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Biden: We Have to Restore the Soul of this Country; U.S. Again Shatters Records for Deaths, Hospitalizations & New Cases. Aired 8- 8:30a ET

Aired December 04, 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]

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: This is their first joint interview since winning the election on all of these subjects.

(BEGIN VIDEO TAPE)

JAKE TAPPER, CNN ANCHOR: The U.S. is entering the dark winter that you warned about with the highest death rate. We just reached a new, horrible milestone of new cases. On a policy level, what's going to be different starting on January 20th when you take office when it comes to dealing with the pandemic?

JOE BIDEN, (D) PRESIDENT-ELECT: Well, there's going to be a couple things. Number one, it's going to be important we set out national standards. Look, we met with governors, Democrat and Republican, as well as 50 Democrat and Republican mayors. They said they need guidance. They need guidance. And they're going to need a fair amount of money. It's one thing for us to talk about being able to get help out there, but it's not getting there. We're having these hospital stays are overwhelming hospitals right now. There's a need for more financial assistance. There's more financial assistance needed as well when the vaccine comes forward. There's need for planning.

And so now the administration has been cooperating with us of late, letting us know what their plans are for the COVID virus, for how they're going to deliver on the vaccine. But there is not any help getting out there.

TAPPER: Madam Vice President-elect, Pfizer and Moderna have applied for emergency use authorization for the vaccines. Are you confident that if and when the FDA does give that approval, it will be safe and effective? And will you take it?

SEN. KAMALA HARRIS, (D-CA) VICE PRESIDENT-ELECT: Of course I will. But we also want to make sure that the American people know that we are committed, the president-elect and I talk about this all the time, that the people who need it most are going to be a priority. We've talked a lot about the need to take care of our frontline workers, as the president-elect was talking about.

TAPPER: Obviously those frontline workers are important, but you are, too, sir. And you will be the oldest president ever inaugurated. Do you plan to get vaccinated before inauguration day? And will you do it in public the way that Presidents Obama, Bush, and Clinton have suggested they're willing to?

BIDEN: I'd be happy to do that. When Dr. Fauci says we have a vaccine that is safe, that's the moment in which I will stand before the public and see that, look, part of what has to happen, Jake, and you know as well as I do, people have lost faith in the ability of the vaccine to work. Already the numbers are staggeringly low. And it matters what a president and vice president do. And so I think that my three predecessors have set the model as to what should be done, saying once it's declared to be safe, and I think Barack said once Fauci says it's clear, that's my measure, then obviously we take it. It's important to communicate to the American people it's safe. It's safe to do this.

TAPPER: Speaking of Fauci, have you spoken with him yet? If so, have you asked him to stay on?

BIDEN: Yes and yes. I asked him to stay on in the exact same role he has had for the past several presidents, and I asked him to be a chief medical adviser for me as well and be part of the COVID team. And so what has to be done is we have to make it clear to the American people that the vaccine is safe when it occurs, when that is determined. And number two, you have to make sure, as he points out, you don't have to close down the economy like a lot of folks are talking about now, if, in fact, you have clear guidance. We talked about masking. It is important that we -- in fact, the president and the vice president, we set the pattern by wearing masks, but beyond that, where the federal government has authority I'm going to issue a standing order that in federal buildings you have to be masked, and in transportation, interstate transportation you must be masked, in airplanes, and buses, et cetera.

And so it's a matter of -- and I think my inclination, Jake, is in the first day I'm inaugurated to say I'm going to ask the public for 100 days to mask, just 100 days to mask. Not forever -- 100 days. And I think we will see a significant reduction if that occurs with vaccinations and masking to drive down the numbers considerably. Considerably.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: Joining us now, CNN White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins, and CNN political analyst David Gregory. David, I want to give some context into the announcement that the president-elect just made, that he's going to call on Americans to wear masks for 100 days. This comes as we learned overnight that the new models from IHME, which is this group that makes the models at the White House and everyone relies on, is projecting that more than half-a-million people will be dead from coronavirus by April 1st, nearly double where we are right now. And not only that, they say that we're going to be averaging 3,000 deaths a day by mid-January when Joe Biden is inaugurated as president. And that really puts everything in a different light. And by the way, that's probably a low-end projection. There may be well over 3,000 people dying a day.

CAMEROTA: We're almost already there.

[08:05:00]

BERMAN: It's horrifying to think about, but just step back and think about what that means, David. Swearing the oath of office, putting your hand on a Bible on a day when 3,000 plus Americans will die. That really puts what he's saying in perspective.

