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The Lead with Jake Tapper

Republicans Petition Supreme Court to Overturn Election; FDA Set to Vote on Pfizer Vaccine Approval. Aired 3-3:30p ET

Aired December 10, 2020 - 15:00   ET

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

[15:00:03]

MOHAMMAD RAZVI, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, COUNCIL OF PEOPLES ORGANIZATION: He comes. His name is Steven Gonzalez (ph). He's here every week.

And he's -- and I was just like, you know, that's what New York is about. I mean, that's what--

BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN HOST: A 5-year-old. That's incredible.

RAZVI: A 5-year-old.

BALDWIN: Forgive me for -- forgive me to have to cut you off. I'm up against the wall. I want to hand it over to Jake.

But, Mohammad Razvi, if people want to help you, COPO.org.

Thank you so much.

"THE LEAD WITH JAKE TAPPER" starts right now.

ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news.

JAKE TAPPER, CNN HOST: And welcome to THE LEAD. I'm Jake Tapper.

We begin today with breaking news in our health lead. We could be just moments away from a rare moment of relief and hope in this terrible pandemic.

An FDA advisory board will soon vote on whether to recommend emergency use authorization of Pfizer's coronavirus vaccine. The FDA could green-light the vaccine at any moment in the next few hours. The authorization would trigger the starting gun for trucks and planes to begin transporting the vaccine to hospitals and other facilities across the country, with shots going into arms perhaps as soon as Monday.

Today's FDA meeting comes at an absolutely crucial and horrific time in the pandemic; 3,124 Americans lost their lives to coronavirus just yesterday. That was the deadliest day in the U.S. since the pandemic began and, frankly, one of the deadliest days in American history. More than 220,000 other Americans tested positive for the virus, and a

record number of Americans, more than 106,000, are hospitalized right now. It is absolutely catastrophic.

And it is a tragedy that did not have to be this bad. And during this treacherous time, our outgoing president, regrettably, seems entirely focused on trying to undermine the results of the presidential election, not helping the citizenry suffering, because of so many of his policy failures.

CNN senior medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen joins me now.

And, Elizabeth, this has been going on all day, this FDA meeting. What have we learned so far?

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN SENIOR MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: So, the FDA -- this advisory committee, Jake, has been briefed by the FDA, by the CDC, by Pfizer about the effectiveness of this vaccine and the side effect.

The effectiveness, as you and I have discussed before, is an amazing 95 percent. Really, that astounded almost everybody. And the side effects are really relatively few. Many people did feel fatigue, fever, achiness. But it only lasted about a day.

So, the members of this advisory committee have heard all that. And in about 10 minutes, we're expecting them to start their discussion, their discussion whether or not they want to recommend that emergency use authorization be issued.

And remember, Jake, this committee of advisers, they don't work for the FDA, they don't work for Pfizer. As a matter of fact, they're really disconnected from both. They are independent, most of them M.D.s, working at universities, who are there to give their independent thoughts and views on this, based on the data.

This is all about science -- Jake.

TAPPER: And, Elizabeth, once this panel votes, what limitations might this committee also recommend, in addition to whether or not they recommend emergency use authorization?

COHEN: So, Jake, everything that this committee votes on is going to be based on this clinical trial that Pfizer did, more than 40,000 people, have of them given a placebo, half of them given the vaccine.

And then they look at the folks who took the vaccine. What safety issues were there? But there were some people who were intentionally not included in the trial. Children under the age of 16 were not included in the trial, pregnant women, women who were breast-feeding. People with underlying immune problems were not included in the trial.

And so it's not clear what they're going to do with that group, because they don't have any data on them. So it may be that they say, you know what, we don't think these people should get the vaccine, or they should get the vaccine, but there are certain pieces of advice that we want to give or certain limitations. We don't know.

But those groups are very important. It'll be very interesting to say -- to see what this group of experts thinks should be done.

TAPPER: So, this is an advisory panel, and their vote would be a recommendation. That's not the final decision, right?

When would the final decision come?

COHEN: That's right. I mean, there's a whole bunch of steps that need to happen.

So, the advisory group advises the FDA, which almost always agrees with them, and does what they say. We think they're going to recommend for authorization. And we think the FDA is going to give that authorization. And then the CDC has to weigh in and say what the priority groups ought to be and give a little bit more advice about who should and shouldn't get this vaccine.

Bottom line, Jake, what you said earlier, this is what we're thinking, is that shots could go into arms for the first time on Monday. It might be more towards midweek, but we're really thinking it's a matter of days, not much longer than that.

