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Biden Planning $250 Million Vaccine Education Campaign; More Than 4,000 Migrant Children in Border Patrol Custody. Aired 7-7:30a ET

Aired March 15, 2021 - 07:00   ET

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


[07:00:00]

JOHN BERMAN, CNN NEW DAY: 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, great to see you here.

ERICA HILL, CNN NEW DAY: Always a pleasure.

BERMAN: So I have some good news, I mean, genuinely really fantastic news. Nearly 6 million doses of the coronavirus vaccine in to arms reported this weekend. The average in the U.S. is no more than 2 million a day. Those are great numbers.

This morning, more than 11 percent of the country has been fully vaccinated and we have new CNN reporting releasing right now, right now. The Biden administration launching a $250 million media blitz targeting the vaccine hesitancy. So, what's the goal here? What's the concern? That coming up.

HILL: Meantime, as more states reopen, health experts a warning that complacency could trigger another deadly surge. And they're very concerned about numbers plateauing. They don't want to see any more scenes like this, large crowds hitting Miami Beach, maskless, as you see there, in the streets, other locations as well, seeing influx of people for spring break.

But for more details, let's bring in Senior Medical Correspondent Elizabeth Cohen. Good morning.

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN SENIOR MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Erica. This is a large campaign, a quarter of a billion dollars. Let's take a look at where that money is going to go. It's going to go largely to T.V., radio, billboard print and digital ads. There will be a podcast by a well-known figure. We don't know who that is. And while it would talk about masking, social distancing and staying away from crowds, it will focus on promoting vaccination.

And they're going to really try to focus that on promoting vaccination to protect your family, to protect your community. They found that that kind of messaging resonated well with people.

Now, you might wonder, gosh, so many people are scrambling to get a vaccine, do we really need to be promoting it? Well, first of all, they're going to time this to when there's enough vaccine out there that they won't create -- unless there's more demand than can be handled. But there are people who do need to hear this message. There are people out there hesitant or even adamant about not getting the vaccine. Let's take a look at how those numbers break down.

When we did a CNN poll March 3rd through 8th, we asked the question, who will not try to get vaccinated. And the answer was Democrats, only 7 percent said they will not try to get vaccinated, independents, 32 percent of them said they will not try to get vaccinated, and Republicans, nearly half, 46 percent. So, as you can see, this campaign, well, they have their work cut out for them. Erica?

HILL: So, Elizabeth, in terms of the campaign, especially looking at those polling numbers, do we know if there are specific plans to encourage Republicans, and specifically, I would say, Trump supporters as well to get vaccinated because we know of that hesitancy there?

COHEN: You know, Erica, I was speaking with a marketing executive who is involved in this campaign. And what they had to say was, look, we recognize different groups need different messages. Now, this executive didn't talk about this, but, in general, there is this sense that, hey, if leading Republicans would come out and say, I got the vaccine, that could have some meaning.

Even though Donald Trump lost the election, there are still people who really do listen to him. He did get vaccinated, but he has not come out and talked about it. Dr. Anthony Fauci recently had something to say about that.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ALLERGY AND INFECTIOUS DISEASES: He's a very widely popular person among Republicans. If he came out and said, go and get vaccinated, it's really important for your health, the health of your family and the health of the country, it seems absolutely inevitable that the vast majority of people who are his close followers would listen to him.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COHEN: So I think there is hope that Trump and other leading Republicans will come out and say, yes, I got the shot. Erica?

HILL: We will be watching for that. Elizabeth, thank you. I appreciate the reporting.

BERMAN: All right. joining us now, CNN Political Analyst David Gregory and CNN Medical Analyst Dr. Leana Wen.

David, I'm going to start with you because this is a political issue. It shouldn't be. I mean, if there's one thing that shouldn't be a political issue, it's this. But you can see how political this is. NPR just asked in a poll if a vaccine for the coronavirus is made available to you, will you choose to be vaccinated? And those who supported Trump in 2020, 47 percent say no. And Republican men, it's 49 percent no. So why doesn't the former president get in the game here?

[07:05:00]

What's the possible explanation for his hesitancy to promote the vaccination when he got one in January?

DAVID GREGORY, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, that's what I got hung up on. He did get vaccinated. He did after having the virus. So he certainly felt it was good enough for him and a necessary step for him to take particularly at his age and his vulnerability because he wouldn't necessarily be immune, although it would be rare for him to be re-infected with one of these variants. So I don't understand this. There's so much we don't understand about the former president. But he could have a real impact.

