Return to Transcripts main page

New Day

U.S Reports Deadliest Day of Pandemic, Record Cases and Hospitalizations; Adviser Says, Trump Throwing Temper Tantrum over Election Loss. Aired 7-7:30a ET

Aired December 17, 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]

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN NEW DAY: More Americans are hospitalized this morning than ever before. More than 247,000 new cases were reported. That breaks another record.

In just hours, an FDA advisory panel will review Moderna's vaccine, meaning we could have a second vaccine authorized within days.

And then, overnight, there was this surprising development about Pfizer's vaccine. Medical workers say they are able to get more doses out of each vial than expected. So we'll have more on what that means in a moment.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN NEW DAY: Also breaking this morning, French President Emmanuel Macron has tested positive for coronavirus. We are told he has experienced symptoms. His office says he will isolate for seven days now.

The White House confirms that Vice President Mike Pence plans to get vaccinated on camera tomorrow morning. This will happen live so that the world, America can see the example that he is setting. And CNN has learned that President-elect Joe Biden will get the vaccine next week, also in public so people can see it happening.

CAMEROTA: Joining us now, CNN Chief Medical Correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta. Sanjay, great to see you, but what horrible, horrible news we're waking up to, 3,656 deaths reported yesterday. I don't know. I mean, I know you've been warning us, but that's higher, I think, than we thought.

You know, we all had this in our head like, oh, gosh, we should get to 3,000 a day. Suddenly, it's up to 3,656.

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes. No, I mean, it's tough to look at these numbers. And I'm glad that we talk about them, because people need to understand just how significant and how awful the situation has been and may become.

When we look at these models, because I was with you on this, Alisyn, you kind of hope that the numbers are going to come down at some point and that there's no specific reason or mitigation measure that would make that happen. When you look at the models, the numbers that we've been constantly talking about have been sort of the scenario based on all of these triggers that go into effect.

So if you look at the IHME model, I don't know if you we have the graphic, but they basically said, when you get to 8 in a million people dying in this country every day, which is around 2,400 to 2,500 people dying, that basically most states at that point would start to put in significant mitigation measures, mask mandates, public gathering reductions, certain business closures, things like that. That was the expectation. They just said that would happen. And it's not happening.

So when we start to look at these numbers now, we get to start to sort of understanding that we may be dealing with the more worst case scenario. And if you look at the worst case scenario, they're saying over 5,000 people dying per day in some of those scenarios if those mitigation measures weren't put in place.

I wrote an article about this. The body, if it's starting to have significant disease or trauma, it will put its own reflexive, protective measures in place. It compensates. It's called compensating within the human body. Decompensating is when you're not doing that. The country is not compensating right now for what is happening. And that is why these numbers continue to go up.

So we really don't know how significant it's going to be, how long it's going to -- where the plateau is going to happen at the peak and how long that plateau is going to last. So we're trying to figure that out, but it's hard if the country doesn't respond.

BERMAN: Look, Sanjay, you grimaced when you said 5,000 deaths a day and I understand why, but it really is very plausible at this point, when you see the hospitalizations continue to rise, deaths are trailing indicator to hospitalizations. So when we see the hospitalizations rise, we can assume that deaths will go up as well, and the cases are going up, and the White House coronavirus task force overnight said the exact same thing you just said, which is that many states are not doing what they did in the summer to stop the surge. They're not instituting the measures you have to if you want to turn this around.

GUPTA: Right. And, you know, we went back and looked at Memorial Day and July 4th and tried to basically see, what were the surges like then, what were the various forces? And if you go back and look, there were predictable surges after those holidays as more and more people aggregated together, but now most people who have been watching understand that that was different time of year. It was warmer, people could be outside.

Here, if we look at the Thanksgiving surge, and I think we're starting to really be in it now, it's obviously colder outside, so we don't have the mitigation measure of people being able to be outside. And you have another holiday now coming up where more and more people are likely to get together. So this is the sort of amplifying effect upon amplifying effect in the cold weather, which is, again, exactly what people have been warning about for some time.

CAMEROTA: All right. Well, I'll give you some good news, this morning, Sanjay, if you need it, and some surprising news. Doctors -- health care workers are getting more of the vaccine out of each vial than they expected.

