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New Day

Critical Week for Relief Package; Raskin Leads Impeachment Trial; South Africa Halts Vaccine; Snow on the Way And Bitter Cold All Week. Aired 6:30-7a ET

Aired February 08, 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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[06:34:01]

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: A critical week for President Biden's $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package. This is the week a lot of the work will be done in Congress behind closed doors. And we are learning new details about what's going on inside this deal.

CNN's Arlette Saenz live in Wilmington, Delaware, with the very latest.

Arlette.

ARLETTE SAENZ, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, John.

Well, with the Senate set to turn its focus to that impeachment trial into former President Trump, President Biden is keeping his focus on the pandemic and that COVID relief package, as he is entering a critical stretch to turn that package into reality.

You've heard the president indicate that he is willing to go it alone with or without Republican support. And House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said she would like to get a bill on the floor of the House within two weeks.

And what you are about to see in this coming week is just how quickly Democrats are working to put this package together.

Now, one key element of this proposal will be introduced a little bit later today.

[06:35:01]

And that is the child tax credit. This legislation that will be introduced would provide $3,600 for children under the age of six and then $3,000 for those between the ages of six and 17. These checks would be going out to American families around the summer and would be provided to those single parents earning $75,000 and couples earning $150,000.

And this is a measure, an element of the measure, that could get some bipartisan support. You saw Senator Mitt Romney, a Republican, last week, talking about his own type of bill introducing this type of credit.

Now, President Biden is waking up this morning here at his home in Wilmington, Delaware. He will be returning to the White House in just a short while. And later today, he will virtually tour a vaccination center at an NFL stadium out in Glendale, Arizona. A White House official tells me that they are intent on keeping the focus on the pandemic and COVID relief this week, and the president's engagement will include business leaders, as well as mayors and governors, and that is on top of the ongoing engagement he's had with Democratic and Republican lawmakers up on Capitol Hill as he is trying to push this package over the finish line, which is going to be an early test of his presidency.

John.

BERMAN: It was interesting to see that PSA, right before the Super Bowl game last night. Clearly, that is where the president wants the focus to be is on the pandemic and pandemic relief.

Arlette Saenz in Wilmington, please keep us posted.

Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin leading the impeachment trial against the former president while he is dealing with unimaginable tragedy at home. That's next.

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[06:40:39]

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: The historic second impeachment trial against former President Trump begins tomorrow. Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin will lead the case to try to convict Trump for inciting the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

For Raskin, this trial is personal.

Sunlen Serfaty has more.

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SEN. PATRICK LEAHY (D-VT): The managers on the part of the House will be received and escorted to the well of the Senate.

SUNLEN SERFATY, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice over): It is his most high-profile moment yet.

REP. JAMIE RASKIN (D-MD): Donald John Trump thus warrants impeachment and trial.

SERFATY: Congressman Jamie Raskin, the lead impeachment manager, tasked with prosecuting the case against former President Donald Trump.

RASKIN: Removal from office and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States.

SERFATY: It's a role that Raskin has been preparing for his entire career. Before coming to Congress in 2016, he was a constitutional law professor for more than two decades. It was for that reason he was chosen by Speaker Pelosi to write the article of impeachment against Donald Trump for incitement of insurrection.

RASKIN: She wanted me to do because she knows that I've devoted my life to the Constitution.

SERFATY: But as he takes on the most consequential moment of his professional career, he is battling a horrible personal tragedy at home. On New Year's Eve, his 25-year-old son, Tommy, whom he later said had been suffering for years with depression, died by suicide. His father revealing he left his family a note saying, please forgive me. My illness won today. Please look after each other, the animals, and the global poor for me. All my love, Tommy.

RASKIN: That was the last act in a life that dazzled anybody who came into contact with Tommy.

SERFATY: One day after he laid his son to rest --

RESKIN: Thank you again.

SERFATY: A mere minutes after his colleagues honored him with a moving standing ovation, bangs were heard at the doors of the House floor and trauma struck again.