I think you're right. What's sad is that the politics around vaccine is not really so much about anti-vaccine sentiment as it is, oh, is this thing really still that serious, or is it just, in effect, over? I think what's incumbent upon the administration is to try to appeal to former President Trump and maybe allies of his who could put some pressure on him or those who are like-minded who could begin to spread that word so that more and more Republican, particularly Republican men, would get over this concern or this hesitancy.

HILL: Dr. Wen, I know I've heard you talked a lot over the last couple of weeks about, as there is messaging around the vaccine, essentially tying it to the incentives, what the vaccine allows you to do. And it's more than just hugging your grandchildren, which is amazing, as we know, but how much do you think, again, with this marketing campaign coming up? If they're tailoring that message to what you can do in terms of businesses reopening, in terms of sending your kids back to school and really targeting perhaps some of the people who are hesitant in areas where we know there's a push to reopen, how effective do you think that could be?

DR. LEANA WEN, CNN MEDICAL ANALYST: Well, I think it would be very effective because we have to see vaccine hesitancy not as a monolith. Yes, there are some people with very specific concerns and, of course, for those individuals, we need to approach them with compassion and address their specific concern. For example, I hear from patients about how they may think that the vaccine may causes coronavirus. And addressing that concern is saying there is not live virus of the vaccine. You're not going to get coronavirus from the vaccine. It's something that protects you from it.

Specific concerns do have to be addressed, but I also think that there are a lot of people who, for lack of a better words, it is complacency. It's people who say, I don't know how serious coronavirus is, I'm not sure that I want to get vaccine, it's going to take a long time to get and I have to wait in line. And I think for these individuals making clear that a vaccine is your ticket back to pre- pandemic life, I think that kind of message is really important.

Of course, we hope that people will answer to the message of it protects you, it protects your family, it protects your loved ones, but I think there are others who need to see a very specific incentive in it for themselves, and that's the kind of carrot that we can give people by making sure, for example, that we say, hey, you can now go to the theater, you can go to restaurants safely if you get the vaccine. And I think that kind of messaging of what's in it for you needs to be made clear in the Biden campaign as well.

BERMAN: Dr. Wen, I want to ask you about something important that Dr. Fauci was asked this weekend, and it has a lot to do with whether or how schools will be open going forward. And this is that the CDC is looking at data about whether or not people who are masked, and that's key, can safely be within three feet of each other not six feet of each other. Listen to this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ALLERGY AND INFECTIOUS DISEASES: The CDC is very well aware the data we are accumulating making it look more like three feet are okay under certain circumstances. They're analyzing that, and I can assure you, within a reasonable period of time, quite reasonable, they will be giving guidelines according to the data that they have.

It won't be very long. I promise you.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: Look, I know that school districts, including my own school district, my kid's school district, this is a big deal. Because if you can be within three feet safely masked, you can do a lot of different things in school.

WEN: That's right, John. And I think also, especially coming into the fall, we need to be looking at three feet as the goal. Because, otherwise, we're not going to get most schools, or in fall, I hope we can get all schools open full-time, but we can't do that if we still have to keep to the six-foot rule.

I think what the CDC needs to do now is to also look at vaccination as the additional layer of protection. So, right now, we have all these other layers that the CDC says, masking, distancing, et cetera, what happens if you put vaccination in there as well? So, for example, if you say all the teachers and staff are vaccinated or even if the parents and caregivers, if they can achieve a certain level of vaccination in that population, are you then able to say, with masking and maybe with testing, can you replace the six- foot rule and replace it with three feet instead?

I think we need to look at the different layers of mitigation and also see which layer can replace others in getting schools back safely.

[07:10:00]

HILL: I mean, we've come back to this so many times, what reopening schools can do in terms of further reopening, sort of the rest of the businesses, the rest of society, in many ways, that is still dealing with all of these. So, David, it also comes back to the messaging and I think the sort of patience level or a lack thereof that we're seeing across the country.

We talk a lot, David, about the race between the variants in the virus. I wonder if there's also a race in many ways between the patience that people have, right, and whether we're doing the right messaging to let them know, just as Dr. Wen said, when we have all these things place, the world reopens.

GREGORY: But some of this is happening already. I mean, when Dr. Fauci says, well, by July 4th, we're going to look like we're on pace to have a small gathering in your backyard. The truth is people will do a lot more than that and public health officials understand that. Once they open that door, it's going to swing open wider than even they might be comfortable with at that point.

And schools are another example. If I look at where my kids are, that's three different schools, slightly different approaches, their testing regimen and their ability to contact trace have gotten a lot better. That should be enough because we haven't had widespread outbreaks, and even public schools as well. Getting closer with the proper PPE, the testing regimen, that should be enough. We're not seeing widespread outbreaks, and that's what the science has shown.

