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Researchers: Hundreds in U.S. Could Already Have New U.K. Variant. Aired 8-8:30a ET

Aired December 23, 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]

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: President Trump signaling that he might not sign the massive $900 billion COVID relief bill.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He's saying it wasn't enough, I haven't been part of this deal, and see you later.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: President Trump is dolling out early Christmas gifts in the forms of pardons, a veritable who's who of lawbreakers on the list.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: All of these things are attempts by the president to exert the power that he has left.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Vaccines are already rolling out across the U.S. with more than 4.6 million doses shipped and more than 600,000 shots in arms. Meantime, coronavirus cases continue to climb.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Our hospitals are overwhelmed in many locations.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I've been a nurse for 40 years. It's the worst I have ever seen.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

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

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our viewers in the United States and all around the world. This is NEW DAY. Alisyn is off. Erica Hill with me this morning. Wow.

ERICA HILL, CNN ANCHOR: It's another busy morning, John Berman.

BERMAN: Yes, and there are millions of Americans, millions of Americans who want to know what happens now. Why? Because the breaking news, this possible $900 billion implosion thanks to one video. The president blindsided Democrats, Republicans, shocked his own staff, releasing a video overnight that signals maybe he could veto the huge coronavirus relief package that has passed both houses of Congress. This would mean direct aid to millions of Americans. It does mean it's in real jeopardy this morning. The president wasn't part of these negotiations. He was on the

sidelines, unclear if he knew about the intricacies at all. He was too busy trying to overturn an election. But he swooped in overnight and insisted that Congress give Americans $2,000 stimulus checks instead of the $600 that's in the deal now. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is trying to capitalize on this and secure that extra money immediately. We do have some new reporting on where this might be headed, but generally speaking it's just one big giant mess.

HILL: Indeed, it is.

Also overnight, President Trump issuing a wave of new pardons, among them three corrupt former Republican members of Congress, two men who pleaded guilty as part of the Mueller investigation, and four military contractors convicted in connection to the massacre of Iraqi civilians, those contractors from the firm Blackwater, which of course is run by Erik Prince, the brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

Meantime, the other big story this morning, the virus, as it has been for months, and the president, as he has for some time, still largely ignoring it. More than 3,400 deaths were reported on Tuesday. That is the second highest daily death toll since the start of the pandemic.

BERMAN: Let's begin with the fate of the stimulus bill and what we know about what might happen. Joining us, John Harwood, CNN White House correspondent, and Seung Min Kim White, CNN political analyst and White House reporter for the "Washington Post." And John, let's just start with what we know about what might happen next. Is the president going to sign this?

JOHN HARWOOD, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: We don't know. And the question is, is this the president just fulminating? He has been raging in private, mostly in private, because he has been hiding out from reporters, raging against his defeat. And Jeremy Diamond, our colleague, reported an adviser told him yesterday that this is a child having a temper tantrum. I'm reminded of a story Mary Trump, his niece, had in her book, which is as a child Donald Trump tormented his brother by threatening to destroy his toy trucks, and the mother took the trucks away and hid them in the attic so Donald Trump couldn't do that.

How destructive does Donald Trump really want to be? Is he blowing off steam? Is he angry at his defeat and, therefore, trying to blow up these negotiations through a gesture? Or is he actually intending to shut down the government and stop this COVID relief, maybe lashing out against Americans who voted against him. We just don't know how serious he is about it.

HILL: And part of it, too, Seung Min, which John has pointed out I think multiple times this morning, and rightly so, is it all speaks to the fact that it's not clear that the president actually understands how this process works, that he understands the legislative process. And also just based on that video, I don't think he understands the difference in the funding that was passed, what's in the COVID bill, what's in the funding bill, and the fact that we also now have not only aid to millions of Americans hanging in the balance, but there could be a government shutdown.

