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FDA May Issue Emergency Use Authorization for Moderna Coronavirus Vaccine; Assistant Secretary of Health at the Department of Health and Human Services Admiral Brett Giroir Interviewed on Continued Measures Americans Should Take to Reduce Spread of Coronavirus; Trump Turns on McConnell After He Congratulates Biden on Victory; Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) is Interviewed on Coronavirus Relief Bill. Aired 8-8:30a ET

Aired December 16, 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]

DR. ARI SARELI, FIRST TO RECEIVE THE VACCINE AT MEMORIAL HEALTHCARE SYSTEM: No unnecessary risks, but yet it's neither a weapon to really curb the epidemiology of this virus.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: Dr. Ari Sareli, Charmaine Pykosh, thank you both very much for sharing your personal experience with all of us. I think it really helps us see what our future looks like. We appreciate you guys.

SARELI: Thank you for having us.

CAMEROTA: And NEW DAY continues right now.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is NEW DAY with Alisyn Camerota and John Berman.

CAMEROTA: We want to welcome our viewers in the United States and all around the world. This is NEW DAY. And developing this morning, hope for a coronavirus relief bill before the holidays, House and Senate leaders worked late into the night and are set to resume negotiations today. There are sticking points that still need to be hammered out. So who will get aid? How close are they to this actually happening? We will ask a key senator who is part of the bipartisan group pushing for this deal.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Help can't come soon enough. On Tuesday the U.S. suffered more than 3,000 coronavirus deaths again, 3,000 deaths reported overnight. Record hospitalizations. Now, a second vaccine could be on the way. An FDA committee meets tomorrow to consider emergency use authorization for Moderna's coronavirus vaccine.

Joining me now is Admiral Brett Giroir. He is assistant secretary of health at the Department of Health and Human Services. Admiral, thank you so much for being with us this morning. How confident are you that we will have a second authorized vaccine in the next few days? And what impact will that have? ADM. BRETT GIROIR, HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES ASSISTANT SECRETARY: So

thank you for having me on. The data from the Moderna vaccine looks extremely good. I have, of course, reviewed all the packets that were made public, and the public can look at them. And we're looking at about a 95 percent efficacy on this vaccine, 100 percent at preventing severe illness. It works across the age spectrum from the 18 to 35- year-olds all the way into the elderly. And, again, the side effects are very mild. It's just your immune system working, like a sore arm like you heard on the segment beforehand. So I am very confident that that vaccine will receive authorization and will add tens of millions of doses to the American public within a very short period of time.

BERMAN: When will these vaccines, the Pfizer and Moderna vaccine, make a dent in what is a horrifying rate of deaths right now?

GIROIR: So there are really two levels, and it's really a great question. Ultimately, we immunize for herd immunity, and that will happen when 70 or 80 percent of the American people have immunity against COVID. That's when you really see the pandemic dissipate, and it will go away, we will end the pandemic. Right now, we're really immunizing for impact, and what I mean by that is even though we're immunizing only a few million people to start, our most vulnerable. So if we could prevent COVID in nursing homes, we know we can lower the death rate dramatically, and we can also lower the hospitalization rate dramatically. And of course, it's vital to protect our health care workers because they are there for us, they're on the front line. So we are immunizing for impact now. We will start seeing that almost immediately. But herd immunity when the pandemic really ends and goes away, that's not until the late spring, early summer.

BERMAN: As I noted, more than 3,000 deaths reported overnight, 112,000 hospitalizations, which is a very troubling figure. We are a week before Christmas, Admiral. What do Americans need to brace themselves for over the next few weeks in terms of these figures?

GIROIR: So there are many parts of the country that are in different phases of this. What we're seeing right now, which is very positive, is the Midwest really starting in Minnesota and the Dakotas, Michigan, throughout the Midwest have actually turned the corner. Their rates of infection are going down. They have had several days and up to a week of decreases. But what you're seeing that the coasts are still on a dramatic rise.