And that step of getting kids back into class is so critically important, because even where they are in a hybrid situation, in smaller schools, you're talking about maybe one or two kids in a classroom. We're not getting back to the actual benefits of in-person education. We're losing more and more grounds. So that patience level, I think, is done.

BERMAN: Dr. Wen, was I wrong to be elated when I saw that there were more than 3,000 vaccinations reported Saturday morning, nearly 3 million on Sunday morning? A lot of shots are going into arms. It just seems that this is really accelerating and we are getting to the point where it won't be about supply or even logistics, but it will be about just simply willingness to get the vaccine.

WEN: That's right. For so long, we've been talking about how demand has been so much higher than supply, but I think that that's going to catch up soon. And credit to the Biden for what they've been doing, because there are three major barriers to achieving herd immunity. That's supply, the speed of distribution and then vaccine acceptance. We are soon going to have enough supply by the end of May for every adult American to be vaccinated.

By May 1st, the Biden team is now saying we can have open season, eligibility open for everyone because distribution has ramped up so much. And I think that's why we really need to focus on this other piece of accepting vaccines. And, again, it's a matter of education, but it's also a matter of making vaccines more accessible. We want to make getting a vaccine the easy choice.

And so I think what we need to do next is not having it be available at mass vaccination sites but doing vaccines also at pharmacies, at primary care doctor's offices, in churches, in schools, in businesses, really making it easy for people to say, yes, this is something I want to do, but I'm not able to take off from work or wait for many hours in line. I want to do this because this protects everyone around me and it's a ticket back to the life that I wanted previous to the pandemic.

BERMAN: Dr. Wen, David Gregory, thank you both very much for being with us this morning.

GREGORY: Thanks.

HILL: CNN video capturing migrant families making the dangerous journey across the southern border. So how is the government now dealing with this surge in migrants, particularly this dramatic surge when it comes to children?

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[07:15:00]

HILL: Developing this morning, the number of unaccompanied children in the custody of Border Patrol agents is now more than 4,000. Keep in mind at the peak of the 2019 border crisis, that number was just 2,600. FEMA will now assist the government to shelter and transfer children.

Over the weekend, our CNN crews witnessed migrant families crossing the Rio Grande from Mexico into Texas.

CNN's Priscilla Alvarez is live in Washington for us this morning with more. Priscilla, good morning.

PRISCILLA ALVAREZ, CNN IMMIGRATION REPORTER: Good morning, Erica. FEMA here is helping move unaccompanied children from Border Patrol custody to shelters that are more appropriate for them. As you mentioned, we now know there are more than 4,000 children in Border Patrol custody. That is a number that is climbing almost daily.

And it underscores the challenge that the Biden administration is facing, which is that there are more children crossing the U.S./Mexico border alone than there is shelter capacity to accommodate that. So, FEMA being tapped by the Homeland Security secretary to try and move that process along quickly to get them out of facilities and into shelters where they should be.

We should also note that FEMA has been involved before when we've seen surges on the U.S./Mexico border, in this case, helping move those kids out of Border Patrol facilities. John?

BERMAN: All right. Priscilla, thank you very much for being with us this morning.

Joining us now, Elizabeth Neumann, she's the former assistant secretary of Homeland Security in the Trump administration and the director of the Republican Accountability Project. Elizabeth, thanks so much for being with us.

You've been on the inside of Homeland Security and seen the immigration situation up close. What are the right considerations this morning? What questions should we be asking this morning?

ELIZABETH NEUMANN, FORMER ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF HOMELAND SECURITY: Thanks for having me, John. And, look, this is really a challenging situation on the border, but it's also one that's been with us for well over a decade. And I think that's what I find most aggravating about the current dialogue that some of the representatives on the Sunday morning talk shows yesterday are trying to turn this into a political issue.

These are kids. These are kids that are fleeing horrible situations in Central American countries. These are Kids that think that there is a chance for a better life and escaping violence.

[07:20:01]

And we need to focus on addressing both the immediate challenge, which is, by the way, not going away, but we need to actually have our congressmen and women do their job and legislate. There have been efforts since 2006 to try to do immigration reform and we never seem to be able to do it. It's been 15 years. It's time to actually pass commonsense, smart, bipartisan reforms. And until we do, this problem doesn't go away regardless of the administration.

