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Trump Returns to White House, Removes Mask Despite Having Coronavirus; Coronavirus Cases Rise in 22 States Across the Country; Trump Treated with Array of Drugs Unavailable to Most. Aired 7-7:30a ET

Aired October 06, 2020 - 07:00   ET

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

[07:00:00]

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN NEW DAY: And good morning, everyone. Welcome to your New Day.

The president is waking up in the White House this morning after staging a made-for-reality T.V. return from Walter Reed Medical Center last night. President Trump choreographed a photo-op complete with a dress rehearsal that you're looking at right here. He took off his mask and he walked into the White House, which is an outbreak, it is now a coronavirus hot zone. The president thinks Americans have no reason to be afraid of a virus that has killed more than 210,000 people here.

President Trump's doctor says Mr. Trump is not out of the woods yet. Of course, it's impossible to know how the president is really doing since neither his doctor nor his staff have been forthcoming or transparent. Have the president's lungs been damaged? Does he have pneumonia? And most important to people around him, when did he actually get sick? Why won't they tell us when he was last tested before his Thursday night diagnosis? It's not clear that the White House is doing any contact tracing after that Amy Coney Barrett reception.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN NEW DAY: Breaking overnight, we have new concerns about politics interfering with the coronavirus vaccine. The New York Times reports the top White House officials are blocking new safety guidelines that the FDA wrote. The FDA wants these guidelines in place, but the White House is getting away because of the possibility it might make it more difficult to get a vaccine emergency-use approval before Election Day.

Also this morning, we're just four weeks from Election Day. And look at this, a brand-new CNN poll which shows the former vice president, Joe Biden, with a 16-point lead over Donald Trump.

Joining us now, CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN Chief Political Correspondent Dana Bash, and CNN Political Analyst David Gregory.

And, Sanjay, I could almost feel the anxiety from you reaching out over the airwaves when the president walked up into the balcony and took his mask off. What was the importance of that public health messaging?

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, you know, it's really important for the public as we're going into the fall that we -- I think people know how much of an impact masks can have. He coupled that with the idea of saying, look, don't fear the coronavirus. Don't fear COVID, basically, in some ways, signaling this idea that herd immunity is still a good strategy. You know, just let the virus go out there and infect people and don't fear it. It will be okay.

I mean, that was sort of the messaging that was coming out, symbolically of taking off the mask, don't really need this thing, going to walk into a residence with other people around me who -- some of them are wearing masks, they're protect meg even though I'm the one with the coronavirus, they're not protected from me necessarily and then I'm walking into the residence without a mask on. So it's the basic -- you know, if he was isolating in that room, perhaps, but that room is going to have to be disinfected.

And, already, the White House is a hot bed of viral activity. There were just so many things about that that went exactly the opposite of the way any public health person would sort of advise, not the least of which him leaving the hospital in the first place.

He didn't have somebody who went up to him and just said, hey, you know, I've had these conversations with patients where you just say, look, you're not going to like what I'm about to tell you, but you need to stay. I'm worried about you. You should be worried about you. Your family is worried about you. We don't know how the next few days are going to go. You need to stay in the hospital right now. I know it's not what you want to hear, but it is the best thing to do.

Nobody is telling him this stuff and, as a result, all these other things are not happening. His health is potentially more in peril and the nation's health, the public's health is more in peril.

CAMEROTA: Right. So, Dana, that was optically dangerous, obviously, what he did last night in that photo-op, and then he sent out this absurd tweet about maybe I'm immune from coronavirus. Could I just pull up the cocktail of treatments that he's on? So if you're immune, would you be on experimental antibody therapy treatment, remdesivir, dexamethasone, taking vitamin D, I mean, et cetera, et cetera?

It's so -- I mean, this is one where it's truly head-slapping. He wants to project that he is, I guess, FDR or whatever, fill in the blank of whatever leader, and yet he was taken to the hospital because he was so sick.

DANA BASH, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: There's really no way to explain it other than the fact that he is a propagandist and he is somebody who has been successful his whole life in trying to bend reality to the way that he says that it is.

[07:05:07]

This is a case where he is up against his most -- his toughest opponent in that, and that is the coronavirus. And there's no way to change that.