And although we're very positive about the vaccine, it is absolutely imperative that we continue our work to wear masks, to avoid crowded spaces, to physically distance, to avoid travel if you can because until the vaccine gets widespread, this is still our best measures to flatten the curve and save lives. We can save tens of thousands of lives just by doing these simple things. That's how we bring the infections down, we bring the infections down, hospitalizations will go down, and deaths will go down. And again, we've got some hope in the Midwest right now, they've turned the corner, but the coasts are still very problematic.

BERMAN: More than 5,000 body bags just ordered by the state of California, refrigeration trucks for makeshift morgues. You were passionate about what people should and should not do before Thanksgiving. Here's your chance to tell people what they need to know before Christmas, Admiral. Go ahead.

GIROIR: What people need to know is we are still at a dangerous and critical part of this pandemic, and tens of thousands of American lives are at stake, really, every week. And we can flatten the curve. Please listen to the public health messages.

[08:05:01]

Masks do work. They really do work to protect you and to protect others. Avoid crowded spaces, whether that's a bar or a house party of 100 people, you can't do it. This is a setup for spread. The end of the pandemic is in sight, it really is with these vaccines, and probably more to come in January. But until we get a few more months down the road, do your best. Save lives. Save American lives. Save global lives just by doing these simple measures. If you do that, we are going to be in really good shape. But if you don't, we're going to have thousands of more casualties in this country that we can avoid. So thanks for this opportunity.

BERMAN: Very simply, traveling and gathering for Christmas, your view?

GIROIR: So I'm not Scrooge here. I think if you can avoid traveling, that's a good measure. If you are going to travel, there are many recommendations to keep you safer. Mask wearing during traveling, make sure if you are in airports or bus station to avoid touched surfaces and to really bring hand sanitizer. When you gather at home, try to decrease the amount of gathering that are there. And if you are going to have a gather, maintain some distance. Yes, it's OK to wear a mask inside, particularly if you have vulnerable, have good ventilation. All these things make you safer. The CDC.gov website has all these suggestions for you. Avoid travel if you can. If you can't, there are many ways to make it safer. As I said before, I come from a Cajun family, we normally have 10 people in the kitchen for six hours. Don't do that. That's not a good idea. Maybe you cook at home and bring it. So make better choices, and we can flatten the curve.

BERMAN: Admiral, you've been working so hard for so long to fight this pandemic and keep people safe. I'm curious how it feels to you when you hear people, leaders, still out there denying that this pandemic exists. I want to play some sound from Congressman-elect Bob Good from Virginia a few days ago. Listen to this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BOB GOOD, (R-VA) U.S. REPRESENTATIVE-ELECT: This looks like a group of people that gets that this is a phony pandemic. It's a serious virus, but it's a virus. It's not a pandemic.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: It's not a pandemic, it's a phony pandemic, Admiral. How does that make you feel? What do you say to leaders who make those claims? GIROIR: Well, I don't know anything about the person you just played,

but of course it's a pandemic. There's a definition of a pandemic, and that is a virus that is raging across the world, and this clearly is doing that, and it has done that. We have hundreds of thousands of dead Americans. We'll have millions of people around the world. This is not phony, this is not fake. It is serious. We are still in a dangerous and critical time.

We are going to beat this because we have vaccines, and that is the way to put the nail in the coffin for this virus. But until then, we have to take it with utmost seriousness, because, again, tens of thousands of Americans can either live or die depending on what we do to protect them until the vaccine gets widespread. So it's real, it's serious, it's what I live, breathe, think, dream every single day, and all of us in America need to be that focused in order to save lives.

BERMAN: That guy is going to be a congressman in a few weeks. That's a soon to be member of Congress saying that.

GIROIR: I will be happy to supply him technical assistance.

BERMAN: Sounds like he might need more than technical assistance, Admiral, but I appreciate your diplomacy there.

