Return to Transcripts main page

The Lead with Jake Tapper

Chinese Documents Show Early Mishandling of COVID-19; COVID-19 Pandemic Surging; Iran: Remote-Controlled Machine Gun, Self-Detonating Car Used in Assassination. Aired 4:30-5p ET

Aired November 30, 2020 - 16:30   ET

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

[16:30:44]

JAKE TAPPER, CNN HOST: In our health lead today, a staggering 4.3 million coronavirus cases this month in just the United States, that's almost the combined total of the last three months.

And another record, 93,000 people are currently hospitalized in the U.S. with coronavirus.

As CNN's Nick Watt reports, with huge spikes in travel for the Thanksgiving holiday, the U.S. could be on the brink of yet another surge on top of this already record-breaking surge.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

NICK WATT, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): This sign of strange times. The Denver Broncos just played a wide receiver at quarterback. One regular Q.B. has COVID, three more in quarantine.

DR. ASHISH JHA, DEAN, BROWN UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH: We are nearing almost 200,000 infections a day. I expect we're going to cross that at some point.

WATT: Soon, maybe fueled by Thanksgiving, Sunday was the busiest air travel day since the pandemic began.

JHA: We won't really know the impact of that for at least another five or seven days, because that's just the dynamics of this virus.

WATT: So many people now tired, bored, sick of this.

MELISSA CHEN, STUDENT: Expecting people to stay at home for 14 days is quite excessive. I mean, I understand the logic behind it.

WATT: Here's the logic, 15 members of this one Texan family all sick after one birthday party.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Now I'm in the hospital and can't see my family.

WATT: More than 93,000 Americans in that same boat, in the hospital, the highest that number has ever been. In November alone, 4.25 million Americans were infected. That's equivalent to the entire populations of Montana, Vermont, Wyoming and New Mexico put together; 42 states are now above a key threshold.

More than 5 percent of tests are coming back positive. This is what exponential spread of an uncontrolled virus looks like, the U.S. average daily death toll now approaching 1,500.

DR. WILLIAM HASELTINE, INFECTIOUS DISEASE EXPERT: We are in it, and we're not at the end of it. I think, by the end of this wave, we will have many more Americans die than died in World War II.

WATT: That's the very bad news. Today, there's also that very good news. Moderna's potential vaccine is, they say, 100 percent effective at preventing severe cases of COVID-19. And, next week, an FDA committee meets to assess Pfizer's offering: Does it work? Is it safe?

ADM. BRETT GIROIR, U.S. ASSISTANT SECRETARY FOR HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES: We could be looking at approval within days after that. Moderna is basically one week behind that. We could be seeing both of these vaccines out and getting into people's arms before Christmas.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

WATT: Now, as of this morning, across Los Angeles County, the playgrounds are all closed. And we have been told we shouldn't mix with anyone outside our immediate household for nearly the next three weeks.

We have also, Jake, just heard from the governor of California. He said he is considering measures, including a stay-home order. He calls that drastic. But current modeling suggests that ICU capacity in California could run out Christmas Eve -- Jake.

TAPPER: All right, Nick Watt in California, thanks so much.

One emergency physician in Los Angeles is exhausted and, frankly, fed up. He writes in an op-ed in "The Los Angeles Times" that -- quote -- "We're tired of seeing patients who got the virus after their kids' limited birthday party or because they went out to a restaurant dinner with close friends or flew to a celebration in a state that didn't have much COVID" -- unquote.

And Dr. Mark Morocco joins me now live to discuss this.

Dr. Morocco, why did you write this op-ed?

DR. MARK MOROCCO, UCLA SCHOOL OF MEDICINE: Well, we felt like it was a call to action at a time that was really, really important.

As Sanjay said in the last piece, we are at the worst part of the monster zombie movie, right? So, this is where, if we don't make a stand and we don't do something -- and it's simple stuff that we have been talking about for a long time -- that can make the difference between an inconvenient winter and one that is truly disastrous.

So the folks who traveled on Thanksgiving, again, with Los Angeles movie metaphors, they're kind of like zombies walking around in our midst. They don't even know that they have been infected. And if they don't quarantine, if they don't stay away, they don't mask, they don't wash their hands, avoid crowds, we're going to have that surge on top have a surge.

[16:35:00]

And before the light at the end of the tunnel with the vaccines could come in, we're going to have a terrible time and lose a lot of people.

TAPPER: So, the Thanksgiving surge has not hit your hospital yet, in all likelihood, but tell us what it's like in your emergency department right now.

