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Interview with Organic Farmer Kate McClendon; Kim Jong Un Information Blackout Inside North Korea; Patient Zero Conspiracy Theory Spreads to China. Aired 10:30-11a ET
Aired April 27, 2020 - 10:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[10:30:00]
MIGUEL MARQUEZ, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): -- date of near suspension with no end in sight.
SUSAN BERNA, UNEMPLOYED: I have to turn off the news at a certain point. I have to go out for a walk, I know I have to do other things so I don't get overwhelmed.
MARQUEZ (voice-over): Susan Berna worked in promotions and sales. She had just started two part-time gigs, now both gone. She has some money saved and can survive for a while, but --
BERNA: I have crummy health insurance.
MARQUEZ (voice-over): -- for Berna, it's the uncertainty of what getting the coronavirus could bring.
BERNA: I pay almost $300 a month, and it only covers me for $15,000 in a year.
MARQUEZ: Total?
BERNA: Total.
MARQUEZ: So if you get coronavirus --
BERNA: I'll either be in huge debt or I won't be treated. I don't think they can turn people away, but I don't see any relief for someone like me who does have insurance. The governor has said he will cover people who don't have insurance, but I do.
MARQUEZ (voice-over): Since mid-March, more than 300,000 Wisconsinites have filed for unemployment. And economists say it is going to get worse.
MARQUEZ: How big a hit is the Wisconsin economy going to take?
NOAH WILLIAMS, ECONOMICS PROFESSOR, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN: It's quite substantial. Our overall numbers are a decline in economic activity on the order of about 50 percent.
MARQUEZ: Fifty, five-zero? WILLIAMS: Fifty percent, year over year.
MARQUEZ (voice-over): Williams and his Center for Research on the Wisconsin Economy tracks anonymous cell phone data at 50,000 establishments statewide, from mom-and-pop retail shops to malls, movie theaters and manufacturing plants, big and small. His latest data indicates a 60 percent reduction in manufacturing activity.
WILLIAMS: It's crushing, to be honest. It's -- manufacturing is the backbone of this state.
MARQUEZ (voice-over): Last October, CNN profiled Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry in Manitowoc. Then, it was struggling with the effects of the trade war with China. Today, it's keeping all its employees paid, but new orders are down 90 percent.
In agriculture, a similar story. The price of milk, in a tailspin. Milk's so cheap, farmers cannot give it away.
RYAN ELBE, FAMILY FARMER, GOLDEN E. DAIRY: This would have been on a store shelf, 24 hours form now, but it's not. We're just dumping it down the drain.
MARQUEZ (voice-over): The restaurant and hospitality industries, nearly at a dead stop. Coming back online won't be easy or quick.
BRANDON WRIGHT, OWNER, HAMBURGER MARY'S: Our sales are down about 90 percent. We'd be good to survive through the current -- what they're saying, like by the end of May. If it goes any further than that, then we're going to have to do a lot of adjustments.
MARQUEZ (voice-over): Those adjustments will be made across the economy, leaving millions vulnerable.
RON (PH) TURISI (PH), VETERAN: I've got $983 in the bank right now.
MARQUEZ (voice-over): Ron (ph) Turisi (ph), a Navy veteran now on disability, was homeless for two years. His job as a cook ended seven weeks ago, when Buckingham's Bar and Grill in Madison closed, his monthly income, cut in half.
MARQUEZ: What's your level of anxiety and stress about the future right now?
TURISI (PH): It's pretty high right now, I'd have to say.
MARQUEZ (voice-over): An avid fisherman, he spends hours every day hooking large-mouth bass and forgetting about how he'll survive the months ahead.
In this political battleground state, the battle for many has become surviving from one day to the next.
(END VIDEOTAPE) MARQUEZ: Now, another thing economists have been trying to figure out is just the effect of these safer-at-home or safe-at-home orders across different states. And what they have found is that for the most part, economic activity ceased before those orders went into effect because, for the most part, consumers were not willing to go out to dinner, go out shopping, take trips, do all that sort of stuff that drives the U.S. economy if it meant a health risk.
