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New Day

U.S. Sets New Record for Coronavirus; U.K. Reimposes Lockdown; National Guard Deployed to D.C.; Spotlight on Georgia's Secretary of State; Giants Coach Blasts Eagles. Aired 6:30-7a ET

Aired January 05, 2021 - 06:30   ET

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

[06:30:00]

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: Squashes an idea health officials had floated about giving half doses to vaccinate more people. Hospitalizations soaring to new records. More than 128,000 Americans are hospitalized with coronavirus this morning.

The situation in Los Angeles is so dire that ambulance crews have been told not to bring patients in who have little chance of survival.

Joining us now, Dr. Peter Hotez. He's the co-director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children's Hospital and the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine.

Dr. Hotez, always nice to see you.

So, basically, what's happening is that there's this huge surge and now we are seeing what we feared, which is rationing of care. I mean if ambulance drivers are having to decide who they bring to the hospital, and, by the way, we're also hearing that hospitals don't have enough oxygen, that is rationing of care. It's underway.

DR. PETER HOTEZ, CO-DIRECTOR, CENTER FOR VACCINE DEVELOPMENT, TEXAS CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL AND DEAN, NATIONAL SCHOOL OF TROPICAL MEDICINE, BAYLOR COLLEGE OF MEDICINE: Yes, no question about it. And this is the catastrophic situation that we had hoped to avoid. And the reason why we desperately needed a national program to contain COVID-19, it was to avoid exactly this scenario. I feel like, you know, this is more -- this is getting into now the second year of our epidemic. And this looks very much like the way it started back in March and April in New York City. And it's almost as if we haven't learned anything. And this is a -- this is a humanitarian catastrophe now unfolding in Los Angeles. And I worry it won't stop in Los Angeles. We'll be looking at this in other metro areas as well.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: I'm going to want your help with this, Alisyn, because there's a development going on in terms of the vaccines, Dr. Hotez, that really Alisyn shined a light on yesterday. And a couple numbers illustrate this. There have been 15 million doses distributed, distributed, but only 4,000 administered, meaning put in --

CAMEROTA: Four million.

BERMAN: Four million, sorry. Four million put in people's arms. And that's a huge gap. And you pressed Moncef Slaoui in charge of Warp Speed on this yesterday.

CAMEROTA: And so what happened yesterday, Dr. Hotez, is that that it sounded like Moncef Slaoui was saying, well, we did our part. We distributed them. We handed them out. And now it's up to the states. And, guess what, you know, our phones are not ringing, so we can't help them. Nobody's calling us.

Let me tell you exactly -- let me play for you exactly what he said.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. MONCEF SLAOUI, CHIEF ADVISER, OPERATION WARP SPEED: The head of department from each states have actually ordered the doses. They told us where to send them. We shipped them to those -- to those areas and to those locations.

We are available and ready to help the states as they ask specifically for help. We will go and help them there. I don't think it's possible for the federal government to be able to say, you know, we should send vaccine to this particular location.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: I just don't know that I see a plan. What's the plan, Dr. Hotez?

HOTEZ: Well -- well, that's it, right, there is no plan to vaccinate the American people. And there is no federal plan. And, you know, there -- this is -- this is -- it's not so much Moncef's fault. This is the way -- this is the philosophy and approach that the White House has taken all of 2020, which is that the federal government cannot be in the lead, putting the states in the lead, even though they don't have the intellectual and physical capability to make this happen. It's why we missed the entry of the virus coming in from Europe into New York. It's why we failed on the diagnostic testing. It's why we are not getting genomic virus sequences. It's why we allowed the surge in the south over the summer and this horrible, horrible surge now.

And now, you know, after all that, we've always heard from the White House that we're going to vaccinate our way out of this. And now we know there's no plan. And here's why. We -- you know, if you look at the population of the United States, which is over 300 million people, and if we want to vaccinate three quarters of the U.S. population, which is our calculation that we came up with in order to interrupt virus transmission with a group at City University in New York, three quarters of the American population, that's 240 million Americans.