As you said, he went to the hospital. You put up on the screen all of the drugs that he was -- he had the benefit and the luxury of being able to take because he's president of the United States, including that experimental treatment which Dr. Fauci said last night to Chris Cuomo, he thinks, doesn't have evidence, but thinks that that could have been a big reason why the president felt well enough to leave the hospital and walk up those stairs and stage that photo-op that looked a lot more like something you would see in North Korea with Kim Jong- un than the United States of America with an elected president of the United States.

BERMAN: David Gregory, you've worked in the White House as a White House reporter, as has Dana. We've seen pictures of people in hazmat suits scrubbing down the public spaces inside the White House. That's the situation. The White House itself is a coronavirus hot spot.

My god, David, I mean, look at that picture. Look at this. This is the White House in the United States of America in and this is the building that the president walked into last night without a mask. And he thinks that's strength?

DAVID GREGORY, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: He thinks that's strength. He thinks he's the Terminator. I mean, that's the bending of the arc in this mythic way, because the cold political reality is that he's up -- he's losing a campaign against someone who he pillorated Joe Biden for, quote unquote, spending time in his basement, and he ends up in the hospital with the coronavirus when his handling of the virus is very much issue number one in this campaign.

So, staying in the hospital had to be a non-starter. And as Sanjay has said over the past 12 to 24 hours to 48 hours, he does have a medical team led by his doctor who seems to be on board with the P.R. campaign, which really hurts.

So, yes, that's the reality that he's, in his political mind, he can only convey strength in an over the top kind of way. As Sanjay said, you know, we would all be much better served if the president said, look, I'm doing okay, I'm not out of the woods, but I -- but I can overcome this as other Americans can and other Americans have not been able to, but the country has got to function. So here are the steps we're going to take to keep moving forward consistent with what we have to do. But he doesn't do that.

And we're in this situation where, you know, Sanjay and I were on after Dr. Fauci last night who is doing everything he can as the top infectious disease specialist in the world to combat this virus. And he is in a position where when he is on television, he has to avoid commenting on this outrageous behavior by the president and try to get people to focus on the need to wear masks at this point because we're still spiking cases around 40,000 a day, which is unacceptable. And we want to get on with life.

CAMEROTA: Sanjay, the president's doctors and his staff have not been forthcoming with information, as John Harwood called it yesterday, comically evasive his doctors have been in some of these press conferences. So what are your questions about the president's health this morning?

GUPTA: Well, we still don't know if the president has pneumonia or not. It's basic question. He has a respiratory viral infection. One of the big concerns is that he would have pneumonia and that would put him in a different risk category in terms of how things might likely progress and what his likelihood of sort of recovery is.

When was the last negative test? This is not just political intrigue, this -- besides sort of figuring out the contact tracing, as Dana was mentioning, but also, again, will give some idea of what his clinical course is likely to be going forward. Is he on blood thinners? There is a bunch of medical questions that need to be answered.

What has happened so many times, and going back to even Friday, is that these medical press briefings, they're saying one thing but then they'll throw these other lines in there that are almost telegraphing a larger concern. So even yesterday, for example, they're saying, he's going home, he's doing well, he's not out of the woods.

Okay. Well, that's some really important line because that basically means you're driving the car along okay and you have a roadblock up there. You need to turn. You need to make some sort of maneuver. You just can't keep going straight. Something has to happen.

The other thing is they said, we're in unchartered territory here, which is true, because the president is on a cocktail of meds, as you put up there on the screen that probably no one maybe or just a few people in the world have had this exact combination of medications.

[07:10:00]

One of them is not even emergency-use authorized, the monoclonal antibodies has very little data around it.

So for those reasons alone, the doctors, I think, were telegraphing, look, he's 74, he has got pre-existing conditions, we're not out of woods, we're on unchartered territory, time go home. That obviously doesn't make sense, right?

So they're sort of signaling that there is concern here and yet here is how the president is going to -- here is what's going to happen, the president is going to go home.

CAMEROTA: Sanjay, David, Dana, please stand by. We have many more questions for you.

A new report creating new concerns about politics interfering with a vaccine, safety guidelines from the FDA, the White House is reportedly trying to block. We'll explain.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BERMAN: This morning, there are signs the coronavirus pandemic in the United States is getting worse. Cases are rising in 22 states, falling in just four. More than 210,000 people have died and there is concern about the approaching flu season. [07:15:20]

Back with us, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Dana Bash and David Gregory.

