Return to Transcripts main page

CNN Newsroom

A Big Pharmaceutical Company, Moderna, Says Today That Its Trials Have Produced Promising Results; Montana Have A High Increase At A High Rate Of Cases In The Coronavirus. Aired 11-11:30a ET

Aired May 18, 2020 - 11:00   ET

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

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

JOHN KING, CNN NEWS ANCHOR: Hello on this Monday. I'm John King in Washington. This is CNN's continuing coverage of the corona virus pandemic. The US ready now to pass a pair of awful benchmarks. 1.5 million confirmed cases and 90,000 American deaths.

The early reopening report card gives some reason for optimism. Death's clocked in under 1,000 yesterday for the second time in a month. It is Monday May 18th, and for most of you your state is now partially open. Forty-eight of the 50 governors now managing this state by state experiment.

In Rhode Island and New Hampshire, restaurants are serving customers outside. In Tennessee, race tracks, amusement parks and museums all get to open their doors this week. In South Carolina, you can get a hair cut again. In West Virginia and in Texas, you can go to the gym and run on a treadmill.

In Arkansas you can gamble. More re-openings means more people back at work. Auto makers today leading that shift; 59,000 Ford factory workers, 15,000 at GM factories, and 16,000 at Fiat Chrysler's hourly workforce.

The president is all in - in all caps - re-opening our country - one of his morning tweets. Georgia started reopening earlier than most and its numbers so far are encouraging. Texas is more of a debate.

In truth - experts say - we need a few more weeks before we know the impact of limited opening. And whether - big question - it is wise to do more - to go faster. The president is not in the mood to wait - calling into NBC's first golf broadcast since the corona virus shut down. The president suggests the old normal will be back soon.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD J. TRUMP, UNITED STATES PRESIDENT: We really want to see it get back to normal. We don't want people having to wear masks and be doing what we've been doing for the last number of months.

Because that's not getting back to normal. We want to be back to normal where you have the big crowds and they're practically standing on top of one another and they're enjoying themselves. (END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: But that is unrealistic in the short term and it's out of step with big companies now debating when it is safe to scale up significantly. Part of that puzzle is a vaccine. And a big pharmaceutical company says today that its trials have produced promising results. Moderna is the drug company claiming to make vaccine progress today.

It says that eight patients who received two doses of its vaccine candidate had an immune response to the coronavirus. CNN's Senior Medical Correspondent Elizabeth Cohen joins us now with details. Elizabeth, always skeptical when you hear these things, but eight trial - eight candidates, eight successes - what do we know?

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN SENIOR MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, even the experts that I've been talking to who are usually on the more the crungilent [ph] side of things are excited about this.

Now they temper their enthusiasm - this might not work out in the long run - but this is a good sign. So eight people who were vaccinated with two doses of the virus did indeed generate what are called neutralizing antibodies.

So John these are antibodies that attach - that bind with the virus and disable it, prevent it from infecting human cells. I spoke earlier today with Dr. Tal Zaks. He is the Chief Medical Officer for Moderna. Let's take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. TAL ZAKS, CHIEF MEDICAL OFFICER FOR MODERNA: These antibodies were able to be proven to block the ability of the virus to infect cells. Even at the lowest dose that we tested - at the 25mg.

We are already seeing an immune response at the level of people who have been infected with this virus and are believed now no to be susceptible to further disease.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COHEN: So again, we don't know what this means in real life. And speaking of real life, let's take a look at what could happen moving forward. So right now, Moderna has vaccinated somewhere between 60 to 100 human study subjects.

That's part of its work that we are seeing today. What they plan to do is starting in July is start large scale clinical trials which are typically tens of thousands of people. And then Dr. Zaks said he thinks he can get the vaccine on the market sometimes between January and June of next year.

Now, I will say that when he told me that that was sort of aspirational. He wasn't making promises. He wasn't guaranteeing anything. It was aspirational; similar timeline to what Tony Fauci has said. John. KING: Well Elizabeth let's be hopeful - even aspirational - you're

still looking into next year. But let's be hopeful on this day and we'll keep on top of it Elizabeth Cohen - very much appreciate that. The re-opening accelerates in a big way this week. Many states already opened are allowing more business activity. And Massachusetts and Connecticut are about to make it 50 states on the road now to re- opening.

It's complicated. And the data we see two or three weeks from now will tell us a lot more than what we see today. But let's take a look at where we are and what we do see. If you look at the trend lines of cases in the United States - people talk about flattening the curve - starting to come down and plateau.

But the new confirmed cases over the past month in the United States; the red line is your seven day average, stubbornly coming down but at least it is finally coming down. You see it there.