SEUNG MIN KIM, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Exactly. And that's why prompt action and attempts to reign the president back in from this is going to be so crucial over the next several days, because this isn't a regular kind of bill goes down to the White House, the president signs or maybe vetoes it, then it goes back to Congress. We just don't simply have that kind of time because the government shuts down again December 28th. So you have a very limited amount of time to get this resolved.

And you're right, in that extraordinary video last night the president conflated what was in a government funding package that has to pass every year to keep the federal government operations running with provisions in the COVID relief bill package.

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But remember, the packaging of those two very big separate bills was greenlighted by everyone, including members of his own administration, to make this easier to pass right before the holidays, this very big, complicated package. And the president is inserting himself into the negotiations at a time when it's, frankly, too late.

So we'll see if the president does back off. I did think it was very significant that he did not explicitly say the word "veto" in his video message last night, but we'll see how far it goes. And, again, we don't have a lot of time.

BERMAN: Seung Min, what you were you hearing from your sources on the Hill overnight? You worked in both places. How did they, including senior Republicans, react to this?

KIM: I got a lot of befuddled texts, a lot of gifs, a lot of texts saying I give up, I'm going on vacation. Because we're just -- we're floored here. Everyone was caught off guard, even White House aides were caught off guard, White House press staff, who had been telling us and other reporters all day that, yes, once the bill arrives at the White House that he will sign it. So this seemed to just completely come out of the blue.

And what's going to be really interesting to watch over the next couple of days is what role Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin takes to calm the president down and how he persuades the president to sign the bill, because he was the chief emissary from the administration to Congress, to both Democratic and Republican leaders. So we'll see if Mnuchin plays any role in being persuasive here.

HILL: Getting to that point, John, it will be interesting to see who is actually there in the president's orbit, because there are fewer and fewer people around him, as we know. He always does what he wants, but it's really moving to a different degree at this point.

HARWOOD: No question about it. And I want to go back to one thing you were just talking about with Seung Min. I'm not sure the president was confused about the bill. Remember, the president is a massive liar, and I think it is very possible that he was deliberately plucking items out of this omnibus spending bill, the entire government funding bill, the kind he signs every year to keep the government going, to discredit the COVID bill struck by Mitch McConnell.

Remember, Mitch McConnell and John Thune, another member of the Republican leadership, have both said in recent days that the effort to overturn or to block the certification of Electoral College votes on January 6th in the Congress is going nowhere and encouraging people not to support it. That angered the president because he still harbors this delusion that he is going to be preserved in office, which is encouraged by a lot of these kooky advisers that you were alluding to, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Mike Flynn, the Overstock.com CEO guy, all these people who are feeding him crazy ideas about how he could stay in power.

So I think he may have been doing that on purpose to try to discredit what McConnell did. I don't think it's going to change the outcome on January 6th, but we could have a big mess and a lot of broken china between now and then in Washington. And for all those millions of people out in the country who are desperately waiting for extended unemployment checks, $600 stimulus check, protection from eviction, small businesses looking for paycheck protection, the president can do a lot of damage if he is determined to do so.

BERMAN: Just to be clear, nobody knows what's going to happen next is an awful sentence for millions of Americans who are depending on these extended unemployment benefits or were hoping for this stimulus check. We don't know what's going to happen, that hits them right in the gut.

I want to move on to pardons in just a minute, John, but before I do, what's the latest on whether the president is going to go on a plane and go to Mar-a-Lago today?

HARWOOD: It's on a schedule that he's supposed to leave this afternoon. My guess is because the president is interested in himself to the exclusion of pretty much everything else that he will decide to go. For one thing, it's warmer down there and he has a better chance of playing golf. On the other hand, if he really does want to swing his sledgehammer around and break as many things as possible before Joe Biden takes over, maybe he will stay here and do some of that. But my bet is that by the end of the day he's gone.

HILL: We have got these pardons as well, which we've been talking about. Look, we knew more pardons were coming from the president, Seung Min, but it is what we saw in this wave of pardons last night which really -- I said this earlier, but I think it's worth saying again, this is contrary to everything that the president bills himself as. These are not about draining the swamp. This shows that apparently it's fine to be in the swamp. These are not about law and order.