And I can say firsthand having served in the Trump administration, deterrents through the way they were trying to do it, it didn't work. We still had surges, we still had people amassing on the border in 2020 during the pandemic when the border was shut down. It's not something that the executive branch can do alone. We need Congress to act.

BERMAN: Just so people know, the one policy that has been changed in terms of the border is that unaccompanied minors are now being let in. They were not before. Now they are. That is what the specific change is. It isn't a giant epic change as it were or not is being portrayed by some people, but there are messages that are being exploited by cartels. How so?

NEUMANN: So, we do have a big problem. This is where you have to look at underlying root causes. You do have cartels, that this is a huge moneymaker for them. It used to be drugs. Now it's smuggling humans. And what they do is they will latch onto any one change, which there was this change where they started admitting children for asylum claims at the start of the Biden administration.

But the cartels were already advertising last fall that changes were afoot, that the border was going to be reopened because, of course, it was the only reason we saw numbers drop in 2020 was because of the ability of the Trump administration to use the public health law, title 22, to be able to shut down the border. So that lost the cartel's money. And starting in the fall, they started amp up, like, hey, the pandemic is starting to go away, the election might change things. And so they have been advertising that they can get their people -- get you in, and they make money off of this.

So in order for us to change the dynamic, it's a very complex mix of law enforcement actions, addressing the transactional criminal organizations that are perpetuating this problem, it's the Central American countries that need assistance both from an economic perspective as well as making sure that it's a safe country -- safe set of countries that people want to live in so they don't feel like they have to escape someplace else just to survive.

So it's very complex. I'm not suggesting that any one administration has it all wrong or all right. It's just that it's really frustrating, after 15 years, to see politicians using this as a war against each other instead of rolling up their sleeves and doing the hard work of legislating, which is what many executive branch officials have been asking for 15 years now.

BERMAN: I'm going to ask you about something else, and this has to do with the siege in the Capitol, the insurrection there on January fth. Ron Johnson has this statement, and I want to play for you and ask you about a specific part of it. Listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. RON JOHNSON (R-WI): I knew those are people that loved this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break a law, and so I wasn't concerned.

Now, had the tables been turned, and Joe, this could get me in trouble. Had the tables been turned and President Trump won the election and those were tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and Antifa protesters, I might have been a little concerned.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: Now, if possible, I want to leave aside Ron Johnson's racism there, the idea that he's not scared by white people, largely white people saying they want to overthrow the government but black people seem to scare him, the Black Lives Matter movement seems to scare him. Leave that aside for a moment, even the fact that he continues to perpetuate the big lie in general, that the insurrection did happen the way that everyone saw it happened.

But he identified, which you've actually pointed to as a real failure in national security, which has been that the national security apparatus looked a lot of the people who were involved on that January 6th leading up to that, and they, for whatever reason, did not see it as a threat. How do you explain that?

NEUMANN: Yes. Again, this is a rather complex situation. It's not any one specific thing but I do think one factor that led to January 6th, is that you had these same groups show up in November and December, had protests that had a little bit spillover violence, usually at night, usually a protest-counterprotest kind of interaction, but it was nothing to the level of what we saw January 6th.

[07:25:15]

So I think that created some complacency.

But I also think that there is just an element of people in the crowd that were showing up on January 6th are people that law enforcement know from their home communities, from the places they grew up, from their high schools, they know people like this. They know people that get agitated about politics, that were very diehard MAGA. And it's really easy when we think that we know a type of person to imagine that they could ever cross the line and do something violent.

So I think there's just this built-in unconscious bias, if you will, that because you think you know them and, yes, they can get a little rowdy at the bar and they're the friend that you have to kind of make sure you drag away before things get too tense and fists might get thrown. I think they overassumed that this was just going to be the same old same old, and these are people that they knew.

And I think that's work that we need to do in the national security community to better understand the nature of these threats. I mean, we clearly have not taken the white supremacist violent extremist threat very seriously, but there's a lot of misunderstanding about that threat that probably also fed into this complacency.

BERMAN: I have to let you go, we're out of time. But to put a fine point on it, had it been largely minority individuals who either marched and/or were in the intelligence fear popped up at the radar beforehand, it would have been handled differently.

NEUMANN: Absolutely. There is no way to watch what happened on January 6th compared to what happened in Lafayette Square about six months earlier and not see that we have a bias problem in the way that we police and the way we secure our country, and we've got to address that.

BERMAN: Maybe even legislate. See, Ron Johnson. Elizabeth Neumann, thank you very much for being with us this morning. I appreciate it.

So, Americans suddenly traveling in numbers not seen since the pandemic began. Does the risk outweigh the reward here? We have a live report, next.

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