DAVID GREGORY, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: It's staggering. And it's doubly hard because we're so deep into this crisis and this pandemic and this war. And here the president-elect will be sworn in after so much exhaustion on the part of the country, people just fed up with the limitations on their lives. And yet we are at this new height of crisis.

So does he have an audience, a captive audience, who will listen to a new president and give that president their due when he says, first things first, we're going to have a hospitalization crisis because of the sharp uptick in cases and the number of deaths resulting from hospitalizations. So let's do this thing, and see if we can bring this down.

I think he has the added challenge of putting this into a greater context, and you heard him address it there. He wants to lead with the science. You're going to hear a more coherent message. But he also has to say to people, look, we don't have to have a total lockdown. We can try to keep kids in schools, we can try to address those people whose very livelihood has been ravaged, ruined by this pandemic. But we have got to deal with the immediate threat, and we can take step one, two, and three to get there. What we've lacked, of course, from President Trump is any coherence in approach to a plan. And that's what President-elect Biden is promising.

CAMEROTA: Yes, Kaitlan, it is just so interesting to hear a president come up with a plan for all Americans. It's a simple one. If there were 95 percent compliance, deaths would come down, that's what the models say, that's what we've been hearing. And there is a beginning and end to it. It's not endless, it's not indefinite. It's for 100 days. Let's try to do that. That's what a plan used to sound like, something that people could get their arms around and try to comply with. And in terms of it being so different than anything that we've heard out of the White House, it's not just the media saying that. Mitt Romney talked about how there hasn't been a plan to save lives. So let's just play what he said yesterday.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. MITT ROMNEY, (R-UT): Well, this hasn't been the focus of his rhetoric, apparently, and I think it's a great human tragedy, without question. The extraordinary loss of life is heartbreaking, and in some respects, unnecessary. From Washington we have not had a constant, consistent plan and plea for people to wear masks, to social distance, to take all the measures that would reduce the spread of this disease. It's unfortunate that this became a political issue. It's not political. This is public health.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: Do we know what the reaction in the White House is?

KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: The president hasn't tweeted about those comments yet. Of course, we know how he feels about Mitt Romney. And when Mitt Romney is saying there has been no leadership from Washington, he is specifically talking about President Trump. And that's true. We have not seen the president take on that role.

And he was not very engaged with the pandemic in the months leading up to the election, but in the month since the election he has been more disengaged than ever before, I think. You see the president isn't talking about it. The only time he does mention the pandemic is when he talks about vaccines and this fear he has that Joe Biden is going to get credit if people are being vaccinated once he's in office. But other than that, you don't hear the president talking about the rising case rates and hospitalizations and what we're seeing play out across the country as new restrictions are going into place in some areas.

And I think what was really stark about Joe Biden's interview with Jake Tapper is where he talked about the prominence that Dr. Anthony Fauci is going to have in a Biden administration. We have seen Dr. Fauci be completely sidelined when it comes to the president and his close circle of advisers on the pandemic. They don't often meet, they don't often speak, and that's a far cry from where it was in the early days of the pandemic, and, of course, because Dr. Fauci has such a high credibility with the American people.

But even despite that the president was irritated with him, he sidelined Dr. Fauci. And so you heard Biden say he is not only going to ask him to stay on in this position, he also wants him to be a chief medical adviser to Biden. So you're likely going to see Dr. Fauci appearing with him. And that's just so different than what we've seen here where you rarely if ever see Dr. Fauci appear with the president, and instead he brought someone like a Dr. Scott Atlas, who we watched on television echo his own unscientific views, and that is the reason why he brought him in. So I think as far as who Joe Biden is listening to is also going to be so different than what you're seeing right now.

GREGORY: And can I just add real quick, I think the federal nature of this really matters. What we've seen under Trump, as Kaitlan well knows, is this abdication to the states. So you have regional approaches and regional differences, and that's been a big problem as well. And that's something that Dr. Fauci has talked about, that we have to have a uniform approach to combating the virus.

[08:10:00]

And by the way, Biden is not just going to face this from Republican governors. He's also got governors who are allies, like Gavin Newsom who was flouting the rules when he went out to dinner a few weeks ago to the French Laundry in wine country out in California. So there's a laxity, there's people who are fed up with taking measures. That has to be shored up in a new administration in the name of a new phase of this crisis, and he's got the political capital, perhaps, to make that happen.

BERMAN: I think you're right. I think there is some political capital there that should not be underestimated. Mitt Romney is right that masks have become political and never should have been. Joe Biden may be a lot of things. I doubt naive is one of them. The guy has been in Washington my entire lifetime, so he knows what's going on. And he knows it hasn't been tried yet. No one has tried to go out there every day and say masks from the bully pulpit. So we'll see if that works out.

