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At This Hour

CDC Says, More Than a Third of All U.S. Adults Fully Vaccinated; President Biden as the Nations' Consoler-in-Chief; Capitol Police Officer Allegedly Told Units to Only Monitor for Anti-Trump Protesters. Aired 11:30a-12p ET

Aired April 22, 2021 - 11:30   ET

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

KATE BOLDUAN, CNN NEWSROOM: White kid, Kyle Rittenhouse, walking right up to police during protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, which a huge gun strapped to his chest, hanging from his chest.

[11:35:09]

He had just shot people, though it's unclear if the people knew that at the time, but they let him walk on by in the midst of this. And the other side of this, we have video after video of black people with no guns at all doing far less dying. What is going on here?

SHON BARNES, CHIEF OF POLICE, MADISON, WISCONSIN: Absolutely. Kate, you know, I'm a black man in America who happens to be a police chief. And I certainly do not wear this uniform every day. And I also have a black son. I have friends and family members who are in policing. But it's important to note that that's the question that should keep every police leader and manager up at night.

Again, we need national standards on how we deal with people when they are non-compliant and/or they're in crisis or distress. Last Year, I had an opportunity to go to Selma, Alabama, because I wanted to learn more about the relationships between police and community. And myself and two other law enforcement professionals, one from Arlington, Texas, Tarrick McGuire, and one from Sacramento, California, (INAUDIBLE).

We had an opportunity to learn about Jimmie Lee Jackson and what happened on Bloody Sunday. And then we walked 54 miles from Selma to Montgomery.

Now, I know everyone can't do that. But I think police officers all over the country should find their own self-discovery so that they understand that, of course, everyone wants to live and survive a police encounter.

However, our number one -- our number one goal should always be the preservation of life, even if it means we have to back away or let someone go for the moment. The preservation of life has to be our number one goal as we move forward.

We are losing or have already lost the trust of many Americans both black, white, and other ethnicities. And so we have to regain that trust by changing the behaviors that you see every day. We have to do this immediately. We can no longer wait.

BOLDUAN: For the change to be enduring, it takes leaders. I'm looking at you, Chief. Thank you so much.

BARNES: Thank you.

BOLDUAN: Really appreciate your time.

Coming up for us, with more people getting vaccinated, there are more questions about what people can and cannot do at this point, like why are we still wearing mask outside.

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[11:35:00]

BOLDUAN: There is some good news of progress this morning in the nation's vaccine effort. The CDC says more than a third of all adults are now fully vaccinated. And President Biden is touting he is hitting a new high, more than 200 million doses administered since he took office.

But as more people get vaccinated, there are more questions about why guidelines are not changing fast enough for many people, really, not only on what is safe to do once you're fully vaccinated but what you can now stop doing as more people get the shot, like what about having to wear mask outside.

Here is what the White House COVID-19 adviser, Andy Slavitt, said about that on CNN yesterday.

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ANDY SLAVITT, SENIOR ADVISER TO WHITE HOUSE COVID-19 RESPONSE TEAM: I think they're in the process of putting together further guidance. They're not always going to be as fast as everyone wants them to be because they like to study the data and make sure that they're generally speaking not putting things out that they will have to take back. But I'm quite confident that over the next couple of weeks and months, those questions will be answered.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BOLDUAN: Joining me right now for more on this Dr. Monica Gandhi. She is professor of medicine at UCSF and the associate division chief of infectious diseases. Thank you for being here.

So that is Andy Slavitt's explanation for why guidelines haven't been updated with regard to this. Does that make sense to you?

DR. MONICA GANDHI, PROFESSOR OF MEDICINE, UCSF: Yes. I mean, I think definitely it's going take a little while. But the reason that I and other infectious disease doctors have been really thinking about taking off that outdoor masks first is because, in a way, outdoor masks were the least of our public health interventions that made sense. You know, really, if we think about the three COVID-19 interventions, the masking, distancing and ventilation and nothing is as good as it gets in terms of ventilation as being outside.

BOLDUAN: So I think this is interesting and also doubly interesting because back in April of 2020, you co-authored one of the first papers that called for universal masking. And so I'm curious what you've seen that is now changing your mind.

GANDHI: Yes. So, masking right now in the indoor setting is still going to be indicated until anyone who wants to get a shot can get a shot in the United States. But there is sort of a -- a lot of accumulating data about how low the risk is outside. For example, there is a study in Wuhan, China, that looked at 7,324 infections, really careful contact tracing and only one was connected to the outside.

There was another study, Ireland, just a couple weeks ago, over 232,000 infections in that country and, again, careful contact tracing, one in a thousand at that were traced to outside transmission.