That means, starting now, we have to vaccinate one to 1.5 million Americans every day from now until say September 1. And, you know, if you were to pare that down to a city like New York City, the greater metropolitan area, our calculations are 50,000 to 70,000 New Yorkers every day. We're not even close to that. We -- what have we done so far? We've

vaccinated 4 million Americans. We are at a fraction of where we're going to need to be. So this has got to be the number one priority.

Remember, the Trump administration has backed us into a corner. They've left us no other approach except to vaccinate our way out of it. And if we don't fix this, the numbers of Americans who will lose their lives could come close to 1 million by the fall. It's that bad. So we've got to make this work.

CAMEROTA: And, by the way, Dr. Hotez, I'm not even blaming Moncef Slaoui. What I was asking him was, who is spearheading this? What's the plan? And I didn't expect him to say, we're just waiting for them to call. I mean if, you know, if, I guess, a local state official or CVS calls, maybe we can try to help them.

[06:35:05]

I thought that there was going to be somebody in charge because Operation Warp Speed, I didn't know, just meant development of the vaccine. I thought it also included vaccinating people.

HOTEZ: I think we all did. You know, that -- that's what's so astonishing. Now, when we heard about having a four star military general out in front, that was very welcoming and -- and welcomed. And now we realize that by logistics what they meant is putting the boxes on the backs of the FedEx trucks and UPS trucks and UPS planes and FedEx planes and making certain there's no temperature incursion. That was the logistics. And after that, you know, it's adios. You know, it's -- it's -- they sent out 40 million boxes of Ikea furniture and now the states are opening the boxes and realizing it says assembly required. There's no plan now for how to distribute vaccines to the people.

And -- and it's not going to work under the current system. I -- you know, relying on calling up CVS and Walgreens and seeing if there's vaccine available for mom or dad or -- or having the hospitals do it, that will simply not be sufficient high throughput capacity to get to where we need to go, which is 1 to 1.5 million Americans every day. We're going to have to come up with an additional mechanism on top of the pharmacy chains, which is fine to have them involved. That's a place where a lot of people get their adult vaccines.

It's fine that the hospital is involved. But we're going to need to start opening up outdoor arenas and stadiums and having it staffed with qualified people in order to get this through. It's going to take federal support, money, and logistics. And this has to be the number one priority for the Biden administration, otherwise we're going to be thrown into total chaos on top of an already horrible, horrible 2020.

BERMAN: Yes, something's got to change. I mean the pace has got to increase multiple fold, very quickly.

Dr. Hotez, thanks so much for helping us understand this.

HOTEZ: Thank you so much. BERMAN: British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has reimposed a strict nationwide lockdown to fight a new coronavirus variant spreading there.

CNN's Phil Black live at 10 Downing Street in London with the very latest.

Phil.

PHIL BLACK, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes, John, soaring cases here, driven by this new, highly transmissible variant. Numbers that threaten to overwhelm parts of the country's health system. Hospital admissions are already 40 percent up on what they were at the peak of the first wave, last April.

This is the awful reality that Boris Johnson has had to accept and act upon. His critics are saying that, once again, he's taken too long to get to this point. His science advisers were suggesting this weeks ago. But now that he has decided to act, he is pushing England to join the rest of the U.K. in a lockdown that is likely to last for months, until at least the end of February. For that time, people will have very few legal reasons for being allowed to leave their homes and, crucially, schools are going to say closed. Johnson says he desperately didn't want to do that, but he has accepted that schools are driving transmissions.

All of this is necessary, he says, because the old rules, the old regulations, they were not working in controlling this new, highly transmissible variant. So the assessment is with cases still rising, the U.K. is about to enter its darkest period of the pandemic. But Boris Johnson, the prime minister, says there is reason to hope.

Take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BORIS JOHNSON, BRITISH PRIME MINISTER: Thanks to the miracle of science, not only is the end in sight, but we know exactly how we will get there. But for now, I'm afraid you must once again stay at home, protect the NHS, and save lives.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLACK: So there is now a race here between the virus and the available vaccines. The hope is the lockdown will force down transmissions and buy us some time while the vaccine program is rolled out as quickly and widely as possible.

John.

