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Study Suggests Coronavirus can Spread via Dust Particles like Flu; Jill Biden, Bill Clinton to Headline Democratic Convention Tonight; Student Push for Tuition Cuts as University Classes Move Online. Aired 10-10:30a ET

Aired August 18, 2020 - 10:00   ET

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

[10:00:00]

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN NEWSROOM: This will be his first chance to answer hard questions from Democrats that the Trump administration is willfully handicapping the U.S. Postal Service in order to hinder mail-in voting.

Remember what the president said on the record about that very thing just a few days ago.

POPPY HARLOW, CNN NEWSROOM: Also this morning, we're learning more about just how easily coronavirus can possibly spread through the air as the U.S. passes 5.4 million COVID-19 cases. What we do know is that the virus has spread varies greatly across many parts of the country and many parts of the U.S., many cases are dropping or leveling off. That's also as testing is being delayed and in short supply nationwide.

Our Medical Correspondent, Elizabeth Cohen, joins us now. Good morning, Elizabeth. Let's talk first about what we know about this new study, right, about how it can spread?

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN SENIOR MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Right. So, actually, the study is looking at the flu. The flu-like coronavirus, experts think, that the main way that it travels is when someone sneezes near you or coughs near you or talks near you and sort of inadvertently spits. And so that seems to be the major driver for how it's transmitted.

But this new study that was done in a labs, which is important to note, shows that flu can kind of attach to dust particles, tiny dust particles and kind of float around so you don't need someone to sneeze on you. You can sort of run into some of those dust particles.

Now, does this really change anything? No, not really. You still should get a flu shot no matter what, you still should wash your hands. Does it mean the coronavirus could spread this way? Sure, it means that it could spread this way, but, again, you're going to do the same things. You're going to use masks, socially distance and also wash your hands. So, interesting but doesn't really change what we need to do. SCIUTTO: Okay. Tell us how vaccine trials are going, because there has been a lot of positive progress noted by Dr. Fauci and others. They are moving along quickly. But are they getting enough folks in the trial to give a full picture of the population here?

COHEN: Right. And, Jim, that is exactly the crux of things. The trials are moving quickly. We know Moderna's numbers, and they are looking very good. Let's take a look. Moderna, like all the other trials, is aiming to enroll 30,000 people. And already in the first three weeks, they enrolled almost 8,400. That means they could get their total enrollment by mid to late September.

But there's a huge but here. You can't just enroll it with anyone. It can't just be 30,000 warm bodies. You need to have diversity that reflects who is getting sick from coronavirus. So take a look at these numbers. If we look at coronavirus cases in the U.S., 22 percent, at least, have been in black people, but blacks enrolled in the trial, that's only 4.5 percent in the Moderna trial.

Now, again, if you look at coronavirus cases in the U.S., 33 percent, a third, have been among Latinos, but Latinos only constitute 10 percent of the study subjects in the Moderna trial. That is a big problem. They cannot continue with these numbers. They need to up those numbers from minorities.

Also I'm told from the elderly, in order to get approval from the FDA, we're told by folks at Operation Warp Speed that Moderna is moving quickly to make that happen. Jim, Poppy?

HARLOW: It's critical that they do. We're going to talk more about that in a moment. Elizabeth, thanks for your great reporting.

COHEN: Thanks.

HARLOW: Just one week into the new semester at UNC Chapel Hill, the school is abruptly doing an about-face this morning, canceling in- person classes. This is after 130 students tested positive for COVID- 19. Here is the university's chancellor explaining what went wrong.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KEVIN GUSKIEWICZ, CHANCELLOR, UNC CHAPEL HILL: When things started, activities began happening off-campus and then bringing some of that back into the residence halls, that's where we began to see the positive cases can. And we were surprised at the velocity and the magnitude of the spread.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SCIUTTO: Well, that prompted the student newspaper on campus, the editorial board put out this scathing, pointed headline, you might say.

Joining us now is Reeves Moseley, he is Student Body President at UNC Chapel Hill. Reeves, good to have you on.

REEVES MOSELEY, STUDENT BODY PRESIDENT, UNC CHAPEL HILL: Good morning.

SCIUTTO: I wonder, we now have the news this morning that sports are going to go ahead but classes not. Can you explain the decision-making there right now? What are the priorities and what's your view of them? The editorial speaks for itself. But you described being angered, angry, tired of gaslighting, tired of the secrecy of all of this.

