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White House Threatens To Veto $3 Trillion COVID Relief Bill; Trump Discusses Push For Coronavirus Vaccine. Aired 12:30-1p ET

Aired May 15, 2020 - 12:30   ET

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

[12:30:00]

JOHN KING, CNN HOST: The White House making clear today, it does not like a $3 trillion aid package the House of Representatives will vote on today. The legislation would never make it to the White House as is but the White House issuing a veto threat, saying it does not like the legislation.

Democrats say this bill would give crucial economic relief to families and small businesses hardest hit by the pandemic. CNN's Manu Raju live for us on Capitol Hill with the latest. Manu, the White House saying it doesn't like this but Speaker Pelosi's first problem are the Democrats who say they don't like it.

MANU RAJU, CNN SENIOR CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes. There are a handful of Democrats who say they are voting no, particularly Democrats who have come from districts that the President carried back in 2016. A Democrat from Oklahoma, Kendra Horn, says that she will vote against it.

Abigail Spanberger from Virginia says she will vote against it. Congressman Joe Cunningham of South Carolina says he will vote against it. And others are also undecided, including Elissa Slotkin who is a -- from Michigan. She's a freshman. She told me yesterday, she's undecided because she has concerns with the overall price tag. She's concerned about things that are in the bill that she wishes were not in the bill.

She's deciding which way to go, which is why a lot of those moderate members are saying. But there are others from those Trump districts who plan to support it. One, I talked to this morning, Max Rose of New York, told me that this bill is important for his district for firemen, for others who could lose their jobs, which is why he plans to support it.

But in an interesting all development that just occurred too, there's also some pushback from the left Pramila Jayapal, who's a co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus is planning to vote against this bill. She has been critical of it for the last several days because of her concerns that it does not go far enough to help the jobless.

She had pushed for a couple of provisions, one including that would ensure that people get paychecks no matter, up to $90,000 during this economic downturn. But that provision did not get into the bill. She's asked for more time. Now Nancy Pelosi is not giving more time to voting on it today, so she's going to vote no.

Nevertheless, John, Democratic leaders are confident that they will have the votes. At least one Republican Pete King of New York plans to vote for the bill. He thinks it's important -- helpful for his district. So they probably will have the votes even though there is dissension in the ranks because this bill has no chance of becoming law.

Senate Republicans are opposed. The White House, as you noted, plan would veto it if it were to land on the President's desk. So ultimately, what happens in the next phase of this aggressive effort by Washington to prop up the economy is uncertain as the two sides remain at odds, John?

KING: And so the marker the marker being put down by House Democrats today. And we'll watch the vote. But as they do so, Manu, you mentioned, this would have to be left for later compromise. As that plays out, the House voting today on what would be historic rules to allow lawmakers to vote remotely during the pet pandemic, how's that going to play out?

RAJU: Yes. We expect that also to go down along party lines, but it will pass. And it is historic. The first time ever in history, the House will allow its members to vote remotely how the -- what will ultimately will occur was that, members will be able to designate someone to vote on their behalf. And if their direction, they would actually be able to go to -- the member would show up on the floor be able to vote for other members based on how that member who's not in Washington wants them to vote.

So perhaps one member could vote for dozens of other members and say, this person votes this way, this person votes that way. And those members could stay back at home. Right now, you have to show up in person to cast your vote on the floor. That's significant.

And also it spells up procedures for House committees to operate remotely. And so we'll start to see the House turn back into action, have there been away for several weeks. The Senate, on the other hand, has not adopted any such procedures. The Senate has been back for two weeks doing its work. Democrats have contended, they should be doing more in dealing with responding to this outbreak.

But Republicans are debating among themselves how to move forward. But nevertheless, this is a significant development by the House by this an act in this unprecedented rule change that will change the way the House operates but only during this pandemic, John?

KING: Busy Friday on the House side up on Capitol Hill. Manu Raju, appreciate the latest on both the stimulus and this new voting procedures. We'll watch as it plays out later today.

[12:34:03]

Russia now has the second largest number of coronavirus cases in the world. That among the big international headlines, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KING: We're told any moment now the President will be in the Rose Garden. There you see the reporters gathered an announcement of his team, the leadership of operation Warp Speed that the White House effort to speed up the development and then production of a vaccine for the coronavirus. We'll take you there live as soon as the President and his team comes out.

Some global perspective now, Russia reporting more than 10,000 new cases just in the last day. Our international correspondents bring us more of the big global developments.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

IVAN WATSON, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Here in Hong Kong, I'm watching how China is trying to deal with an outbreak of coronavirus in the City of Wuhan. Now that is the original epicenter city for the coronavirus.

