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New Stay-At-Home Orders in California; Authorization of Coronavirus Vaccine; Trump and Biden Hold Pandemic Events. Aired 8:30- 9a ET

Aired December 08, 2020 - 08:30   ET

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

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[08:30:14]

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: Nearly 70 percent of California is under a stay-at-home order. Nearly 28 million people who live in the San Joaquin Valley and southern California. The order is causing confusion and frustration. And one of the people who tried to crack the confusion and figure out if there's any logic to these restrictions is Deborah Netburn. She's a science reporter for "The L.A. Times" and joins us now.

Deborah, great to have you here and thanks for doing all this work so the rest of us don't have to.

DEBORAH NETBURN, SCIENCE REPORTER, "LOS ANGELES TIMES": Oh, my pleasure.

CAMEROTA: And I appreciate that you admit that you, a science reporter who deals with this day in and day out, were confused about which restrictions to follow, which ones made sense. So why were you confused?

NETBURN: You know, I would say almost more than confused I felt really frustrated. I felt like I had made a sort of manageable life under COVID, you know, taking precautions, seeing people only outside, you know, going to restaurants only a little bit. I have kids. They have scooter playdates. They have backyard playdates. I just -- I thought we were like OK and we had figured out a safe way to live with this. And then sort of starting last Monday was when the first restrictions came down. I just was like, seriously? Because the one that was the most challenging for me was like that you can't gather with anybody who's not in your household, whether that's outside, whether that's masked, you're just not supposed to gather with anyone from outside your household. And that just seemed really extreme based on my reporting.

CAMEROTA: Yes. And I want to get into that and all of the restrictions.

So what you did to try to crack all this is you consulted a panel of experts. And it was more than just infectious disease experts. So who did you talk to? NETBURN: Yes, so I talked to, you're right, a bunch of different

people. I really tried to find people who had studied how the virus moves and specifically how restrictions have affected -- there are some people that looked at fatalities, some people that looked at case numbers, but that included computer scientists. There was an economist that I spoke with. There were some doctors, two, you know, who I felt like could speak to how the infection works. So I just wanted to get a broad range of inputs.

And I also spoke to somebody at the county public health department to hear what they were thinking.

CAMEROTA: OK. So let's talk about the findings. Let's just go through them. Let's tick through them. We have a graphic here.

You started with suspension of outdoor dining at restaurants. What did the panel think?

NETBURN: Well, they were mixed. So one of my favorite people I spoke with was this guy named Spencer Fox (ph), and he is at the University of Texas at Austin. And what he said is they found that restrictions don't really move the needle on virus -- on the spread, it's behaviors. And -- but restrictions can sort of influence behaviors. So like, for example, from his perspective, he felt like shutting down restaurants, even for outdoor dining, sends a very clear message, we are in a different phase of this virus. Things that used to be safe before are no longer safe. So maybe just the fact that you can't go to a restaurant, you can't meet your friend at a restaurant is a deterrent, you know, from getting together with other people.

Then I spoke with someone else who felt that that was, you know -- we all know that the outside is better than inside. So, you know, she didn't really think it was a major problem.

As I've heard from many readers, however, she also said, especially if you're wearing masks between bites, and many readers were like, come on, how many people are like, you eat, mask, you know, so --

CAMEROTA: Right. That's impossible. I mean that one is -- I would say very close to impossible, or it certainly takes the pleasure out of going out to a restaurant. But I hear what you're saying, that the restrictions then influence behavior that then stops the spread.

And so let's get to your big question, and that is the gatherings with people, friends, outside of your nuclear family. So what were you able to figure out about if you do it outside is that still safe?

NETBURN: So, you know, I'll tell you how two -- the experts I talked to who are not from the county all felt that this was really an excessive order, that there really are safe ways to see small groups of people outside and that really presents a very low risk and probably not a risk that is weighed the same as the essentialness of just seeing friends and family. What the -- and they thought that it would be better to sort of educate people about how to do that safely.

[08:35:03] The person I spoke with from the public health department said, though, is that they've really been trying to educate people and empower people to see others in a safe way. And it hasn't been working. And, you know, one of my colleagues wrote about, you know, like in his neighborhood, you know, seeing a bouncy house every weekend, you know, and like hearing these big parties and gatherings. So from the counties' perspective, they're saying, if you can't see anybody, you know, maybe at least those bigger gatherings that are more risky will be shut down.

But, you know, me and my colleagues, Samya Sulamonga (ph), who just wrote a really great story about that frustration we both have, you know, there's this idea of harm reduction and, you know, just doing less is better. Does that make sense?

CAMEROTA: It does. I think that's actually a good rule to live by, do less, you know, I mean --

NETBURN: Yes, especially now.

CAMEROTA: Yes, just do less because I do think that the restrictions are meant to be extreme because they know that people will try to cut corners or take advantage of them. I mean that's probably human nature on some level.

So just if everybody can do less, I think that that's a good place to start. So, again, Deborah Netburn, thank you very much for doing that research. Everybody should read your article on the findings. It's really interesting.

