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New Day

U.S Reports Deadliest Day of Pandemic, More than 3,100 Deaths; Trump Asks U.S. Supreme Court to Invalidate Millions of Votes. Aired 7-7:30a ET

Aired December 10, 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]

JOHN BERMAN, CNN NEW DAY: Welcome our viewers in the United States and all around the world. This is New Day. It's Thursday, December 10th, 7:00 here in New York.

And we do have breaking news. The deadliest day of the coronavirus pandemic in America, a record 3,124 deaths reported in the U.S. Now, a single one is a tragedy. The number you're seeing there is an abomination. And it's now happening every day. It's higher than the number of people killed on September 11th, Hurricane Maria and Katrina, the attack on Pearl Harbor, and it is now every day.

The U.S. set a new record for Americans hospitalized with coronavirus, which is deeply troubling, because it means the deaths will keep on rising. Nearly 107,000 people now in the hospital, that's an increase of 2,000 from the prior day.

Now, an FDA panel meets today to consider emergency use authorization of the Pfizer vaccine. That is positive news. If it is approved, the first doses could be administered within days.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN NEW DAY: President Trump, as you know, is not focused on the raging pandemic. He has not been for a very long time. Instead, he's very focused on trying to overturn the results of an election he lost in a landslide.

The president joined a lawsuit brought by the Texas attorney general asking the Supreme Court to invalidate millions of valid votes in battleground states. 17 Republican-led states have now joined in support of that case.

The Texas A.G. is reportedly under federal investigation. He will be at the White House today. We'll have more on that later.

BERMAN: We're going to begin with the breaking news on the pandemic. Joining us now, CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta.

Sanjay, more than 3,100 deaths, we are at this record number. And I think what should truly scare people this morning is there is every reason to believe that number will go up and will not go down for some time. This is a dire moment in this pandemic. DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes. Unfortunately, John, you know, you're right. It was -- it's a dire moment, it's a predictable moment. I think people have been saying this for some time that these couple of months were going to be the worst months in all of this.

We are two weeks, today, exactly, from Thanksgiving. It is around this time that we start to see that surge in hospitalizations and, you know, we've been seeing that already. It was already going up. You're going to add this surge now on top of it. We're probably in the throes of it.

And then a week or so, maybe two weeks later, is when we typically see the death rates increasing. So one week from two weeks from now. They're already increasing. So, again, you apply the surge on top of that.

I mean, I hate to speak in such dire terms, but it is the truth, and then we're going to into the winter holidays, and we may see some of that surge, you know, amplified even greater. That's the real concern here.

So, you know, lots of excitement. Today is a big day, a day that very few people would have predicted happening this early in terms of an FDA advisory committee meeting. But at the same time, as you point out, it's layered on top of numbers that are truly becoming awful.

ICUs that don't have any beds right now, where doctors, nurses are looking at themselves in the morning and saying, what are we going to do if another patient comes in who needs intensive care. Do we move a patient out? Do we somehow try to find another space? Do we turn regular care floors into ICU floors? Are we using other buildings in the community as a possible surge capacity? I mean, these are real decisions that are happening right now.

CAMEROTA: Well, at least Rudy Giuliani was able to take a hospital bed with mild symptoms, as he has described them.

But Sanjay, I know that you have looked into how this rollout is going to happen. If today, two hours from now, if the FDA approves this for emergency use authorization, as expected, what happens next? So let's take a look at your reporting.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

GUPTA (voice over): It was the shot seen around the world. 90-year- old Margaret Keenan, thefirst woman in the United Kingdom, in the world, to receive an authorized COVID-19 vaccine.

It had been 286 days since the first patient in the United States died. And now, finally, a signal of hope.

BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN ANCHOR: Pfizer and BioNTech have submitted --

GUPTA: Up until now, the only real information about how well the vaccines were working was coming from the companies themselves. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: 90 percent is a game changer.

GUPTA: But the world is now watching as this vaccine is being rolled out in real-time, with all of the excitement, but also the concerns.

