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FDA Approves New Saliva-Based Test for Coronavirus; Coronavirus Cases Breaking Out on Campuses as Colleges and Universities Reopen; Democratic Party to Hold Virtual National Convention. Aired 8-8:30a ET

Aired August 17, 2020 - 08:00   ET

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

[08:00:00]

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: On average for the last three weeks. And the last thing you want to see as we're seeing increased deaths in all these cases is an actual decrease in testing. You can see 15 states conducting fewer tests than the previous week, and as you just saw, the seven-day average of new testing peaked in mid-July and then dropped. So why on earth do less testing now? One thing that might help, the FDA has approved a saliva-based coronavirus test for emergency use. This could give Americans a fast and inexpensive option to get tested, not to mention avoiding the discomfort of that swab way up your nose.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi calling for lawmakers to return to Washington this week for a vote to block the Trump administration from defunding the U.S. postal system. The Trump- appointed postmaster general already enacting a series of changes leading to slower mail delivery. And he's warning that some states, some mail-in ballots, may not be delivered on time for Election Day.

President Trump admits he is blocking Postal Service funding in order to stop mail-in voting. Several states now considering legal action.

Meanwhile, Democrats are set to kick off the first ever virtual nominating convention today. We'll tell you what to expect in this unusual year.

Also, a new CNN national poll shows the race between President Trump and Joe Biden tightening considerably. So we'll get to that.

But first, let's discuss the latest developments on the pandemic. Joining us now is Andy Slavitt, the former acting administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services for President Obama. Andy, great to see you. I understand that there's not much that makes you really enthusiastic in the past few months, but today you are, and that's because of the saliva test that is on the horizon, the FDA just approved it. So tell us why this is a game changer.

ANDY SLAVITT, FORMER ACTING ADMINISTRATOR, CENTERS FOR MEDICARE AND MEDICAID SERVICES FOR PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, good morning. I think the good news is that what we really need in this country to get back to what we want to be doing, to opening schools safely, to going into offices, to traveling again, and that's to be able to frequently test, and to be able to test ourselves at every point in time possible, go see your mother, your grandmother. All of these occasions where we want to know.

And the only way you can do that is if you have a low cost test. So with great credit to a number of people, but Yale and the NBA who have basically released an open sourced test. And what that means is, they're not making any money on it, which I think is the right model in a pandemic. The ingredient costs are very few. And they're interchangeable ingredients. So if you need any type of ingredient you have around, as long as you get it approved, you can do the test in your lab. So that's great. And then of course it's saliva-based, so it's easier for kids and otherwise. So I think it's a good step, it's a good development, and I think one of many we will need along the road to success.

BERMAN: We will speak to a representative from the NBA as well as Yale, who developed this test, to find out exactly how they did it and what hope they have for it going forward. And it's coming at a good time because these testing numbers we've seen, Andy, it's hard to explain, right? It's hard to explain when we're averaging 1,000 deaths a day and have been here for three weeks, how when you look at the graph, testing peaked in mid-July. You shouldn't be having fewer tests six months into a pandemic that's still growing. You shouldn't see that drop that you can see in mid-July there, so why is it happening, and what do you think the impact is?

SLAVITT: It's concerning, and I think it's happening for two big picture reasons. The first is that we just have no national testing strategy. We started on one in March and April. We abandoned that when the president made the decision to hand all the things over to the states and let everybody have a laissez-faire approach. And therefore we didn't have the plan in place to continually go to the testing and the resources that we need.

The second, of course, is just rampant case growth. The growth in the number of cases in the south was way more than these labs could keep up with. And so that started to increase the turnaround time. And just to be clear, no one needs a test that has a seven or eight-day turnaround time. That's not helpful. So we might as well not have testing at all if that's the case.

So these numbers that we're reporting, they have been underreported for a long time. We've known that, but now I think it's becoming more difficult because we don't really know what the visibility is into where the spread is right now.