Raskin had his daughter and son-in-law with him during the now infamous day at the Capitol. As mobs tried to take the Capitol building, his chief of staff barricaded the door with chairs, put his family under a desk and armed herself with a flat iron. Raskin said, I asked her to protect them with her life, and she did.

Friends and colleagues say that the pair of tragedies to a nation and to his family have only fueled his purpose of the moment.

RASKIN: You know, I'm not going to lose my son at the end of 2020 and lose my country and my republic in 2021. It's not going to happen.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

SERFATY: And Jamie Raskin may not have been a household name before this moment, but very likely he will be now with the start of the impeachment trial up here on Capitol Hill this week. He is, of course, still very much a grieving father, Alisyn. And he says this week he will be carrying his son with him in his heart.

Alisyn.

CAMEROTA: Oh, my gosh, the loss is profound there, as you've captured in the piece. Thank you, Sunlen, for all of that reporting.

SERFATY: Yes.

CAMEROTA: Now to coronavirus.

South Africa is suspending the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine after clinical trials shows it is not effective against the new variant. What does this mean for the vaccines in the U.S.? That's next.

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[06:47:52]

BERMAN: Developing this morning, South Africa is halting the rollout of the AstraZeneca vaccine after researchers found it offers only minimal, if any, protection against the strain first identified in that country. The announcement comes as a new study finds that the variant predominant in the United Kingdom is already spreading rapidly across the United States.

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

Dr. Reiner, thanks for being with us.

What's important about this finding out of South Africa? It was a pretty rash decision or a bold decision to stop administering it altogether. But why is it of such concern if that vaccine isn't having an effect there?

DR. JONATHAN REINER, CNN MEDICAL ANALYST: Well, about 95 percent of the cases in South Africa are of that variant. And if they're going to roll out a vaccine, they want to make sure that it has efficacy.

We know that the Moderna and the Pfizer vaccines and the Johnson & Johnson vaccines all retain efficacy, albeit at a somewhat reduced level compared to the original wild type of virus. But the AstraZeneca vaccine in a small study of only 2,000 people did not appear to be effective at preventing mild or moderate disease.

There's a problem with that study, though, in that it was really small. You know, 2,000 people enrolled in that study, the large trials that were used by the FDA to approve the vaccines in the United States each enrolled about 40,000 patients each. There really weren't a sufficient number of patients with severe disease to understand whether the AstraZeneca vaccine is effective against severe disease, against the South African variant. But there is concern that that vaccine just may not have enough efficacy to warrant implementation in South Africa.

CAMEROTA: But I'm still a little confused about why South Africa would pause it because if the AstraZeneca vaccine prevents hospitalization and death, isn't that our goal? I mean, yes, it would be nice if it also prevented mild-to-moderate disease, but we're trying to stay out of the hospital and trying to prevent dying. So why pause it?

REINER: Absolutely.

[06:50:00]

I think they're concerned about its overall efficacy with that -- with that variant.

But, you're right, the -- if you look at all of the vaccines that have been launched in the United States, plus the Johnson & Johnson and the Novavax, in none of those trials have any patient who has received a vaccine been hospitalized or died. Those vaccines are spectacularly effective at preventing what we're really trying to do, as you say, Alisyn, to prevent people from dying or getting so sick they need to be hospitalized. I think there is concern in South Africa whether the AstraZeneca vaccine is robust enough to have that effect. But that 2,000-patient study isn't sufficient to answer that question.

BERMAN: Yes. The problem is they just don't know in terms of hospitalizations and deaths.

REINER: Right.

BERMAN: With that study because it was young people who aren't susceptible to hospitalizations and deaths or as susceptible anyway and they may be trying to figure that out.

As we look to the United States and we learn that the variant that was predominant in the United Kingdom is spreading really quickly here. I mean it's doubling every week or so in this country.

What does that mean for the effort to get out ahead of it here, Dr. Reiner?

