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Los Angeles Extending Stay-At-Home Order?; Supreme Court Hears Arguments Over Trump Tax Returns; Dr. Fauci Warns of Suffering and Death If States Reopen Too Soon. Aired 3-3:30p ET

Aired May 12, 2020 - 15:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

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JOAN BISKUPIC, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: What kind of signal are they going to send to the public? Is President Trump above the law? Or will they come up with a standard that...

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: Yes.

BISKUPIC: ... frankly, doesn't appear to favor him as a threshold, but, as I say, runs the clock and ensures that these subpoenas are not enforced?

KEILAR: Joan -- OK, Joan and Carrie, thank you so much for that.

And our special coverage continues right now.

KATE BOLDUAN, CNN HOST: Hello, everyone. I'm Kate Bolduan. Thank you so much for joining us this hour.

At a moment when the most important thing in the world is containing the coronavirus, there really couldn't be anything more important than today than hearing straight from the country's top public health and infectious disease experts, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the CDC, the head of the FDA, the top official at HHS in charge of the testing effort all facing questions before a Senate committee on the current state of the U.S. response to the coronavirus.

And Dr. Anthony Fauci offering this stark warning:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, NIAID DIRECTOR: My concern is that, if states or cities or regions, their attempt, understandable, to get back to some form of normality disregard, to a greater or a lesser degree, the checkpoints that we put in our guidelines about when it is safe to proceed in pulling back on mitigation.

Because I feel, if that occurs, there is a real risk that you will trigger an outbreak that you might not be able to control, which, in fact, paradoxically, will set you back, not only leading to some suffering and death that could be avoided, but could even set you back on the road to try to get economic recovery, because you could almost turn the clock back, rather than going forward.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BOLDUAN: And, as you saw right there, Dr. Fauci, and all the witnesses, even the chairman of the committee testifying, well, speaking and testifying remotely because they're in some form of quarantine after contact with COVID-positive staffers.

That, in and of itself, is a statement on the current state of the pandemic here.

Let's start at the White House. CNN's Kaitlan Collins, she's standing by.

Kaitlan, it was an extraordinary hearing, Dr. Fauci very clearly, as everyone heard, not mincing words with his warning. But that is not what we have been hearing from the president.

KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Yes, you saw a really much more sober analysis of really the state of where the nation is right now, and as far as just dealing with the pandemic and when it comes to reopening, with Fauci warning about reopening too soon and prematurely and what that could look like if that does happen, but also the CDC director, Dr. Robert Redfield, saying, we are not out of the woods yet, though people have made strides in this.

As you watched those lawmakers get the first chance to really question these officials ,I don't think anyone's testified since Fauci did in March, so a lot has happened obviously since then.

But Democrats pushed back on the president's claims about the U.S. prevailing on testing. But, Kate, so did Republicans. You heard from Lamar Alexander there at the beginning, who was chairing this committee, talking his concerns about testing.

Senator Mitt Romney saying that he doesn't believe how the U.S. has done on testing is anything to brag about. So, they were really trying to give a much more realistic, pragmatic look at where things are right now, though you saw those officials being careful to say their answers in a certain way, being careful to say where they think things are, where things are going, what kind of advice they're offering to the president, and also saying that they do not believe they have any kind of a confrontational relationship with the president who often, at times, they are publicly at odds with.

BOLDUAN: As you're mentioning Mitt Romney and what senators were kind of breaking from the president, this also during the hearing, Dr. Giroir, the man in charge of testing, he projected that the U.S. will be able to conduct 40 to 50 million tests a month by September.

And then you have senators like Republican Senator Mitt Romney taking issue with not just that, but the administration's record on testing to date.

Let me play that for folks.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. MITT ROMNEY (R-UT): Yesterday, you celebrated that we had done more tests and more tests per capita even in South Korea.

But you ignored the fact that they accomplish theirs at the beginning of the outbreak, while we treaded water during February and March. I find our testing record nothing to celebrate whatsoever.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BOLDUAN: And, Kaitlan, again, that is not what we're hearing from the president.

COLLINS: Well, that was really interesting to hear Mitt Romney push back, not only on what they have said about testing so far, but also the comparisons with other countries, which is what you have seen several officials make, given the fact that you saw other countries have more successful track records early on.

And South Korea has been one of those, because, of course, they're testing a little bit differently now, but many health experts, Kate, have said that's because they had such rigorous testing early on that it changed the trajectory for them. They were able to flatten their curve a lot differently than the United States was.

And that's why they have had a few hundred deaths, and there have been over 80,000 deaths so far reported here in the United States, though Fauci did also say today he doesn't even know if that number is accurate. He actually think it's almost certainly higher than that 80,000 number, which is a really a sobering reminder of just where things are right now.