CAMEROTA: Andy, a couple more questions about the saliva test. When will it be available in our house that we can use? And just explain the process to me. so I'm at my home, I collect my kids' saliva, but then I still need it to be processed, right? At the moment I have to send it off to someone?

SLAVITT: Yes, so this isn't designed to be a home-based test from what I understand, although labs will be able to do this in their own way. Here is the way to think about this. [08:05:00]

What they basically did is they released a pizza recipe. They didn't bake thousands of pizzas. They released a pizza recipe and said any lab in the country can apply to basically do this as long as they show that they're using the methods that the FDA agreed. And the ingredients are quite simple. You spit into a test tube. It then gets heated up and goes into a machine with a bunch of other test tubes and comes out. So you still need that machine. And we still need tests that -- we still need to develop tests done without those machines. But these tests can be done very rapidly, very inexpensively, lots of them, and with a quick turnaround time. And that's a big difference from where we are today where we're paying over $100 in many cases for a test.

CAMEROTA: So it's not a pregnancy test yet. It's not at the level where you buy something at a pharmacy and you do it at home?

SLAVITT: No. And I think in the next couple of months, I put a paper out on what is a national testing strategy, and there's three pieces of national testing strategy we need, and I'm sure I'm not the only one that has put this out. One of them is for testing people who have illnesses, one of them is testing for general population, so you see where the spread is, and the third is to be able to do rapid entry and exit tests that you want to be able -- you'll need to be able to do instantly. Those tests have not been approved by the FDA. Those tests still need to get the data to show that they work.

And by the way, they don't need to work as well as the other types of tests, because if they're inexpensive and rapid, they will do, they will help us get back to life. So this is a step. Of course it's not everything.

BERMAN: So Andy, schools are coming back, colleges, some of them going back, hybrid, some of them going back with more in-person study. We saw in North Georgia University, we saw these kids outside partying. Alisyn Camerota says when you put kids at a college, they're going to do this. Apparently, she thinks it can't be stopped under any circumstances.

CAMEROTA: I remember college.

BERMAN: But my question is, look, North Carolina, UNC, four independent clusters have sprouted up there, and we're getting stories from Oklahoma State and other colleges. What is going to happen this fall? When you see pictures like this, what do you think will start to happen -- I say this fall -- in the next few weeks?

SLAVITT: I agree with Scott Galloway who you just had on. I think, my advice to universities would be let's aim for a great opening in January, and what would a great opening be in person? A great opening would be rapid amount of testing, a lot of testing like the kind we described, the ability to do what we call surveillance testing, so that means testing kids once or twice a week so they have to understand that that's going to happen, because you're going to get cases at colleges. There's no question about it. The question is whether you can stop it at five cases or at 500 cases.

And there's a lot of universities that are opening now without any testing capability. And my worry, and our worry should be that by the time these are discovered, they will have been going on for weeks. It will be impossible to contact trace. They'll have spread, and not only in the college community but into the community at-large. So unless you're in an isolated college on a hill and nobody else is there, you have also, you are also going to impact many people in the community, and that's going to be a hardship.

So my hope is, I know this is a financial hardship for schools as Scott described, but my hope is that people will wait until the tools and resources showed up. My view is we should have been working on the resources over the summer, and we would have been able to open the school on time, and I put that directly on the Trump administration.

CAMEROTA: But when you see those videos of what's happening in Georgia, it doesn't look like they're in a her hermetically sealed environment, like I just say, the college on the hill where nobody will come or go. So do you predict schools will have to shut down soon? Is that the next step here?