[07:05:03]

They thought they would have five doses in each vial. And after they've vaccinated five people, they realize, oh, we have another dose or two left in here. And so it sounds like they're going to go to vaccinate more people this round than we thought.

GUPTA: Yes. This is really interesting. And I was just talking to a pharmacist right before I came on the program about this. It seems true, first of all, that these vials are supposed to contain five doses. Many of them contain more than five doses.

A couple of interesting things sort of popped out. One is that they did notice this in the U.K., as well, right, the same Pfizer vaccine that was being distributed over there, They did notice it, didn't quite know what to do with it at that point. There was no specific guidance. So what do we do with this extra fluid that's sitting in the bottom of the bottle here? It's 0.3 milliliters per dose. So five doses would be a certain amount of fluid, they had more than that in these things. They didn't know what to do with it. We started seeing the same thing here in the United States.

And it was interesting, the pharmacists say oftentimes when they do what's called the fill and finish, these bottles, they will put a little extra in because there's an anticipated amount of waste as you're drawing it up in the syringe, or a little bit spillage, whatever it may be, even pressure changes when it's traveling by plane, so all of these things, they sort of take into account, again, according to this pharmacist. And that's why you may get a little extra dose.

But then the second part of the equation is, okay, now we're putting in six doses, let's say, instead of five. Are we going to get six doses for the second shot, or are we going to potentially be behind over there? So they were trying to take that into consideration as well. There are lots of different factors, quite an interesting story actually when you put it all together. But the bottom line is exactly what you said, we may have 20 percent more dosing. So instead of 100 million, potentially, Pfizer doses, there could be 120 million, which there's a huge demand, not enough supply. That is great news.

BERMAN: Yes, and it's statistically significant. And I think we all had the same reaction when we read it this morning saying, huh, that's something. It really is something.

Sanjay, we want to be as transparent as possible about the vaccine and about what's happening to people when they take it. And, by and large, it has been incredibly safe, it has gone very smoothly. There have been a very small number of what's called adverse reactions, including this one which got some press yesterday in Alaska, maybe more than one, where people ended up with a flush feeling, shortness of breath, evaluated heart rate, developed rash. I want you to explain to people what exactly this means and what they should take away from this. And, again, we're being as transparent as we can be. We don't want people to think we're hiding adverse reactions, but we don't want to overplay it either.

GUPTA: Yes. No, absolutely, and I'm glad you frame it that way, because when we first heard about this in the U.K., we wanted to give all the details of specifically what happened there. And we are all seeing this together, learning together about what's happening.

So there seems to have been now two allergic reactions in Alaska. One you sort of mentioned, there was someone who developed flushing of the skin within about ten minutes after receiving the vaccine, received some Benadryl at that point, helped a little bit maybe but not enough. The person had some tightness in the chest, some shortness of breath. Got epinephrine, ended up getting epinephrine in a drip form, and eventually recovered. But it was a significant allergic reaction, an anaphylactic-type reaction.

Another person now, I think this was originally reported by The New York Times, had an allergic reaction as well but didn't sound like anaphylactic-type flack tick reaction. Had scratchy throat, some puffiness of the eyes, seemed to respond to Benadryl and I think some PEPCID, but not something that was a true anaphylaxis.

But you're right. We need to keep very close tabs on what these reactions are. And there's this adverse event reporting system, which is in place and people need to be reporting things like this. So far, it is interesting, when we've heard about these reactions, both were in the U.K., at the same place, and now two here in the United States in Alaska. So, I think that's something investigators are going to look at, as well.

I don't know what that means, why it was there and not other places, but there's been tens of thousands now of these vaccines given around the country. We've not heard those other adverse events. So people need to obviously be reporting those and investigators need to figure out what is it about the vaccine that may be causing the allergy? Is there some particular ingredient? People are starting to speculate on what that is. I'm not even going to say it because it's all speculation at this point. But investigators will probably start looking at what that potential aggravant is in the vaccine that's causing these sorts of allergic reactions.

It is very manageable. I do want to say that.

[07:10:00]

It is -- these reactions seem very manageable. And even with other vaccines, there's 1 in a million anaphylactic or severe allergic reactions. You've got 350 million people, you're going to expect hundreds of these, ultimately. We don't hear about them. We don't typically report on them. But now we're going to report on everything, just like you said.