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And we're not even through this yet.

BOLDUAN: Yes. We know some. We know a lot. But we definitely don't know a lot, Dr. Fauci making that very clear during testimony.

Good to see you, Kaitlan. Thank you.

Joining me right now -- a lot happened in that hearing -- is Dr. Seema Yasmin. She's a CNN medical analyst and former disease detective at the CDC. And CNN national security analyst Juliette Kayyem, she was assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security during the Obama administration.

Thank you guys for being here.

Dr. Yasmin, just your first -- first, your big impression coming off of this hearing. I mean, do you have a sense that the country after watching that hearing is ready to safely open up?

DR. SEEMA YASMIN, CNN MEDICAL ANALYST: So the title of this Senate committee hearing was safely getting back to work and safely getting back to school. And I don't think it really answered those questions about how state should best do that.

And you could just hear the frustration in some of those senators' voices. I'm thinking especially about Senator Chris Murphy from Connecticut, who was asking the CDC director quite clearly and directly what happened to that 17-page report that came from CDC last week that the White House seem to have shelved.

And Senator Murphy was asking when should we open, how should we reopen, and when they might expect that guidance from CDC. And the director just gave a very vague and, frankly, disappointing response.

So I think that this hearing still leaves so many questions. Yes, it reminded us that we probably have more than 80,000 deaths in America, also reminded us, as Dr. Fauci said, that we're not out of the woods and this is not under control.

But I think that guidance for states about how best to move forward, that still hasn't happened.

BOLDUAN: Yes.

And that -- people really are searching for that at this moment.

And, Juliette, contrast all of this with the message that the president has been pushing, especially just yesterday, kind of hitting at kind of -- quote, unquote -- "certain blue states," hitting them for making no effort, in his view, to open up.

Let me play, just to remind folks, what the president said yesterday.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: stand for it. They want to get back. They're not going to stand for it. They want our country open. I want our country open too. I want it open safely, but I want it open.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BOLDUAN: Also saying that, when it comes to testing, that they -- as he said yesterday, they met the moment and prevailed.

JULIETTE KAYYEM, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: So, everything the president said was a lie. Let's begin first with the people.

The people -- the polling has been consistent from the beginning that Americans actually are much more cautious than what -- how Trump is portraying them. Anywhere from 60 to 80 percent of Americans feel that it's too soon to go out.

They're very nervous about -- about our inability to test and trace, our failure to have treatments, and the fact that the vaccine is so far away. So, that's -- the people is Donald Trump.

The second piece was about opening up and the commercial activity. What I really liked about Fauci's testimony is, he linked the economy with the public health needs. In other words, Donald Trump has been able to put camps, open up everything or shut down, and everyone's unemployed. What Fauci was saying was, cautiously open up, because, if you don't

open up cautiously, which I read him to mean a lot later -- he's definitely not in a hurry to open up -- your economy, Governor or Mayor, is going to be worse.

So if you're actually thinking about this in economic terms, no country, no city has ever been vibrant, has ever been economically vibrant with a pandemic. It's just impossible, because people will die, people will be sick, people won't be able to go to work.

So I really like that Fauci sort of put the lie to Donald Trump's camps, and the fact that he -- Trump speaks for the people is just not true. The polling is very, very consistent on this.

BOLDUAN: And, Doctor, on testing, what does that statement mean that they are expecting the country to be able to do 40 to 50 million tests a month by September? What does that mean to you?

YASMIN: We have had so many promises since February, that I feel many of us don't know how to interpret that. And I'm really skeptical about whether that will actually materialize.

We do know that, since January, we have done about nine million tests in the U.S. Just last week, we were doing about 260,000 tests a day. That is woefully inadequate.

In order to reopen the economy, we need to have testing. The whole point of testing is so that you can adequately separate people who are infected from people who are susceptible, and yet we need to have maybe four or five, even 10 times as many tests being done in the U.S. as we're seeing now.

And it's just amazing to me, as a British doctor who left England to train in public health in America because this had one of the best public health systems in the world, I'm baffled as to what's happened and why, 103 days after the World Health Organization declared this an international emergency, why is the U.S. still so far behind in the most basic pandemic response stage, which is testing?

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BOLDUAN: Well, and to that point, Juliette, from a preparedness perspective, leaning on your background, when it comes to testing, there seems to be agreement, maybe not at the White House, but there seemed to be agreement within the hearing and outside of the hearing that, as a country, the government needs to get better at this.

KAYYEM: Yes.

BOLDUAN: Are you seeing any signs that they are?

KAYYEM: Yes, so that is the good news.