Very quickly I want to play what Joe Biden said when he was asked about whether or not he hopes Donald Trump comes to his inauguration.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JAKE TAPPER, CNN ANCHOR: President Trump has not said if he's going to attend your inauguration yet. Do you think it's important that he's there? You're laughing.

JOE BIDEN, (D) PRESIDENT-ELECT: I think it would -- important only in one sense, not in a personal sense, important in the sense that we are able to demonstrate at the end of this chaos that he's created that there is peaceful transfer of power with the competing parties standing there shaking hands and moving on. I think that's an important -- what I worry about, Jake, more than the impact on the domestic politics, I really worry about the image we're presenting to the rest of the world.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: Kaitlan, very quickly, that encapsulates I think the different perspectives on the world that they both have. Biden is saying Donald Trump sees this is about him. Joe Biden is saying I see this as about America.

COLLINS: Yes, imagine how different that answer would be if the roles were reversed here and someone wasn't going to show up to Donald Trump's inauguration. And that did happen with some people. You saw how the president and his aides talked about that in the first year in office. And to see how Joe Biden answered that, saying personally I don't care if Donald Trump comes to my inauguration, but I do think it's important for the good of the country. Though I should note, out of all the source that I have spoken to about this and about whether or not the president is going to show up, only one person has told me they do think that in the end he'll go. Everyone else thinks that if you look at his actions over the last few weeks, he is likely not going to be there in January.

BERMAN: Such a loss in so many ways. Thumbing his nose at American tradition. David, Kaitlan, stick around.

We also want to note that Jake is going to join us later this hour to talk about this exclusive interview. Very curious to hear from him what he thought about the interpersonal relationship in how the president-elect and vice president-elect paid off each other. CAMEROTA: We have much more to discuss in that exclusive, including

the message that Joe Biden hopes the administration, his administration, will send to the world.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:16:47]

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JAKE TAPPER, CNN HOST: What does it feel like? Are you -- are you daunted? Are you worried? Are you fearful? Are you exhilarated? What's the emotion that goes through you?

JOE BIDEN (D), PRESIDENT-ELECT: I'm determined and I'm confident that what I've said from the outset and I've never changed my view. This whole campaign for over -- almost going on 600 days, exactly what had to be done. We have to restore the soul of this country, meaning honor, decency, honesty, basic, basic fundamental decency.

The second thing we have to rebuild the backbone of this country, the middle class, that in this time bring everybody along.

And, thirdly, we have to unite the country. They are all going to be difficult to do, but I've never veered from those three principles.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: Back with us to discuss CNN's exclusive interview with President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, we have David Gregory and Kaitlan Collins.

So, David, just talk about his tone. I mean, we've talked this morning about how Joe Biden -- I don't know if he's to go it intentionally, but he's bringing down the temperature and he does it in every statement.

I mean, this -- he is consistent. He is steady Eddie on this. He doesn't rise to celebrate and nor does he take the bait when he could lob, you know, an easy insult or something.

He just stays sort of -- I don't know, he said confident and determined. What do you hear there?

GREGORY: Well, I hear that -- look, this is a really somber time and this is a time of crisis that requires leadership at the presidential level to marshal forces on Capitol Hill and in the public. But there's so much headwind, our politics feels really broken, it feels like there's huge cultural divides, so the polarization we've talked about has grown worse in the sense that there's such distrust and there's so much toxicity in the country. Just around the election itself, which President Trump has stoked without any basis.

So you hear that in the president-elect and I think he has done two things that are really wise. One is he's talking about a return to decency. He's talking about a return to a kind of normal order of leadership.

I think people want that. I think they're harried by their past four years, they're whipsawed, they're buffeted, there is a heaviness from the past four years. And I think most voters want to transcend that, and I think that that's what Biden is giving voice to. He's going to need as much good will as he can muster because of the criticism he will face and because of how difficult the task is. That he will now own, that he will now be judged on.

BERMAN: He will be tested and he will be baited, I think, to come off that high road that he is trying to walk very carefully an intentionally. You can see him tip toe through the interview at times with Jake trying to stay on the high road, but he does.

Kaitlan, I'm curious if you have had any reaction yet inside the White House to this interview and I am curious what you think or how you think that the defeated president will treat Joe Biden or address the issue of Joe Biden over the next 47 days.

[08:20:05]

COLLINS: I think Donald Trump's first year out of office is going to look a lot like this last month has looked, where he is breaking all of these norms. He is doing things that typically outgoing presidents don't do in a lame duck period that could affect their successor.