BERMAN: Very manageable, I think, the key words here as of now, Sanjay. Thanks so much for explaining that so well. I appreciate it.

GUPTA: You got it. Thank you.

BERMAN: Developing this morning, there's a lot of snow out there, especially here in the northeast. More snow in some cities than they received all of last winter.

CNN meteorologist Derek Van Dam live in Boston to get a sense of how things are going, Derek. What do you see?

DEREK VAN DAM, CNN METEOROLOGIST: Yes, we've got a nice clip of snow coming down right now. The mayor of Boston, Marty Walsh, he declared a snow emergency late last night. And that meant that people needed to talk their cars off the road. No parking overnight on some of these streets, but you can see, well, some people didn't listen. So they got snowed in.

We are measuring anywhere between nine to ten inches. The plows are out in full force here. But there's a concern that the National Weather Service keeps talking about, and it is this flash freeze potential. Often along the New England coastline where I'm located here, by the north end of Boston, we get these warm noses of temperatures where they flirt around 32 degrees. That's why we have these huge snowflakes falling from the sky right now.

And with the temperature so close to the freezing mark, once cold air ushers in behind the nor'easter, it will freeze on the ground. We're talking about a ten-degree temperature drop within the next two to three hours.

So just in time for the morning rush, these roads will get extremely icy. But on the flipside of this, of course, children loving this. They are outside making snow angels, snow forts and snowball fights. We're in Paul Revere Parkway here on the north end of Boston, and you can see just how beautiful of a sight it is, a real-life snow globe here. And the conditions, of course, are going to deteriorate at least the next six hours, because winds gusting 50 miles an hour on the backside of the storm, once that cold air rushes in. That means power outages and more flight delays. Already 600 flight delays coming in and out of the east coast cities.

So, John, it is beautiful here, but, of course, we are needing these plows to do their work this morning so we can get on with our business. Back to you.

BERMAN: Boston always looks prettiest in the snow. Derek, we're so glad you're there. Enjoy the north end. The restaurants not open anyway, but just know that they're great. If you had an opportunity to eat, they would be great. Thanks so much for being there.

VAN DAM: I'm eyeing a coffee shop. Thanks.

CAMEROTA: It looks particularly pretty from a warm studio, I find.

By the way, it was not just the snow, Chad, it was the wind. I mean, this morning at 4:30 A.M., it was crazy out there, how windy it was. CHAD MYERS, CNN METEOROLOGIST: And you could hear the sleet bouncing off the windows. You know, some of these snowflakes turned into little sleet balls. That's why they didn't pile up quite as much for New York City. But I know Binghamton, New York, is beautiful in the snow. We just can't find it this morning. 41 inches now, the updated number for Binghamton, just in the past half hour.

So it is still snowing. It is snowing hard in places. Upstate New York, Schenectady. East Glenville, New York, you scored a touchdown, six inches of snow in the past one hour. Here is a hotshot from Albany, on of our local affiliates out there, and, yes, dumping. I mean, I have never really heard of six inches of snow in one hour, but they proved it. I saw the ruler. I saw the two rulers, one after another on the internet.

So here comes the snow up for Portland into Boston, another probably six to ten hours of snow for you and that will be the case, piling up another possible foot of snow for parts of Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and even into Boston. This is what the forecast radar is going to look like. finally by 8:00 tonight, it is gone, but not before another foot of snow coming down there.

We'll know more about Central Park here probably closer to 8:00, but I'm guessing that 6.5 is going to turn into about eight inches of snow, because we have now snowed for C. Park, because we are now have snowed for about six hours since the last report.

CAMEROTA: After all of this technology, Chad, we still just use our rulers, we reporters, when we go out there. And they work, they work really well. Chad, thank you very much.

MYERS: You're welcome.

CAMEROTA: So there were a record number of people who died, Americans, from coronavirus yesterday. President Trump remains silent on this. Instead, he's putting his energy into considering a flurry of pardons.

CNN's new reporting on this, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[07:15:00]

BERMAN: This morning, the United States in the midst of the deadliest phase of the coronavirus pandemic. And despite the crisis, President Trump is focused on something else, potential pardons and denying his election loss. Trump has reportedly even told some advisers that he will refuse to leave the White House on inauguration day. One of his advisers tells CNN, quote, he's throwing an f'ing temper tantrum. He's going to leave. He's just lashing out.

