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Pfizer: Early Analysis Shows Its Coronavirus Vaccine Is 90 Percent Effective; CNN Reality Check: Joe Biden's Big Win By The Numbers; Biden And Harris Call For Unity In Victory Speeches. Aired 7:30-8a ET

Aired November 09, 2020 - 07:30   ET

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

[07:30:00]

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Get the shot of the vaccine or a placebo.

What happens is there's this independent committee -- data monitoring committee -- which then un-blinded some of the data. And when they did that they found a couple of things.

One is that, as you point out, that the likelihood of becoming infected in the placebo group versus the vaccinated group was very different. There was about 90 percent protection if you received the vaccine. So that's really good news.

They also found that it was about seven days after the second dose -- remember, this is two doses. Second -- seven days after the second dose where you seem to get that protection. So it seems to work and it seems to work fairly quickly.

There's still a couple of questions that they need to answer.

One is the safety data. They need to wait two months for that safety data, and that -- and that -- when we look at the calendar, that's sort of roughly the third week of November. The third to fourth week of November before they have that safety data.

And at that point, guys, they may apply for an emergency use authorization, which would be huge. That would be the first week of December. And it's looking quite likely the FDA will say this is good to go for an emergency use and then the process begins.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: I know they're waiting on some more cases to come back -- some more testing. Basically -- I know this sounds odd -- they want some more people to get sick inside the giant trial to be able to judge whether it's in the placebo group or the vaccine group. But that should happen in the next two weeks.

GUPTA: Right.

BERMAN: If emergency use approval is granted, Sanjay -- and I'm sure they will apply for it if it continues like this -- what does that mean in terms of when Americans -- GUPTA: Yes.

BERMAN: -- most Americans will have access to this vaccine?

GUPTA: Well, this process -- there's sort of three ingredients. One is the effectiveness -- we talk about the safety. And then the manufacturing, which has been happening in earnest and at risk, meaning that a lot of times, typically what happens is you wait for approval and then if you get it, they start manufacturing.

Many of these vaccine-makers have been doing this for some time. You know, I think we have some images of what the Pfizer sort of manufacturing process has been like. But in Kalamazoo, Michigan, for example, there is a football field's worth of freezers -- 350 freezers where they're basically starting to store vaccines.

Pfizer -- and I'm going to talk to the Pfizer CEO here in just a little bit and I'm going to tell you in the next hour what he said -- but they basically say they have hundreds of thousands of doses now. They anticipate having up to 40 million by the end of the year and 100 million by March of next year.

So, you know, I mean, it's not going -- as we've said for some time, it's not going to be enough for everyone right away. And a lot of people, obviously, are very anxious about this vaccine. But it's still going to take some time.

And we still have a couple of checkpoints to sort of pass, including the safety data. They haven't seen adverse effects, we are told -- according to the data monitoring committee -- that are of concern within these first several weeks of monitoring. But, again, third, fourth week of November we should have a clearer picture on that.

And this is going to be a challenging vaccine to distribute. It needs to be stored at super-cold temperatures. All these various organizations -- pharmacies, yes; hospitals, yes. Hospitals that are going to be very busy taking care of patients are also, at the same time, going to be tasked with one of the largest vaccine distributions we've ever seen.

So there's going to be a lot of moving parts over the next few weeks. But this first hurdle and a very positive one that's it's effected, this vaccine, seems to be 90 percent effective is critical to getting the rest of those things moving.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: Oh, absolutely. I mean, if this holds -- if the good news holds, then it would be a game changer.

And, Sanjay, in terms of rolling it out and when everybody would be able to get it, is it true what we've heard that it would be first responders first? You know, hospital workers first. They would get it the first year. And then it would be elderly. And then, I don't know, maybe high-risk people, if that means people with asthma or whatever.

Just give us a sense of how that would -- tiered system would work. GUPTA: Yes, I think you sort of nailed it, Alisyn. I mean, they do have a system by which they're sort of figuring out who is most likely to benefit from it the earliest. So, health care workers, certainly -- nursing homes. We know -- we've seen, you know -- since March, we knew more vulnerable populations were located. And so, you can sort of go down that list.

There may be areas of the country where people are just at higher risk because of population density. And that may be part of the hierarchy.

I've got to be honest, you know. We haven't really seen -- we knew that there was a discussion happening between the federal government and the states in terms of developing statewide distribution plans, but we haven't seen how individual states have planned on doing that. You know, those sort of plans seem to have gone away a little bit or at least not gotten as much attention.