BERMAN: Request for sacrifice there. Very interesting to hear that from a leader.

Phil Black, thanks so much for being with us.

So the National Guard is now being deployed in Washington D.C., after President Trump encouraged his supporters to protest the election results tomorrow. We have a live report from Washington, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:43:09]

CAMEROTA: Developing overnight, National Guard troops being deployed to the nation's capital to assist local law enforcement ahead of pro- Trump demonstrations that are expected there tomorrow.

CNN's Alex Marquardt is live in Washington with more. So what do we think the numbers are going to be, Alex?

ALEX MARQUARDT, CNN SENIOR NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: Well, it's hard to say right now, Alisyn, but this city is certainly bracing for more demonstrations that certainly have the potential to get violent as they did late last year. Already this morning, early Tuesday morning, streets have been blocked off by police all around the White House.

The mayor of Washington, D.C., Muriel Bowser, has asked that residents do not come into downtown D.C. today and tomorrow and that they not engage with these protesters for fear of violence. She has also set up an emergency operations center to coordinate the law enforcement.

There will be a number of different groups coming into D.C., including the far right Proud Boys. There will be a number of different events and rallies all across town, including one right here on the ellipse. We are just south of the White House. You can see this stage right behind me. And the president has said himself that he will be attending.

As you mentioned, the National Huard has been called up. The mayor of D.C. and her office have told me that some 340 National Guard troops will be mobilized. At any given time there will be around 100 in the streets.

They will not be armed. They will be mainly supporting the Metropolitan Police Department, doing things like coordinating traffic, helping in the subway. But it is, of course, hugely significant that the National Guard are being called up.

And in her request, I want to read you a bit of what the mayor wrote in her letter. She said that they are needed because these demonstrations follow similar events, she said, in both November and December, which resulted in a large influx of participants, violence, and criminal activity.

[06:45:03]

This city, of course, knows protests very well. Extremely significant when the National Guard is being called up. And most remarkable is that it is the president who is fueling this and it is at the center of all of this.

John.

BERMAN: All right, Alex, please stand watch for us there. Appreciate you being there.

Also developing overnight, police in the nation's capital have arrested the leader of the Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio is accused of burning a Black Lives Matter sign that was torn down from an historic black church during a pro-Trump rally in Washington last month. The 36-year-old is facing an additional weapons charge after police found him with two high-capacity firearm magazines when he was arrested.

Georgia's Republican secretary of state in the spotlight for standing up to President Trump's apparent shakedown. We'll tell you more about Brad Raffensperger, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CAMEROTA: Polls open in ten minutes for the critical Georgia Senate runoff races.

[06:50:01]

President Trump's efforts to overturn his loss has thrust Georgia's Republican secretary of state into the spotlight.

CNN's Amara Walker tells us more about Brad Raffensperger and his career.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

AMARA WALKER, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice over): In the face of repeated attacks and pressure from President Trump.

BRAD RAFFENSPERGER, GEORGIA SECRETARY OF STATE: We believe that we do have an accurate election.

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: No, I -- no, you don't. No, no you don't. You don't have it. you don't have it. Not even close.

WALKER: Georgia's Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger hasn't budged from his principles as the president refuses to accept the reality that he lost Georgia just two weeks before Joe Biden's inauguration.

RAFFENSPERGER: I think that's really what we're called to be, is people of integrity. And that's -- I -- I work hard on that every day so people know that we were working hard for honest elections.

WALKER: On Saturday, the secretary took the call he's been trying to avoid for weeks.

RAFFENSPERGER: I never believed it was appropriate to speak to the president, but he pushed out and I guess he had his staff push us and they wanted a call. The challenge that we have -- first of all, we're in a litigation mode with the president's team against the state of Georgia.

WALKER: Raffensperger sat down for an interview with us at the beginning of December. The secretary who voted for Trump says he leans on his faith in tough times.

RAFFENSPERGER: It's truth in that faith. And so you can't kill it. It's just an organism. It's a -- it's -- it's living, breathing because it's within us. And so I'm very hopeful and we need to just continue, quote, to fight the good fight.