ALEX AZAR, SECRETARY, HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES: We want to make sure that any vaccine that comes out in America has the full gold standard stamp of approval of the FDA career people.

GUPTA: The data was submitted three days earlier to the FDA versus to the U.K. regulatory authorities. Why is it?

DR. STEPHEN HAHN, COMMISSIONER, FOOD AND DRUG ADMINISTRATION: If we don't do our job to reassure and ensure the safety and efficacy of the vaccine to the American people, then we're going to contribute to vaccine hesitancy.

[07:05:02]

PETER MARKS, DIRECTOR, FDA'S CENTER FOR BIOLOGICS EVALUATION AND RESEARCH: We look at the actual adverse event reports, the bad spelling errors that are made by physicians.

GUPTA: Peter Marks is the director of the FDA Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, leading the FDA team reviewing the data of about 44,000 Pfizer trial volunteers, half on placebo, half on actual vaccine. Their findings so far, similar to what we've heard from Pfizer itself.

MARKS: They had 95 percent effectiveness across a wide range of individuals.

GUPTA: Since November 20th, FDA scientists have pored over tens of thousands of pages of data, down to the level of the individual participants' medical records. Now, more than 20 scientists and committee members, collectively known as the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, will review all the data, yes, for effectiveness, but equally important, how did the vaccine fare among people of different ages, different races and different medical conditions?

HAHN: We're going to look at underrepresented minorities. We're going to look at the elderly. We're going to look at young folks, pregnant women, folks with underlying immunodeficiencies, immune problems.

That's part of the entire package that we'll present to the vaccine advisory committee.

GUPTA: But after the first dose, there is a lot a fair amount of protection, and it was 52.4 percent, roughly. They're obviously a lot lower, but better than the 50 percent that the FDA originally required. Does it make sense to you to take the 40 million projected doses by the end of the year and give all of those as first doses to people?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ALLERGY AND INFECTIOUS DISEASES: We considered that, Sanjay, and we decided that it would be more prudent not to do that, namely, to get the real total degree of protection, not the 52 percent, but the 95 percent after the second dose.

GUPTA: These are the kinds of questions the advisory group will ask to help determine who the vaccine will be authorized for. And then the group will vote. Their vote doesn't bind the FDA, but the agency usually does follow their lead.

The goal, to have 60 to 70 percent of the country vaccinated to achieve herd immunity and protect our communities from this virus, which is why this meeting will be repeated again next week as the FDA considers the equally promising vaccine candidate from Moderna, and, again, to consider other vaccines, like that from Johnson & Johnson and Oxford/AstraZeneca, all of it to get to this point for all Americans and eventually all the citizens of the world.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

GUPTA (on camera): It's about nine hours worth of committee meetings today. They're going to be publicly streamed so people can watch this. I'm certainly going to be watching it, looking for not only whether or not this is looking towards an emergency use authorization, but also, are there certain people who the committee is going to recommend not take the vaccine, people under the age of 16, pregnant women, people who are immunocompromised. We've heard about that from the FDA commissioner.

And also, you know, if people have been infected recently with the coronavirus, should they also be getting the vaccine? These are real questions that the committee is going to try to address and hopefully will make some sense as the vaccine starts to get rolled out.

BERMAN: And I know you'll be watching it closely. It is a key moment.

I will say, though, in terms of what impact this will all have on where we are today, Sanjay. I spoke to Dr. Fauci on Monday. You spoke to him repeatedly over the last few days. One of the questions I asked him is, when would the vaccine have an impact on reducing the mortality we're seeing, an impact on this huge number of deaths that we're seeing? And the answer is not soon, right?

GUPTA: Right. I mean, that's the thing. You've got to think about the vaccine as having massive impact, but in a more delayed sort of way. I think there's sort of benchmarks if you look at the modeling, when you get to about 30 percent of the country vaccinated, you start to see some significant impact. But the majority of the impact on the vaccine, probably not until we get to that 60, 70 percent number of the country being vaccinated.