SLAVITT: Yes, I think so. I think, unfortunately. They're giving it the college try, but I don't think anybody can say they're surprised by what they're seeing. And by the way, I'm not so sure that blaming the kids and putting them in the position where they're signing these compacts that are incredibly realistic -- unrealistic. You will stay in your home. You will never go out to eat. You will never see friends. You will never go to class. But we're going to bring you all the way to this place. I'm not sure that doing that and then putting all the blame on them when it fails, I think that's adults not doing right by young people, putting them in positions where we know they're likely to fail, we're setting them up to fail, and then we're going to blame them for being irresponsible. And I think we're the ones that are, quite frankly, being irresponsible by allowing that kind of thing to happen.

BERMAN: Andy Slavitt, great to see you remember. Thanks so much for being with us.

SLAVITT: You got it.

BERMAN: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi calling back members to address the growing controversy over the Trump administration's service cuts at the U.S. Postal Service. This comes as Democrats kick off their virtual national convention tonight.

[08:10:02]

CNN's John Harwood live at the White House with the latest. Nancy Pelosi bringing the House back in the middle of these two highly politically charged weeks, the convention, saying we're going to take on the issue of the Postal Service. What do you think this does, shining a spotlight on this during these two weeks?

JOHN HARWOOD, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: I think raising the stakes of this issue, John, is going to put a lot of pressure on Republicans. This is an issue where the Republican disdain, opposition to government, has meshed with Donald Trump's desire when he faces a losing hand in the election to throw all the cards up in the air and cast out about mail balloting, make it more difficult.

But if Democrats can focus attention on this and force Republicans to answer to people who, say, depend on Postal Services for life-saving medications that they get in the mail, by shining that spotlight, that puts a real squeeze on them. And if you put a Republican congressperson in the position of choosing between a constituent who needs medication in the mail and do I offend Donald Trump by shoring up the Postal Service or preventing him from impeding mail-in balloting, that's one where Republicans might be closer to Nancy Pelosi in the end than Donald Trump.

BERMAN: Plenty of Republicans and Democrats who represent more rural districts know how important the Postal Service is, and they're hearing from their constituents. And in some cases, Susan Collins and the Senators from Alaska, they're already having to deal with this.

John, obviously the Democratic Convention starts tonight. This is the Democrats week. But the president is trying not to cede the political territory. What does he have planned?

HARWOOD: He's going to four different swing states, Minnesota, Arizona, Wisconsin, trying to get in the way of the Democratic story. And then on Thursday night when Joe Biden is giving his speech accepting the nomination, he's going to be in Pennsylvania near Scranton, where Joe Biden came from. This is an unconventional tactic by the president. In the past, other nominees have traditionally gone dark when the opposition party is holding their convention. But many of those norms politically have broken down over the years. That's not just a Donald Trump thing.

But he is -- look, new "Washington Post"/ABC poll this morning had him down 12 points against Joe Biden. Our poll yesterday had him down four points, so you can average those and see Joe Biden has had a consistent lead. Donald Trump is losing this race. He's got to do something different to try to change the equation, and that's what he's doing with this swing state travel.

BERMAN: It's interesting in Wisconsin they're already running ads saying, though, he's putting people at risk by doing all the traveling. We'll have to see whether or not that's effective. John Harwood, thank you very much for being with us this morning. Appreciate it.

So as we were talking about, the Democratic National Convention kicks off in just hours. What can we expect to see? We're going to ask one of tonight's prime team speakers, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:16:37]

CAMEROTA: The National Democratic Convention kicks off tonight. It will be the first chance for the party to present its vision and make their case for Joe Biden in the White House.

Former First Lady, Michelle Obama, Senator Bernie Sanders and our next guest will be among the big speakers tonight. So joining us now is former Democratic presidential candidate, Senator Amy Klobuchar. Senator, great to see you.

SEN. AMY KLOBUCHAR (D-MN): Thanks, Alisyn, it's great to be on again.

CAMEROTA: Okay, so tell us what you plan to say tonight.

KLOBUCHAR: Well, I'm going to focus on the fact that we have such unity in our party, and that we are unified behind Joe Biden, who is someone that is going to bring competence and compassion to the White House, someone who is going to bring decency.

