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New Day

U.K. Variant Could be more Deadly; Russians Protest Navalny's Arrest; Super Bowl Matchup Set; Pandemic Update from Around the World. Aired 6:30-7a ET

Aired January 25, 2021 - 06:30   ET

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

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[06:33:57]

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DR. ROCHELLE WALENSKY, CDC DIRECTOR: You know, I would say one of the biggest problems right now is, I can't tell you how much vaccine we have. And if I can't tell it to you, then I can't tell it to the governors and I can't tell it to the state health officials. If they don't know how much vaccine they're getting, not just this week, but next week and the week after, they can't plan.

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JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: That's pretty crazy, when the new CDC director in the Biden administration says she does not know many -- how many vaccines are available. As of this morning, nearly 22 million doses have been administered. More than 73,000 deaths have been reported in this month so far.

Joining us now, CNN medical analyst, Dr. Jonathan Reiner, he's a professor of medicine at George Washington University.

And, Doctor, the reason that this is so urgent, or one of the many reasons this is so urgent, is because of the new and I think rising concern about the new variants.

We have now heard leading infectious disease doctors, including Dr. Anthony Fauci last week at the White House, and then even yesterday, talking about the new variants in a different way.

[06:35:01]

Listen to what he says about the U.K. variant.

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DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, CHIEF MEDICAL ADVISER ON CORONAVIRUS TO PRESIDENT BIDEN: We need to assume now that what has been circulating dominantly in the U.K. does have a certain degree of increase in what we call virulence, namely the power of the virus to cause more damage, including death. (END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: So what does that mean for us here? If the U.K. variant -- it's certainly more transmissible, maybe more deadly. Then there's the South African variant, which more transmissible, maybe more deadly, and maybe resistant to some degree to the vaccines. That's a lot going on there.

DR. JONATHAN REINER, CNN MEDICAL ANALYST: Yes, that is a lot going on, John.

So, for the U.K. variant, we know that it's significantly more transmissible. And if it's more transmissible, more people are going to acquire the illness. And if more people are sick, more people are going to die, even if on a per person biological basis the virus isn't more virulent. And Dr. Fauci, this weekend, raises some concern that maybe it is. So we know that that variant and the South African variant do have the potential to cause more death in the United States.

The good news, you know, as we spoke about last week, there is now clear evidence that the peak has passed in the United States and cases are dropping rapidly. Yesterday, there were 143,000 cases reported in the United States. And even though the reporting on the weekends can be a little funky, other than Christmas, we haven't had that few a number of cases reported in a single day since December 1st. And hospitalizations are dropping by 2,000 to 3,000 patients per day. So that's all good news. So the virus seems to be beginning to noticeably wane in the United States, although the death rate still high.

So this creates a window of opportunity to suppress the virus even further, before the new variants can take hold. And the way to do that, besides all of the important measures, including social distancing and masking, is to vaccinate as many people as quickly as possible. And that's what we need to do. And hence Dr. Walensky's concern about how much vaccine we have.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: Well, let's drill down on that, Dr. Reiner, because why doesn't she, as the head of the CDC now, know how many vaccine -- what kind of vaccine supply we have and how many doses we have?

REINER: All right, so there are two components to that. One is, how much vaccine is out in the community and how many people are getting shots every day. And the CDC tracks that pretty well. And, as you mentioned, about 21 million people have gotten at least one shot. There's about 41 million doses have been distributed, which suggests that there are still 20 million ungiven doses in the community.

The bigger piece, though, is, how much vaccine is in the pipeline. "The New York Times" reported this week that the manufacturers, Moderna and Pfizer, now have the ability to distribute between 12 and 18 million doses of vaccine per week. If that's the case, we're really only administering half of what they are shipping. And it bears out by the excess in the community. And if we are only administering half of what they're shipping, we're not giving enough. So, you know, the president's goal of 100 million shots in a hundred

days is basically what we're doing now. It's not sufficient. We need to ramp that up maybe close to 2 million shots per day.

It would be the same as if the administration said that the goal of the economy should be to get the unemployment rate to about 6.7 percent. You'd say, gee, that's great, but that's where we are now. That's not a goal. We need to be more ambitious. Now is the opportunity to dramatically reduce the spread of this virus before those variants take hold in the United States.

