Bernie Smacks Down Moderna On Vaccine Pricing & FL GOP Attacks Free Press With Ridiculous Bills

Moderna has decided to NOT raise the price of their COVID vaccine after Bernie Sanders threatened to haul the CEO in for a Senate hearing. Then, Florida Republicans are still moving forward with their attempts to re-write defamation laws in the state, but their favorite conservative media outlets are telling them that this will kill their businesses. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Moderna has decided not to raise the price of their covid vaccine after Bernie Sanders threatened to haul the CEO in for a Senate hearing. Boy, this happened quick. Right. You know. Okay. You got a company that developed a vaccine, actually, taxpayers paid for.

Yeah.

Billions of dollars. Taxpayers helped them develop it. Taxpayers gave them billions of dollars to, in the first phase where there was an emergency need for it, they made billions. And then after that, after they couldn't get, count on that money, vaccine cost $26, for the consumer they tried to raise it to $130. What was it 400%?

Yeah. 400% increase. And so, of course, always has to be Bernie Sanders.

Yeah.

Comes out and he says, okay, listen, Moderna. And he points out everything you just said, you know, we gave you the money. You know, you're using also publicly available research. We threw all the resources at you to do this. And we're thankful for it, by the way. You did good. But now you're trying to screw us again. So how about you, Mr. CEO of Moderna, I want you to come into this senate. Now I'm gonna sit you down and you're gonna tell your story.

It was Mrs. Mrs.

Oh, Mrs. Mrs. Moderna.

Yeah.

You come in and you tell your story to the entire country about why you're raising the prices 400%. And a couple days later, they said, you know what, uh, we're gonna keep it 20 bucks.

Yeah.

Everybody just do what you're gonna do. But that is the kind of pressure that you could see somebody like Pete Buttigieg putting on the airline industry or the train industry.

Of course.

But nothing. But Bernie Sanders is still the, the leader out there with taking on these corporations.

That, that's called, it's called leadership. You're in an office where you can use that kinda leadership. And he, he beat them back like a wild dog, I'm telling you. And so that's, that's all that had to happen. No, Mrs. Moderna, you're not gonna raise it from $26 to $130, because you've already made billions of dollars on the backs of taxpayers. They've already paid you a lot of money. I love that kinda leadership.

It, it does. And Bernie wasn't threatening legislation against them.

No.

He wasn't threatening, you know, price gouging charges. He just said, why don't you come tell everybody why you're doing this. And that was enough to scare 'em.

Yeah. Yeah.

Florida Republicans are still moving forward with their attempts to rewrite defamation laws in the state. But their favorite conservative media outlets are telling them, you're gonna kill us. You're gonna put us outta business. It is virtually, okay. First of all, this is Andrade. I call him anonymous because most people don't even know who he is, but Andrade here is, that's him. Okay. So he's come up with the bill. Why don't you talk about what the bill is?

Yeah. What this bill would do is it would basically try to rewrite federal law at the state level, which you already can't do anyway. So it should be dead on arrival. But I guess Andrade and his giant forehead doesn't care about that. So what he's done is he's got this legislation that would basically do away with actual malice, which means in order to prove defamation, you no longer have to have that standard of they did it intentionally. So if you go out there and you accidentally say something, you can be sued for it.

Well, a reporter should be able to project about what they believe is happening. They don't always get it right. Now that's different from malice. It's different from, it's different from the kind of recklessness that the Sullivan case says, look, if you do this, you're gonna, defamation is gonna stick even if it's a public figure.