[11:40:03]

And then lots of other data, University of Canterbury meta analysis, UCSF meta analysis, it shows the risk of outdoor transmission, just because you have that advantage of literally ventilation of the particles of the virus being dispersed in the air is so low that, in fact, the University of Canterbury's scoping review said, you should actually be encouraging people to be outside not with masks.

And so, actually, WHO never recommended masks outside when they put them together, their December 2020 guidelines, unless you are in packed spaces, like a rally, really close to each other, yelling, that's where we recommend masks outside.

BOLDUAN: So this is really important, because all along, the mantra, and I think it still should be, which is follow the science. And what I'm hearing you say is that the science is following us to a place of this isn't following the science anymore, because it is just -- it's more nuanced than that.

GANDHI: It's just more nuanced. And what you said is really key about this question of nuance, right? Because there has been a complicated relationship with masking in the United States, there just has. I have personally gotten many letters that I wrote about, for example, double masking and the advantages of that indoors.

And so when you have a complicated public health intervention, you want to follow the data sort of to a tee. And just like we've all seen, March 2020, we had to shut everything down. We didn't even want to surfaces. We were cleaning our groceries. Things happen because we didn't have enough data .We realize that surface transmission is not a thing and we shouldn't be disinfecting to this degree. We realize that masks were important. We didn't say that at the beginning. But with a lot of accumulating data, we realize they're important. And now the science is telling us outside this is just a virus that cannot spread outside readily. And that means even if we want to follow the science regardless of our vaccination status, we can already be lifting outdoor mask mandates.

We also kind of, you know, do this a lot. We sometimes have to change.

BOLDUAN: Well then this is -- I'm kind of -- what I'm wondering is, you know, if you look at how well or not well America has done in terms of following public health guidelines through this pandemic compared to other countries, is it just we can't really handle nuance?

GANDHI: See, I push back on that question of us not handling nuance, and this could be because I'm an HIV doctor. And we always say if this, then that. If two people are positive together, then do this. If you're one negative and one positive, do this.

So I think that that has been a public health question that maybe we cannot follow the guidelines if we put in more nuance tiered messaging. If you're vaccinated together, you don't have to wear a mask. If you're vaccinated and unvaccinated, do this.

But I actually think that doesn't give the American public credit enough and this is pretty simple. Carry a mask with you all the time. Absolutely, you have to go inside, grab that mask, put that back on. But it's pretty simple, people know when they're outside to say that when you're outside, that's when it's not necessary unless you're in packed circumstances, and inside, grab it and put it on. So I want to give credit to the American people and say we can do this.

BOLDUAN: And also, for me, it's like hope on the horizon. We're moving out of this. You can do some more normal things especially if you get vaccinated and (INAUDIBLE).

Doctor, fascinating stuff, thank you for coming on.

GANDHI: Thank you.

BOLDUAN: Coming up for us, friends have called Joe Biden's superpower, how the president has been forced though to become the nation's grief consoler so many times already.

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[11:45:00]

BOLDUAN: President Biden hasn't even hit the 100 day mark, yet in that relatively short time, he has again and again had to step into the role as the nation's grief consoler. He is no stranger to personal tragedy, of course, and he speaks candidly about that.

But it is remarkable how many times he has been forced to lean on that, draw from his own experience with grief in just these first few months. This week he called the family of George Floyd after his killer was convicted of murder.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOE BIDEN, U.S. PRESIDENT: I think of Gianna's, my dad is going to change the world. We're going to start to change it now.

You're an incredible family. I wish I was there to put my arms around you.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BOLDUAN: And earlier this month, it wasn't only his words but his gentle comfort with the children of fallen Capitol Police Officer Billy Evans during his memorial.

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BIDEN: The day will come when you have that memory and you smile before you bring a tear to your eyes, because I promise you it's going to come. Your son, your husband, your brother, your dad was a hero.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BOLDUAN: And also just before that, he was in Atlanta trying to comfort the grieving families of the mass shooting there.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BIDEN: I know they feel that there is a black hole in their chest and being sucked into and things will never get better but our prayers are with you. And I assure you, the one you lost will always be with you.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BOLDUAN: Joining me right now for more on this is Evan Osnos. He's a CNN Contributor, Staff Writer of The New Yorker and author of Joe Biden, the Life, the Run and What Matters Now.

Evan, Chris Coons has called this ability of Biden comfort and connect with people in their loss his superpower.

[11:50:00]

What do you call it?