That also means that V-shaped recovery that they're hoping for, that it would go off very quickly and then come back very quickly, is probably not going to happen until consumers are confident of either a cure, a vaccine or both -- Poppy.
POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR, NEWSROOM: I think that's such a good point. If businesses open, that's one thing. But to have a V-shaped recovery, everyone has to go back to business. Thanks, Miguel.
MARQUEZ: Yes.
HARLOW: Now, to our food supply and a stunning new warning from Tyson. The company says, quote, "millions of pounds of meat will disappear" from the supply chain as coronavirus infections in their plants and other meat plants have forced them to finally shutter.
It's not just the big ones really reeling; family-owned farms, struggling to stay afloat. With me now to share her story is organic farmer Kate McClendon. For three generations, the McClendon family has provided over 100 varieties of fruits and vegetables and more in Arizona.
Kate, thank you for being here. I was just really struck, reading about your story and what you're going through. Because you say 95 percent of your business -- right? -- selling to restaurants --
KATE MCCLENDON, FARMER, MCCLENDON'S SELECT: Yes, yes.
HARLOW: -- essentially evaporated overnight. So --
MCCLENDON: It did.
HARLOW: -- now what?
MCCLENDON: Well, we did sell to farmers' markets, and so the crops that were in the ground that we had designated for restaurants, we were able to quickly, within 36 hours, put together a grab-and-go CSA- type box that we could then try (ph) to sell into our farmers' markets, to our farmers' market customers.
[10:35:12]
So farmers' markets were about 25 percent of our business. And because the governor of the state of Arizona said that farmers' markets were allowed to stay open as an essential business, as a grocery-like operation, we had to quickly turn around and put together a solution that would allow us to move these boxes to a home consumer, so that we could move these crops that were destined for restaurants. HARLOW: That is an amazing 36-hour pivot. Good for you, but it can't
be bringing in the type of revenue that you were getting on a consistent basis from restaurants.
And I just -- I wonder what the personal toll have been for you. I mean, you've talked about like losing all this weight, and sleepless nights. What's it like?
MCCLENDON: It's been incredibly stressful for our entire family. We're trying desperately to keep our employees right now.
This has changed our business operations completely overnight. We do desperately still want to support our restaurants that are trying to stay open right now, that has dropped considerably. We have been able to do this program and get these CSA boxes out, but Arizona has a different growing season than the rest of the country.
So we are starting to face 100-degree temperatures starting this week, and that is usually when farmers' markets slow down. So we would like to continue this box program as long as possible because that is our revenue stream at the moment. But what that is going to look like with the summer heat, I don't know.
HARLOW: You did get a PPP loan. That is --
MCCLENDON: Yes.
HARLOW: -- good news, in the first round of funding. Can you talk to me about what that means for your business, how long it can sustain you with no layoffs?
MCCLENDON: For right now, it means we can meet our payroll for the next eight weeks. After that, I don't know what it's going to look like, obviously. Then we will definitely be into triple digits here in Arizona.
I was also trying to secure an Economic Injury Disaster Loan through the Small Business Administration to help offset our operational and our overhead. We need both to get us through the next several months.
Small farms were shut out of the initial round of the EIDL program because of an oversight. It was the intent of Congress that farmers be able to access the EIDL program to get some of that relief. They were supposed to be included with other small businesses, they were not.
During the second round of the CARES Act, it was put more explicit language into the bill, that farms should be allowed to access that. But it is on a first-come, first-serve basis based off when your application was put in --
HARLOW: Yes, yes.
MCCLENDON: -- and because farms were not allowed to submit during the first round, that means we're now last. There has been no priority placed on farms being able to access that relief lending at the moment. HARLOW: Well, I think a lot of leaders are probably listening, and
hopefully they're hearing that plea from you guys because, you know, farmers have come off such a hard year already, with soaring farm bankruptcies, weather crises and now this. I'm so sorry you're in this predicament, we're wishing you luck. Thank you, Kate.