I mean, you talked to Dr. Fauci, but this is how he put it to me.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

FAUCI: Let's say we get 75 percent, 80 percent of the population vaccinated. If we do that, I believe if we do it efficiently enough over the second quarter of 2021, by the time we get to the end of the summer, i.e., the third quarter, we may actually have enough herd immunity protecting our society that as we get to the end of 2021, we could approach very much some degree of normality that is close to where we were before.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

GUPTA: Now, one point I want to just quickly, it's a nuanced point, but it has to do with masks. And we keep saying, look, even after the vaccine rolls out, people are going to have to wear masks.

[07:10:01]

And part of the reason why is for a very tangible one, and that is that what we know about this vaccine right now is that it helps prevent the illness and the symptoms of COVID-19.

It is not clear that this vaccine actually helps prevent infection, okay? So think about it. You got vaccinated, you think, I'm good to go, you could still be carrying the virus, you could still potentially transmit the virus. So that's why masks are going to be recommended for a while until enough people are vaccinated that they're not going to get sick even if the virus continues to spread.

And, by the way, that's sort of how the flu vaccine works as well. It more dramatically prevent illness than it does infection. That's likely to be the case with this vaccine as well.

CAMEROTA: Sanjay, how about those home test kits for COVID? Did the FDA just approve an over-the-counter version for this?

GUPTA: Yes, that's exactly right. The big difference here is that it's over-the-counter now home test kit. The previous ones, you could get home test kits that had been approved or authorized under emergency use, but you had to do a telehealth sort of visit, get a prescription, whatever the case may be. Now, it's over the counter. You can send the results in, you've got to send the samples in, collect the samples yourself at home, and you get the results back.

So it's becoming more autonomous in terms of actually how these results and how people are getting their test results in the home. Ideally, you would like to get to the point where you collect the sample, you run the sample, everything at home, no machine required, no lab required, anything, and we could get to that point. You know, many people have talked about the idea of doing regular, even daily home antigen sort of testing.

So this is a big move to be able to have an over-the-counter test like this from LabCorp. But, hopefully, these tests will continue to improve.

CAMEROTA: Do you know how much it costs?

GUPTA: I didn't see the cost. But it's -- I'll check that out.

CAMEROTA: Thanks. I mean, I'm just wondering, because I know at one time they were like $150, which is great, but, obviously, it's prohibitive to do that very often and for some people. And so this just sounds to me like it could be a game changer, you know, if you knew if you were carrying around the virus.

GUPTA: Absolutely. And you remember, you've got to have these costs under some sort of control. The Abbott test, you may remember, Binax test, they specifically, you know, priced that at $5 per test for that very reason, Alisyn.

BERMAN: Sanjay, thank you very much. We'll talk to you again in a little bit. Obviously, there is a lot going on, both good and, frankly, horrifying this morning in this pandemic.

So, President Trump in public trying to overturn the results of the election, even tweeted yesterday one word, overturn. So it's not subtle. He is not hiding this.

But the person on the screen there, she may not be --

CAMEROTA (voice over): There's three people, which one do you mean?

BERMAN (voice over): I mean, the one on the left. Well, all three. We'll go three for three here. CNN has learned that the president's family is making plans now for a future outside the White House, beginning the process, frankly, of moving out. Brand-new CNN reporting, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[07:15:00]

CAMEROTA: Developing this morning, President Trump plans to have lunch today with several state attorneys general at the White House as he continues to try to overturn the election he lost. The Texas attorney general will be there. He's asking the U.S. Supreme Court to invalidate millions of valid votes in four battleground states. Attorneys general from 17 other states have come out in support of that Texas lawsuit.

Joining us now to talk about this and more, we have CNN Political Correspondent Abby Phillip and CNN White House Correspondent John Harwood.

Abby, the Supreme Court move is curious. So, the Texas attorney general wants other battleground states to overturn their legitimate findings. And he is willing to go to the Supreme Court and make this last-ditch effort at doing this. And somehow, he has persuaded, or President Trump has, I should say, 17 others to join with this. Every legal expert we can find say that it's specious and absurd.