And, Sanjay, I want to start with this news overnight in The New York Times that the White House has blocked proposed FDA guidelines, guidelines that the FDA want that they have written for how a vaccine would receive emergency-use approval. Basically, the FDA wants a two- month waiting period between the time that participants in a vaccine study receive their last dose. The White House says not doing, we think we know better. What do you see here?

GUPTA: Yes. This is -- this has sort of been happening now for a while where the FDA signaled these guidelines some time ago saying that they wanted to wait at least two months because that's -- if side effects occur, they usually occur within two months, so that was the time period. As you may remember, last month, President Trump said he didn't think that they necessarily would approve those.

And now, that's what's happened. These guidelines have to go through the Office of Management and Budget and that's where they sort of got stalled. And we hear that the Chief of Staff Mark Meadows has said, look, we're not going to approve these. So that's really concerning.

And there's a couple things that -- I was talking to some people overnight about this. There's a couple things. First of all, it is worth reminding people that this vaccine project has moved really, really fast, right? This is the moon shot of vaccines in terms of the speed. It will be under a year if it works and the quickest was four years before that. So that's really fast.

But the safety protocols are really critical to make sure that the public has confidence and that it is safe. It's kind of like back, if there was the moon shot in July of '69, it's kind of like if Kennedy had said, it's got to be done in January, don't bother with the safety checks, just go ahead and do it. It's sort of the same thing in terms of how quickly they want to move without doing these safety checks.

The other thing, and we did some reporting on this a couple weeks ago, is there are other safeguards in place. Even though the guidelines may not be adopted by the Office of Management and Budget, the companies themselves may not submit data to the FDA until they have that safety data. And then there are other committees that can get involved as well.

So, as Dr. Fauci said, it's not the last word, but it does show, again, this interference coming from the White House on the FDA process, which is really unfortunate. I think it's part of what's really created this crisis of confidence in the vaccine.

CAMEROTA: Dana, it's just politics. The president has said that he wants it by Election Day. I mean, how better could he telegraph what the goals are here? And what's really interesting is that it doesn't look like it's working. I mean, if you look at our CNN poll just out this morning, Joe Biden is leading Donald Trump by 16 points, which is the largest gap that we have seen to-date. And so I guess we could conclude that voters' instincts for self- preservation are even bigger than politics. I mean, they don't want to get something that's not ready.

BASH: That's exactly right. And if you look deeper in the poll, as you did with David Chalian last hour, Joe Biden is winning across the board except the economy, where they're basically within a margin of error. But on the coronavirus, Biden has almost 60 percent and Donald Trump has 40 percent. So, I mean, that's not even close.

Now, what Donald Trump is trying to do in politicizing this vaccine is trying to narrow that gap in a quick way before Election Day. But it just doesn't seem feasible at all, politically speaking, never mind the fact that, you know, there are people out there, I would say, most people out there, who want to be confident that a vaccine that is approved by the FDA is safe for them to take.

And that looking at stories about political people inside the White House trying to speed it along will make it even more frightening for people to say, wait a minute, as Sanjay said, this is the fastest we have ever seen a vaccine process work. And that's good, the technology is better, the science is better, all cylinders are at every single pharmaceutical company in the world.

But if this goes through and it is not safe, I mean, talk about a legacy problem for Donald Trump. So, it's so shortsighted, but that is not surprising, I guess.

GREGORY: You know, if you also look at what Biden is doing in his remarks today, he's got such a big lead now nationally and in a number of states, states like Arizona even, that he's trying to bring the country together. I think you're going to see his message focused more and more on the idea that, in the response to the coronavirus, we can't be so divided if we're going to take real

steps forward.

Because what the president is doing, it's kind of obvious, is continuing to divide the American people on how to respond to the virus, how seriously to take the virus.

[07:20:04]

And it's got the public health community so frustrated because it's standing in the way of some of the gains that we can make.

I mean, even this highly scrutinized, appropriately Judge Barrett ceremony at the White House outside, you know, I'm told by people who were there that they had a smaller gathering inside with the family without masks, inside before they even came outside.