The city where that disease was first discovered back in December, it suffered more than 3,800 deaths. And now after new cases have been discovered, most recently, 11 asymptomatic cases on Friday, the authorities are trying to test all 11 million residents to try to isolate and stop a second wave from spiraling out of control in Wuhan.

As of Wednesday, the city authorities say they were able to test about 67,000 people in a single day. They have their work cut out for them.

Ivan Watson, CNN, Hong Kong.

PAULA HANCOCKS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Here in South Korea, more than 150 people have now tested positive for the virus due to that one outbreak in Seoul's nightclub district. But this is out of more than 46,000 tests that officials say that they have done it since May the 6th.

[12:40:10]

But critically, what they admitted on Friday afternoon was that they are still trying to track down more than 1,000 people who they say have not come forward to be tested yet. But where in those clubs where the original infected man had been? They're looking at a two week period to try and contain this outbreak.

Now they say they know that these individuals are at the clubs because they have traced them through their credit card use --

(END VIDEOTAPE)

KING: To the Rose Garden. Now, the President of the United States, this is an announcement on Operation Warp Speed, the Whitehouse vaccine effort.

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: This is going to be a very hot one. And we apologize to everybody out there that's going to suffer through it. But you know what, it's better than bad weather. And it's great to be in the Rose Garden. I want to especially thank this group for joining us as we announced a historic groundbreaking initiative in our ongoing effort to rapidly develop and manufacture a coronavirus vaccine. We're joined by Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Secretary Mark Esper, Secretary Alex Azar, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, FDA Director Dr. Stephen Hahn, Director of the National Institute of Health Dr. Francis Collins, Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx. We're joined by a very terrific group of professionals.

Tomorrow will mark 30 days since we released the White House guidelines for a safe and phased opening of America. That's what we're doing. It's the opening of America. We're going to have an amazing year next year. We're going to have a great transition into the fourth quarter.

As of this morning, almost every state has taken steps to begin reopening. And the American people are doing an extraordinary job of continuing to take precautions while at the same time wanting to start and they will be starting to resume their American way of life.

We will be reigniting our economic engines. We're going to be taking care of our most vulnerable, which are our senior citizens and some others. We're going to be working very, very hard on our senior citizens and our nursing homes and various communities to support those that are struggling in this very difficult time. Others don't have the same kind of struggle.

For example, today, Secretary Perdue, together with Ivanka Trump launched the farmers and families food box program, which will provide $3 billion to help small farmers and it'll be helping farmers, ranchers, but it'll be bringing food to some of the food lines and some of the food kitchens that you've been seeing on television.

And I said, why are we doing that? We have all of this tremendous food produced by our farmers and our ranchers. And so we're going to be buying $3 billion worth of that food, great for everybody, our farmers, our ranchers, and the people that need great food.

A key feature of our reopening plan is the largest and most ambitious testing system in the world by far. America is now conducting close to 350,000 tests per day and unthinkable number just a short while ago, more than anybody in the world by far suggesting many states now have access testing capacity to monitor for new outbreaks, Florida, many other states have so much testing. They -- the testers are waiting for people to show up. It's great.

Another essential pillar of our strategy to keep America open is the development of effective treatments and vaccines as quickly as possible. I want to see if we can do that very quickly. We're looking to, when I say quickly, we're looking to get it by the end of the year if we can, maybe before we're doing tremendously well.

From the earliest days of the pandemic, we have marshal the genius of American scientists and researchers from all across government and the private sector, from academia, from everywhere to vanquish the virus and tremendous strides have been made. I can tell you I get to see it every day, tremendous strides are being made.

Scientists at the NIH began developing the first vaccine candidate on January 11th, think of that, within hours of the virus's genetic code being posted online. So January 11th, most people never even heard what was going on January 11th. And we were out there trying to develop a vaccine, not even knowing what we were up against.

Then my administration cut through every piece of red tape to achieve the fastest ever by far launch of a vaccine trial for this new virus. It's very vicious virus. And I want to thank all of the doctors and scientists and researchers involved because they've never moved like this or never even close.

[12:45:12]

The NIH and the HHS have also been working constantly with private industry to evaluate more than 100 potential treatments. The Food and Drug Administration has swiftly approved more than 130 therapies for active trials. That's what we have right now, 130. And another 450 are in the planning stages and tremendous potential awaits.

I think you're going to have some very interesting things to report in the not too distant future. And thank you very much, Dr. Hahn. Through a historic series of funding bills, my administration is providing roughly $10 billion to support a medical research effort without parallel.

I especially want to thank Senator Steve Daines of Montana for his incredible work. He has worked so hard to secure additional funding for vaccine development. He has been right at the forefront.