ABBY PHILLIP, CNN POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: And it is. I mean, just from a pure logical perspective, this case is basically arguing that any state can say, I don't like the way another state is administering their elections, even though federal elections for president and those federal offices are administered by states, and have been for a very long time. And they can just go to the Supreme Court and say, I don't like it, and I want to throw out all of their votes and have this decided either by the state legislatures or by the House of Representatives. It's a completely absurd argument.

And it was really encapsulated by, you know, Senator Cornyn from Texas, basically saying, look, I don't see the logic of this, because as Republicans, even, we believe in the idea of the sort of diffuse nature of American elections. It's one of the reasons that Republicans have been arguing against federal requirements for, you know, how elections should be administered, which is actually something that Democrats have been wanting to do for different reasons in the past.

So from a Republican perspective, it makes very little sense. And it also makes no sense that the Supreme Court would want to even get into this kind of debate based on absolutely no concrete evidence. I cannot emphasize that enough. If you read this filing, there is zero concrete evidence of actual wrongdoing. It is all conjecture.

BERMAN: Yes. John Cornyn, who is the senior senator from Texas, he said, I frankly struggle to understand the legal theory of it, because, honestly, there is none. That's the senior senator from the state of Texas.

Now, the president has asked, if it ever does get to arguments before the Supreme Court, which it almost definitely won't. Every legal expert will tell you, the court is not going to take this up.

[07:20:01]

But if it does, the president has asked the junior senator from Texas, Ted Cruz, to argue the case for him before the court, and Senator Cruz has agreed. So we now provide for you Ted Cruz for the defense. Listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. TED CRUZ (R-TX): I'll tell you what I really think of Donald Trump. This man is a pathological liar. He doesn't know the difference between truth and lies. He lies practically every word that comes out of his mouth.

The man cannot tell the truth, but he combines it with being a narcissist, a narcissist at a level I don't think this country has ever seen.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: Are you sure he's for the defense?

BERMAN: I don't know. What are the signs there? That was in 2016. But it's representative, John, I don't think the moral gymnastics that Ted Cruz has done over the last four years has surprised anyone anymore. So, Cruz will argue the case if it gets to the court, which it won't.

But it's the silence, still. Yes, there were some Republicans, Mitt Romney, even John Cornyn, the governor Utah, come out and said this is absurd, the attorney general of Georgia, but Mitch McConnell hasn't, still, Kevin McCarthy hasn't, still, there are 40 Republican senators still who are silent on this, as the president has filed this absurd, legally offensive case now before the Supreme Court. Explain.

JOHN HARWOOD, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Well, John, first of all, I think we need to give Ted Cruz credit. Every word that he said in that clip you played is true about Donald Trump. But the irony of it is that it was Ted Cruz saying that. Because we all remember, when Ted Cruz came to the Senate, his colleagues quickly came to loathe him because he was so cynical and so shameless that he would make outlandish claims on the Senate floor. We're going to get rid of Obamacare if we just have enough guts and courage to do so.

His colleagues knew that couldn't be done. Barack Obama was president and it simply wasn't going to happen. But he pressed them and pressed them and pressed them in order to generate pressure to further his political ambitions from the Republican base. Then he ran for president with that as his -- on his resume.

And he encountered someone more shameless, more cynical, more persuasive than he was, and it enraged him. He tried to pretend during the campaign that he liked Donald Trump. And then by the end, when he was defeated, he was enraged by the fact that he lost to Donald Trump and he went off as he did on that clip that you played.

And what's happened in the four years since is, he couldn't do anything about it, he still has the same ambition that he had in 2016. And so what he's decided to do, like much of the rest of the party, is accommodate Donald Trump, go along with him to the point that this president, who insulted his wife, said blasphemous, ridiculous things about his father and JFK's assassination, he's saying he's going to take up this argument. It is a clownish argument, it's a cynical argument. Ted Cruz is a smart guy, he understands that. But for the purpose of his ambition, he's going to do it.