Joining us now, CNN Political Correspondent Abby Phillip and CNN Political Analyst David Gregory.

Abby, pardons seem to be where his mind is, not the 3,600 new deaths reported overnight.

ABBY PHILLIP, CNN POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: That's right. And in addition to pardons, of course, the election, but, I think, the thing about pardons is that President Trump, for years, has viewed the pardon power as one of the things that he relishes the most about the job, and you can see why. He's the only person who has the ability to do it and there's nothing anybody else can do about it. So he can really wield it however he wants. And I think that we can expect that he will do that.

There have been some pardons of people, you know, in the vein of, you know, Alice Johnson, a grandmother who was jailed for a non-violent crime years ago and who has become kind of the face of criminal justice reform, I think we may be -- we may see some more of those.

[07:20:02]

But underlying those, I think you'll see a lot of political allies of the president's, conservatives and others who the president believes for whatever reason had been wronged by the criminal justice system, I think you will see a slew of those pardons, because the president likes the idea that he can push back on the justice system and he alone can do that. No one else has that power. And no one else can do anything about it.

CAMEROTA: Yes. In fact, David, that is our CNN reporting that the phone lines at the White House are clogged from President Trump's friends, his former business associates, all wanting a pardon, sometimes a sort of preemptive, I guess, pardon.

And he -- you know, because he is a norm breaker and doesn't go through the proper channels really of anything, he's not -- there's a system set up for pardons, whereby you can vet these requests through the Department of Justice. He's not doing that. He is taking some of these calls personally, sometimes Jared Kushner is. And so, it's hard to know how many pardons we should expect in the next 35 days.

DAVID GREGORY, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Yes, I mean, I don't know where the limits would be. And it's interesting that Bill Barr got out of the Justice Department before that full controversy hit, because there's always controversy around pardons or lobbying for pardons at the end of the administration, no matter who the president is. But as Abby says quite well, this president doesn't have any restraints and Jared Kushner inside the White House, I think, even more important than the Justice Department reviews, is going to be an important gatekeeper for these.

BERMAN: David, it's interesting now what's happening inside the Biden transition. They have made a number of cabinet announcements, but there's a big one that's still hanging out there, and that's attorney general, you know, one of the big four positions. And CNN's reporting now is that it's down to two men, and it is men, they say, Alabama Senator Doug Jones, who was a close friend, or a longtime friend of the Biden's, and then Judge Merrick Garland, who, of course, was Barack Obama's nominee to fill a Supreme Court vacancy and is on the court of appeals. The complicating factor, or one of the complicating factors, David, now does appear to be the investigation into Hunter Biden, which Hunter Biden has acknowledged. The reason being the Doug Jones relationship with the Biden family, Biden may feel that it may not look good if he puts a friend in the Justice Department. How do you see this playing out?

GREGORY: Well, I think it's very interesting, the fact that this pick has taken so long. And there are -- you know, there are different considerations. You know, we tend to mock President Trump saying, you know, I want my Eric Holder, which is his way of saying, you know, I want somebody who, in his mind, would protect him, even though the Attorney General is independent.

Here, with the Hunter Biden investigation, there are Republicans who are going to look very carefully to make sure that there will be some independents there and the matter that will be handled free of political interference. And yet, the president-elect wants somebody with whom he's comfortable, who will have independence, but at some level, allies of the president-elect are going to want to make sure that this is somebody who is going to watch his back a little bit too. I mean, that's just the reality of these moves.

In Merrick Garland, who, you know, as I've said before, I know well, who married my wife and me, actually, it's not only the issue of can he be replaced on the D.C. circuit, which is the highest court of appeals, it's the feeder into the Supreme Court, that's a consideration. But beyond that, I think Biden is looking at who gets through a closely divided Senate. And in Merrick Garland, you have someone who sailed through confirmation before, who has a lot of political support and is seen as moderate in that regard, and, of course, has deep experience, Justice Department going back to coordinating in investigation and prosecutions of the Oklahoma City bombings.

CAMEROTA: Abby, while all of this is happening, there has been a massive security, cyber security breach on the United States, on the government, on the most sensitive and vital systems and networks in our government. Tom Bossert, former Homeland Security Aide, adviser, wrote a piece about this in The New York Times. And he's just trying to, it sounds like, grab the president and the White House and Congress and anybody who will listen by the shoulders and shake them and say, it is impossible to overstate the magnitude of this.