So, thanks so much for being with us.

NETBURN: Oh, thanks for having me.

CAMEROTA: John.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: We want to remember some of the nearly 284,000 Americans lost to coronavirus.

Police Sergeant Twan Johnson (ph) served the city of Charlestown, Indiana, for 13 years as a narcotics detective, field training officer and shift commander. The department is treating his passing as a line of duty death. He was 47 years old.

Retired New Jersey Nurse Toby Robinson (ph) was a champion of women's health, dedicating 20 years to her local Planned Parenthood. She also worked as a camp nurse, operating room scrub nurse and private pediatric nurse. Governor Phil Murphy paying tribute to Robinson, noted, she was also active in the League of Women Voter.

Seventy-two-year-old Linda Ladder Dominguez (ph) was born and raised in New Orleans where she worked as a support staff for prominent chefs. Her family says she loved monster truck rallies, concerts, tennis and travel. She is survived by two adult children and her husband of nearly 50 years, Frank.

May their memories be a blessing.

We'll be right back.

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[08:41:26]

CAMEROTA: Breaking news, Britain becoming the first western country to vaccinate people this morning. A 90-year-old woman from northern Ireland was first in line for the shot. Here in the U.S., vaccinations could be days away. An FDA Emergency Use Authorization could come on Thursday and then the question becomes will there be enough doses to vaccinate top priority people.

CNN's Pete Muntean is live in Washington with more.

Pete.

PETE MUNTEAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Alisyn, the FDA just released new data on the Pfizer vaccine and how well it works. As you know, an emergency authorization could be coming soon. But remember that the federal government ordered about 100 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine earlier this year and there are new reports that after that supply runs out there will not be enough vaccine to go around.

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MUNTEAN (voice over): There is new hope that a coronavirus vaccine could soon bring an end to the pandemic, but the new problem is not enough vaccine.

MONCEF SLAOUI, CHIEF SCIENTIFIC ADVISER, OPERATION WARP SPEED: On the manufacturing side, it's turned out to be somewhat more complicated and more difficult than we planned.

MUNTEAN: A new CNN analysis of 27 states finds none will get enough doses in early shipments to cover those who need to get the vaccine first, frontline health care workers and those in long-term care facilities.

SLAOUI: We probably are six or eight weeks later than an ideal scenario where we would have had 100 million doses by the end of the year but we are not far.

MUNTEAN: If both Moderna and Pfizer get emergency FDA authorization, officials estimate early doses will be enough to vaccinate 20 million people by the end of this month, even though the first phase needs to cover about 24 million people. With FDA authorization the first Pfizer doses could come this week, but distribution is tricky.

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ALLERGY AND INFECTIOUS DISEASES: It is up to the state and local authorities in their individual way to make the decisions about the distribution as well as the logistics of it.

MUNTEAN: States tell CNN they have different needs. Montana's 40,000 health care workers will get less than 10,000 initial doses. In California, almost 2.5 million health care workers must be vaccinated, but the first doses there will cover less than one in every ten of them.

GOV. GAVIN NEWSOM (D-CA): We have to look at sub-prioritization of those doses.

MUNTEAN: New York could get 170,000 doses by next week.

GOV. ANDREW CUOMO (D-NY): Assuming they approve it, the trucks roll. We then have the prioritization of where they go. There are about 700,000 health care workers.

MUNTEAN: Distribution leans heavily on help from private companies. CVS, along with Walgreens, will aid in administering the vaccine. CVS just urged more pharmacists and technician to apply to administer shots.

American Airlines tells CNN it plans to transport vaccine within 24 hours of FDA authorization. The airline has been preparing temperature-controlled containers to make sure doses do not spoil in transit.

ROGER SAMWAYS, VICE PRESIDENT OF CARGO SALES, AMERICAN AIRLINES: If the temperature range is exceeded on either end, the top or the bottom, alarms will trigger and so that will send a notification to our team to come out and do something.

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MUNTEAN (on-camera): We could learn new developments on vaccine distribution later today. There will be a White House summit. But, interestingly, Pfizer and vaccine manufacturers will not be there as to not share the stage with the FDA, a regulator.

Alisyn.

[08:45:00]

CAMEROTA: Pete Muntean, thank you very much for all of that.

So, President Trump and President-elect Biden will hold dueling coronavirus events today. We'll get "The Bottom Line" on what to expect.

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BERMAN: Just hours from now both President Trump and President-elect Joe Biden will be speaking about coronavirus. These dueling events will show the contrast really with how they've handled the pandemic. Frankly, the president's absence from the scene talking about the suffering going on in the country over the last few days shows that contrast as much as anything.

Let's get "The Bottom Line" with CNN political correspondent Abby Phillip. Abby, great to see you.

President-elect Biden will officially unveil his health team today with Xavier Becerra, the attorney general of California, to be nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services. And it's just stark, right? I mean, yes, the president's having a vaccine event at the White House, but I think more tellingly he had an indoor, unmasked event inside the White House yesterday, which has been a super spreader site. I mean you get a sense of the difference in emphasis between the two men.