[11:05:00]

Also you're starting to see a drop, and this is important, and it is wishful - hopefully a drop in the deaths as well. Seven-day moving average of deaths in the United States starting to come down, especially in recent days. Let's all hope that that trend continues and it stays down.

So now you look at 50 states, 50 experiments. This gets pretty complicated. One states, Montana has a problem right now. Relatively low number of cases, but it's having an increase at a high rate. 16 states - 16 others states you see them in the lighter orange, also going up in their case count including Texas, which is one of the big reopening experience we watch there. 15 states, the beige color, they're holding steady right now. They flattened the curve. The question is many of them are reopening as two (ph). Do they hold steady? Do they go up? Do they go down? You need to watch this every day. And you have 18 states going down. That's the positive. There are 18 states on the way down.

Let's just take a look at a few of these states that are reopening. You see here the blue is South Carolina, the yellow is Colorado, and the green is Texas. In the case of Georgia, Colorado, and South Carolina, you see the dates of some of their reopening beginning to expand them. They're all flatter down. That's what you want to see. Flatter down as the activity starts to increase in those states.

Texas is more of a question mark because you do see the Texas reopening and you see the case count going up. Now the governor's team says this is because there are more tests. They're testing more people. That's why the rate is going up, but this is a debate in the state of Texas. So look quickly at that testing data. The green line is Texas. You see a big spike here. It comes down a bit. There are fluctuations when you get a cluster, a hot spot, but as states start to ramp up testing, the Georgia line now constantly going up, Texas more of a bouncing ball there.

Texas reported its biggest single-day increase in COVID-19 cases since the start. You see the numbers on your screen right there as you go through it right there. That is up. Still the governor's going to make a big announcement today about expanding that. CNN's Ed Lavandera is live for us in Dallas with the latest.

ED LAVANDERA, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Hey, John. Well, as you mentioned those - the day that was so concerning here over the weekend was Saturday. 1,800 cases reported in just that one day. There were more than I think 32,000 tests, some of the what are the highest numbers we have seen since this pandemic started in terms of testing. And state health officials attribute the majority of those cases to about 734 of those cases because of focused testing on meat packing plants in the Texas panhandle area around the city of Amarillo, but despite that there is still a sense of concern across the states as today we see even more openings, gyms, exercise facilities open up at 25 percent, non-essential manufacturing also given the green light as well as businesses inside of office buildings can open up today as well.

And as you mentioned, the governor expected to announce even more openings, so - but there is a sense especially among big city leaders here in the state that Texas remains in this precarious situation as the medical data isn't necessarily - seems very kind of lukewarm if you will at this point, very flat in a lot of cases, not necessarily trending you know high spikes upward or downward, but all of it is causing a great deal of concern for like the mayor of Dallas here.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MAYOR ERIC JOHNSON (D), DALLAS: What's important to me is making sure folks know that no matter what is open they still need to use some common sense. We want our economy back, but we also want to be safe. We don't want to get sick, so I think people have mixed feelings about this.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

LAVANDERA: So there is still as you mentioned and I mentioned this concern about what exactly is going to happen. We are just now, John, getting to the point where you're going to start seeing the effects of the phase reopening which started here on May 1. Medical experts and health experts will tell you it takes several weeks. This has been a slow, phased-in process in terms of what has been happening, so we're just now getting to the beginning of being able to sense what the trajectory is going to be here because of this reopening. John -

KING: You're on the leading edge of this experiment. Lavandera on the ground for us in Dallas. Thanks so much. We'll keep in touch in the days ahead. Testing, as Ed just noted, vital to managing and to grading the opening. The Trump administration says reliability and supply problems are a thing of the past and that testing is now up to the challenge at hand.

(BEGIN VIDEOCLIP)

ALEX AZAR, SECRETARY OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES: We have adequate testing capacity. We surged that in. We need to make sure anybody who's symptomatic is tested and that we have adequate asymptomatic surveillance as a gauge of whether you have adequate testing for surveillance purposes. You want to be seeing a positivity rate of 10 percent or below. Nationwide we're at 9 percent.

(END VIDEOCLIP)

KING: William Hanage is an Associate Professor of Epidemiology at Harvard. Dr. Hanage, thank you for being with us. To the point that Secretary Azar was trying to make there, I just want to put on the screen if you look at coronavirus, let's just look at Texas. The percent of new tests that are positive -- this is the states that we're watching for the leading edge of this 50-state experiment out there - the positivity rate is down somewhere between around 5 percent if you look at that graphic. Explain why that is potentially a good thing.

[11:10:00]

HANAGE: Well John, it's great to see you digging into the data so much. I really appreciate that. When test rates are down it means that you're getting a better picture of exactly what's going on, because if you're testing and doing a lot of tests and roughly like, you know, more than 10 percent are coming back positive then it suggests that you're not getting all of them, you're only getting a fraction.