Today, I want to update you on the next stage of this momentous medical initiative. It's called Operation Warp Speed. That means big and it means fast. A massive scientific, industrial, and logistical endeavor unlike anything our country has seen since the Manhattan Project, you really could say that nobody's seen anything like we're doing whether it's ventilators or testing. Nobody has seen anything like we're doing now within our country since the Second World War, incredible.

Its objective is to finish developing and then to manufacture and distribute a proven coronavirus vaccine as fast as possible. Again, we'd love to see if we could do it prior to the end of the year. We think we're going to have some very good results coming out very quickly.

In addition, it will continue accelerating the development of diagnostics and breakthrough therapies. The great national project will bring together the best of American industry and innovation, the full resources of the United States government, and the excellence and precision of the United States military, we have the military totally involved.

We're also working very strongly with other countries who are also have some great, great scientists, doctors, and we're all working very closely together and they're viewing us as the leader. And we are -- the relationship with other countries on solving this problem has been incredible.

Today, the Operation Warp Speed has brought together all of the experts across the federal government from places like the NIH, CDC, FDA, and many other agencies. This historic partnership will now bring together the full resources of the Department of Health and Human Services with the Department of Defense.

And we know what that means. That means the full power and strength of military, the military and that, really talking about the logistics. We get it when we get it. That means the logistics getting it out so that everybody can take it.

And today we're proud to announce the addition of two of the most highly respected skill professionals in our country, worldwide respected. Operation Warp Speed's chief scientist will be Dr. Moncef Slaoui, a world renowned immunologist who helped create 14 new vaccines. That's a lot of our new vaccines in 10 years during his time, in the private sector. One of the most respected men in the world in the production and really on the formulation of vaccines.

Joining Dr. Slaoui is chief operating officer will be General Gus Perna, a four-star general currently oversees 190,000 service members, civilians, and contractors as commander of the U.S. Army Materiel Command, that means logistics. That means getting it out. We got to get it out there. So General, thank you very much. And Doctor, thank you very much. It's great to have you on board, really highly respected people. Thank you.

These two outstanding individuals will provide more details following my remarks. In preparation for this initiative, experts throughout the government have been collaborating to evaluate roughly 100 vaccine candidates from all over the world. They have identified 14 that they believe are the most promising and they're working to narrow that list still further. So we started off with over 100. We're down to 14. And we have some really interesting choices to be made. We're doing very well.

Through Operation Warp Speed, the Federal Government is providing unprecedented support and resources to safely expedite the trials moving on at record, record, record speed. While we accelerate the final phases of vaccine trials, Operation Warp Speed will be simultaneously accelerating its manufacturing and manufacturing process.

[12:50:23]

In other words, we're getting ready. So that when we get the good word that we have the vaccine, we have the formula, we have what we need. We're ready to go as opposed to taking years to gear up. We're gearing up. It's risky. It's expensive. But we'll be saving massive amounts of time. We'll be saving years if we do this properly, and that's what we're doing. So we're gearing up on the assumption that we'll have in the near future relatively near future of vaccine.

Typically pharmaceutical companies wait to manufacture a vaccine until it is received all of the regulatory approvals necessary. And this can delay vaccines availability to the public as much as a year and even more than that. However, our task is so urgent that under Operation Warp Speed, the Federal Government will invest in manufacturing all of the top vaccine candidates before they're approved. So we're knowing exactly what we're doing before they're approved.

That means they better come up with a good vaccine because we're ready to deliver it. This will eliminate any unnecessary delay and enable us to begin providing Americans with a proven vaccine the day our scientists say we're ready, we got it. And as we work to bring critical medical production back to America, these vaccines will manufacture that we're going to be focused on in manufacturing.

They're all going to be right here in the USA. Now, we're working as I said with other people outside, and that's fine too. We want to get to the solution. We know exactly where the other countries are. And we'll be very happy if they were able to do it. We'll help them with delivery. We'll help them with -- in every way we can. We have no ego when it comes to this, no ego whatsoever.

Operation Warp Speed is also making the necessary preparations to distribute these lifesaving treatments at scale. So we're talking about massive numbers so that millions of Americans will quickly have access to them. This includes ramping up production of supplies needed for distribution. And I have to say, we're also very, very much involved in other things other than the vaccine.

If you take a look at what we're doing beyond vaccines, it's going to be very interesting and we may talk about that in a little while. But this includes ramping up production of supplies needed for distribution such as cold chain storage, glass, vials, needles, syringes, and more. We'll have everything right on hand ready to go.

When a vaccine is ready, the U.S. government will deploy every plane, truck, and soldier required to help distribute it to the American people as quickly as possible. America is blessed to have the most brilliant talented doctors and researchers anywhere in the world. We have the mightiest military by far in the world, our military is completely rebuilt. Much of the equipment has been delivered. Some of it's on the way. All made right here in the USA.