Listen, in your wheelhouse is testing, to be sure, and we learned overnight that the FDA has green lit the use and sale of this home test, the 100 percent home test. You get the test, you take it at home, you analyze it at home, you get your results at home, it's an antigen test. It's called the Ellume test. What are your hopes for this? And how soon will this be widely available for Americans?

GIROIR: So we've been working on this and other similar tests for the entire time, this just didn't happen overnight. We've done investments in March and in June and have been following the company and are prepared to help them scale it. It's going to be available in January, but only in relatively small quantities, about 3 million per month. We hope to really increase that.

You're going to hear more good news from the FDA very soon about other home tests that are not exactly the over the counter type but are in the same ballpark. So we are now reaping the investments of being able to bring these tests into the home. It was a major, major step forward with the Binax cards of which we have distributed almost 85 million now, this is the rapid card-based test, this is the next iteration. And you'll see more and more tests get authorized and them ramping up very soon in the early part of the year, which is, it's not soon enough, but it is as fast as physically possible. And we are proud of Ellume and some of the other companies you will hear about, another one starting today.

BERMAN: I have got to let you go, Admiral. When are you scheduled to get the vaccine?

GIROIR: I don't know. I'm not -- I'm not a frontline worker anymore. I'm an intensive care physician, but I'm not treating patients, and I'm not a nursing home resident, at least yet, so I will wait my turn. But as soon as my turn comes up, I will definitely be getting it, as will everyone in my family.

[08:10:10]

BERMAN: Admiral Giroir, we appreciate you being with us this morning. Thank you for what you've done, and thank you for your promised technical assistance, which in some cases might mean slapping people on the head. But thank you, sir. Thanks for your time.

GIROIR: Thank you.

CAMEROTA: Joining us now is CNN chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta. Sanjay, if you would like to react to Admiral Giroir and what he told John there.

SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: I think the whole question about testing, we are talking a lot about vaccines, but testing has been an issue since the very beginning. We have not been adequately testing. And you remember the roadmap to recovery that the Harvard School of Public Health had put out. At one point they said we should be doing 20 million tests a day in this country to really get to that path to recovery, because you can get tested, people have a better idea of whether or not they are contagious, stay home. By the end of January, we are just calculating the numbers, perhaps 70 million tests per week.

So it's good, it's great news that these other tests are coming online. We're in December of this year now, 11 months after this. It will still always be a question for me, I think for a lot of people, why we did not lean more into testing. There was these antigen-based tests, one had been authorized in May. Why weren't those produced in larger numbers that people could have tests in their homes? Every day, or at least frequently people could be tested within their own homes. And we still haven't gotten there. It sounds like we will get there, at the same time that the vaccines will roll out, which is, again, good news, but it's all the ways this could have gone differently.

BERMAN: Sanjay, one of the things Admiral Giroir said, and I think we have the map so people can see it, in terms of the number of new daily cases, we see patterns about where we're seeing more cases, and in some cases where we're seeing fewer. And for the first time in a while there's green on this map, which means week to week we're seeing a drop in new cases. He brought up the Midwest and places like Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, which had been to hard hit, we're seeing a drop in new cases. Everywhere in beige is static, which is, frankly, of concern because those are major population centers. And then you see California, Arizona, and you see the southeast as well, they're seeing a rise, some cases a steep rise in new cases. What should we make of this map? Will this lead to a reduction in cases overall, or is it going to balance itself out and the cases will still go up?

GUPTA: I'm worried about the latter, John. When you see these numbers drop a little bit from very high numbers where they've been, obviously it's good, you want the numbers to be going in the right direction. But if they're dropping from high levels, obviously that's still of concern. Nothing about the virus has changed. It's still contagious. I think what you see in some of these areas they get very bad, they almost red line, and then they have to enact measures again.