REINER: Well, first of all, what I would stress is that things look so much better in the United States overall than things did six weeks ago. If you look yesterday, the COVID tracking project reported that the U.S. had 96,000 new cases, which is the first time since December or actually since November that the U.S. has reported less than 100,000 new cases in a day. So cases are dropping rapidly in the United States. Hospitalizations are dropping rapidly. But the new variants, particularly the U.K. variant, is becoming more common when we isolate viruses.

So we're in a race. We need to continue to do what we're doing now. We need to get more people to mask up. And, most importantly, we need to get shots into arms. Saturday was a remarkable day. We had 1.8 million vaccines administered in the United States. If we can do that every single day, than we'll stay ahead of this. But the trends right now in the United States in terms of illness look great, but we are watching very closely these variants because they are much more transmissible.

CAMEROTA: The reason that I am still anxious about it is because when we talk to Michael Osterholm, he's the person who has, I would say, probably the gloomiest outlook and he has warned us that we're sort of in the calm before the storm. So while the graphic that we showed of cases coming down is so impressive and comforting to look at, he thinks that with the variants we're going to see it tick up again pretty steeply.

Do you agree with that?

REINER: You know, I don't know. What I do know is that the precautions that can prevent transmission with the original wild type virus work against the U.K. variant. So, you know, the U.S. actually has, you know, relative to a few months ago, more people wearing masks now most of the time. If we can increase that, and this has been an initial goal of the Biden administration, to increase mask wearing for the first 100 days, if we can do that, we can prevent that virus from spreading in the United States, as well. Our mitigation methods work against that U.K. variant, we just need to do it.

BERMAN: Masks make a big difference.

Dr. Reiner, thanks, as always, for getting up for us. Really appreciate it.

REINER: My pleasure.

BERMAN: This morning, millions of Americans digging out from snow. More on the way. Seriously. Like, a lot, over the next few days. The forecast, next.

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[06:57:47]

CAMEROTA: Another round of snow and bitter cold is on the way after a fast-moving snowstorm blanketed the northeast. It wasn't that fast moving.

CNN meteorologist Jennifer Gray has our forecast.

It's going to be a cold, snowy week, right?

JENNIFER GRAY, AMS METEOROLOGIST: It really is. We're sort of stuck in this pattern where we're going to have these systems roll through every couple of days. So do expect a shot of snow the beginning part of the week, another one again at the end of the week, and so on. So this is going to be the pattern over the next couple of weeks, most likely.

So this weather is brought to you by O'Keefe's, guaranteed relief for extremely dry, cracked skin.

Here's a look at those very, very cold temperatures, as you were mentioning. Temperatures below 32, 79 percent of the country this morning will be waking up at freezing or below. That's 284 million people. So, yes, everyone is feeling the chill, pretty much.

So that very cold air is going to continue to work its way down to the south. This is for much of the week. So these temperatures aren't going anywhere. We are going to feel that arctic air. We're also going to see the snow. And that's going to impact the mid-Atlantic, the northeast in the next couple of days. This is today and tomorrow. That's going to move out and then you can see across the Mississippi River Valley the next system already trying to get together.

Now, this one, unfortunately, has a huge ice component. So that's going to be incredibly dangerous for travel. Of course, the snow accumulation across the Ohio Valley, the northeast. Not a whole lot, especially across the Ohio Valley. We're going to see anywhere from 2 to 4 inches, at most. We could see a little bit higher across the interior sections of the northeast, but we are going to see anywhere from, say 4 to 6 inches. That's going to be outside of the big cities, a little bit to the west.

SO here is the ice accumulation. We could see half an inch to three quarters of an inch of ice across this area, and that is going to bring areas to a standstill as far as travel goes.

CAMEROTA: Absolutely. Jennifer, thank you very much for the warning.

And NEW DAY continues right now.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I think it's clearly constitutional to conduct a Senate trial. My job is going to be to listen to both sides of this and make a decision.

[07:00:01]

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Should he be convicted in an impeachment trial, and the answer is no.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Somebody who has provoked an attack.