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But these are about the president doing what he can, at least in a couple of cases, to discredit the Mueller investigation. All of that served up on a platter last night, Seung Min.

KIM: It was pretty swampy if you go down the list of pardons that the president issued last night. And you're right a lot of it -- there's a lot of provision here, but one is that he's really doing whatever he can in the final days to discredit and undo the work of the Mueller investigation by pardoning last night two figures connected to that as part of the Russia probe, which we know he has railed on as an illegitimate investigation, and we know was a very legitimate investigation.

And you see how he rewards his allies and people who are loyal to him, even if they have been convicted of serious federal crimes. Two of the former members of the Congress who were pardoned last night, Chris Collins and Duncan Hunter, were early supporters of his presidential bid. And we saw this going all the way back to his first pardon of his presidency when he pardoned the controversial Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio who was convicted of contempt in his efforts towards cracking down against illegal immigration. Arpaio was a supporter of the president.

So that's a message that the president is giving here, if you are loyal to me, I will reward you with the powers of my presidency, which is a pretty swampy message to be conveying on his way out.

BERMAN: Indeed. I think Chris Collins and Duncan Hunter literally were the very first two House members to endorse Donald Trump. And John Harwood, you know from your days in financial reporting, the phrase return on investment, ROI, that's a pretty big ROI for those early endorsements for those two members of Congress. And there is a pretty bit ROI also in terms of the Russia investigation and silence as well.

HARWOOD: No question about it. And just to be clear, there was never the slightest bit of sincerity or merit to the president saying I'm going to drain the swamp. The president's ethos from the beginning, his entire life, really, is I'm going to get mine, and that's what he has tried to do as president.

Now, what's interesting about these pardons is, on the one hand, he's occupying this fantasy world in which he won the election and he's somehow convinced himself that's true, and lying to people and raising money from them and that sort of thing. On the other hand, these pardons show somebody who actually understands he's leaving office in a few days and he is going to use the unchallenged power he has to protect himself. Yes, he is pardoning early allies, those corrupt members of Congress. Yes, he's pardoning the Blackwater guards who worked for Erik Prince, who is the brother of his education secretary.

But the real mission for the president is to try to discredit, unravel the Mueller investigation, which, let's just remember the stakes here. Russia was Donald Trump's financial benefactor before he ran for president. He hired a Putin-aligned campaign manager. There was an FBI investigation, Russia helped him get elected. As soon as he got into office, he fired the FBI director. Then we had the Mueller investigation.

In all of the meantime, this president has taken actions to benefit Russia by weakening the western alliance, raising questions about NATO. And now his administration is ending with a massive Russian hack of the U.S. government and U.S. business, which the president in response, when his own secretary of state slammed Russia, he defended Russia and suggested it was China. There is a long pattern of this president being subservient to Vladimir Putin. That's how he started his presidency and that's how he's ending it.

BERMAN: John Harwood, Seung Min Kim, merry Christmas? Thanks for being with us this morning? Nice to see you, at a bare minimum. Appreciate it.

HILL: Researchers now think that new coronavirus variant which is spreading in the U.K. is already here in the U.S., likely hundreds of people already infected. We're going to take a closer look at what we know and also what we don't know. That's next.

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HILL: Researchers studying the new U.K. variant of coronavirus now believe hundreds of people in the United States could already be infected with the strain.

Joining us now, Dr. William Schaffner, professor of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and Dr. Ashish Jha, he's the dean of Brown University School of Public Health.

Good to see both of you this morning.

You know, Dr. Schaffner, in some ways I feel like you hear that it's likely already here and that probably is not a big surprise, hundreds maybe already infected. I am no expert as we know, it would almost seem like it needs to be a bigger number based on where we're at and that it was first reported discovered in September in the U.K.

How should we be digesting all of this this morning?