So in Michigan, for example, middle of November, they enacted some of these mandates back into place again because they recognized what was happening, and it does make an impact. So I think it's just a question at this point for places starting to look around their community and seeing what's happening in the hospitals, at what point do they act? And again, it doesn't mean that they have to go into some sort of shutdown mode, but at what point do they act in terms of mask mandates, reducing large public gatherings, and also some businesses that require people to be indoors without masks, such as restaurants and bars, do you limit maximum occupancy there? Do you wait until you're redlining and hospitals are really full, or do you take some of those measures preventively?

And also you asked Admiral Giroir about home gatherings. And it's interesting, Secretary Azar said this the other day as well, I don't want to be Scrooge here, I want to be reasonable, but it's tough. Everybody wants to be reasonable, but we are in the middle of a pandemic. We know that these home gatherings are one of the greatest sources of increased spread and increased viral dynamics. This is the year to not do those things, as opposed to trying to tell people here is how you do it as safely as possible because it's tough when you have that much virus, the likelihood you're going to come in contact with somebody who has the virus inside without a mask on is increasingly high in just about every place in the country.

CAMEROTA: OK, Sanjay Gupta, thank you very much for all the information.

So Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell finally admitting that Joe Biden will be the next president, and telling his Senate colleagues not to challenge the results from here on out. President Trump has some select words for McConnell as a result. That's next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:18:34]

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: President Trump turning on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell now after McConnell publicly congratulated President-elect Joe Biden, albeit like 38 days after the election. McConnell is also warning Senate Republicans to not pull any more stunts.

CNN's John Harwood live at the White House with the latest on this.

That latter part is interesting, John, that McConnell is working behind the scenes -- John, can you hear me?

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: He's really acting as if he can't.

BERMAN: Yeah, that was a sign. That was a sign. When he ducks his head down and says he can't hear you.

CAMEROTA: And also when you do the tapping your ear. Come in. Come in. BERMAN: That's a sign.

CAMEROTA: All right. Well, we had hoped to talk to him about everything that's happening between Trump and McConnell.

BERMAN: John Harwood back with us.

Thank goodness, John.

What can you tell us about President Trump turning on Mitch McConnell and what it means and what it means for McConnell's ability to keep senators in line?

JOHN HARWOOD, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: John, I think given the pathologies of Donald Trump and of the Republican Party, it's not a bad outcome for the country. It was way belated, much of the party and the White House is playing fantasy football with the results of the election, but when the Electoral College smacked them in the face earlier this week, Mitch McConnell said, enough, said so on the Senate floor. He also asked his colleagues in the interest of party, the health of the party, to call off shenanigans on January 6th when the Congress is supposed to certify the results.

[08:20:04]

He gave the White House a heads up that he was going to do this. He cushioned the blow as Bill Barr did in his resignation letter with all sorts of flattery for the president. And as a result, the president's rebuke of McConnell on Twitter was fairly mild, and we seem to be heading toward a multi-hundred billion dollar deal on COVID relief, which is desperately needed as people look to the expiration of unemployment benefits, eviction protections, business failures, all of that sort of thing.

So, all that is positive, better than it could have been. Not healthy for the country that the bar is set that low, but that's where we are.

CAMEROTA: You make such a good point, John. It was -- the president's rebuke was relatively mild, more mild than Congressman Mo Brooks who is still planning to fight the electoral college it sounds like.

I just want to read it because I think the president is missing some fundamental math in his tweet. He says, Mitch, 75 million votes, a record for a sitting president by a lot. Too soon to give up. Republican Party must finally learn to fight. People are angry.

Seventy-five million votes, that is impressive. Not as impressive as what Joe Biden got in a record-setting 81 million. He doesn't mention that part, strangely.

HARWOOD: Well, exactly. Joe Biden beat him by 7 million popular votes, by 74 million electoral votes.

Look, it has to be said, if the president really believes that he won this election, he's crazy. He could be just grifting, using these phony claims to extract money from his base, and he's extracted about $200 million from them so far.