And what it underscores is, anybody who actually believes that the clownish claims in that suit, there's something wrong with them. And President Trump, he's saying these things privately, as well as publicly. It's not just lying in public to fleece people out of their money, and he's been doing some of that, but he seems to believe this privately.

So we have a president of the United States, there's something wrong with them, he cannot accept the defeat. Mary Trump, his niece, told us during her book this summer that he has the emotional maturity of a small child. He is doing this, the entire Republican Party, almost the entire Republican Party, either because they are scared of him or because going along with him serves their purposes, is basically silent.

And then you've got tens of millions of people in the Republican Party, who because of the silence of elected officials, because of what Trump is saying, because of what a cynical conservative media is saying, believe things that are not true. And that's where the country has landed right now. CAMEROTA: Isn't Senator Cruz going to be miffed when President Trump runs again in 2024?

But speaking of the president's family, Abby, they seem to be making plans for after January 20th, even if President Trump isn't. Here is the new CNN reporting. First Lady Melania Trump has begun overseeing shipments of family furniture and art to Mar-a-Lago, where they will move in January. People familiar with the matter told CNN, his daughter and son-in-law, both senior advisers of the White House, are in the process of purchasing bay front property in Florida. What do they know that President Trump doesn't know?

PHILLIP: Well, everyone around this president is making plans for what's going to happen after January 20th. And, frankly, President Trump knows that he's lost this election and that he'll be moving out of the White House. You know, the first lady, Melania Trump is planning on going back to Florida.

[07:25:01]

They are in the process of renovating their quarters at Mar-a-Lago. Jared and Ivanka are buying a property in Florida. They're doing work on other properties in an effort to prepare themselves for the future.

People within the White House are searching for jobs because that's what they have to do if they want to be employed after January 20th. You're even seeing people like the press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, effectively auditioning for her post-White House job while appearing every single night on cable news, even while not briefing the media, which is what taxpayers are paying her to do.

Everyone around the White House and around the president are moving on, and even President Trump in his own mind is moving on. He said just a few days ago that he didn't know what the next administration would be. That was a tacit acknowledgement that there is going to be a Biden administration.

It's not convenient for him to acknowledge that right now, because he's in the process of raising money for his political future, but he knows that that is what is coming and he's acting that way. He's saying it and his family is saying it, and everything else is just you know, just really an effort to fundraise. That is really what this has all boiled down to.

BERMAN: On the subject of family, John Harwood, Hunter Biden, the son of President-elect Joe Biden, acknowledged yesterday that he has been contacted by investigators as part of this investigation into his business dealings. It seems to have something to do with his taxes. This was a story really first reported by our own Evan Perez and Pamela Brown, who had some great reporting on this.

There are a lot of layers to this, including the fact that it was begun in 2018, including the fact that the details of it did not leak out during the election, as they are not supposed to by Justice Department guidelines. But here we are now with the incoming president-elect. His son is under, apparently, federal investigation. What kind of position does that put the president-elect in this morning?

HARWOOD: Well, it's a sad position, as a father. But if, in fact, as we believe, these investigations are being conducted by career officials, that they've been going on for some time, and they're legitimate, they will go forward and we'll see what they turn up. It's obvious that, you know, Hunter Biden has had a rough go in life in many different ways. And it's also obvious that he has been trying to get by, by making money off of his name. The fact that his father's prominent in politics, that's an uncomfortable thing for any politician to have their child in that position.

And if he did something wrong with respect to his taxes, we're going to find out and I would expect that Joe Biden and his attorney general would not interfere in that process. But we're just going to have to let it play out and see what it comes up with.

BERMAN: I expect to hear a lot about it in the coming days when Joe Biden does announce who he will nominate to be the attorney general of the United States. John Harwood and Abby Phillip, thank you both so much for being with us.

All right, there is a big debate in a small town over wearing masks, as the United States just underwent its deadliest day of the pandemic, to-date.

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[07:30:00]