MCCLENDON: Thank you, thank you.
HARLOW: Yes -- Jim.
[10:38:18]
JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR, NEWSROOM: There are hard questions filtering out of North Korea about the health of that country's leader. Is North Korea's state media providing any answers? We'll have more.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
SCIUTTO: Confusing questions concerning the health of the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. As we reported last week, the U.S. had been monitoring intelligence suggesting Kim's health was in danger. But North Korean state media says he's sent greetings to South Africa's president just today. Clearly, though, he's not been seen in public for more than two weeks. CNN's Will Ripley joins us now.
Will, North Korea, as we said and always say, is the blackest of black boxes for any foreign intelligence service, but there are signals that come out of the country, one of them being his absence from public view. Explain to us, with all your experience traveling there and covering this country, how unusual is that silence?
WILL RIPLEY, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: I think the fact that North Korea has not responded nearly a week after you broke the story about the U.S. intelligence that he might be in grave danger after surgery, Jim, is very, very telling.
Silence speaks volumes because, remember, North Korea replied in less than a day, when President Trump said that he had received a recent letter from Kim Jong Un, they denied that the very next day. And yet they're not saying anything substantive about this.
We -- you and I both know that these kind of greetings that he could send to world leaders or to workers, these are things that other people sign off on. They are neither confirmation nor denial of the now-stories that are circulating from one end of the spectrum of the other, all over the world, that he's been hiding out because of coronavirus, or that he's at death's door. And I give a lot of it not much credence until we get the facts from the North Koreans themselves.
SCIUTTO: Now, given that even U.S. intelligence will grant that when they're looking at this country, they don't know for sure. You know, there's some reading of tea leaves here, and so on. For folks at home who have been following this, what should they look for now to get a sense of what's really happening inside that hermit kingdom, as it's called? RIPLEY: Well, we obviously look for clues. And, you know, the
appearance of Kim Jong Un's train at his luxury compound on the coastal city of Wonsan, does give some credibility to a theory that he might be there, and that, you know, even though he often likes to fly to and from there, the train might be there for a very serious type of procession, he took a train to Hanoi to be with President Trump. The train could also be there because that's just how he wants to travel, or the train could be there because he can't fly after surgery.
[10:45:20]
But this is all speculative, but that's all that we have to go on. I can tell you what's very telling to me is that well-placed sources that, in the past, can usually, by this amount of time, give me a sense of what's going on inside the country, they say there is a total information blackout, even for people inside North Korea. So rumors are running there.
And the fact that Kim Jong Un has not come out to say, hey, I'm OK, or even release a photo, again, I find very interesting and we need to watch closely.
SCIUTTO: Well, you heard last week, the national security advisor Robert O'Brien say publicly more than once that the U.S. is closely watching these reports there. In the region -- you're in Japan now, you speak to people on the Korean Peninsula -- how seriously are Asian governments, Asian leaders taking these questions now? How closely are they watching this?
RIPLEY: This is very troubling for people here in the region, and certainly around the world -- there in the U.S., here in Japan -- because North Korea has a stockpile of nuclear weapons. And right now, it's just not clear who is in command.
There is not a clear succession strategy in place because the North Koreans would certainly not expect Kim Jong Un, in his mid-30s -- yes, overweight; yes, a heavy smoker with a history of heart problems in his family, but still -- they would not expect Kim Jong Un to go any time soon. So if North Korea is indeed scrambling, there's going to be a lot of concern about who is -- you know, has their hand on the nuclear button in North Korea now and moving forward.
SCIUTTO: Well, we know we'll continue to watch this story very closely. Will Ripley in Tokyo, thanks very much.
HARLOW: Ahead for us, a remarkable story, an Army reservist and a mother of two is being targeted in a vicious and false conspiracy theory that she was the first to spread coronavirus. CNN's exclusive interview with her is next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[10:51:30]
HARLOW: This morning, a U.S. Army reservist is facing the fight of her life during the coronavirus pandemic. And it has nothing to do with her health.