As people who watch your program every single day know, there is chaos when it comes to tackling this virus, and Joe Biden has got that experience from having worked hand in hand with Barack Obama, getting us out of the last downturn, which is going to be so important to families across America, but he also has got the experience of dealing with our last disease, which is Ebola, that took lives in America.

So he is someone that we want to see in the White House. My focus is going to be about the fact that we need to cross the river of our divide and get to a higher plain.

When I ended my campaign, I had a moment of joy and that's because I endorsed Joe Biden, and so I am going to focus a lot on that unity and how we bring people together in this nation.

CAMEROTA: And what is it going to be like when you deliver some of your great lines and don't hear rousing applause and you hear crickets?

KLOBUCHAR: Especially this one joke that I came up with, you know --

CAMEROTA: Try it out on us. Right now.

KLOBUCHAR: No.

CAMEROTA: Come on, I'll let you know if it's funny.

KLOBUCHAR: Okay, tomorrow morning. Well, the key about it is that you just have to keep smiling, like we do sometimes when we do these interviews and I'm sitting here in Minnesota, and you are where you are. We do that, right?

So, that's how you've got to picture it, and you know there's people out there watching, and what I've told -- I did a bunch of Zoom calls yesterday with all of these different state delegations, everything from Idaho to Indiana, to Nebraska, and Missouri and Kansas, and I would do things like hold up signs.

I'd put on some aviator glasses. I think you have got to find ways to relate to the crowd and here is the advantage. It's a great advantage. All your viewers are going to be able to watch you like never before. Obviously, there will be more use of technology and videos and not

everyone is going to be standing in the same place behind the same podium.

You're going to be able to see people where they are. You're going to be able to have access for people who wouldn't be able to fly to a convention or drive to a convention because they're going to be able to be part of that right at home.

So, I actually think it's exciting and I can't think of a better time in American history than now for people to tune in and be focused on how we can change and bring back some decency to the White House.

And how can you miss Michelle Obama or Governor Kasich, Republican governor speaking tonight; Bernie Sanders. It's just going to show that broad, broad support that we have for Joe Biden.

CAMEROTA: I like the idea that you're going to use props. May I suggest some fun props.

KLOBUCHAR: Not in my speech. No, no. Just -- I've been using -- that would be funny. I have one that tweet less, listen more. No, I've been using signs and various other techniques to engage my audience that I came up with myself.

[08:20:10]

CAMEROTA: Well, just consider it for your speech is all I'm saying.

KLOBUCHAR: Okay, I will. I will.

CAMEROTA: Okay, so I want to ask you about what's going on with the Postal Service.

You tweeted yesterday something I thought was interesting. You say. "As I prepare for the Democratic Convention this week and my fight to save the Post Office and our democracy, please share your stories you have with me of late or undelivered mail."

"My bill that passed the House that requires states to count all ballots sent by Election Day regardless of delivery time."

Can I just ask you about that last sentence? You want all ballots counted that are sent by Election Day, even as they trickle in, over what -- next week?

KLOBUCHAR: Yes.

CAMEROTA: I mean, how are they going to be counted if they don't arrive by Election Day?

KLOBUCHAR: Well, remember, we can count ballots as long as they are postmarked by Election Day.

A number of states right now, including my own in this last primary, that's our rule. It worked just fine. So that is one solution, but as you know, it's not enough, which is

exactly why Speaker Pelosi is calling the House back in an emergency session as early as Saturday, because one, we need funding for the Post Office. Two, this guy, Postmaster General is literally not just jerking around voters, he is literally upending our entire mail system.

In response to my tweet, Alisyn, I got tons of response, including texts to my phone this morning from a Republican businessman and from some farmers who said, we can't do business anymore. It's taking weeks to pay my contractors, one guy said. They can't get their checks.

So this isn't just about the election. It's about people's life-saving medication. It's about seniors who are trying to get mail from their loved ones. It's about people that can't get their documents because now maybe they can't go into a bank anymore, because of the pandemic.