DR. WILLIAM SCHAFFNER, PROFESSOR, INFECTIOUS DISEASES, VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER: Well, I think we all ought to look at it with some care, Erica. You know, perhaps it is more transmissible, there is some computer models that suggest that it is. It may be here already and being transmitted. I know our colleagues in the U.K. traced these strains more assiduously than we do here in the United States.

But the important thing to remember is, masking still works and we can reduce the spread of this strain and any other strain if we wear our masks, if we do social distancing and if we avoid groups, and if we avoid a lot of travel during the holiday season. If we do all those things, we can join together to dampen the spread of this virus and all the other strains of COVID also.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Dr. Jha, what would the impact be if there is a strain here that is more contagious, more infectious, able to spread more quickly particularly as, if some are now concerned, although I understand the science is still out on this, that children might be more susceptible to this variant of the disease? DR. ASHISH JHA, DEAN, BROWN UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH: Yeah,

so, John, good morning. Thanks for having me on.

You know, I think the issue here is we've got so much spread already happening in the country that adding more fuel to that fire is certainly not going to be helpful. I think at this point, there's a lot we need to sort out as Dr. Schaffner said. What we need right now is people to really try to hunker down for the next six, eight weeks or so until the vaccine started getting more widely deployed and we start making a difference.

But I'm absolutely -- I think we need to track this strain and make sure that it isn't spreading more substantially in this country.

HILL: Just to follow up on your point, Dr. Jha, that people need to hunker down for the next six to eight weeks. That's not what we're seeing. We've been talking about COVID fatigue, but this is really when it's getting bad. So, if we're asking people to hunker down more now, a couple of days before Christmas. What do you think the reality is that people are going to listen?

JHA: Yeah, so it's a challenging situation because people have been sort of battered with so much misinformation about this pandemic. I'm very sympathetic to that and I'm also sympathetic to the fact that it's been a long pandemic already and people feel tired and they want to see their families. And that is not only understandable it's completely normal.

The key here is unfortunately because we're in probably the hardest time in the pandemic I think people have to redouble their efforts. We need to hear from our political leaders the importance of doing these things. And, again, we are not talking about forever, we are really talk being a short period of time until we can get to the other side of this tunnel.

BERMAN: Dr. Schaffner, we just got word a few minutes ago that the administration has struck a new deal with Pfizer for an additional 100 million doses of their vaccine by July 31st. Is that enough?

Your reaction to that news.

SCHAFFNER: Well, it's terrific. We would like more vaccine from both manufacturers. The more vaccine we have, the more quickly we can protect more people.

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And, of course, the vaccine is a fabulous addition, a fabulous addition, to everything we can do to try to bring this outbreak, this pandemic under control.

And so, more vaccine, I'm really enthusiastic about.

HILL: In terms of more vaccine, some reporting, Dr. Jha, from our colleague Elizabeth Cohen this morning found in her discussions with people that this new variant may take a modest hit I think were the words she used. So, maybe it would be -- the vaccines would be 80 percent to 85 percent effective against this new variant versus what we're seeing in Pfizer, Moderna rates as high as 95 percent.

How much of a concern is that, that modest hit, and based on that how many more Americans may need to be vaccinated?

JHA: Yeah, I think the science here is not at all clear, meaning -- first of all, I'm still optimistic that the vaccines will continue to be just as effective for this new variant, though we don't know. And if there is a bit of a hit, 80 percent, 85 percent is still quite good.

And then as we've heard from the BioNTech CEO, they could make modest changes to the vaccine to make it more effective yet.

So, I think we have a lot of tools in front of us. On the vaccine, I certainly am not worried that the vaccine as an important way to get out of this pandemic will somehow be dampened by this new variant.

BERMAN: Dr. Schaffner, are we getting people vaccinated quickly enough? By that I mean, it's amazing that we have the vaccines at all now. I get that.

But Operation Warp Speed has been trying to develop a distribution plan for some time. There is the issue of how many vaccines are allocated, but allocation and actually in your arm are two different things.