So you're taking all of these risks which convey to the country that we should think about this so differently than what we're being told by the likes of Dr. Fauci and others. Biden, as a political matter, is saying, let's put our best foot forward and with one message, that's how we get through this. And I think he's going to step that up in the days to come. BERMAN: Look, if you want something that's going to piss off you even more about the Amy Coney Barrett event, David Gregory, The New York Times, this morning, is reporting there aren't even contact tracing off of it. The White House contact tracers are only starting the time say, two days back from the president's first symptoms.

Dana, I want to ask you a question. Last night on our air, we had former Defense Secretary William Cohen, who had been a Republican senator from Maine, basically say there needs to be an intervention. The president should resign. Bob Woodward said there needs to be an intervention. We're going to have Carl Bernstein on later in the show, who says that people need to intervene at this point.

My concrete question to you is are you hearing anything from Capitol Hill, from senior Republicans who say, we've got to step in, we've got to figure out a way to stop this, maybe politically, but maybe for the public health of the nation?

BASH: And the short answer is no. It doesn't mean that there isn't deep concern about the nation, about the presidency, about Americans and then probably not in this order about, their own political futures. Because, you know, a third of the Senate is on the ballot along with the president, never mind the entire House of Representatives. And when I say, on the ballot, that's a month from today, that is Election Day, but people are voting, as we speak.

And so, you know, they have -- there's a lot of fatigue, which might sound odd because I don't know what most Republicans are tired from since not many of them have spoken up about major issues over the past four years. But the fatigue is in just having to deal with this -- this guy at the top of the ticket and knowing that their own base back home, that everybody back home actually really still likes him.

Now, that base is shrinking, as is evidenced in our poll today, but they are still grappling with the same political kind of problem, the push and pull that they have all along. It doesn't answer the question about whether why they should not -- why they aren't just putting politics aside and saying, this is not right. But I don't know that we should expect anything to be different now than it was over the past four years.

CAMEROTA: David Gregory, Dana Bash, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, thank you all very much. Great to talk to you.

While the president says he's feeling better after taking a full spectrum of experimental drugs to treat coronavirus, but what about the rest of us? Is there a lesson in his treatment that can help the hundreds of thousands of Americans currently fighting the virus? An E.R. doctor on the frontlines tells us next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[07:25:00]

CAMEROTA: President Trump is waking up at the White House this morning after spending three nights at Walter Reed Medical Center battling coronavirus. The president was treated with a range of experimental drugs that few others have access to. So what have we learned from the course of his illness? What options do the rest of us, the millions of Americans who are watching this, what do we have?

Let's bring in Dr. Lorenzo Paladino, he's an Emergency Room Physician and Associate Professor of Medicine at SUNY Downstate. Doctor, great to have you here this morning.

First things first, I want to start with the timing, okay? So, President Trump went to the hospital basically as soon as he was experiencing symptoms, we're told. The rest of us have been told, I think explicitly, do not go to the hospital until, basically, you can't breathe. We have interviewed family members on New Day repeatedly whose loved ones went to the hospital because they were very sick, were turned away, were told to go home, you're not sick enough and they died at home. Is one of the lessons here that we should go to the hospital sooner?

DR. LORENZO PALADINO, EMERGENCY ROOM PHYSICIAN: Good morning. Thank you for having me.

I think that the timing of -- and putting in context those statements are very important. Going to the hospital in the middle of the pandemic could have been dangerous, especially if you weren't having symptoms and you wanted to just check if you had COVID-19. But if you're having the slightest bit of shortness of breath, the earlier we treat you, the better.

The hospitals now, at least mostly, and in New York State, I could speak for, are safe and it's safe to go to the hospital, as long as you're social distancing, as long as you're wearing the masks. Going to the hospital now is not the same as going to the hospital in late March or early April.

CAMEROTA: Super helpful. So we were told to stay out of the hospital because they were overrun. But now, the second that you have any shortness of breath, you should get to the hospital because you might be able to survive.

Okay. Next question that we've watched -- we might be able to glean from President Trump's treatment for the rest of us, this monoclonal antibody therapy that he's gotten, I know it's not released and available to the public yet. But Dr. Fauci said last night that he thinks, based on his decades of experience, that might have been what turned it around for President Trump. Is there any way that more of us, on compassionate use reasons, should be trying that?

PALADINO: Yes, I think so, and I agree with that statement. I think that the monoclonal antibodies that are not available to everybody probably did turn it around.

[07:30:02]

The president is not the first one to get it. Regeneron recently released some data of 275 people they tested it on.