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President Trump Goes To Walter Reed Medical Center After Testing Positive For COVID-19; President Trump's Doctors Hold Press Conferences On President's Condition; White House Announces President Trump May Leave Walter Reed Today Despite Ongoing Regimen Of Treatment For COVID-19; Trump Attempts To Show Strength In Surprise Photo-op; Interview With NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio. Aired 8-8:30a ET

Aired October 05, 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: He's experienced two drops in oxygen levels and was given supplemental oxygen Friday. Dr. Sean Conley lied about that in his first news conference on Saturday.

The president had a high fever. They won't tell us how high. Now they say he has no fever. They say they've looked at his lung scans but they won't tell us if there's any damage.

Ten people in the president's circle are infected so far, including the first lady and two senators, the president of Notre Dame and Governor Chris Christie. Governor Christie is in the hospital at this moment, and we really have no new word on his condition.

The pandemic itself is showing signs of worsening again, 23 states are reporting a rise in cases. That graph right there is the reported number of new deaths around the country.

Joining us now, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN chief medical correspondent, John Harwood, CNN White House correspondent, and Dr. James Phillips, non-military attending physician at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. And Dr. Philips, we're going to start with you, because you watched what happened last night with the SUV photo-op drive-by, and you were outraged.

DR. JAMES PHILLIPS, NON-MILITARY ATTENDING PHYSICIAN, WALTER REED MEDICAL CENTER: It was disappointing to see, that's for sure. Good morning, and thanks for having me on. So a quick explainer is that I'm the chief of Disaster and Operational Medicine at G.W., and as part of my work there, we help to cover the emergency care at Walter Reed.

And so you know, the inner machinations of what's taking place at Walter Reed, those are guarded, and that's OK. But what took place outside of Walter Reed with that political theater was detrimental, and detrimental in several ways. Primarily, there's risks to transporting a patient completely unnecessarily with severe COVID-19 out of the hospital area.

It's detrimental to the people who were inside that vehicle with him, and we can talk about that further for sure, but even more so detrimental to the people, detrimental to those who are willing to put themselves and others at risk by going into public when they have COVID-19. We've seen examples of parents sending their kids to school despite a known diagnosis, and this sends the absolute wrong public health message.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: And Dr. Philips, I just want to stick with you for one more second, because obviously the doctors at Walter Reed can't tackle the president of the United States when he says he wants to do this, but what would happen behind the scenes when a seemingly infectious, sick patient says I'm just going to go take a spin for a while?

PHILLIPS: It's a great question. So working at Walter Reed and in particular working at G.W., we come in contact with VIPs on a near daily basis. And there is a very particular type of medicine, protective medicine, VIP medicine, that we study. And there is surprisingly something called VIP syndrome, it's been described since the 1960s.

And what that is describes is the poorer outcomes that celebrities, politicians, and those with influence have because of deviations from the standard of care that doctors perform because of their influence. And whether that's a politician or a musician, you can look at examples like Prince and Michael Jackson and maybe Joan Rivers as being premiere examples of how those poor outcomes can occur. And so this is a deviation outside of what any normal American patient would be allowed to do.

BERMAN: So Sanjay, one of the things we're trying to figure out this morning and one of the things that's truly very important is, what is the condition of the president of the United States? How is he doing? As I noted, he looked better in the video Sunday than he did Saturday.

That might be the steroid, which as you noted before, gives you a false feeling of doing better. But I'm so hesitant to ask what do we know because what we've been told has been drawn into question because the White House doctor has admitted to lying, but best as we can piece it together, what do we know, Sanjay, about the president's condition this morning?

SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, we know this disease has had a significant impact on his lungs because he's had at least a couple of bouts that they talk about where his blood oxygenation dropped. And that's a significant factor. People may say doesn't blood oxygenation sort of vary?

When you have a sustained drop like that, the lungs typically have a lot of redundancy, so if you've dropped your oxygenation like that when you're just at rest, that typically means there's been a significant amount of disease that's affected that. He responded to the supplemental oxygen, it sounds like, so that's good. But we know it puts him in a different sort of risk category overall with this disease.

One of the basic questions, this is a respiratory virus, does he have pneumonia? Have his lungs been objectively impacted in some way? And twice, several times, actually, the doctors have been asked this question. Listen to how they respond.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What do the x-rays and CT scans show? Are there signs of pneumonia? Are there signs of lung involvement or any damage to the lungs?

[08:05:03]

DR. SEAN CONLEY, PRESIDENT TRUMP'S PHYSICIAN: Yes, so we're tracking all of that. There's some expected findings, but nothing of any major clinical concern.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

GUPTA: That's a really strange answer, I have to say. And obviously, they're spinning there. And either you say it's normal or it's not, so clearly these scans aren't normal, but we still don't know exactly what they show. They say they're expected findings. For what? For someone who has severe COVID disease? For someone who is doing relatively OK? We don't know.