TAPPER: All right, Elizabeth Cohen, thank you so much.

If and when the FDA decides whether the Pfizer vaccine is cleared for emergency use, the CDC then needs to then recommend who should get it. Trucks and planes need to be loaded with doses. Some states still are sorting out their own patient priority lists.

[15:05:02]

CNN's Sara Murray now reports on that part of the process.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DR. STEPHEN HAHN, COMMISSIONER, FOOD AND DRUG ADMINISTRATION: We intend to act quickly.

SARA MURRAY, CNN POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Within 24 hours of an FDA authorization, the first coronavirus vaccines are set to ship out across the country.

FedEx and UPS on standby to carry the first batch of nearly three million doses from a Pfizer facility in Kalamazoo, Michigan, to more than 600 sites nationwide.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There will be no higher-priority shipments in our network than these vaccine shipments.

MURRAY: Another Operation Warp Speed partner, McKesson, is already shipping out supply kits, millions of syringes, needles, face masks and vaccination cards.

The monumental task of beginning to vaccinate Americans coming as states are still grappling with uncertainty over exactly how many doses they will receive and when. In Nebraska, the governor is warning delays could lie ahead.

GOV. PETE RICKETTS (R-NE): We have been notified that Pfizer shipments will be delayed for week two and week three. We have not been told what that actually means for us.

MURRAY: One thing is clear nationwide. For a while, supplies will be extremely limited.

DR. NIRAV SHAH, DIRECTOR, MAINE CENTER FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION: Whenever the first shipment arrives, of course, it won't be enough for every single person in Maine who may want or need the vaccine. Unfortunately, that has prompted us to have to make some difficult, unsavory choices.

MURRAY: The first doses will be steered toward front-line health care workers and residents of long-term care facilities.

Some hospitals are already setting up a delicate dance, staggering their staff vaccinations, so entire departments aren't suffering the vaccine side effects, such as fevers and body aches, at the same time. And even those at the front of the vaccination line could still have to wait.

DR. NGOZI EZIKE, DIRECTOR, ILLINOIS DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC HEALTH: Definitely, we have to send the message that, yes, there are a lot of people in that priority group. And, yes, we want to make sure we get it to you. But, no, it won't happen on day one or week one, or maybe even week two. So, patience will be the name of the game.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MURRAY: Now, it is still going to be months before this is available to the general public. We know that this is going to kind of be a dry run for states to figure out how this is going to work with a population of health care workers that's already pretty educated when it comes to this vaccine.

But, obviously, Jake, there could still be hiccups that come. And the states we talked to say, they have their best-laid plans and they're ready to adjust, depending on how this all goes.

TAPPER: Right.

What about a vaccine for the next group in line? And what about for essential workers?

MURRAY: Yes, I mean, this is going to be really challenging. Look, right now, there's a limited supply and health care workers are a pretty well-defined group.

But when you start to talk about essential workers, you're talking about tens of millions of people. And we're already starting to see this kind of angling and this lobbying, because, of course, Jake, everyone wants to be considered an essential worker. We saw a letter from the aviation industry today to the CDC, making the argument that these front-line airline workers should be included in essential workers.

But this is going to be a tricky decision. We're going to see CDC recommendations on it. But a lot of this could ultimately fall to governors and to state officials to decide what is going to work best for their state. And you can bet there are going to be a lot of unhappy people as long as the supply is limited and everyone wants to be part of this kind of initial group.

TAPPER: Right? Who's essential? Police, firefighters, teachers, grocery clerks? I mean, there are a lot of people I think of as essential.

Sara Murray, thank you so much.

Fourteen states reported record high hospitalizations on Wednesday, including Nevada.

I want to show you what the reality looks like on the ground in that state. This is a hospital in Reno, Nevada. It was once a parking garage. But in just 10 days, it was transformed and became a new hospital wing treating coronavirus patients.

CNN Sara Sidner is there.

And, Sara, you have been speaking to these people on the front lines, these health care workers. What are you hearing?

SARA SIDNER, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Look, we're outside of this parking garage. It doesn't look like anything much different. But if you notice just there, you will notice those pipes going up. Those are to create negative pressure inside, in other words, to try to blow out the bad air and make sure the air inside is healthier.

Right now, there are doctors and nurses and technical staff working inside of what was a parking lot now turned into a COVID unit. We were able to talk to the doctors and nurses who have been spending weeks and months every single day trying to make sure that these COVID-19 patients are able to survive. They don't always survive. Some are acutely ill.