SCIUTTO: Yes, it's a real shame. She's become the target of a false conspiracy theory that somehow she was patient zero for the outbreak in China. CNN's Donie O'Sullivan spoke exclusively with her and the man who started this false claim.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
MAATJE BENASSI, VICTIM OF CONSPIRACY THEORY: It's like waking up from a bad dream going into a nightmare, like day after day.
DONIE O'SULLIVAN, CNN REPORTER (voice-over): This is Maatje Benassi. She and her husband Matt are in the center of an elaborate conspiracy theory promoted by George Webb.
GEORGE WEBB, CONSPIRACY THEORIST: This goes back to our story here, which is patient zero, which is Maatje Benassi --
O'SULLIVAN (voice-over): He's a conspiracy theorist who has nearly 100,000 subscribers on YouTube. He falsely claims, without any evidence that Maatje brought the virus to China during a cycling competition.
Maatje is in the U.S. Army Reserves and last October, she competed in the military world games in Wuhan, China. Six months later, comments under Webb's YouTube videos about the Benassis have become the stuff of nightmares.
MATT BENASSI, VICTIM OF CONSPIRACY THEORY: execute them by firing squad, we need to be killing these key people, these people will get a bullet to the skull.
O'SULLIVAN (voice-over): The conspiracy theory has even reached China. Webb has been featured in media controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, which has sought to deflect blame for the coronavirus.
MATT BENASSI: We've gone to law enforcement. Because they're not direct threats, there's not a lot that they can actually do. For folks like us, it's just too expensive to litigate something like this.
O'SULLIVAN: Could you talk me through the specific evidence you have that she is, as you described, coronavirus patient zero?
WEBB: Yes. Well, I have to -- there's a lot of circumstantial evidence, and then there's a source here that I cannot reveal.
O'SULLIVAN: So -- but specifically on Maatje Benassi, how do you know that she has the coronavirus or has antibodies or -- how do you know that for sure?
WEBB: Well, I have a source at the Fort Belvoir Community Hospital, and she actually works at -- or I have someone saying that she works at the Fort Belvoir Community Hospital, and she tested positive for the coronavirus.
O'SULLIVAN: She denies that.
WEBB: She denies that? Does she deny that she works at the Fort Belvoir Community Hospital?
O'SULLIVAN: She denies that she's had the coronavirus, that she's has had any symptoms of the coronavirus --
TEXT: "We're committed to providing timely and helpful information at this critical time, including raising authoritative content, and reducing the spread of harmful misinformation. We have clear policies against COVID misinformation and we quickly remove videos violating these policies when flagged to us."
O'SULLIVAN (voice-over): A YouTube spokesperson told CNN the company is committed to promoting accurate information about the coronavirus, and taking down misinformation when it's flagged by users. YouTube took down some trending comments under Webb's videos after CNN asked about them.
MATT BENASSI: A couple years ago, I was diagnosed with a rare cancer. Dealing with that situation is way easier than trying to deal with this George Webb situation.
MAATJE BENASSI: It's getting out of hand and it needs to stop.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
O'SULLIVAN: You can see there how this has clearly upended their lives, Jim and Poppy. While the allegations about the Benassis may be wildly untrue, the threats they face and the fear they feel is very real.
[10:55:05]
The couple say they've tried to keep track of these false videos on YouTube, but it has been overwhelming. Clearly, YouTube, which is owned by Google, needs to be doing a lot more here.
And I should also mention that in response to the wider conspiracy theory pushed by China that the United States is in some way responsible for the outbreak of the coronavirus, the government here in the U.S. says that is categorically false.
HARLOW: Donie, that was such an important piece. I'm so sorry that's happening to her. Thank you for bringing it to us, we appreciate it.
And thanks to all of you for joining us today. We'll see you back here tomorrow morning. I'm Poppy Harlow.
SCIUTTO: And I'm Jim Sciutto. NEWSROOM with John King starts right after a short break.
[1l:00:00]