We took over very, very empty cupboards, I say, medically, we also had empty cupboards in a military sense. Our military was in sad shape. It was depleted. We now have the strongest military the United States has ever had by far and the best equipment. And you hear that outside that beautiful sound, those are truckers that are with us all the way. There protesting in favor of President Trump as opposed to against is hundreds of trucks out there.

And that's the sign of love, not the sign of your typical protests. I want to thank our great truckers. They like me and I like them. We're working on something together. But we have the mightiest and there'll be helping us with this by the way, speaking of truckers. We have the mightiest military in the long history of humankind. We have the best and most devoted workers ever walked the face of the earth.

And now we're combining all of these amazing strengths for the most aggressive vaccine project in history. There's never been a vaccine project anywhere in history like this. And I just want to make something clear. It's very important, vaccine or no vaccine, we're back. And we're starting the process.

And in many cases, they don't have vaccines and a virus or flu comes and you fight through it. We haven't seen anything like this in 100 and some odd years, 1917. But you fight through it and people sometimes, I guess we don't know exactly yet, but it looks like they become immune, or at least for a short while, and maybe for life, but you fight through it.

[12:55:18]

But what we'd like to do, if we can is the vaccine. I think we're going to be successful in doing it and hopefully by the end of the year. Just as generations of Americans before is face down the most difficult trials, set their sights on the highest summit and overcame the biggest obstacles, America will meet the moment. And this moment, specifically, in our time, with unrivaled speed, unmatched skill, and the unyielding spirit of the American people, our nation will come back stronger and greater than ever.

We're going to have a tremendous year next year. We're going to have a really good fourth quarter. We're going to have a very interesting and productive transition quarter, where Steve is there. And I'm sure our Secretary of the Treasury, I think you feel the same way, Steve, so, and thank you for your good work, really good work. And it's not finished yet, is it? I want to thank Steve Mnuchin, everybody.

Now I'd like to ask Dr. Slaoui and General Perna to come up and say a few words, followed by Secretary Azar and Secretary Esper. Thank you all very much. We're doing something that has never been done before. It's going to result in a tremendous end. I think we're going to come up with a solution to a problem like this country probably has never seen before. But it's an honor to be your President. We're doing a great job. These people are doing an incredible job. The people right here. I want to thank you all total professionals, great men, great women. Thank you all very much, please.

MONCEF SLAOUI, CHIEF ADVISER TO "WARP SPEED" VACCINE EFFORT: Thank you, Mr. President. Good afternoon everyone. It's a great honor and privilege for me to have the opportunity to serve our country and the world in this remarkable endeavor, extraordinary endeavor, helping them and supporting them do it.

The Operation Warp Speed's objectives are very clear that the President has described them. And I believe they are very credible. I also believe they are extremely challenging. However, I am really confident that our team across the many governmental agencies that are involved in these efforts NIH, the CDC, the FDA, Esper, and of course, with the support of the army, and our partners in the private sector, will be able and will do the utmost to deliver these objectives.

In fact, Mr. President, I have very recently seen early data from a clinical trial with a coronavirus vaccine. And these data made me feel even more confident that we will be able to deliver a few hundred million doses of vaccine by the end of 2020. And we will do the best we can, the best we can to do that. Thank you.

We will of course also focus on progressing and accelerating development of medicines for those who unfortunately, already caught the virus, as well as optimize the diagnostic tests. This will be our focus 24/7 over the next many months. Thank you. Thank you.

GEN. GUSTAVE PERNA, COMMANDER OF U.S. ARMY MATERIEL COMMAND: Good afternoon, Mr. President. Thank you. Thank you for this great honor for allowing me to be a part of this team. I'm very excited about this team. It will be historic as we execute the mission that's been given to us.

I also feel very confident that the team will be able to provide the results as directed. It is going to be a Herculean task. But the combination of the two main partners between Health and Human Services and the Department of Defense, their combined strengths, partner with the other teammates will ensure our success.

One of the great advantages that we have as a military is our ability to do logistical and sustainment operations of far. We're just going to apply those capabilities to this mission. This mission is about defeating the enemy. We will defeat the enemy. Why? Because winning matters. And I'm excited to be a part of this team. And Mr. President, thank you.

TRUMP: Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

ALEX AZAR, HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES SECRETARY: Well, thank you, Mr. President, for your leadership of this historic effort. Your vision for Operation Warp Speed, setting a goal of a vaccine by January 2021 will be one of the great scientific and humanitarian accomplishments in human history.

[13:00:06]

Today, you're announcing the team that can get it done.