So, like -- like we were just hearing, if you get under about 10 percent of asymptomatics and you have a pretty good surveillance within the community, that's what you really want to be looking at. Unfortunately it's not clear how many of these are truly from asymptomatic people.

KING: And so help -- help people who are watching the Texas experiment, maybe people watching in Texas right now, they see the case count going up, a record over the weekend, and some people just see that and they say, whoa, slow down governor.

The governor and his team say, no, no, the -- we're testing more, we're getting more positive results, but that percentage you just mentioned, they say that's in the manageable range. They look at their hospital beds and they say we're in the manageable range. Who's right are we still in these early stages of a debate?

HANAGE: Well I think that it's pretty clear that if you do like 15,000 tests and 5 percent of them come back positive and then the next day you do 20,000 tests and 5 percent of them comeback positive, and then you do 30,000 and 5 percent of them come back positive, then essentially the number you're getting back is really dependent on the number of tests you're doing.

So, I think that they need to be doing far more tests. They're also -- I -- there's some lack of clarity about exactly which tests are being counted here. So, I would just urge Texas and everywhere else to be like, you know, really on top of this.

KING: That transparency would help. And some of it is this not -- not accusing anybody of anything, but you have different standards in different states about how often they release, how specific they are when they release. It would help if we had more transparency.

I want to ask you a reliability question. There's no question that the CDC was slow, it's initial test was botched. We're in a place now where even the White House is using this Abbott fast test, the quick test, the FDA says it has worries about the accuracy.

I just want you to listen here, the president says it's great.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: No, Abbott's a great -- it's a great test, it's a very quick test and it can always be very rapidly double checked.

We have the best testing in the world. It could be that testing's frankly overrated. Maybe it is overrated.

This is a 5 to 15 minute test, as an example the Abbott Laboratories test, these tests are highly sophisticated, very quick, very good.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: That's just one of the tests being used at what you might argue as one of the most important work places in American 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Yet the FDA, the president's own FDA, issued an advisory questioning the accuracy. What do we know? Where are we on that?

HANAGE: Well, I think that what we -- what we do know is that we need to know more. I think that all of the tests that we're looking at, at the moment are things that they vary in their sensitivity and their specificity, sometimes depending on whether or not you're looking at somebody who is asymptomatic or the specific course of disease.

I am -- people in my position know a number of people who have always tested negative but where who presumed to have COVID and eventually developed antibodies. So, all of these tests and all of this testing is a moving target that we need to keep on top of.

And I think that, as you say, we're going to be getting a much better picture about what's going on within a few weeks, when we start seeing the impact of the phased reopening which is being done in different states.

KING: Well, let's keep in touch as we go through that. Dr. Hanage, very much appreciate your insights and your expertise today.

HANAGE: Thank you.

KING: Thank you sir. Up next for us, friendly fire. A top presidential advisor blames testing problems on the CDC, and a senior CDC official fires back.

[11:15:00]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KING: Centering internal tensions between the White House and the Centers for Disease Control spilled into the open this weekend.

(BEGIN VIDEOCLIP)

PETER NAVARRO, DIRETOR OFFICE OF TRADE AND MANUFACTURING POLICY: Early on in this crisis, the CDC, which really had the most trusted brand around the world in this space, really let the country down with the testing because not only did they keep the testing within the bureaucracy, they had a bad test, and that did set us back.

(END VIDEOCLIP)

KING: Trade Advisor, Peter Navarro, isn't the only White House aide mad at the CDC. Remember the president tried and failed to get the CDC Director to say he was misquoted when he voiced worries about a second coronavirus wave, and it was the White House that killed detailed CDC reopening guidelines that the president saw as too cautious and restrictive. CNN's Nick Valencia joins me now with some reporting on how this Peter Navarro attack is going over at the CDC. Nick -

NICK VALENCIA, CNN CORRESPONDENT: This was a pointed rebuke from a senior CDC official and we should be clear about this, John, that we don't hear this type of language coming from the CDC not even on background, but the senior official responding directly to the scathing criticism that you just heard there from White House Trade Advisor, Peter Navarro, this is what they had to say in response.

"We should remind Mr. Navarro that the CDC is a federal agency part of the administration. The CDC Director is appointed - is an appointed position and Dr. Redfield was appointed by President Trump." They went onto to say if there is criticism of the CDC, ultimately Mr. Navarro is being critical of the president and the man who President Trump placed to lead the agency.

And John, as you know and as we've been reporting in detail, it seems as though the CDC, the leaders there, and the leaders at the White House haven't been on the same page since the very beginning. We should remind our viewers that it was in early January that CDC officials were holding briefings - multiple briefings per week advising Americans that there was going to be a disruption to their every day life. Those briefings were, according to two federal health officials, cancelled directly by the White House and HHS.