MOROCCO: Well, we're back in that sort of anticipatory sort of raw nerve moment, where we're seeing numbers tick up, but we haven't had the big wave hit us.

So, all of us are asking, really, a pledge for unity in these un- united states, because the virus is so widespread. It's like we're all grass and it's a fire burning from sea to shining sea. This is the time now to help us help you, because even though we're better at treating coronavirus than we have been ever, if we don't have a bed to put you in, you're in a lot of trouble.

TAPPER: I want to read another quote from your op-ed.

You wrote -- quote -- "We're eight months into COVID. World War II lasted six years and a day. The Great Depression lasted 10 years. The 1918 flu lasted two years and two months. Are we really that soft, that careless, that selfish?"

What do you think? Are we?

MOROCCO: Well, I think we have had this trouble. We haven't had a wartime leader and a unified message. And now we have a president and a president-elect.

My fantasy is that they would both finally get together and say, look, we need to fight this war. We need to use all of the things that we have at our -- in our grasp.

And we're not asking the public to do difficult things, take expensive drugs, or to do something dangerous, like get in a boat and go fight someplace else. We're just asking for simple masking social distancing, use your head, be smart, avoid crowds and avoid sick people. For the next six months, help us take the edge off of this, so that we can get on to the next level of our life.

We all want to get back to the way we used to live our lives.

TAPPER: A record number of Californians are currently hospitalized with this virus. Data suggests that the most patients are hospitalized in your county, Los Angeles County.

How is this changing the way you make decisions in the E.R.? Are you turning away people because you don't have room for them? MOROCCO: Well, we're not at that that point yet. And we hope that

that'll never happen.

We are seeing everybody. Like the virus, we don't care if you're a Republican, Democrat, whether you live in the center of the Midwest or you live on the coasts. we're going to take great care of you if you come to our E.R. And I think that culture is baked into emergency and ICU and critical care people and nurses across the country.

But we really don't want you to get to that point. And a little prevention can really, really help us do it. We don't want to get to the point where we have to make those kinds of decisions that are, quite frankly, unthinkable as a doctor.

TAPPER: Los Angeles county's new stay-at-home order starts today. It bans all public and private gatherings of people outside one single household.

And some Californians are really angry about these new restrictions. What would you say to them?

MOROCCO: Well, we're human beings. We understand the anger. We feel the same thing.

But, you know, for instance, if you own a restaurant, your anger shouldn't be at the health people and the county people who are telling you the truth about the limited amount that we know about fighting this virus. Your anger should be at the virus and really at the federal government.

This is a time when federal money can help the people who have those jobs who are stuck at home, help them stay at home and still be able to pay their rents. This is a time when you can help restaurant owners get their people through. This is a time -- you can't fight a big global war, like we did in World War II, without a lot of federal money and a lot of support.

And so we want people to unify and to come together as a country and really become the United States and to at least be united for the next six to eight weeks, because the sooner we get through this, the faster we will get back to open restaurants, our life the way we love to live.

TAPPER: All right, Dr. Mark Morocco, thank you so much. And thanks for what you do. We appreciate it.

Coming up: secret documents from city zero -- the confusion and delays from inside China as coronavirus began to spread around the world now revealed. It's a CNN global exclusive. You will see it first on THE LEAD.

That's next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[16:43:38] TAPPER: And we have some breaking news for you in our world lead.

CNN has obtained leaked documents from inside China, documents that revealed the missteps and the chaos of the Chinese government's early response to the coronavirus pandemic. The documents are from Hubei province, home to the city of Wuhan, where the pandemic is thought to have started.

They show authorities released misleading public data on the number of deaths, on the number of cases. They took, on average, three weeks to diagnose a new case, and much more.

CNN's Nick Paton Walsh is breaking the story for us right now.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

NICK PATON WALSH, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL SECURITY EDITOR (voice- over): An unprecedented leak of internal Chinese documents to CNN reveals for the first time what China knew in the opening weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, but did not tell the world.

A whistle-blower who said they worked inside the Chinese health care system shared the documents with CNN online, which show a chaotic local response from the start.

YANZHONG HUANG, COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS: This lack of transparency sort of also contributed to the crisis.

DR. WILLIAM SCHAFFNER, DEPARTMENT OF PREVENTIVE MEDICINE CHAIRMAN, VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY: Seeing information in black and white was very revealing and instructive.

WALSH: CNN has verified them with half-a-dozen experts, a European security official, and using complex digital forensic analysis looking at their source code.

The documents provide a number of key revelations about the province of Hubei, home to the epicenter city of Wuhan.