MOSELEY: Absolutely. Well, thank you both for having me on this morning. I will say there's a lot of uncertainty. Throughout this process, I've been involved with conversations with the administration and the Carolina community for attempting to bring students back on to campus in the fall. And I will say in May when we began making this Carolina roadmap, we were optimistic about what cases would look like across North Carolina and across the entire country.

You know, when July rolled around and August rolled around, the cases were much higher than we originally anticipated, and that was alarming. And students want to be on campus. They want to have that in-person educational experience, and that's now what we were able to have.

[10:05:02]

We saw four clusters across the entire cabinet in just three days. Students weren't necessarily social distancing and upholding the community standards but at the same time a lot of students were pressuring the university from the get-go saying this isn't going to be a feasible transition to campus given the extenuating circumstances. And so it's been difficult to balance that.

HARLOW: So, the issue here, I think, the question a lot of us have this morning, Reeves, is what about all the warnings. I mean, there was the July 21st letter from the chair of the faculty to UNC saying, quote, the belief that we can safely return to campus with 30,000 students is, quote, quickly eroding.

July 29th, just a week later, you had the Orange County Health Department, which has jurisdiction over where UNC Chapel Hill is, saying that there needed to be significant changes and that the school should, quote, consider going all online for the first five weeks. Why did the university not heed those multiple warnings?

MOSELEY: So it's a difficult circumstance to navigate, especially since the Board of Governors and the UNC system schools, all 17 of them, were mandated to return to campus. So I think the university and the chancellor --

HARLOW: By whom?

MOSELEY: Excuse me?

HARLOW: By whom, by the governor?

MOSELEY: By the Board of Governors. So, the UNC system is comprised of 17 public university system schools, And it was a mandate deciding that, you know, you have to come back to campus in the fall. So you're seeing some -- I think 8 out of the 17 UNC system schools still haven't even come back to campus. And UNC, was kind of, for lack of a better phrase, a guinea pig for all of these, both nationally and across the State of North Carolina.

And when you saw 130 students test positive, that should tell the rest of the universities across the system that this isn't the best idea especially given the rise cases across the state.

SCIUTTO: Okay. So, how are they explaining now that it's not safe to come back to go to actual school, right, it's a university, but it is safe to come back and play sports? How are they explaining that?

MOSELEY: I'm not sure how they're going to be able to explain it. I know you saw PAC 12 and the BIG 10 say, we're are going to postpone the season until next semester, but at the same time how is ACC going to be able to make decision to bring people into these communities that are seeing a rise in cases already?

And you see schools in the ACC, like Clemson, postponing online courses and schools like the University of Virginia, which is a peer institution, very similar to that of the University of North Carolina also postponing classes.

So, I don't know how they're going to be able to make that decision for over a dozen schools when, you know, just after a week of classes we had to go to an online format.

HARLOW: I just have one follow-up for you, Reeves, and that is the fact that you were on 60 Minutes. I mean, the school was profiled on 60 Minutes earlier this summer. And you said on 60 Minutes, quote, you're paying these tuition dollars and if you're having online experiences, that's nowhere like the actual experience you'd be having otherwise. Do you share the concern of any of the other students that the university may have placed profit, tuition, funding ahead of safety given all these warnings?

MOSELEY: Absolutely, there's been warnings out the entire summer. You know, that's been a discussion both at the university level and at the system level. Students want the in-person educational experience, like I've said before, but, however, you know, we're moving back online right way and due date -- the first for tuition fee -- excuse, tuition fee deadline for students at UNC Chapel Hill. So we need to prioritize the students who are struggling financially.

We're transitioning to an online format immediately and we need to focus on the students who are at risk, the students who are most in need right now. And it's difficult to navigate when we're already online just after a week of coming back to campus.

SCIUTTO: Right. Well, students have got to be careful too, right? You've got to wear the mask, you've got to social distance. I mean, it's on all of us, right, and that includes college students. Reeves Moseley, thanks so much.

MOSELEY: Thank you both. HARLOW: So, now to the race for a vaccine and new concerns as we talked about is that Moderna, the company behind one of the biggest trials, a multi-billion dollar effort, says it's struggling to recruit a proportional amount of black and Latino participants in phase three of the human trial.