Hopefully, we will see that -- and will it be a national plan? Will it even be, possibly, an international plan as we start to talk about worldwide vaccine distribution? Because, look -- I mean, an infection anywhere now in the world is an infection everywhere in the world. So how do you sort of inoculate people who are vulnerable in all parts of the world quickly? That's going to be part of the discussion as well.

[07:35:08]

BERMAN: I have to say there's also a political implication on all this also. How the transition -- how the president-elect, Joe Biden, and his team coordinates with the outgoing administration on vaccine distribution and all the vast planning that needs to happen here.

GUPTA: True.

BERMAN: This is complicated.

Very quickly, Sanjay, this good news comes in the midst of just terrible news about the path of the pandemic right now -- the number of new cases and the number of hospitalizations. We're in a bad, bad place.

GUPTA: Yes. I mean, this past week, we didn't get to talk about COVID nearly enough because of the election. But the numbers -- you know, the virus doesn't care. As we've said, the numbers continue to go up.

The concern that I see -- and I spent a lot of time this past weekend even talking to modelers, talking to epidemiologists, and looking at all the various public health practices. The numbers, as you know, are all going in the wrong direction. The number of people who are becoming infected -- diagnosis infection.

The number of hospitalizations. You have several states now that have hospitalizations that are the highest they have seen throughout this entire pandemic and we're sort of at the beginning of winter season.

If we implement these public health measures -- let's say we just did it right now. We said mask mandates, physical distancing, closing down of poorly-ventilated indoor locations, such as bars. If we did that right now the numbers would still continue to go up for a while. We're going to apex at some point and depending on the models, it looks like sort of the end of January.

I think when we talked about these public health practices and all the things, they are still critically important because it becomes a question of when we get to the high number of new infections and hospitalizations, do we quickly come down. How quickly do we accelerate the back end of that curve? Do we plateau up there -- you know, into January, February, and March, or do we bring it down quickly?

What we do now will make a difference.

We are going to see the numbers go up and people will say well look, none of this is working. We said masks and numbers are still going up. No, you're not going to see the benefit right away. It's going to be a question of how quickly we come off the curve.

CAMEROTA: Sanjay, thank you very much for all the information and for helping us digest this breaking news. Great to talk to you.

GUPTA: Yes, thank you.

CAMEROTA: We want to take some time right now to remember some of the nearly 238,000 Americans lost to coronavirus.

Tagan Drone of Amarillo, Texas, was just five years old. She died only days after her diagnosis. Her parents tell KAMR T.V. that she was healthy and that her death was unexpected. They say she loved riding her Hoverboard, reading, and spelling.

Seventy-two-year-old Terry Watson served on the Bay City, Michigan police force for nearly 30 years. He was also a Bangor Township supervisor and an active local booster. His fundraising stunts for the Bay City Fireworks Festival included scaling a cherry picker and living in an ice fishing hut.

Gene Mater entered journalism writing a newsletter on the troopship taking him to Germany at the end of World War II.

Over a seven-decade career, he was news director at Radio Free Europe when the Berlin Wall went up and a consultant helping Eastern European journalists after the wall came down. In between, he worked for newspapers, CBS, and later the museum in Washington, D.C.

Mater was 93 years old.

We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[07:42:43]

BERMAN: You know, yes, it took time for the outcome of the election to be clear, but by some key historical measurements, the results in the Biden victory not all that close.

John Avlon here with a reality check -- sir.

JOHN AVLON, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Joe Biden will be the next president of the United States despite Donald Trump refusing to concede defeat. But as votes have come in over election week, there's been talk that Biden might enter the Oval Office without a major mandate. Don't believe the hype.

So far, Joe Biden has won over 75 million votes. That's more than any other presidential candidate in American history, exceeding Obama's previous record. He's roared past 270 electoral votes with more than 50 percent of the popular vote. And some project that he could win by a margin of more than seven million after Trump lost the popular vote by 2.8 million in 2016.

So, this is huge, especially when you consider that defeating an incumbent president is really tough -- something that only six candidates have done in the past 120 years.

Biden flipped three states Hillary Clinton lost -- Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania -- and looks on track to possibly become the first Democrat in decades to win Georgia and Arizona.

So, Biden's big win is only a disappointment if you judge it against sky-high expectations pre-election. The reality is that the Biden- Harris ticket built a broad coalition.

Let's look at the exit polls. Biden won Independent voters by 14 points, which Trump won only by four against Hillary Clinton. He won moderates by 31 points. Biden won union households by 17 points, voters who make less than $100,000 by double-digits, and he won 45 percent of military veterans compared to Hillary Clinton's 34 percent.