But, again, if the president isn't all there, the easing of the way toward January 20th, I notice he retweeted a Breitbart story quoting Franklin Graham, Billy Graham's son, the Christian leader, saying that he wished Donald Trump and Melania Trump well in the next phase of their life. That could signal the beginning of some acceptance there.

BERMAN: Yeah, the Trump campaign sent out an email to supporters basically asking, do you want him to run in 2024? So you're starting to see some of this stuff on the margins there.

HARWOOD: Exactly.

BERMAN: John, very quickly, one other thing. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo threw a big party --

CAMEROTA: Well, it was supposed to be a big party. He invited 900 people.

BERMAN: How did that turn out for him?

HARWOOD: Not too well. You had something like 70 people RSVP and fewer than that showed up. "The Washington Post" reported. There's no wonder that they didn't show up because it's dangerous.

But the fact that Mike Pompeo would want to hold this party is consistent with the politics of the administration which has tried to down play the pandemic and just the heedlessness of the administration about their own public health. That's why the president himself, members of his family, many of his top aides have all gotten the coronavirus. They've been fortunate to get gold-plated treatment, which is not available to the average American. And so, fortunately, they've survived and come out okay on the other side of COVID.

But that doesn't mean they are not completely reckless in how they've approached this and it appears that many of the families of State Department diplomats are a little smarter than the Trump administration about what's safe and what's not safe.

BERMAN: John Harwood, thank you very much for being with us, perseverance through all the technical difficulties, thanks so much.

So we are getting new reporting just in about a possible key deal on relief. One of the senators who has been in the middle of the negotiations joins us next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:28:06]

CAMEROTA: Negotiations will resume this morning on Capitol Hill on hundreds of billions of dollars in much needed economic relief. Leaders on both sides say they are close to making a deal. How close?

Let's ask Democratic Senator Joe Manchin. He is one of the people working on a bipartisan compromise bill. Good morning, Senator.

SEN. JOE MANCHIN (D-WV): Good morning, Alisyn. How are you?

CAMEROTA: How close are you?

MANCHIN: Well, I think it's going to be done. I think we're going to hit the deadline and we'll do it, and hopefully have it done by Friday. They're moving.

Alisyn, let me show you the size of what we're dealing with. This is what our bipartisan group worked on, about 600 pages.

We're very happy to be contributing, setting the guidelines of how this bill will be put together. I'm sure the language that we've worked on for a long period of time is being used as a basis to work off of. And this will help accelerate everything to get it done.

Because the legislative language in this bill here, the legislative language is really what takes time to come back from the legislative bill drafters, and that's been done. So we appreciate that.

And, you know --

CAMEROTA: Yeah --

MANCHIN: Go ahead.

CAMEROTA: And I appreciate that show and tell, that is actually very helpful for the viewers to see all of the --

MANCHIN: That's what we're dealing with.

CAMEROTA: I don't know how you can lift that.

But, I mean, is it possible -- I know you said by Friday, that's good news, but it sounded like you worked late last night. Is it possible it happens today?

MANCHIN: Well, I think, basically now, putting it all together because they make modifications, they basically take a guideline or baseline, and we were able to break the gridlock. The gridlock really was what -- how much money.

The Republicans were stuck in the $500 billion range, we knew that was not enough, and the Democrats were wanting a minimum of 1.2, 1.3, and we all know by economic reports, we needed that much if not more. But that wasn't to be had.

So, we had to break that logjam.

CAMEROTA: So, what's the dollar figure you've come out with?

MANCHIN: I think -- I think it's going to be in the $900 billion range. The same as we set, 908. It will be in that range there. They might change things around. State and local might not fit in this time, state and local, because

of the liability. The difference they have --

(CROSSTALK)

CAMEROTA: Okay. But hold on, sorry to interrupt. Let me just ask you. So, 908, is that separated into two different bills?

MANCHIN: No, no, no. It will be one bill, I'm sure. Whatever they come out with, it will be one major piece of legislation, at least.