’s important, because there’s been a lot of, like, breathless coverage about where Maryland ranked on our percentage of doses utilized. The numbers were completely wrong, and it’s a mistake by the federal government. I think we mentioned this about a month and a half ago, but people continue to report it. The federal government admitted that it’s an issue on their end, but they just haven’t been able to fix it. So we’ve been administering the doses that we’re in charge of at more than 100 percent, which would put us at number one in the country, I would imagine. 112 percent, 128 percent. We’re getting five or six doses out of a vial, extra doses. All the ones we get, we’re utilizing. But they’re allocating hundreds of thousands of doses to us that don’t ever come to us, that go to five federal agencies, and they’re administering them at about 44 percent. So that 44 percent drags our numbers down from 100 down to about 70. And we’re trying to get them to fix that problem, but we’re leading in almost every single category: The total number of shots, the percentage of shots, the percentage of different groups vaccinated or having gotten one shot. The one we’re missing is, they’re saying, one CDC chart keeps saying that we have a bunch of doses that we actually don’t have. They’re sitting at the Department of Defense, at NIH, at Walter Reed, and we have no knowledge of them or when they’re going to use them or why they have such a stockpile. But it has nothing to do with us. So there’s communication problems and issues, and glitches that have to be fixed, but we’re working with them almost every day to try to fix all that.
SPEAKER: Last question.
(Question off mic.)
SPEAKER: COVID spreaders are ticking up again — is there a threshold that that can’t be stopped where you might have to reconsider recommending new restrictions?
GOVERNOR HOGAN: Yeah, it’s, we’re watching that every day. We have really big teams of really smart virologists and epidemiologists and public health doctors and teams that are looking at the data and tracking what’s happening around the country and looking at every metric. We are concerned about the variants. We’re sequencing variants at the highest level of any state in the country. We’ve identified a number of different variants. Most of them are the New York variant, or the U.K. variant — which is a mutation of the U.K. variant. Some are smaller numbers — South African or Brazilian. But we’re concerned. If you look at a map, all of the states to the north of us are in the red zone. We are not. We’re still holding the lane, as the — right, it’s at the, you know, the Mason-Dixon Line, we’re holding them off, but it’s coming. And if you look at Maryland, the three hot counties are the ones that border Pennsylvania. I mine, it’s like Pennsylvania completely lit up in every county. And if you look at Baltimore County, Baltimore City, where we have our highest numbers, it’s coming. So we are in a race between variants and vaccines. And, you know, that’s why we did 82,000 shots yesterday. It’s why we signed up 100,000 people on our mass vax website yesterday. And we’ve done 650,000. It’s why this week I opened up two more mass vax sites and I’m opening two more next week. And we’re going to keep — you know, there are thousands of people working around the clock to do millions of vaccines. And at the same time, those variants are spreading. Most of it is being traced to, you know, it’s popping up in regions as it has throughout this crisis. It goes from one part of the country to the other. Now the entire Northeast is lit up, and we’re the only ones who aren’t. So we don’t have a magic wall that’s going to keep it out. But we can try to defeat it by getting everybody vaccinated, and that’s what we’re going to focus on.
Thank you.
(End of transcript).