[08:50:03]

ABBY PHILLIP, CNN POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, absolutely.

Look, I don't think we need to be surprised or guess at what is going to happen today. We know that President Trump is fixated on the issue of who gets credit for the vaccine more than anything else. More than even the issue of ensuring Americans that it's safe, that it's effective, that it's going to be administered in a way that is fair and equitable and that there's going to be enough of it. The president wants everyone to know that he thinks that he deserves credit for the vaccine even coming into existence. But that's just a sort of, you know, very -- like a lot of things with President Trump, very much focused on himself.

I do think that when you look at the contrast here, it's not just the contrast in style with the Biden administration that is coming into being, it's also in pretty much every form of substance you can get. There are, you know, three main things that the Biden nominees seem to all have in common. They have experience in the subject matter that they are being chosen to lead, they have experience in government, most of them, and they also have experience with the principle. And those are all things that four years ago, as we were sitting in a very same -- similar position watching President Trump put together his cabinet, virtually none of those things were true about many of the people he was choosing for his cabinet. In many cases, he had never met some of the people that he was announcing to lead senior roles. And I think that that contrast is pretty clear as we move forward with some of these more senior positions within the Biden cabinet.

CAMEROTA: Abby, I'm interested in that reporting about the president wanting credit for the vaccine. Is that still an open debate? I mean, he does deserve credit for fast tracking that.

PHILLIP: Yes.

CAMEROTA: Is anybody even debating that? And so you're suggesting that because he's fixated on that he can't be comforter in chief, he can't talk about coronavirus, we can't talk about home testing and fast tracking that somehow, we can't figure out contact tracing? I mean between now and the time when most Americans can get vaccinated, more than 100,000 more Americans are predicted to die.

PHILLIP: Yes, I mean, I think that's exactly the point, Alisyn. Look, it's -- there's no question that the federal government's role in helping usher this vaccine along, the president deserves credit for that. The problem is that that's not the only thing that matters when you have more than 2,000 people in this country dying every day.

And the president, as you -- as John pointed out, keeps having these events. He had a massive rally in which they didn't even bother to give masks to people who were standing behind the president in Georgia over the weekend. He's had indoor events repeatedly over the last several weeks. He will not talk to the American people about precautions that they should be taking to keep themselves and their families safe.

The vaccine is coming, but as everybody has said, there is a lot that needs to be done in terms of presidential leadership right now to be a bridge between where we are with this extraordinary number of deaths and hospitalizations and where we will be when the vaccine is actually distributed to enough people in this country to be protective.

BERMAN: There's no public evidence he cares about the loss right now.

PHILLIP: Yes.

BERMAN: We just haven't heard it and we haven't seen it at all. I'm sorry, we just haven't. There's no evidence he's talking about it.

PHILLIP: And he's tweeting about literally everything else but this enormous crisis that the country is facing.

BERMAN: He's trying to overturn the results of an election. I mean there are two things going on here where it's just outrageous. I mean, number one, it's outrageous when you try to overturn the results of the election. It's infinitely more outrageous when you're doing it when 2,200 Americans are dying every day from a pandemic and you're not promoting safe ways to get past it.

And, Abby, I -- we're seeing the results of the former there, the overturning of the election. You start to see the results of this around the country.

We're just now seeing this tweet from the Arizona Republican Party. And I want to put it up because this is going on. The Arizona Republican Party is putting out a tweet and it's a tweet of "Rambo." This is from the movie "Rambo" here. And it says, this is what we do, who we are. Live for nothing or die for something. And this is part of a string of tweets where they talk about the hash tag stopthesteal. They're talking about the fight to overturn the election and they're talking about violence. I'm sorry, they just are. This is the Arizona Republican Party now. This is what we've come to.

PHILLIP: It is so incredibly disturbing on a number of levels. Just the level of incitement that's happening all across the country, the fact that regular people and -- and not even just these elected officials like the Michigan secretary of state but just, you know, that election worker in Georgia that you heard the Georgia election official, Gabriel Sterling, talk about, who found a noose outside of his home. Real people who are just doing normal things to administer an election being threatened, being -- you know, being sort of put out there and -- and all of this being supported by the highest levels, including by the president.

[08:55:04]

But, you know, what's amazing about all of this is that President Trump is so insistent that he has won this election that he wants another four years in office, but seems to want to do very little of the actual job of the presidency. With a lot of the reports out there that he has withdrawn from so much of the job, the meetings have become kind of limited to his fixation on the election, it seems the president doesn't actually want to do the job, he just wants to say that he has it.

BERMAN: Yes, look, Lindsey Graham calls this a civil war. He should know better. That's sick. He lives in South Carolina. He knows what a civil war is. For him to be equating this to a civil war, he knows better.

Abby, thank you very much.

CAMEROTA: Thank you, Abby.

All right, CNN's coverage continues next.

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