And it's a problem, I think, not if you're going to come out and answer questions like this, to be forthright. We know they're trying different medications. Some of these medications in combination have not been tried before. Some may be working at odds with each other, meaning on one hand you're giving him medication to decrease how fast the virus is replicating, the remdesivir. Dexamethasone, which can be a very effective medication for inflammation, can also suppress your immune system a bit, making the virus more easily to replicate.

So it's a confusing picture. It's muddled. I think they're probably great doctors and hopefully they're being very honest with the patient if they're not being honest with us so that he's at least getting the best care possible.

CAMEROTA: Well, that ride outside the hospital -- I hope they're being honest with him also. But John Harwood, it was also confusing when President Trump's doctor said that he might be released today, because as Sanjay has pointed out, remdesivir is a five-day course. That would mean he still has to get it today and tomorrow. That's administered, I think, Sanjay, correct me if I'm wrong, by I.V. That's administered in the hospital.

GUPTA: That's right.

CAMEROTA: So coming out early seems confusing, unless, and John, I don't know if you have any information about this, are they outfitting the White House to be some sort of hospital room for him where he could be treated there instead of Walter Reed?

JOHN HARWOOD, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Alisyn, they've got pretty sophisticated medical facilities at the White House itself. It's not -- it's not Walter Reed, but they could administer remdesivir at the White House if necessary. And the president's surrogates are out this morning on television suggesting that they understand he's still on track to be released as early as today.

It's not clear whether that is intended to be a signal when they say as early today, a signal that's doing better as opposed to the actual intention of releasing him today. It's very difficult to say because, as my colleagues have just been saying, the doctors have been so dishonest so far.

I think the other thing we have to take account of is what is the mood and what is the orientation of the president right now? He's under a lot of pressure. He's in a reelection campaign that's going badly for him, and he badly does not want to be embarrassed or humiliated in that campaign. Leana Wen, the former Baltimore city health commissioner who is a CNN analyst as well on medical issues, said yesterday that if she had a patient who insisted taking a drive around the block in his condition, she'd order a psychiatric evaluation.

So you don't know exactly what the president's mood is and to what extent the variations in his mood are dictating to what he is ordering his doctors and security detail to do.

BERMAN: There is a question about, shouldn't someone near him, whether it be a doctor or an aide or his wife or somebody say, no, no, this is a bad idea for you personally. This is a bad idea for the country, and certainly a bad idea, as Dr. Phillips has pointed out, for the Secret Service agents.

The president said yesterday, this is 209,734 deaths later, and now, now after it's happened to him, he's learned something about coronavirus. We just had a release moments ago of new old audio from Bob Woodward, of course, wrote the book "Rage," in a conversation he had with President Trump. This is a conversation in March, which gets to the president's, I suppose, intellectual curiosity on coronavirus back then. So listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BOB WOODWARD, JOURNALIST: OK, so now tell me about the relationship with Fauci. Fauci, as you now say you're a wartime president, and I think that's exactly right, by the way.

DONALD TRUMP, (R) PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: This is a war.

WOODWARD: This is a war, and he's in many ways your Eisenhower.

TRUMP: Well he's a very good guy. He's done it before. He's a sharp guy. I think he's 79 years old.

WOODWARD: Yes, he is. He's even older than you or me.

TRUMP: When you compare him -- well, listen, you compare that to Biden, and when you compare it to all, a lot of people we see, he's sharp. And he's doing a good job. He's a very dedicated --

WOODWARD: Have you ever sat down alone with him and gotten a tutorial. TRUMP: Yes, I guess, but honestly, there's not a lot of time for that,

Bob. This is a busy White House. This is a busy White House. We have a lot of things happening. And then this came about.

[08:10:04]

Look, we had the greatest economy on earth, the greatest economy we've ever had, and in one day, this thing came in and we had a choice to make -- close everything up and save potentially millions of lives, hundreds of thousands of lives, or don't do anything and watch, and look at body bags every day being taken out of apartment buildings.

WOODWARD: Who told you that?

TRUMP: Me. I told me that.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: All right, well, look, he said he didn't have a lot of time to listen back in March. Obviously, things were bad then, he should have been listening more. Now we know 209,000 deaths later, a lot more should have been done that early.

Let's talk about where we are and where we're going, Dr. Phillips. Michael Shearer, who is a "New York Times" reporter who has tested positive for coronavirus was at the White House that Saturday, which was the day of the Amy Coney Barrett event, he traveled with the president on Air Force One later that day.