EVAN OSNOS, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: Well, it is, in a way, reluctant super power, and it's one that he's come to really value in his life. When he got into politics, he didn't actually want to be known as somebody who had these personal appointments with grief. Look, he wanted to be known for his work on foreign policy or in Judiciary Committee.

It took him a while. He was young. And it took him a while to really understand that people were expecting something from him because they looked at him and they said you've been through this, you've survived it. And over the years, he sort of developed this set of habits in a way of talking, a kind of language of healing that he has used in private and now increasingly in public. I talk to people over the years who have had all kinds of experiences with him in which they have been through something terrible, and he says very practical things sometimes, things like, keep a pad and paper next to your bed because you will be able to mark off at the end of the day these small measures of progress as you begin to sort of fight your way back out of grief. It's that firsthand experience that, frankly, not a lot of presidents have had or at least have been willing to talk about and bring into the public conversation.

BOLDUAN: Evan, he's had to do this so many times, dozens and dozens of eulogies he's offered, any so many times in just a short presidency so far. I mean, does this weigh on him?

OSNOS: It does. I mean, he carries this stuff very close to the surface. As you've seen whether it was in his remarks to the family of Officer Evans at the Capitol, or when he talked in very personal terms, after all, I want to put my arms around you, as he said to the Floyd family. This is braided into his understanding what it means to be in public life.

And the hard thing to do, the thing he tries to do is to say to people, take this pain and make it -- to use the word that he uses a lot -- make it a source of purpose. And at one point when he was grieving over his son, Beau, he received a letter that had been written years ago by Joseph Kennedy, who, after all, buried four of his own children, who had said that when you are grieving, find a way to take that loss and do what it is that that person never could have done. And you hear them talking about that now with the death of George Floyd. Let's turn that into a legislative process and prevent these things from happening again.

BOLDUAN: Evan, do you think that this is so striking because he can speak to grief in such a personal way or is it because maybe it's both, that he's such a contrast from the president before him?

OSNOS: Well, clearly there's just a personal contrast with the person who came before him. And he was doing, this Joe Biden was already as a candidate. I remember last summer talking to him who after the George Floyd tape came out, and he said to me, look, I'll be honest with you, I'm embarrassed to say that I thought that you could extinguish hate and what I've discovered over the last few years, particularly in watching that video. He said, hate hides and it can come roaring back if somebody in power gives it oxygen.

And I think he was very aware on the degree in which the prior occupant of the White House didn't use the language of grief, didn't sort of inhabit that space with the public and Biden felt like that was something people were hungry for. And so he began to talk about it as a candidate and he talks about it now. But it's delicate. You can get it wrong and if you say things that feel as if you're being politically opportunistic or if you say something that's bland, like thoughts and prayers. People don't want that. What they want is real humanity in a moment like that.

BOLDUAN: You can question lots of things, you cannot question his sincerity in these horrible moments. We see that over and over again. Evan, thank you very much.

Coming up for us, CNN is not learning the Capitol Police officer allegedly ordered units to target only anti-Trump protesters during the Capitol riot. What he allegedly said is next.

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[11:55:00]

BOLDUAN: This morning, a new allegation against the U.S. Capitol Police following the January 6th riot that an officer directed his unit to only look for, quote, anti-Trump protesters.

CNN's Ryan Nobles is joining me now with more on this. Ryan, what more can you tell us about this?

RYAN NOBLES, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, Kate. This came up at a hearing at the House Administration Committee yesterday talking about the Capitol Police response to the insurrection on January 6th. Then it was the chair of that committee, Representative Zoe Lofgren of California, who referred to this transmission that was caught from Capitol Police to their officers that were on the ground that were responding to the growing protests.

And she said, it said, quote, attention all units on the field, we're not looking for any pro-Trump in the crowd, we're only looking for anti pro-Trump who want to start a fight.

And Lofgren suggested that that was not an appropriate way for the Capitol Police to be responding to this incident, given that the crowd was overwhelmingly people that were connected or supporters of the former president.

Now, Capitol Police did respond to this comment from Lofgren saying that this was part of the transmission that was early on in the day, around 8:00 in the morning. And what they were specifically looking for potential incidents, problems that could arise, which is the reason that they said to look for people that could be instigators, starting trouble with the overwhelmingly pro-Trump crowd.

Regardless, Kate, this is part of a growing issue that House Democrats in particular are concerned about that Capitol Police didn't take the threat from pro-Trump supporters enough. And that is what ultimately led to them overwhelming the Capitol and then creating that massive security breakdown.

[12:00:05]

So, Kate, this is just the beginning of a much longer conversation on this topic.

BOLDUAN: For sure. Ryan, thank you.