With us now, Dr. Georges Benjamin, he is Executive Director of the American Public Health Association. It's great to have you.

the fact that you have an Operation Warp Speed official saying that Latinos make up about 10 percent of enrollment in this vaccine trial, blacks only 4.5 percent, A, that's not reflective of their percentage of the U.S. population, right, and, B, we know that black and Latino Americans have been getting this disease and dying from it at higher rates. How problematic is it that they are not equally represented in this trial?

DR. GEORGES BENJAMIN, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, AMERICAN PUBLIC HEALTH ASSOCIATION: Well, it's a big problem, because we know that getting everybody into these studies will tell us whether or not it works on people of color and work as effectively. And so we need to get more people of color in these studies. That's going to require a lot of work.

HARLOW: Okay. So what do you do because you've got multiple issues here?

[10:10:00]

Let's begin with what you've written and talked about and that is the trust issue given this country's history. Look at Tuskagee, look at 40 years of lying to African-American men not giving them penicillin, for example, a cure when they had one, and only apologizing for it in 1997. How much of it is a trust factor?

BENJAMIN: It's a major trust factor, and they are going to have to reach out and they're going to have to have trust in messengers. That the means more physicians, nurses and health providers of color are going to have to talk to the general public, that means communicating to communities where we are, which is much difficult, much more difficult because of us being sequestered in our homes.

It means, in many ways, reaching out in a very, very assertive, aggressive and proactive manner to identify people that could be part of these studies. I know my association is trying to encourage people of color to be part of these studies because we think it's very important that everybody is represented if we're going to get our hands around this disease.

HARLOW: No question. And you bring up the other issue here which is representation. If you look at data from just last year from the Association of American Medical Colleges, of all of, you know, the medical professionals and doctors out there, only 5 percent identify as black. So you've also got a representation and communication issue, don't you? BENJAMIN: We've got a big issue, and we've had that issue for many years. And we have been trying to resolve this since before I went to medical school in terms of getting more people of color into the medical specialties. And if anything tells us this is one of the reasons we have to do that is this kind of malrepresentation in research studies.

HARLOW: Yes. You know, obviously, there's a big issue here too with what component of that has been a function of and because of systemic racism, and on that point, you have been working so hard towards declaring racism a public health emergency. It's something that you've been pushing for. And now, we're finally see it. We saw it first in Milwaukee. We saw it most recently in the State of Michigan, where the governor made that declaration.

But you say the true test will not just be statements and resolutions by officials. It will be to walk the talk, not just pass the resolution. How do you do that?

BENJAMIN: Well, that's correct. We have to go back and we have to undermine the structural foundations of racism. That means we're dealing with housing segregation. That means we're dealing with access to healthcare. That means with systems that are designed to keep everyone out of the system who doesn't have a lot of money. It means putting people of color in leadership positions so that people in the room that are making those decisions can have the full scope of experiences that are necessary to make informed decisions.

HARLOW: I'm so glad to have your voice in this conversation. Dr. Georges Benjamin, thanks very, very much.

BENJAMIN: Poppy, thank you very much for having me this morning.

HARLOW: Of course.

Well, tonight, Dr. Jill Biden set to take the spotlight as the Democratic National Convention heads into its second evening. DNC Chair Thomas Perez will join us with a preview of what to expect.

SCIUTTO: Plus, the postmaster general right in the middle of the news and this election will face lawmakers on Friday for hard questions about what he's doing now to your Postal Service and how it might impact your vote.

And President Trump calls out New Zealand for its recent outbreak of new coronavirus cases, a tiny, tiny fraction, by the way, of what the U.S. has experienced, but the country's prime minister isn't having it. We're going to hear her response ahead.

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SCIUTTO: Welcome back.

The second night of the virtual DNC will showcase old and new faces in the Democratic Party. Tonight, we're going to hear from Dr. Jill Biden, former President Bill Clinton, as well as New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. This comes after the first lady, former First Lady Michelle Obama's fiery convention opener last night.

Joining me now is the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee Tom Perez. Thanks so much for taking the time this morning.

TOM PEREZ, CHAIRMAN, DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE: Good morning, Jim. It's great to be with you and all of your viewers.

SCIUTTO: Okay. So, Michelle Obama, she was the big star last night. Tonight, you're going to have Jill Biden, Bill Clinton, John Kerry. Donald Trump reportedly will participate in every night of the RNC. I wonder where is Joe Biden in all this and when will he take center stage and why not more so?

PEREZ: Well, you saw the vice president leading a number of discussions last night on criminal justice issues, on the pandemic, on health-related issues. You'll see similar things in the days ahead. And, obviously, Thursday is going to be a big night for the vice president.