We don't know for sure where he has been infected. What we do know for sure is Michael tells us he hasn't been called at all for contact tracing. No contact tracing at all, and he's one of the White House reporters who has tested positive. So what bells does that ring?

PHILLIPS: Well, contact tracing is one of the pillars of infectious disease control. You diagnose, you isolate, you contact trace. My concerns are not just about the contact tracing, but, honestly, the reporters, those staff at the White House, the Secret Service agents, and the general public have all been told that the president and those around him are tested daily. And testing is by no means the panacea. Testing is not, we can't test our way out of this. It has to be a combination of social distancing, mask wearing, hygiene, and testing is a very valuable tool.

But that being said, there's an understanding of safety, whenever you tell anybody you're being tested every day. But instead it sounds like perhaps people were let into that inner circle when the testing they assumed was happening was not. And so again, it's another question of undue risk being put on to people who may or may not be fully understanding of the risks that they're being put under.

BERMAN: Dr. Phillips, Sanjay, John Harwood, thank you all very much.

So what kind of security situation does the president's sickness put the country under right now? Former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson joins us next. (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:16:15]

BERMAN: New questions this morning about the President's judgment after his SUV drive-by Sunday outside Walter Reed possibly exposing the Secret Service agents with him to coronavirus. Obviously, the President wants people to think he is doing well, but we don't know. At this point, we just don't know.

We know what we see here, but we also know that the doctors, at least his doctor, Sean Conley, has lied to us at least once about the President's wellbeing.

Joining us is Jeh Johnson, former Homeland Security Secretary under President Obama. Secretary Johnson, thank you very much for being with us this morning.

JEH JOHNSON, FORMER HOMELAND SECURITY SECRETARY UNDER PRESIDENT OBAMA: Hi, John.

BERMAN: I don't want to spend a lot of time on it, but the Secret Service is under Homeland Security and you were a Secret Service protectee. So, just, I want to get your thoughts on that picture of the President in the SUV, obviously we think still contagious, with the agents so close by.

JOHNSON: John, you're right. Secret Service is part of the Department of Homeland Security. For three years, I was a protectee of the Secret Service. The Secret Service are men and women who are courageous. They're dedicated. They are trained to take a bullet for the President of the United States.

I am -- frankly, I noticed in the images, the agent in the front seat was wearing some form of PPE, so I'm frankly less concerned about the brave men and women of the Secret Service who are trained to protect themselves and the President. More concerned frankly about the large gatherings in the Rose Garden, on the South Lawn during the acceptance speech of senior government officials not wearing masks.

We have an outbreak of COVID in the White House, in the most protected building in the country, and that's where I think the White House staff, the Chief of Staff and others need to be focused in terms of continuity of government and our security situation.

BERMAN: Yes, we were surprised earlier this morning, we heard from Michael Shear, who is one of the White House reporters who has tested positive who says he hasn't been contacted at all by contact tracers.

He thinks he might have been infected the day of that Rose Garden event for Amy Coney Barrett. He wasn't there, but he traveled with the President on Air Force One that night. No contact from the White House or any contact tracers at all.

So you're concerned about the top level of leadership. What does this tell you in terms of their focus on keeping everyone safe? JOHNSON: I'm concerned about the top level of leadership. I'm

concerned about our Cabinet. I'm concerned about the presidential line of succession. To be frank, I have strong reservations about the Vice President while the President is in the hospital, going on a trip to Utah for the vice presidential debate.

In my judgment, that debate should be conducted virtually, remote, much like the conversation you and I are having right now.

We've learned that a lot can be achieved through conversations such as this, including for example you can turn someone's microphone off when it's not their turn, but I do think that we need to be concerned about our continuity of government, now that we see there is an outbreak of COVID among the senior most levels of our government.

BERMAN: So who should be quarantining right now? You brought up the Vice President. The Vice President we think is still headed to Utah today. His last known contact with the President that they've told us about, if we believe it was last Tuesday, and we've been told he has had only negative tests since then. So you think he should stay in isolation still or in quarantine. Who else?

JOHNSON: John, a test as we're learning, a test is not immunity. A test is not a get out of jail card. A test can have a lagging indicator.

[08:20:10]

JOHNSON: The presidential line of succession is the President, the Vice President, the Speaker of the House, the Senate Pro Tem of the Senate and the Cabinet in the order of seniority of their Department.

In my view, the top half or so of that line of succession needs to think seriously about some form of quarantine while the President is in the hospital infected by a lethal pandemic. That may take the form of staying home. It may take the form of very, very limited contact with certain individuals, but I do think that those at the senior most levels in the line of succession need to think seriously about doing something like that.