Now, the Biden-Harris ticket benefited from strong turnout in urban centers, particularly from the African-American community, but it made even bigger gains in the suburbs. According to "The New York Times," Biden improved on Hillary Clinton's performance in 373 suburban counties around the country by an average of 4.6 percentage points to date.

Nonetheless, we've heard a lot about Democrats down-ballot troubles and they were real. At least seven House Democrats lost their seats, including two from the Miami area where socialist attacks seemed to have resonated with the Hispanic community.

And, Democrats picked up Senate seats in only Colorado and Arizona to date, despite a half-dozen they hope were in heavy contention. Georgia's still out.

Now, they gave rise to the idea that even if Donald Trump is defeated, Trumpism is alive and well.

[07:45:00]

Now, there's no question Trump turned out his base, but here's the thing. Some districts that rejected Trump in favor of Joe Biden still voted Republican down-ballot and that's a sign of his weakness with swing voters.

For example, Nebraska's 2nd District awarded its single electoral vote to Biden after Trump narrowly won it four years ago. But those same voters also reelected a Republican to Congress who ran about 17,000 votes ahead of Trump.

And some of Donald's brands damage may linger for Republicans. As Mitt Romney's former chief strategist Stuart Stevens told me, the Republican Party will now have more QAnon believers than African- Americans in the House of Representatives" -- ouch.

All of this is evidence that Biden-Harris was the right ticket at the time, running head of Democrats in some swing districts and set to enter the White House with a larger margin of the popular vote than iconic presidents like JFK while leaving Donald Trump in the dust as a two-time popular vote loser. And I don't recall Republicans complaining about his lack of commitment.

And that's your reality check.

BERMAN: Yes -- percentage-wise, you can look at 2000, 2004, 2016, 1960, '68, '76. This election not nearly as close as any of those.

AVLON: That's right.

BERMAN: But people just need to keep that in mind.

AVLON: Second doesn't count in politics.

BERMAN: Joe Biden and Kamala Harris already making history before they even enter the Oval Office. A closer look at why their message for the country resonated with voters from someone who worked closely with both of them.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[07:51:32]

CAMEROTA: In his first speech as president-elect, Joe Biden delivered a message of unity.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT-ELECT OF THE UNITED STATES: For all those of you who voted for President Trump, I understand the disappointment tonight. I've lost a couple of times myself. But now, let's give each other a chance. It's time to put away the harsh rhetoric, lower the temperature, see each other again, listen to each other again.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: Joining us now is Dylan Loewe. He was a chief speechwriter for then-Vice President Biden in 2012 and '13, and he collaborated with Sen. Kamala Harris on her 2018 memoir. So you are the perfect person to talk to this morning, Dylan. Great to -- great to have you here.

I heard people say that they felt that was the best speech of Joe Biden's public life. I mean -- and I don't mean to downplay your work with him, but where do you -- where do you rank it among all of his speeches?

DYLAN LOEWE, FORMER CHIEF SPEECHWRITER FOR JOE BIDEN, COLLABORATED WITH VICE PRESIDENT-ELECT KAMALA HARRIS ON HER 2018 MEMOIR (via Skype): I thought it was also the best speech of his life and primarily, because it was the most important moment of his political career and frankly, one of the most important moments in modern American history.

I think it was powerful, both in terms of the message that it put forward in terms of bringing down the temperature and unity argument, and I think it was also just -- it gave us a sense of hope that we have been reaching for desperately for a long time and reminded us that it is possible to do great things in this country.

CAMEROTA: One of the things that was remarkable about the speech is how he delivered it -- not just the words but how he delivered it. You know, it's no secret that President-elect Biden often trips over his words. He's been candid about his struggles with a stutter.

But this one he didn't struggle with. And so what do you think made the difference?

LOEWE: Well, you know, I think you do see President-elect Biden struggle with his stutter every once in a while. But functionally, the way that he tends to approach a speech is that if he can, really internalize it. If he can essentially memorize it, then the stutter tends to go away.

I think a lot of what he said that night was reflective of what he's been saying all along, talking about the fight for the soul of the nation, talking about the work that needs to be done. And so while the atmospherics of the moment were new, much of the speech was stuff that he had said before many times on the campaign trail. And it was more of bringing that to real -- to a realization than it was writing something entirely new.

CAMEROTA: That's real -- that is exactly what I assumed. Because it seemed like he had metabolized it in a way that was -- it seemed like maybe he had memorized it. I mean, I didn't -- I couldn't sort of -- I assumed that he had Teleprompters, but I couldn't see him reading.