As usual, Donald Trump is wreaking havoc on America. Nancy Pelosi knows how to lead. She's bringing the House back and it is time for Mitch McConnell to do the same.

I'm ready to go back tomorrow. We should go back. We should deal not just with the Postal Service and the election funding, and the rules that we need in place, we need the funding for testing, and we need to make sure our economy and people get the help they need.

CAMEROTA: Yes.

KLOBUCHAR: They walked, we didn't. Go ahead.

CAMEROTA: I guess point is that how likely is it that you think that we wouldn't have results by election night, given all of this slowdown?

KLOBUCHAR: Okay, well my plan is to win big, so it will be so obvious who the winner is, because we're going to win in states across this country that we will know on Election Night.

However, we know in race after race, even before the pandemic, sometimes you have close elections. Votes have to be counted.

The most important thing is that everyone gets to vote, not just by mail, also by early voting. So that people can go in not when there's a big crowd at the polls.

My bill that passed the House would require those polling places to be open for two weeks ahead, making sure that we have poll workers trained on the day of the election, so we don't rely on our seniors, who are more vulnerable to the disease.

And the one amazing thing about funding for Federal help, Republican governors, Republican Secretaries of States, Republican senators, a number of them have come out in favor of it, so the key is to put the pressure on the President and yes, Mitch McConnell to call the Senate back to get this done.

CAMEROTA: Are you calling on Postmaster DeJoy to resign?

KLOBUCHAR: I would love it if he resigned. He should resign, about you in the meantime, the subpoena power should be used to call him in, to haul him before the House so that questions can be asked exactly why is he doing this? Why is he doing this months before the election?

I think the answer is pretty obvious. When he sends threatening letters to the states and say, hey, I know you always use bulk rate and the mail got delivered on time, like ballots. This time we can't guarantee it. You're going to have to spend a ton more money on first class.

What do you think he's doing? I think it is obvious their game plan. They want to stop people from voting.

CAMEROTA: Last, I want to ask you about Kamala Harris. As someone who herself was in contention to be the vice presidential choice at one time, why do you think she is the right person now?

KLOBUCHAR: I know Kamala personally, and when you run against someone -- you know, sometimes people don't even talk to each other again. They go different ways.

She and I became closer friends. She is someone that's going to work so well side by side with Joe Biden.

She has the experience to do the job. She managed the biggest Justice Department next to the Department of Justice in the country.

She serves on the Senate Intelligence Committee, while he is dealing correctly for those first 100 days on solving this crisis, on bringing us back to normal.

While he's doing that, he is going to need help in foreign relations. She'll be a great person to do it.

And she also loves her family.

I think when people get to know her especially this week, they're going to see this delightful side of Kamala Harris. They're going to see her empathy and they're going to be able to know the person I know and I just think the launch has been incredible, exciting, and they're going to be an amazing ticket.

[08:25:27]

KLOBUCHAR: And in Minnesota, we know a little bit about vice presidents. We produced two great ones in Walter Mondale and Hubert Humphrey, and so, I just know she is going to follow in their footsteps.

CAMEROTA: Senator Amy Klobuchar, great to talk to you. We will be watching tonight. Thanks so much.

KLOBUCHAR: Okay, and I will come on with my props next time. Thank you. CAMEROTA: And funny hats.

KLOBUCHAR: I like that.

CAMEROTA: Okay, thank you.

KLOBUCHAR: Very good, thank you. See you.

CAMEROTA: Thanks so much. Great to talk to you.

Democrats are ramping up their investigation of these proposed cuts at the U.S. Postal Service. Is the future of the Postal Service itself at risk? A former top official at the Postal Service is going to join us, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CAMEROTA: There's growing concern over President Trump's attacks on the U.S. Postal Service as he continues to lie about the level of fraud with mail-in ballots.

[08:30:08]