BERMAN: Dr. Jonathan Reiner, thank you very much for being with us this morning.

REINER: My pleasure.

BERMAN: We're seeing widespread protests in Russia over the jailing of an opposition leader and now authorities there cracking down. We have a live report from the streets, next.

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[06:43:04]

CAMEROTA: Developing this morning, hundreds of protesters arrested in Russia for supporting opposition leader Alexey Navalny.

CNN's Frederik Pleitgen is live in Moscow with more.

What's happening, Fred?

FREDERIK PLEITGEN, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Hi there, Alisyn.

Well, the Russians are now lashing out at the U.S. over this, saying that the U.S., as they put it, quote, encouraged radicals in those protests that took place across Russia, especially on Saturday.

Now, what they're essentially saying is that a post that was released by the U.S. embassy saying that protests were going to take place in Saturday on a certain location and the U.S. embassy then encouraged U.S. nationals not to go to that area, the Russians are interpreting that as the U.S. meddling in Russia's affairs and encouraging, essentially, those protests.

Now, you're seeing some of that on the street. And I can tell you, I was down on the streets on Saturday here in Moscow. There was a very heavy-handed police presence there. Police very often using clubs, detaining a lot of people. In fact, according to one monitoring grouping, they've detained more than a thousand people in Moscow alone. But these protests, they were a lot bigger and a lot wider spread than anybody would have thought they would be. They were, obviously, calling for the release of Alexey Navalny, the Kremlin critic who came back here after being poisoned by Novichok was immediately detained upon arrival and they took place in cities from the far east through Siberia, where people protested, get this, at minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit all the way to here in Moscow, where those scenes that you're seeing right there happened on a very frequent basis.

And there are several things that stood out to us as we were there on the ground. First of all, there were a lot of young people at those protests. In fact, the organizers said that 40 percent of those who attended the protest, it was the first protest they had ever attended in their entire lives. And some of those people, this is something we haven't seen in a long time here in Russia, they actually came and they pushed back against police when police started charging them. So you do feel that there is a good bit of discontent here on the streets.

And while these protests were obviously aimed at trying to free Alexey Navalny, there were a lot of people and a lot of chants there calling on Vladimir Putin to go as well.

[06:45:06]

And certainly you can feel that the Russian authorities do believe that this could be quite a threat in the coming weeks, guys.

CAMEROTA: OK, Frederik, thank you very much for keeping us posted on what's happening there.

OK, in lighter news, the Super Bowl matchup is set. Some guy named Brady, I don't know if it's Greg Brady, Peter Brady or Bobby Brady, but he'll be there again.

BERMAN: You know what, Tom Brady won his first Super Bowl when "The Brady Bunch" was on TV!

CAMEROTA: The "Bleacher Report" is next.

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BERMAN: There's no human way to describe what is going on in the sports world. No statistics to measure what Tom Brady has managed to pull off. He is playing in his roughly 300th Super Bowl in a couple of weeks. I understand the Chiefs will also be there.

[06:50:00]

Andy Scholes, honestly, it's inexplicable what he's managed to do.

ANDY SCHOLES, CNN SPORTS CORRESPONDENT: Incredible. Incredible, right, John? He didn't even have an off-season to prepare with his new team, but yet what a surprise, Tom Brady is once again in the Super Bowl. This is going to be Brady's tenth Super Bowl in the past 20 years. The 43-year-old getting the Bucs to the big game in his first year with the team. And the Bucs now going to be the first team ever to play a Super Bowl in their home stadium.

And, Brady, he was playing in his record 14th conference championship game against the Packers yesterday, right before the half. Brady stunning Green Bay with a 49 yard touchdown strike to Scotty Miller. Brady, three touchdown passes in the game. The Bucs led 28-10 at one point. Packers, though, did make a comeback, but when faced with fourth and goal, down by 8 in the closing minute, head coach Matt LaFleur decides to kick a field goal instead of going for the tie. Brady and the Bucs get the ball back and they run out the clock to win the game 31-26.

And, afterwards, Brady going over to the stands, sharing a pretty special moment with his son, calling him down to get a nice victory hug. Then while getting on the plane, Brady and Gronk recreating their video from two years ago, playing the song, "Bad Boys for Life." Gronk now rocking NFC championship gear.