And we had a conversation with the head of the ICU here at Renown Health. And Dr. Jacob Keeperman talked to us about what his worst day was like.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SIDNER: What was you worst day?

DR. JACOB KEEPERMAN, RENOWN HEALTH: So, my worst day this pandemic was actually the day I posted the tweet thanking my teammates.

I had just finished a seven-day stretch in the intensive care unit. There had been patient after patient after patient who was not surviving this illness. [15:10:00]

And beyond the physical exhaustion of working 100 hours that week, I was mentally fatigued.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SIDNER: So, you heard him there talking about that tweet.

The tweet he is referring to is, he was so exhausted, but so proud of the people that he worked with, that he tweeted out inside of this particular parking lot.

The president of the United States, President Trump, retweeted another tweet that called it a scam. He called it fake. And that really set him off. It hurt. And for a lot of the folks that work here every single day, they just could not believe what they were seeing, because they're working so incredibly hard, exhausting themselves, putting themselves in danger.

And, by the way, the numbers here are really, really difficult in this particular county. Washoe County is seeing nine times the number of cases they saw in the past couple of months -- Jake.

TAPPER: President Trump once again attacking one of the good guys.

Sara Sidner, thanks so much.

It could be one of the biggest challenges to getting the majority of Americans vaccinated. That's next.

Plus, CNN visits a ruby-red county in Tennessee where masks are not popular, and a pastor is preaching that he will refuse a vaccine.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[15:15:33]

TAPPER: In our health lead: Any moment, the FDA vaccine advisory committee is scheduled to vote on whether to recommend an emergency use authorization for Pfizer's COVID vaccine.

This comes just a day after the U.S. had its deadliest day in this pandemic.

Joining me now is comparative immunologist Erin Bromage. He's a biology professor at UMass Dartmouth. Thanks so much for joining us.

If this committee votes to recommend emergency use authorization of the vaccine, which is what's expected, how soon do you think we will start seeing shots going into arms?

ERIN BROMAGE, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: I really think it could be as early as this weekend. Certainly, by the end of next week, there will be a substantial rollout hitting those people that have been targeted as the most important to vaccinate early. TAPPER: Once this vaccine is signed off on and the first doses are

administered, when are we going to start to see an impact in communities? And how long before this will actually help stopping -- help stop the spread?

BROMAGE: Right.

So, unfortunately, there is a limited number of doses right now. So what we're going to see is, as it rolls out, it's going to have a bigger impact on the number of daily deaths, rather than the number of daily cases that we have. It's going to take until March or April to have a real impact on case numbers.

So, case numbers is really (AUDIO GAP) on what we do. On death side of things, it's really going to be December, maybe January before it's actually having a significant impact on that, as we protect the vulnerable populations.

TAPPER: There's obviously some mistrust surrounding the vaccine, for a lot of reasons, anti-Trump sentiment, pro-Trump sentiment, historic racism in vaccines, a la Tuskegee.

According to a new Quinnipiac poll, 61 percent of Americans say they're willing to get a vaccine; 33 percent say they're not. And experts say we need at least 70 percent of the American public to take this vaccine to stop the spread.

How much does this concern you? Can those numbers be turned around?

BROMAGE: Yes, we need to be working much better on the communication of this vaccine.

So, I would admit, even at the start of this, this felt fast. And it is incredibly fast. But when you look at the history of mRNA vaccine, realize we have got at least 15 years of data, a lot of animal work that has been done before now, and at least 10 years working on human mRNA vaccines.

So, a lot has gone into the safety and efficacy of these in general. What we really needed to work out was now, on a much larger scale, the safety of it, and that data is coming in. And it looks remarkable.

So we need to be able to get that information across to the public in a way that's actually digestible, that it's both safe and effective. We do need to get a lot of people vaccinated, and it would have needed to be a lot more if these vaccinations or vaccines were only 50 or 60 percent effective.

But being up 90, 95 percent effective, coupling that with the terrible job that we have done on controlling new cases, actually means that, if we get to 50 percent of the people getting an uptake, and we have got 10, 15, 20 percent of the population infected and recovered already, we're going to see a significant impact, positive impact, from the vaccination probably starting around March and April of next year in regards to slowing cases. TAPPER: The Department of Health and Human Services reported that, last week, one in three hospitals across the U.S. was at -- were at least 90 percent capacity. Health care facilities say that they're overflowing.

While we're waiting for these vaccines to become available for the general public, which will not happen for several more months, what do Americans need to be doing right now to slow the spread and to ease the strain on health care workers?