So, in an odd way, because the governors were left on their own, a lot of them just have had to invest with funds they can barely find on a testing and tracing program. You just saw Governor Cuomo on air. Here in Massachusetts, we have actually had that from the beginning.

It's not ideal. And it certainly does not have any unified effort coming from the federal government. So, we're challenged in that regard.

But this is just another instance where -- and Senator Romney picked up on this -- where we knew what was coming in January, February and March. That's when you want the testing capacity. This is what South Korea did, because then you stop community spread, right?

Everyone has to remember, we're all home because there was massive community spread before anyone noticed that the virus was here. So, from a preparedness perspective, I want to avoid this moment, this eight weeks that we have been home, and the only way to have been able to do that was what the preparedness plans from the Bush administration and the Obama administration were telling this administration, which is identification first, social distancing to control certain pockets.

We will be able -- we will get better at testing, but we're sort of always three or four months too late.

BOLDUAN: Juliette, if I can also just quickly ask you, because Dr. Fauci made clear that he believes the death toll overall is higher than is listed right now.

KAYYEM: Yes.

BOLDUAN: He said, certainly, it's higher.

You have written quite a bit about this and why it matters so much. Why?

KAYYEM: Well, I appreciate that.

So I have been writing for "The Atlantic" through this. And so one is just obviously a number matters, because we will have a sense of how bad we are. I mean, it's such a horrifying and embarrassing number, 80,000, but it's larger.

And the reason why we need to know is because, as I said, the dead speak to us. In emergency management and preparedness, we need to find out how people and why they died. Was it that they didn't go to hospitals? Was it that there were other conditions that were not being addressed? Were they dying of heart attacks? Was it nursing homes?

And so we believe there's lots more dead because of comparing the dead this month, this year compared to dead last in the last couple years in the same months. So, we do believe that there's more dead.

And we have to understand how they're dying, so that we can prepare for the rest of this pandemic and certainly the next one. We also obviously do it for the moral and religious reasons of just being able to honor those who died and died of the plague.

So, I really, again, appreciated Fauci bringing that up. No one should be proud of 80,000, but it's not 80,000. The numbers that we are looking at now and just bracing Americans for it are well above 100,000 at this stage.

And that's just -- that's our own reckoning at this stage.

BOLDUAN: Juliette, Dr. Yasmin, stick with me. We have got much more to come on this critical Senate hearing, including Dr. Fauci's warning not to be cavalier when it comes to how the virus is impacting children.

Also, later for us, the Supreme Court hears landmark cases on the president's tax returns and financial records. What led one justice to respond, the president isn't above the law?

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BOLDUAN: Welcome back, everybody.

A topic that came up quite a bit during today's coronavirus hearing was how and when kids can safely head back to school.

At one point, Senator Rand Paul, who is a physician, argued that the relatively low death rate among children from COVID-19 is reason enough that they should be going back to school in the fall.

Dr. Anthony Fauci seemed to take issue with that.

Listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. RAND PAUL (R-KY): With regard to going back to school, one thing that was left out of that discussion is mortality.

I mean, shouldn't we at least be discussing what the mortality of children is? This is for Dr. Fauci as well.

The mortality between zero and 18 in the New York data approaches zero. I think the one-size-fits-all, that we're going to have a national strategy and nobody's going to go to school is kind of ridiculous.

FAUCI: I think we have got to be careful if we are not cavalier in thinking that children are completely immune to the deleterious effects.

So, again, you're right in the numbers that children in general do much, much better than adults and the elderly, and particularly those with underlying conditions.

But I am very careful, and hopefully humble, in knowing that I don't know everything about this disease. And that's why I'm very reserved in making broad predictions.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BOLDUAN: Back with me now, Dr. Seema Yasmin and Juliette Kayyem.

Dr. Yasmin, what did you think when you saw this back and forth between Senator Rand Paul and Dr. Fauci?

YASMIN: Senator Paul said some really questionable things about immunity in general. He kind of stated it as a scientific fact that, once you have got it, you won't get COVID-19 again in the short term.

And we just don't have enough evidence to say that. But these comments about children do concern me, Kate, because how things have changed in just the past few months. Early on in the pandemic, the data we were getting from China really led us to believe that children were somehow spared from contracting this virus.

And we were really wondering how that was. Now we're seeing that, yes, children might fare better overall compared to adults, but they are certainly not spared. We have seen children dying in the U.S. from COVID-19.

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And now we're starting to see these very strange manifestations of COVID-19 in children, possibly a syndrome called Kawasaki disease, where their blood vessels get very swollen and leaky, also a condition called multistate inflammatory syndrome, and also toxic shock syndrome, potentially linked to COVID-19.