He writes, the logistical conclusion -- I'm sorry, the logical collusion is that we must act as if the Russian government has control of all the networks it has penetrated, but it is unclear what the Russians intend to do next. The access the Russians now enjoy could be used for far more than simply spying.

I mean, I don't know if my imagination is good enough to understand what happens next.

PHILLIP: Yes. I mean, it does raise a lot of very serious questions about, frankly, how it even happened in the first place, considering that we had a lot of notice that the Russians were trying to gain access to our systems and that they were being very aggressive on this front.

[07:25:15]

And we were, frankly, assured by senior members of the administration that they were on guard, looking for this, and yet it still happened.

But I think what's also the most alarming is that the silence coming from this administration has been very telling. And it seems that it's because the president continues to really not want to talk about Russia as a bad actor, really not want to address any of these kind of very serious cyber security threats that the country faces, because he's focused on a lot of other things, including his false claims about the election. But this is also a problem that's going to persist into the Biden administration.

And, you know, I think it just illustrates between the 2016 election and today that the U.S. seems to remain behind the eight ball in protecting itself from these kinds of incursions. And there needs to be some real attention paid to that. The problem is, over the last four years, this issue has actually only become more politicized, not less. And on Capitol Hill, in the Senate, you're seeing some of these committees that are usually charged with looking at these things in a bipartisan fashion, fracturing into basically a partisan mess.

So, at some point, everyone needs to have a wake-up call and realize that, as Tom Bossert says, we don't know what Russia is going to do with this information, but the possibilities are pretty scary.

BERMAN: Yes. I've got to say, this is not funny at all. But you want to hear something kind of funny though? Vladimir Putin in his marathon press conference, which is still going on, as far as we know, was just asked if he thought Donald Trump might be granted asylum in Russia once he leaves office, and Putin sort of laughed it off and said, half jokingly, we are told, there's no need for Trump to seek a job in Russia, he said. Almost 50 percent of the population voted for him and, basically, Putin said, he'll be fine where he is. So be that as it may.

David, to Abby's point, this is clearly something that people need to focus on here in the United States. You would think that the key committees in Congress would be laser-focused on this, like, say, the Senate Homeland Security Committee. But, no. Senator Ron Johnson yesterday, instead of focusing on this, a giant hack, which affects all kind of agencies and maybe millions of Americans, focused on these outlandish allegations of election fraud instead. What does that tell you?

GREGORY: That it's not on the up and up, you know? I mean, this is not on a level. This is political theater of its worst kind. It's hardly unprecedented. We've seen a lot of political theater in Washington and on the Hill. But it is just an amazing dereliction of duty.

I mean, it's not a serious effort that the Homeland Security Committee is engaged. And other members of the committee won't even participate. This is just a bold attempt to shore up some political support on Trump's coattails and nurse the grievance that Trump is going to be nursing in his political exile.

These are, as Abby says, really important concerns about our infrastructure, about hardening targets for Russians and the Chinese and others who would do us harm in ways that are very, very much in keeping with the 21st century.

I do expect a Biden administration to take a harder line on Russia, which wouldn't be that difficult after the past four years, certainly, rhetorically, but then in critical areas, especially with our national security apparatus being targeted by Russians.

CAMEROTA: Abby, David, thank you both very much.

Also developing this morning, an important update on a story we first told you about two weeks ago. This involves legislation to give federal judges the power to take down internet and social media posts that contain their own personal information, like their social security numbers and their addresses. Politico reports the bill has been sidelined after Senator Rand Paul insisted that it had to give similar protections to members of Congress before he would pass this one.

The measure is named in memory of the 20-year-old son of New Jersey Judge Esther Salas. He was murdered, you'll remember, by a disgruntled man who showed up at the judge's front door with a gun. I spoke with Judge Salas earlier this month.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JUDGE ESTHER SALAS, U.S. DISTRICT JUDGE, DISTRICT OF NEW JERSEY: I had one child, one child, and he has been taken from me. My husband of 25 years was almost taken from me. I am not exaggerating when I tell you that these, these tragedies are going to happen again if we don't act and we don't act now.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

[07:30:08]