And so, I think that, you know, the first year in office, typically, you see former presidents stay quiet, they don't comment on what's going on, we saw that with Barack Obama and I think you're going to see something completely different than that with Donald Trump.

So, when you talk to people in the White House about what the transition is going to look like they all know it's going to be Joe Biden in the office in January and they also talk about how boring they think the Biden administration is going to be compared to the nonstop day to day of the Trump administration, where you Look at something like what Joe Biden was saying about the Justice Department in that interview, he did not equivocate, he said he will not be involved in the decisions that his attorney general, whoever it's going to be, will be making when they talked about whether or not Donald Trump should be prosecuted once he is out of office, they said politics is not going to be the factor here.

And so that is such a different answer than you hear from Donald Trump who over the last four years would say things like, well, I'm not going to be involved, but I could if I wanted to be. I'm the chief law enforcement officer in the country. Statements like that that would kind of give him this leeway or he would tweet at his attorney general about what he thought he should be doing.

Just a difference in things like that I think is what's going to be so stark between what we've seen for the last four years and what we should expect for the next four.

CAMEROTA: Here is another point of contrast, David, President Trump, as you know, has been focused on fighting the election results. He has successfully raised $207 million for people who, I think, think that they are contributing to some sort of legal defense fund, but he can take that piggy bank with him for whatever he moves on to.

And then yesterday, we heard President-elect Biden talking about what Americans need right now and the money that they need right now and what dire straits they're in and how he's pressing even before he is in office, Congress to do something on a stimulus bill.

So here's that moment.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BIDEN: It's not enough. They should focus on the things that are immediately needed and what's immediately needed is relief for people in their unemployment checks, relief for people that are going to get thrown out of their apartments after Christmas because they can't afford to pay the rent anymore, relieve on mortgage payments, relief on all the things that are in the original bill the House passed.

CAMEROTA: Do you think that he can loosen the log jam in Congress?

GREGORY: I think he can and I think there is going to be a tremendous need for it. I go back to the importance of the message that the new president has to carry, what can we do immediately to address a new level of crisis? How can you help people who are in such dire straits here, we have all time highs for the S&P 500 and then we have people who are in food lines and who have lost their jobs with no prospect of coming back.

That kind of release has to happen all at the same time and mental health awareness, I don't think we talk about this enough, how much anxiety and depression and other forms of mental illness there are in the country right now that are perhaps exacerbated by what people are going through. We have an opportunity now for a new president to give all of that voice, to be able to do a number of things at once. That's what leadership looks like in the face of a crisis like this.

BERMAN: All right. David Gregory, Kaitlan Collins, thank you both so much for being with us this morning. Really appreciate it.

So the model that the white house relies on in terms of coronavirus now projects that deaths in the U.S. will double by April. What does that mean? Why won't a vaccine stop that?

Dr. Sanjay Gupta joins us next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:26:54]

BERMAN: This morning, the United States is shattering daily coronavirus records. More than 2,800 new deaths reported. That is hurricane Katrina and a half levels of people dying every day now in America. More than 100,000 people are hospitalized this morning, more than 217,000 new cases reported overnight.

And the influential model that studies this projects it will get worse, that the death count will nearly double by April.

Joining us now, CNN chief medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta.

And we look out toward April and see that number, 538,000 Americans dead projected by April. I think, Sanjay, one of the things that's even more disheartening that people need to know is that this model, it's a conservative projection of where things are headed over the next several months.

Explain why.

GUPTA: Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting. I mean, what the model sort of projected was that when the death rate in this country got to a certain level, that the vast majority, at least 40 states according to the model, would put in stay-at-home orders again. That's what they projected. Eight people per million dying if you do the rough math is about 2,800 deaths per day.

And as you just pointed out, we've already surpass that had and there's only two states, again, according to the IHME models, that have stay-at-home orders in place right now, California and Georgia.

There's others that are considering it, but the point is that the model just predicted that states would react strongly to these increasing numbers and we're still not seeing it. So given the fact that the states have not reacted to the numbers the way the models predicted, it is -- it is almost inevitable that the numbers will surpass what these models suggest right now.

I mean, the models also suggest that the daily death toll would peak around 2,900, close to 3,000 people. We're already close to this, guys. They thought that would happen middle of January, here we are beginning of December and we are already getting pretty close to that.

So, this is -- this is concerning. That's why they think these models are conservative.

CAMEROTA: Sanjay, I think for -- most of the past decade, if not longer, the leading causes of death in the U.S. have been heart disease and cancer. And so, where is COVID now in that ranking?

GUPTA: Yeah, no.

[08:30:00]