So there are too many unknowns for us to just declare that kids are fine, we can reopen schools, when we have so many questions about their role in the pandemic, how likely they are to be asymptomatic carriers, and for those that get sick, what can we really do to make sure that they don't develop these very severe clinical manifestations of the disease?

BOLDUAN: And I was actually talking to a pediatric care specialist, who was saying, with these complications that seem to be -- that are showing up, presenting themselves with the disease, there are long- term impacts that they will then need to track and follow as these children hopefully then recover from COVID even past that, because of this massive inflammatory disorder that is popping up in more children.

So, there is more concern to that.

So, Juliette, beyond that back-and-forth between Fauci and Rand Paul, did you hear clear guidance on what school in the fall should look like? And I'm talking from kindergarten through college, because they -- it was all asked.

KAYYEM: Right. Right.

So, I have got a middle schooler, high schooler, and a college student. So I'm hearing it from all ends, because it is different. Residential is different than younger kids. So, no, there was no specific guidance. We have reason to believe that

the CDC has gone through this exercise. We should assume that's what they're -- that they have, because that's what they're planning on doing.

The White House has not allowed it to be released, because they simply don't want to own this huge challenge. And it is a challenge, because no one wants kids sick.

But this is just another instance where the White House presents everything as binary. And Senator Rand fell into that. There will be opening up of educational programs. There absolutely has to be, because working parents actually have to start working again too.

Our productivity may be admittedly down a little bit these days. And so how that works is going to be different. Calendars may change. You're hearing about colleges and universities having one-third, one- third, one-third. We will probably do more in terms of online learning. There will be -- classrooms will be different

In public schools, where my kids are, they're talking about getting rid of some classes to be able to have a teacher in the hallway that's -- because the teacher is the one that's vulnerable, and have the students inside.

So there's going to be a lot of creativity. There's no one-size-fits- all. But this idea that you just open up without taking into account what Dr. Yasmin was saying or some of the medical concerns, is just absolutely -- it's -- it's so dangerous for our children.

So, there will be openings up, but the word means something different depending on where -- the jurisdiction and the age of the children.

BOLDUAN: Yes.

And, look, and without buy-in from the federal government or the CDC at least saying, we trust this will mean safety for your children, how can any parent feel comfortable with what is being presented?

KAYYEM: Yes.

BOLDUAN: I mean, that is a very -- that is a much longer conversation to be happening -- having.

(CROSSTALK)

KAYYEM: Yes, that's the confidence gap. We have no confidence.

(CROSSTALK)

BOLDUAN: And that gets to everything, yes.

KAYYEM: Yes.

BOLDUAN: Dr. Yasmin, thank you so much.

Juliette, great to see you. Thank you as well.

YASMIN: Thank you. Thanks.

BOLDUAN: We have this just coming into CNN right now.

While 48 states will be at least partially open by this weekend, a very different announcement is just coming in, in Southern California. "The L.A. Times" is reporting Los Angeles County could be extending its stay-at-home orders through midsummer.

Let's get to Nick Watt. He's in California for us with more on this.

Nick, bring everybody up to speed. What are you hearing?

NICK WATT, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, as you mentioned, "The L.A. Times" is reporting that during a board of supervisors meeting in Los Angeles County, the director of public health said that L.A. County will very likely extend the stay home for another three months through the end of July.

This will be a big shock for many people here in California, who have been getting used to the gradual easing of restrictions since this past Friday. But the governor has made it very clear that rural and urban areas in this state will and can be treated differently.

L.A. County has been very cautious. They're going to open the beaches here tomorrow, but nobody's lying in the sand. People are wearing masks unless they're in the water. L.A. County, which has seen a relatively high number of cases, is being cautious.

But this, extending this stay-home for another three months, is a surprise.

BOLDUAN: And, Nick, there's also a development in the standoff between Tesla owner Elon Musk and California officials about reopening one of his plants. What's happening now?

WATT: Yes, well, Elon Musk has made no secret of the fact that he wants to ramp up to full production again pretty soon at this Tesla plant up in Alameda County.

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They are only allowed minimal operations right now. The president has said California should just let them go ahead and do it. Elon Musk has said, if you want to arrest -- arrest anybody, make it just me. He said all this on Twitter.

So he's not hiding the fact that they're reopening. But the county, apparently in an e-mail just sent to Tesla, has said that, if normal operations are back, then they are violating the order and they do need to shut down.

But the tone makes it very clear that they don't want a confrontation. They don't want to actually have to go in there and enforce this. They are at this point politely asking Tesla to back down -- Kate. BOLDUAN: Nick, thanks so much.

Still ahead for us: the Supreme Court as we have never heard it before, oral arguments airing live to the public in historic cases dealing with, among other things, President Trump's tax returns.

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