And what we saw yesterday was so many folks who know him testifying and Michelle Obama being obviously a major highlight. We need a president who has, as Michelle Obama said, the empathy and compassion, who has walked in the shoes of struggling people. I think last night was a really compelling testimonial, the Amtrak segment.

Joe Biden treats everybody with the same level of respect. He understands their struggles. He understands their hopes and dreams and Donald Trump is incapable.

[10:20:02]

Donald Trump -- I hope he speaks every night because the more he speaks, the deeper he digs his hole.

SCIUTTO: Okay.

PEREZ: And what we've seen from all the people is, again, a Joe Biden who is exactly what our nation needs.

SCIUTTO: Okay. I get the character message there, but as you know, CNN's latest polling shows Trump and Biden neck and neck in the battleground states, I mean, very much within the margin of error there. These are the states that turned the election in 2016. What is your message to those swing voters, the folks who voted for Obama in 2012, 2008, voted for Trump in 2016, how are you going to get them to come back in 2020?

PEREZ: Well, we heard from a number of them last night, people who they believed Donald Trump. They believed him when he said that there would never be a plant closure. They believed him when he said he'd have the backs of family farmers. And he's had a knife in the back of family farmers. Our message to not only those voters you mentioned but every voter is we need leadership that is competent, leadership that is empathetic, leadership that can unite the nation, leadership that can command respect around the world, leadership that can build back a better America so that our economy gets back on track.

The number of deaths, we've crossed 170,000 now, Jim, and so many preventable deaths. This president didn't cause coronavirus but his failure exacerbated all of these crises. That's our message. You need leadership you can trust to build us back, to d bring us back the way we need to be in --

SCIUTTO: I get that argument. I guess what I'm saying here is, in 2018, what worked in those swing districts was running moderate candidates that had moderate messages about policy issues, right? It seems like the message in the general is kind of a character issue, I mean, as well as better response to the coronavirus and character.

I just wonder what those moderate issues you're going to use in those swing districts that you need to win this?

PEREZ: Well, Jim, we're in the throes of three crises right now. And what the voters are going to be asking themselves when they go to the polls is who can lift us out of these crises? Who can make sure I continue to have access to healthcare? That's the Democrats. That's Joe Biden. Donald Trump is in the Supreme Court trying to do away with access to coverage.

Who can build back our economy? Who can -- I've lost my job. We've had historic job losses, Jim. Joe Biden has a very bold plan to build back better our economy. Donald Trump is presiding over net job loss. The last president who did that was Herbert Hoover. So we're very, very clear on these kitchen table issues of healthcare and education.

But the basic one right now is safety, getting our economy back by fixing this epidemic, and this president is incompetent at that.

SCIUTTO: Okay. Let's talk about criticism that you're getting from even within your own party. You're aware of what Julian Castro said, of course, the only Latino who ran in this cycle, saying, there were more GOP speakers in the convention this week than Latino speakers. What do you say to that criticism? Why not more of an outreach to Latino voters?

PEREZ: Well, Julian is a good friend, and I appreciate everything he's done. I would ask people to look at the list of speakers. We had Katherine Cortez Masto. We have Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham. I will be speaking tonight. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is speaking. Yes, we have so many other people like yesterday. I think, one of the most compelling speakers, a woman from Arizona, who talked about her father and his death, his preventable death. And she said his pre-existing condition was that he trusted Donald Trump.

And so our diversity of our party was on stark display last night and I'm so proud of that. It will be on stark display all week. And Joe Biden -- I've worked with him. I've worked closely with him. Diversity is an operational imperative as well as a moral imperative for Joe Biden and all the Democrats. And you will see our diversity proudly reflected.

SCIUTTO: All right. We'll be watching tonight. Tom Perez, thanks for joining the program this morning.

PEREZ: Always a pleasure, Jim.

SCIUTTO: And tonight, be sure to watch CNN, this as Dr. Jill Biden, former president Bill Clinton and many more will speak tonight. CNN's special live coverage of the convention continues tonight 8:00 Eastern Time.

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[10:25:00]

HARLOW: Paying college tuition is one of the many struggles many families are facing, especially during this economic crisis caused by the pandemic.

SCIUTTO: But as more colleges and universities move to online-only classes, those some families are wondering why, you might be among them, they're paying full tuition without getting anything close, really, to the full college experience.

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END