BROMAGE: Yes, I mean, we're all tired of the COVID protocols, of masks everywhere, and distancing, and not seeing our friends. But we have to buckle up and just keep doing it.

There really is a light at the end of the tunnel now. We can actually see the way out of this, thanks to the amazing work of the scientists that got this vaccine into arms, tested it, found out it was safe and effective. But we need to get through this.

[15:20:04]

So we need to make sure that we are avoiding situations, close encounters with people, especially indoors in poorly ventilated spaces. We need to be wearing masks. We just need to be vigilant for the next two, three, four months to really stop the community spread, stop it from getting back into our households, where we're seeing rapid amplification of infections inside somebody's home, and stopping that pressure then coming back to our hospitals.

They can only take so much. I mean, one of the interesting things about all these infections, we're saving more people now than we ever did in the past. But it's taking longer inside the ICU to clear them than they did in the past because of the treatments. And our beds are filling up. And it's taking longer to get them out.

So we need to be better as individuals in order to protect our health care system from not being overloaded.

TAPPER: All right, Erin Bromage, thank you so much for your time and your expertise. We appreciate it.

A state attorney general who is under FBI investigation is asking the Supreme Court to overturn the results of the presidential election, so that President Trump actually won, even though, in reality, he lost.

Even one Republican senator is saying, you do the math on that one.

Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[15:26:17]

TAPPER: In our 2020 lead: a blistering brief filed today at the Supreme Court in response to that Texas lawsuit that seeks to overturn the votes of millions of legal American voters in four states. The attorney general of Pennsylvania now calling the suit a cacophony

of bogus claims to support a -- quote -- "seditious abuse" of the judicial process.

President Trump and the Texas attorney general, along with 18 other attorneys general, all Republican, they're asking the Supreme Court to intervene and block the legally elected electors of Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, all of whom are going to Joe Biden, the president-elect.

The president has been inactive and quiet, however, regarding the devastation of the COVID pandemic, which claimed 3,124 lives yesterday, the deadliest day of this pandemic in the United States and one of the deadliest days in American history.

CNN's Kaitlan Collins joins us now live.

Kaitlan, every single credible legal expert I know left, right and center, has said that this Texas case has zero merit, zero. I have even heard these people use terms such as garbage or insanity. What does the White House say about this attempt to undermine the will of the American people and stage what is essentially a nonviolent coup?

KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Well, they think it's less of an actual legal effort that they think is going to go anywhere and more of a public relations endeavor that the president is grasping to, given that every other legal step they have taken so far has failed.

This is what the president is turning to, this longshot lawsuit that even Republicans in Texas say they do not believe has merit, including Senator John Cornyn, several Republican House members as well saying they think it's a distraction, and it's not going to go anywhere, and it's an affront to federalism, since it's one state suing other states for the way they run their election.

So, privately, officials will tell you they don't think this is actually going to go anywhere. But the president is really trying to cling to anything he can given everything else has failed.

So what you're not hearing privately is a lot of surprise that this is going on. And, of course, it was the Texas attorney general that filed this lawsuit. The president, conveniently -- though the White House said it was previously scheduled -- had a lunch with several Republican attorneys general here earlier today, including Ken Paxton was also in attendance at that lunch, which we were told just ended a short time ago, Jake.

TAPPER: Paxton's reputations in shreds already, but there are a lot of young ambitious attorneys general that are really risking their reputations by aligning themselves with this insanity.

Kaitlan, you reported a few days ago that the Trump campaign was winding down its legal efforts. So, does this mean it this Texas case, is this the last desperate gasp? COLLINS: It could be, but we have seen with the legal team before

they thought they were coming to the end of the road, only for the president to urge them to keep pushing.

One thing we should note is that the attorney who is representing the president in his intervention in this Texas lawsuit, basically joining on to become a party to it, is a new face to the group, John Eastman, who, of course, you will remember, is the one who wrote that column about Senator Kamala Harris earlier this year questioning whether or not she could be vice president because her parents were immigrants.

That obviously is a birther conspiracy, and she obviously is eligible to be the vice president, given she's about to become the vice president. That's who's representing the president in this case.

And I'm told by sources he is reporting directly to the president, not working in coordination really with the rest of the legal team that had been handling those earlier legal challenges that the president was using.

So you're seeing the president is even turning to new attorneys when it comes to situations like this, Jake.

TAPPER: Yes, a former senior administration official tells me that Stephen Miller and Jenna Ellis, the president's attorney, wanted the president to attack now vice president-elect Kamala Harris using this deranged birther nonsense.

Kaitlan Collins, thanks so much.