Up next for Brady and the Bucs, a super showdown with Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs. Like usual, the Chiefs falling behind against the Bills. They were down 9-0 before reeling off 21 unanswered points. Never looked back. Mahomes' three touchdowns in the 38-24 win.

The 25-year-old is going to be the youngest quarterback to ever start two Super Bowls. And the Chiefs look to become the first team to win back-to-back titles. It's, well, Brady and the Patriots did it back in 2005.

And, John, this is going to be the first ever Super Bowl matchup between the last two Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks. I mean you've got Brady, 43 years old, the greatest of all time, Mahomes, 25, the greatest right now. I mean you really couldn't have written it better than this.

BERMAN: It's amazing. And watching Tom Brady hug his son there. His son, by the way, is 36. No, I mean it's -- it's really -- it's unbelievable what's gone on here. I imagine -- what -- the Chiefs have to be favored in this game, yes?

SCHOLES: Yes, they're -- the Chiefs are three-point favorites right now heading into the game.

BERMAN: It will be an incredible game. But just -- just the fact that Brady got there is stunning.

Andy Scholes, thank you so much.

SCHOLES: Yes. All right.

BERMAN: So as of this morning, Israel has vaccinated more than a quarter of its population. How are they doing it so fast? We'll tell you, next.

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[06:56:30]

CAMEROTA: Mexico's president has tested positive for coronavirus. CNN has reporters around the globe covering all of the COVID developments for you.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) RAFAEL ROMO, CNN SENIOR LATIN AMERICAN AFFAIRS EDITOR: I'm Rafael Romo.

President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador confirmed the news on his Twitter account. He posted a couple of messages. The first one to confirm the diagnosis and the second one to say that he will keep an eye on the government's affairs from the national palace, the presidential mansion in Mexico. The president participated in a public event about government welfare programs Saturday in (INAUDIBLE) state, where he was seen without a mask. He spoke on the phone with President Joe Biden Friday, surrounded by his foreign minister, a former business adviser, and a president's office translator. No one was wearing a mask.

SCOTT MCLEAN, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: I'm Scott McLean in London, where the U.K.'s coronavirus death toll is nearing 100,000. And a number of COVID patients in the hospital is near its all-time high.

And it's not just seniors. About one in five patients is under 55. The good news is that almost 10 percent of the British public has gotten its first shot of the coronavirus vaccine, including three quarters of people over the age of 80.

But the British strategy of spacing out vaccine doses by 12 weeks instead of six is controversial. The idea is to give more people at least some level of protection rather than giving some people full protection and many others none at all. British doctors, though, are urging the government to scrap that strategy over fears that the vaccine won't be as effective with that much time between doses. The U.K., right now, is dealing with a mutated strain of the virus, which spreads more easily. And now it may also be more deadly. Though the government says there's still a lot of uncertainty around that data.

Either way, the health secretary says the government is a long, long way from easing lockdown restrictions.

SAM KILEY, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: I'm Sam Kiley in Jerusalem, where the government of Benjamin Netanyahu has just announced that it is banning all international air carriers flying into and out of Israel. There will be very limited flights allowed by national carriers. This is against a background of a successful national vaccination campaign, about 25 percent of the country has had its first -- well, their first inoculation. But the problem is that, at the same time, the country seems to be unable to get a grip, particularly on the new strains of the coronavirus.

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CAMEROTA: Our thanks to our correspondents.

And NEW DAY continues right now.

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UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The White House is trying to drum up bipartisan support for President Biden's COVID relief package.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Before we were to pass a new program, we need to understand where the money is going, are these two individuals or to entities that really need the help.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's history in the making once again as Capitol Hill prepares for the second Donald Trump impeachment trial.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I think it's a moot point because I think right now Donald Trump is no longer the president.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: For months he was riling up his supporters by convincing them that the election was stolen and that they could do something if they came to this rally and then joined him and stormed the Capitol.

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ANNOUNCER: 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.

So where are we this morning with economic relief for millions of struggling Americans? White House officials held a conference call with a bipartisan group of senators on Sunday to discuss President Biden's $1.9 trillion relief plan.

[07:00:02]

But there's already pushback. Senators on both sides of the aisle think that Democrats need to explain more about how.