The official I spoke to went on to say that they are frustrated. They expressed a lot of anger saying that they continue to get mixed messages, that they are dealing with an administration that doesn't seem to like science. They are giving them science officials said, but it's not being received.

[11:20:00]

A detailed description of exactly what they're talking about is a 68- page draft document, which you mentioned was shelved, out of this was a six page decision tree. That official going on to say, initially we were too specific, they

gave the White House a targeted plan of containment and mitigation in those early weeks of the pandemic, that was shelved for a 15 day national pause which was extended.

So, this official saying, first we were being too specific, now we're being too general and they're very frustrated and this is spilling out into the open, John.

KING: Spilling out in the open, and it's important these tensions between a very critical federal agency and the White House in the middle of a pandemic.

Nick Valencia, I really appreciate the good reporting there. Keep in touch as this story is not over.

Just ahead for us, that State Department watchdog fired by President Trump. Guess what? He was looking into the personal conduct of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

[11:20:55]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KING: The latest Inspector General fired by President Trump was in the process of at least two investigations into the Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. One for possibly using government workers for personal errands; the other - for fast tracking $8 billion in arms sales off to Saudi Arabia.

That firing came Friday night, and we know Secretary Pompeo was the force behind the decision. It is a part of the pattern of president firing government watchdogs who raise questions about how your tax dollars are being spent; or, whether government programs are working.

The specifics of this case guarantee it will get attention from congressional democrats. CNN's Head of National Security Correspondent Kylie Atwood is at the State Department for us and also joining us is Michael Shear - White House Correspondent for the New York Times.

Kylie let us start with you. Two - at least two investigations involving the Secretary of State, what do we know?

KYLIE ATWOOD, CNN HEAD OF NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: We're learning about a new investigation. This is coming from the top democrat for the house of Foreign Affairs Committee - who launched an investigation over the weekend with the Senate democrats also looking into this because they want to get to the bottom of why Secretary Pompeo recommened that President Trump fire Steve Linick at the State Department.

And we are learning that there wasn't an investigation that Steve Linick was carrying out which he almost completed. And I want to read to you a statement that we have from Chairman Elliot Engle about this investigation saying quote 'I have learned there may be another reason for Mr. Linick's firing. His office was investigated at my request. Trumps phony declaration of

an emergency so he could send weapons to Saudi Arabia. We don't have the full picture yet. But it's troubling that Secretary Pompeo wanted Mr. Linick pushed out before this work was completed.'

So, there was a fast track of sales - arms sales to Saudi Arabia last year that Secretary Pompeo triggered and the house democrats were very critical of that decision saying, that there was no emergency that really led to that decision. They wanted the Inspector General to look into that.

We're now learning that Steve Linick did look into that. And then the other piece of the picture here that you mentioned is the fact that there was also an investigation into Secretary Pompeo and his use of a political appointee for his own personal needs.

Things like walking his dog and so there are some investigations that really - the democrats that are investigating this don't know the full picture yet. But they are putting the puzzle pieces together to try and really get to the bottom of why this Inspector General was let go so suddenly on Friday night.

KING: And obviously the democrats control the house so one can assume Mr. Linick will end up before a house committee 30 days until the firing officially takes place. And Michael this is a part of a pattern.

We can show our viewers on the screen - Steve Linick, the State Department Inspector General is the latest. Michael Atkinson, the Inspector General for the Intelligence Community. We know the president has sparred with him. Didn't like that he did the right thing and followed the law back in the whistle blower case there.

Glenn Fine was the acting Defense Department Inspector General, but also was overseeing responds to the pandemic. Any questions about money being spent there-- program implementation.

And Christi Graham the acting AHS Inspector General raised some questions about supplies during the pandemic. She said PPE and other issues - there was a huge shortage in the country. A former Inspector General who served under President's Clinton, Bush and Obama was on CNN this morning and he says he finds this quite troubling. Listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GORDON HEDDELL, INSPECTOR GENERAL UNDER CLINTON, BUSH AND OBAMA: When these Inspector Generals speak the truth they are basically being told by this administration that we do not want to hear it.

And if you do speak out, you're going to be admonished and in these cases, fired. This president unfortunately doesn't want to hear the truth.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: It is hard to argue with that Michael. You can see maybe as a personality conflict; maybe there's one issue. The General gets fired and (inaudible). When you have four and other examples and other positions in government there does seem to be a pattern here of the president not appreciating accountability and oversight.

MICHAEL SHEAR, WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT, THE NEW YORK TIMES: Well, right and in fact I think it's much larger than the four IG's, right? We know from all of the reporting we've done over the years, but especially since the president's acquittal after the impeachment case.

END