So, are they getting into people's arms at the rate that you were hoping?

SCHAFFNER: Well, John, at the present time, you know, we're vaccinating health care providers and also residents of long term care facilities as the first priority group. That's going very well. Right here in my own medical center, people are lining up just as soon as their number is called, rolling up their sleeves and getting vaccinated.

So I think we're modeling this for the general population. When we start vaccinating more and more people in the general population, I hope that they say, gee, those medical people all got vaccinated, they must know something. If they're getting vaccinated, I should, too.

So I hope that we provide this kind of reassurance to the general population that these vaccines are very effective and safe.

HILL: I don't want to, you know, end on a down note, Dr. Jha, but I do think it's important to remember the hundreds of thousands of lives that have been lost in this country, more around the world, 3,400 deaths reported on Tuesday. We know that residents of long term care facilities were recommended to be in that first group because of the high number of deaths of residents, right, and overall deaths.

As we look at what's happening now, these rising death tolls, do we have a better sense of who is succumbing to the disease? Are these changing? JHA: Yeah, it's a mix. So we do have a sense that we've done a little

bit of a better job on protecting people in long term care facilities, though there's still a lot of infections and deaths happening in those facilities. We're also seeing a lot of people who live in the community, we're seeing younger people get sick and die.

This is not somehow the disease shifting, this is just about the fact that we have so much infection across the country that even younger people who are less likely to die still are investigate infected in unprecedented numbers.

So this is a tough moment and, again, I think we will get -- I know we will get through this, but we just have to really focus for the next six to eight weeks on doing those public health things so we can get through this safely.

BERMAN: Dr. Jha, Dr. Schaffner, thank you both for being with us this morning and thank you both so much for the work that you're doing. Really appreciate it.

SCHAFFNER: Happy holidays.

BERMAN: You, too.

So, something fascinating has been going on on television over the last few days. The threat of a lawsuit has these right wing media outlets clarifying in quotation marks some of the lies, some of the baseless claims they've been making about the election for weeks. We will tell you what they're saying now and why, next.

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BERMAN: So, new this morning, an executive at Dominion Voting Systems says he is suing the Trump campaign, some of the president's lawyers and several conservative media outlets for spreading baseless claims about election fraud that he says forced him into hiding.

Erik Coomer says in a statement, quote: Today, I filed a lawsuit in Colorado in an attempt to unwind as much as damage as possible done to me, my family, my life and my livelihood as a result of the numerous false public statements that I was somehow responsible for rigging the 2020 presidential election.

We do not yet have a response from the defendants. The question now is, what can we expect to see in court?

Joining us now, CNN legal analyst and former federal prosecutor, Elie Honig, and Brian Stelter, CNN chief media correspondent and anchor of "RELIABLE SOURCES."

Elie, first to you, how viable is this lawsuit?

ELIE HONIG, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: Yeah, John, this is a legitimate lawsuit. So, the First Amendment provides very broad protections for media organizations. That's a good thing. That's an important thing. That's an important feature of our democracy.

But the First Amendment protections are not unlimited. Look, media organizations are allowed to be provocative, they are allowed to ask questions, they are allowed to be opinionated, they are even allowed to make mistakes, as long as those mistakes aren't made while ignoring the obvious reality.

And if you look at the case here what you cannot do is make a false statement or something that you claim is a true statement but a false statement when it is obviously false, when you knew it was false or you obviously should have known it's false.

And here, when we are talking about these statements of a rigged election, I mean, look at all the sources who have said that's not the case. The attorney general, the FBI, DHS, dozens of courts around the country have said this election was not rigged. So, it's going to be hard to defend those statements as being true or something that was even made in good faith.

HILL: There's also this threat a 20-page letter that said a lawsuit could be coming from another country, which has been thrown out there, Smartmatic. Among -- among what is written in that letter is that Fox News has engaged in, quote, converted disinformation campaign against Smartmatic, telling its millions of viewers and readers it was founded by Hugo Chavez.

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