BERMAN: Just some people know, Nancy Pelosi met with Steve Mnuchin, they are both in that top strata of the line of succession. Mnuchin met with the President on Wednesday; Mnuchin then went and met with the House Speaker later that day. They both tested negative at this point, but again, as you say, reason for possible concern there.

What message does it send to you then that the Vice President not only getting on the plane to go to this debate, but then apparently attending a campaign rally on Thursday in Arizona and Jason Miller, who works for the campaign on TV has been saying they're not going to change the protocols at these campaign events at all.

JOHNSON: John, I think this has to be a wake-up call for the senior most members of our government. Let's hit the pause button. Let's take a step back. We're a couple of weeks away from the election, but it's time to take a step back and reflect on exactly where we are. The larger picture, of course, is that we see a resurgence of the

virus in many parts of the country right now. This should be a wake-up call for all Americans that if the most protected American there is and the most secure place in America can get COVID, no one is safe from this invisible enemy and --

BERMAN: Let me --

JOHNSON: Go ahead. I'm sorry, I am sorry. I know the audio is stuck here. I did want to jump in and say, the former Vice President Joe Biden shared a stage with Donald Trump for 90 minutes, and I know they were more than six feet apart, but still, it was indoors. Should the Vice President who has received a series of negative tests still, in your mind, if you think these other senior officials should remain in quarantine, is it a good idea for him to go to Florida today for campaign events and a Town Hall then tonight.

JOHNSON: That's a good question. It does seem to me that the Biden campaign, the former Vice President are observing good practices. So far as I know, there has not been a member of his campaign that has been infected by the virus.

They do seem to be observing prudent good measures, but I think, all of us in the presidential campaign, those in the presidential campaign need to think very, very seriously about whether it's necessary to campaign full bore, even though we're just a few weeks away from this election.

BERMAN: So you might advise the Biden campaign to back off in-person events?

JOHNSON: I would advise them to be very, very careful, and they seem to be doing that, frankly. They seem to be taking this very, very seriously, and so I hope they continue to do so.

Larger picture, John, this is a wake-up call for all Americans. This mask here, this little ten cent device does save lives.

Many people make fun of it. They think it's a matter of political correctness. Real men don't wear masks. It's not a prop. This thing actually saves lives and we need to double down and not get sloppy and not let our guard down.

BERMAN: I agree and all you have to do is walk out the front door and see people over the last few weeks, I think backing off and getting a little bit more careless here.

Former Secretary Jeh Johnson, thank you for being with us this morning. I appreciate it.

JOHNSON: Thank you.

BERMAN: We are seeing new spikes in cases around the country and we are learning that New York City could soon close schools and businesses in areas where there is a surge in coronavirus cases.

The Mayor of New York City joins us next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:28:09]

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: After a worrisome spring, New York City was able to bring the coronavirus case numbers way down and flattened the curve. But now cases are rising again.

Mayor Bill de Blasio is proposing closing down schools and nonessential businesses in some parts of the city to stop this new surge, and New York City Mayor, Bill de Blasio joins us now. Mr. Mayor, great to see you this morning.

MAYOR BILL DE BLASIO (D), NEW YORK CITY: Good morning, Alisyn, how are you doing?

CAMEROTA: I'm doing well. So tell us what was the tipping point? I mean, what got you to this point of feeling as though you were going to have to close down schools and businesses in -- or partially do so in 20 different neighborhoods?

DE BLASIO: Yes, well right now, it is nine zip codes out of the 146 zip codes in New York City that we are particularly concerned about, Alisyn, and there's another 11 we're watching very carefully.

So look, the truth is, the vast majority of New York City, we continue to see what we've seen for months, thank God, low levels of transmission.

For a long time, we've hovered around one percent. Now, we are still well below two percent in most of the city, we want to keep it that way.

But in these nine zip codes, we're particularly concerned about Brooklyn and Queens. It's time, I believe fundamentally, having really looked at the data carefully and worked with our public health officials, it's time for to us rewind, to take some of the steps we took before that worked and it's -- I don't say it with anything but pain for folks in the community, small business owners, folks who really want to get their lives more back to normal, but this is to make sure that this virus does not spread more deeply in those communities, and threaten lives and that does not spread to the rest of the city.

So it's a measure, I think we have to take to contain the situation before it gets any worse.

CAMEROTA: As I understand it, Governor Cuomo would have to approve this plan. Is he on board with doing this?

DE BLASIO: We're waiting to hear the state's response to this plan. I expect to hear something in the next few hours, but the bottom line here is, this is consistent with what we've done, the city and the state together in previous situations.

[08:30:10]