Firstly, some of the death tolls were off. The worst day in these reports is February the 17th, where these say 196 people who were confirmed cases died. But, that day, they only announced 93.

[16:45:03]

China was also circulating internally bigger, more detailed totals for new cases in Hubei for one day in February, recording internally nearly 6,000 new cases, some diagnosed by tests, others clinically by doctors and some suspected because of symptoms and contact but all pretty serious.

Yet, publicly that day, China reported nationwide about 2,500 new confirmed cases. The rest were downplayed and ongoing tally of suspected cases. That meant patient that doctors diagnosed as being seriously ill sounded like they were in doubt. They did later improve the criteria. DALI YANG, PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO: If

China had been more transparent and also more aggressive in responding, clearly, there would have had an impact on how much the virus spread in Wuhan, in Hubei in China and perhaps to the rest of the world as well.

WALSH: Strikingly, the documents reveal one possible reason behind the discrepancy in the numbers. A report from early March says it took a staggering 23 days on average from when someone showed COVID-19 symptoms to when they got a confirmed diagnosis. That's three weeks to officially catch each case.

YANZHONG HUANG, SENIOR FELLOW FOR GLOBAL HEALTH, COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS: As the information seems very surprising to me because normally, it would take just a couple of days.

WILLIAM SCHAFFNERR, PROFESSOR, VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER: You're making policy today based on information that already is three weeks old.

WALSH: Perhaps the most remarkable revelation concerns early December, the moments when COVID-19 first emerged in China.

Starkingly, these documents reveal there was an enormous spike in influenza cases in Hubei, right when studies have shown the very first known patients were infected with COVID-19, 20 times the number of flu cases compared to the same week the year before.

Experts said it could have flooded the hospital system with patients sick from flu-like symptoms, making it harder to spot the first cases of COVID-19. The documents don't link the outbreak to coronavirus origins directly but they show flu patients were regularly screened and many did not have a known flu virus strain, leaving open the possibility they were sick with COVID-19.

HUANG: The spike, right, in Wuhan was very unusual, like compared to previous years, so that would raise a red flag.

SCHAFFNER: It was very, very sizeable. It's clear that the Chinese virologists can make precise diagnosis of influenza, but in retrospect, you have to wonder, was there some COVID in there masquerading as influenza?

WALSH: The documents also show the flu outbreak was biggest that first week in December, not in Wuhan but in two other cities nearby in Hubei, all valuable information in the hunt for where the disease came from.

Chinese officials have said the outbreak began here, the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan in mid-December. And despite Western accusations that it has limited its cooperation with WHO investigation into the virus's origins, China has insisted it has been as transparent as possible over the coronavirus.

Sometime now, in order to shift the blame, she said, some U.S. politicians have constantly used the pandemic and other issues as a pretext to smear and demonize China and sow lies and misinformation about China. This will, of course, seriously mislead citizens of the United States and some other Western countries understanding of the truth of China's fight against the epidemic.

China's foreign ministry and health officials in Beijing have not responded to our requests for comment.

This disease has killed nearly 1.5 million people, about a fifth of known deaths in America. These documents are rare, clear, an open window into what China knew all along, trying to appear in control, while a local outbreak turned into a global pandemic.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

TAPPER: And Nick Paton Walsh joins us now.

Nick, this is a major exclusive you uncovered. How rare is it to get this kind of window into China's response to a crisis of this magnitude?

WALSH: Jake, this sort of detail is very rare. These are details China chose, it seems, not to share, at least in full, and it's pretty clear if it would have been share in the real time very helpful in other countries knowing what to do.

Now, to some degree it doesn't confirm some of the crazier conspiracy theories thrown around about what China did. Was it a lab leak or manmade? They were simply facing the things that other countries ended up facing themselves but they faced it first. And so, you have to ask the question, if they were more open, if they were more transparent and shared their mistakes, could other countries have had an easier ride?

TAPPER: And what implications might these documents have on the Chinese government and its image as other countries try to investigate the origins of this virus and how it got to their shores?

[16:50:07]

WALSH: Yeah. I mean, whatever you think about the World Health Organization, they're the ones spearheading the investigation into the origins of the virus, and that's important because we need to know how this started. The planet is always changing, and we want to make sure it doesn't happen again, maybe worse, in our lifetime.

So, it's important, but obviously, they're open up and every get to share their scientific knowledge around where this came from.

But there's a broader issue, too, for China's image, because I think it's fair to say, they put their authoritarian system forward now as the most capable, that was able to move fast, swift, without the dithering over masks you've seen in democracies and able to get a grip on this. Well, that may be true now, they're doing reasonably well, it seems, the image they gave off internally.