And so, tell us about his process because it sounds like from your description it's laborious. So how often do you rewrite all of this stuff with him?

LOEWE: Well, I will say that when Joe Biden was struggling with a stutter as a kid, the way that he got over it was by learning to memorize Irish poetry and repeat it over and over again. And what he found was that if he memorized something or came close to it, he could get past the words that would sometimes result in a contraction of the muscles of his face. [07:50:00]

And so, a lot of the work -- of working on speeches with him is a process of internalizing it over and over again. And what that means is that you tend to do 20 or 30 drafts on a speech.

There were times -- many times when I was working with then-Vice President Biden where we were working on a speech in his office, and then later at his home, and then later in the helicopter, and then later on Air Force Two, and then later in the motorcade.

And we would just sort of fill up whatever time there was available to get the speech done. And at the end of the day, we would get it done and he would go out there and deliver a speech that would move audiences, and that's how he got to where he is today.

CAMEROTA: That's really interesting to me hearing about the process.

OK, totally different process, it sounds like, when you worked with then-Sen. Kamala Harris on her memoir. So what was that like?

LOEWE: Well, working with somebody on a memoir is very different than being a staffer. It's a combination of part staff, part interviewer, part friend, and part therapist. You know, essentially, what you're doing is interviewing somebody about their life and you get to ask questions like so how did that make you feel? You know, the kind of questions you would never get to ask.

And so we developed a close relationship through that process and I got to see her up-close and learn not just about the important work that she's done and about her leadership style, but also about her personal story and the way which people like her mother shaped who she was and who she is today. And so that was -- that was a unique and special experience.

And one of my big takeaways from it is that I can't imagine a better partner for Joe Biden in the White House than Kamala Harris. I am just so thrilled that they are going to both be there within about 73 days.

CAMEROTA: I mean -- and so, knowing her on that personal level as you do, as you would working on her memoir, what was your takeaway from her speech? What stood out to you?

LOEWE: You know, I think her speech reflected the long road that she has taken to this moment, but also the long road the black community has taken to this moment and the work that has been done, the work that still needs to be done. I think it was a reflection of her values and her personality.

You know, she spoke I thought quite touchingly about her mother who was this incredibly powerful, five-foot tall, Indian scientist who pushed her daughters to be the very best they could and to believe that they could be anything. And though Shyamala is not with us today, I'm sure that she is smiling down on her daughter, the next Vice President of the United States.

CAMEROTA: Dylan Loewe, really interesting to talk to you about all of this. Thanks for the insight.

LOEWE: Thank you.

CAMEROTA: John.

BERMAN: So, "SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE" had to adjust quickly on Saturday with the news that Joe Biden had been declared the winner of the presidential election.

Here are your "Late-Night Laughs."

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BECK BENNETT, CAST MEMBER, "SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE", PORTRAYING CNN'S WOLF BLITZER: Welcome back to what has become election week in America. I'm Wolf Blitzer and I have been awake so long that my weird stubbly beard finally makes sense.

ALEC BALDWIN, ACTOR, "SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE", PORTRAYING PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Singing The Village People's "Macho Man."

And this isn't goodbye, America. I'm just going to say see you in court.

JIM CARREY, ACTOR, "SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE," PORTRAYING PRESIDENT-ELECT JOE BIDEN: Unfortunately, there are situations in life, and this is one of them, where there must be a winner and a loser. Loser!

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: I get the sense they were waiting a long time for this one -- this episode. That maybe they had banked some of these jokes for a while.

CAMEROTA: When they said live from New York, it's Saturday night, I did feel the sense that they had been waiting with anticipation --

BERMAN: Yes.

CAMEROTA: -- for that moment.

BERMAN: All right, NEW DAY continues right now.

ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news.

BERMAN: Welcome to our viewers in the United States and all around the world. This is NEW DAY.

And we have major breaking news that will be music to the ears of so many. Drugmaker Pfizer is reporting that early data from its vaccine trial has shown it to be 90 percent effective.

Moments ago, Dr. Anthony Fauci told CNN, quote, "This is extraordinarily good news."

Now, if this holds, the company could apply for emergency use approval later this month, and that would be an important milestone.

Our own Dr. Sanjay Gupta -- he has been speaking -- in fact, I think he's speaking right now with Pfizer's CEO and we will hear what he has to say in just minutes.

CAMEROTA: OK. Also new this morning, President-elect Joe Biden naming his Coronavirus Advisory Board. The chairs are former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, former FDA commissioner David Kessler.