WALKER: The death threats and vulgar messages targeting his family began pouring in since Trump and his allies continue to make baseless claims of voter fraud in Georgia.

TRUMP: He's an enemy of the people, the secretary of state.

You know, the people of Georgia know that this was a scam. And because of what you've done to the president, a lot of people aren't going out to vote. And a lot of Republicans are going to vote negative because they hate what you did to the president.

RAFFENSPERGER: Well, you know, we've been through an awful lot.

WALKER: Raffensperger says losing his 37-year-old son after a fentanyl overdose nearly three years ago helped put life in perspective.

RAFFENSPERGER: It was a struggle throughout his life, but every one of those times that we had, you know, that he struggled, you know, God was there for us.

WALKER: And prepared him for moments like this.

RAFFENSPERGER: I do lean into the Lord because I know what he calls us to be, in all things, is to be honest and treat people with dignity.

We have to just lower the rhetoric and we have to really restart trying to understand and have conversations with people and not put up our walls and not attack, but just listen.

WALKER: And that's exactly what he did during the stunning call from the president. He listened, but never gave in. As a conservative and born-again Christian, Raffensperger says he's focusing on the tight Senate runoff, hoping the Republicans will pull through.

RAFFENSPERGER: My job is to make sure elections are run honestly and fairly. The Republican Party's job is to raise money and make sure they turn their people out to vote.

WALKER: In Atlanta, Amara Walker, CNN.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

CAMEROTA: Really interesting to learn more about him.

All right, now to sports.

College basketball players wearing masks during games. Is this the start of a trend? "Bleacher Report," next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) [06:57:30]

BERMAN: Ohh, this is getting ugly. The head coach of the New York Giants is blasting the Philadelphia Eagles for what he says is disrespecting the game of football.

Andy Scholes with more in the "Bleacher Report.

Hey, Andy.

ANDY SCHOLES, CNN SPORTS CORRESPONDENT: Yes, good morning, John.

So had the Eagles beat Washington on Sunday, the 6-10 New York Giants would have made the playoffs. And New York's head coach, Joe Judge, well, he's one of many not happy with what they saw from Philadelphia in the loss. Down by three in the fourth quarter, Eagles Head Coach Doug Pederson pulled starting quarterback Jalen Hurts for third stringer Nate Sudfeld. Pederson said after the game, he was still trying to win, but Judge certainly isn't buying it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOE JUDGE, NEW YORK GIANTS HEAD COACH: To disrespect the effort that everyone put forward to make this season a success for the National Football League, by disrespecting the game by going out there and not competing for 60 minutes and do everything you can to help those players win, we will never do that as long as I'm the head coach of the New York Giants.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SCHOLES: All right, Eagles/Giants game should be fun next year.

And, finally, check this out, Boston University's men and women's basketball teams opened their seasons yesterday wearing masks during their games. A BU spokesperson telling CNN that the school requires all athletes to wear face coverings during every activity. The woman hosted Holy Cross and both teams in that game wore masks. Today, the men will host Holy Cross and both teams for that game will be wearing masks.

And, you know, John, you know, people say, oh, you can't wear masks while you're playing basketball. Well, Boston University was wearing a mask yesterday. Holy Cross was not. Boston University won the game. So it couldn't have hindered them that much.

BERMAN: Go Terriers.

Andy Scholes, thanks so much. Appreciate you being there.

SCHOLES: All right.

BERMAN: NEW DAY continues right now.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN ANCHOR: Georgia is the center of the political universe today. Senate runoffs there will decide the balance of power.

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Kelly fights for me. David fights for me. That I can tell you.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The president's actions are essentially suppressing the vote in Georgia.

JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT-ELECT FOR THE UNITED STATES: We need you to vote again in record numbers. The power is literally in your hands.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: California in crisis. Hospitals are running out of beds and equipment.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We're seeing a person every six seconds contract COVID-19 here in Los Angeles.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

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

BERMAN: Welcome to our viewers in the United States and all around the world. This is NEW DAY.

And it's Election Day. Polls open in Georgia.

[07:00:02]

These two Senate runoff races will determine control of the U.S. Senate. Democrats need to win both.