But more broadly, it looks like at the start, they were a bit of a mess, frankly. They miscounted, they misdiagnosed, they misinformed people about what was really going on inside there.

So, essentially, the vision you get is a country struggling like everybody else but with a strange impulse it seems at times just to try and bury some of the bad news. I have to say, it was remarkable insights. Some of the things here, I think, many scientists will be interested to learn about -- Jake.

TAPPER: Yeah, and some confirmation of our suspicions that they have been undercounting their fatalities and their cases significantly.

Nick Paton Walsh, thank you so much. Appreciate it.

Remote controlled guns, a hit square, and a self-destructing car -- extraordinary details now coming out about how Iran believes its top nuclear mind was taken out.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[16:56:04]

TAPPER: In the world lead, we are learning new details of what the Iranian government says was an elaborate, high-tech operation used to assassinate its top nuclear scientist. According to the Iranian government, the killers used a remote controlled machine gun and self- destructing car in last Friday's ambush. Iran is blaming Israeli for the attack and is vowing revenge, though, of course, any evidence of culpability has not yet been released by the Iranian government.

CNN's Oren Liebermann is live in Jerusalem.

And, Oren, set the scene for us. How does the Iranian government believe this was carried out?

OREN LIEBERMANN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, there are slightly different versions of events between Iranian news media, both official and semi official, but they all go something like this -- Iran's top nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was traveling in a bullet-proof car with his wife and a security convoy. When his car came under fire, he then got out of his car at which point he was shot and killed.

The weapon that was used to shot and kill him, according to Iranian news media, a remote-controlled gun that then exploded, destroying the evidence in that Nissan there. Now, Iran has blamed Israeli for this, saying they have found Israeli logos and imagery on the weapons of the remnants of it that indicate that Israeli is behind this but none of that forward or shown any of it. It's important to point out intelligence and security experts we have spoken with said, look, the technology out there to use a remote-controlled gun to do something like this exists, but this was likely done in person because of the nature of the target and how sensitive an operation like this would have been.

TAPPER: Oren, obviously, Israeli considers a nuclear weapons-armed Iran to be an exponential threat and that's, of course, the context of all this. What are your intelligence and security experts in the Israeli government telling you about whether or not the Israeli government actually ordered this hit on this nuclear scientist?

LIEBERMANN: The Israeli government has gone completely quiet on that. And many of the sources we normally turn to are also quite on that. That's not a surprise. They don't want to invite any sort of retaliation from Iran, especially since it seems that Iran is already determined to retaliate at this point.

And there are a number of options there. First, perhaps from something like Hezbollah and Lebanon, though that seems unlikely, because Hezbollah has not gotten involved in Israel and Iran. A response could come from Syria or it could be a response against Israeli embassies, diplomats or even tourists overseas.

And, in fact, there was a cable from the foreign ministry that we've learned about that essentially warned, be vigilant and be ready, especially as the Israelis are now set to travel to the Gulf with normalization ties there moving forward.

TAPPER: All right. Oren Liebermann, thank you so much. Appreciate it.

Turning now to our money lead, "The New York Times" is out with a stinging report about major U.S. corporations trying to water down legislation that would ban the import of goods made with forced labor in the Xinjiang region of China. "The Times" cites a recent government report pointing to Coca-Cola and Nike among the companies suspected of using slave labor to make their products, your sneakers, your sodas.

The House of Representatives passed a bill this year to stop all American companies from using forced labor.

Nike and Coke have both said they don't use forced labor in their supply chains. Mind you, Nike, of course, has been at the forefront of promoting social justice in its ads, including Black Lives Matter. Coca-Cola donated the land in Atlanta to build the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, which obviously strongly condemns slavery in all forms. Perhaps it's time for corporate leaders from Coca-Cola and Nike to visit that museum.

With 267,000 deaths in the U.S. from COVID, we'd like to remember one of the nurses on the front lines of this pandemic. Brittany Poloma (ph) was 27 years old. She was an E.R. nurse in Texas. She started her nursing career just before the pandemic hit south Texas.

Her step-dad Robert remembers how they bonded over sports. She really got to baseball, became a loyal Cubs fan. Her family is not sure where she got coronavirus but they know it took her away from them way too soon. May her memory be a blessing, of course.

And we want to end the show with some happy news. THE LEAD is welcoming its newest member to the team. Her name is Sofia Tejera. She was born early this morning. She is the daughter of our producer Veronica Batista (ph). We're wishing her and her mother and dad all of the best.

Thanks so much. The news on CNN continues right now.

[17:00:00]