Return to Transcripts main page

The Lead with Jake Tapper

President Biden Holds Press Conference. Aired 4-4:30p ET

Aired January 25, 2021 - 16:00   ET

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

[16:00:00]

JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: It's so important that we provide money to provide for the ability of people not to be thrown out of their apartments during this pandemic because they can't afford their rent.

And to make the case to you why I think and what I think the priorities within this piece -- what we think the priorities are -- I apologize -- were within this legislation.

And I don't expect we will know whether we have an agreement and to what extent the entire package will be able to pass or not pass until we get right down to the very end of this process, which will be probably in a couple of weeks.

But the point is, this is just the process beginning.

QUESTION: Thank you, Mr. President.

Annie Linskey with "The Washington Post."

BIDEN: Annie.

QUESTION: I wanted to ask you a little bit about one of the sort of major themes of your campaign and how you sort of intend to measure and enact it, and that is the idea of unity.

If you could talk a little bit about what you see unity as being. There are some people who are defining it as being bipartisan. Others are saying it is what most of the people in the country defined by some poll might believe, or any sort of number, or perhaps it's 50 plus one, or 50 plus two, or 75 percent.

So, given that it is such a key part of your message and your promise, can you talk and reflect a little bit more about, what is unity, when you see it, as you define it?

BIDEN: Well, Annie, I think it's makes up several of the issues, the points you made.

One is, unity requires you to take away -- eliminate the vitriol, make anything that you disagree with about the other person's personality or their lack of integrity or they're not decent legislators and the like. So we have to get rid of that.

And I think that's already beginning to change. But God knows where things go, number one.

Unity also is trying to reflect what the majority of the American people, Democrat, Republican, independent, think is within the fulcrum of what needs to be done to make their lives and the lives of Americans better.

For example, if you look at the data -- and I'm not claiming the polling data to be exact, but, if you look at the data, you have, I think it's -- I hope I'm saying -- you may correct me if I get the number wrong.

I think it's 57, 58 percent of the American people, including Republicans, Democrats and independents, think that we have to do something about the COVID vaccine, we have to do something about making sure that people who are -- be hurting badly, can't eat, don't have food, are in a position where they're about to be thrown out of their apartments, et cetera, being able to have an opportunity to get a job, that they all think we should be acting, we should be doing more.

Unity also is trying to get, at a minimum, if you pass a piece of legislation that breaks down on party lines, but it gets passed, it doesn't mean there wasn't unity. It just means it wasn't bipartisan. I prefer these things to be bipartisan, because I'm trying to generate some consensus and take sort of the -- how can I say it? The vitriol out of all of this.

Because I'm confident, I'm confident from my discussions there are a number of Republicans who know we have to do something about food insecurity for people in this pandemic, I'm confident they know we have to do something about figuring out how to get children back in school.

There's easy ways to deal with this. One, if you're anti-union, you can say it's all because of teachers. If you want to make a case, though, that it's complicated, you say, well, what do you have to do to make it safe to get in those schools?

Now, we're going to have arguments. For example, I propose that we -- because it was bipartisan, I thought it would increase the prospects of passage the additional $1,400 in direct cash payment to folks.

Well, there's legitimate reason for people to say, do you have the lines drawn the exact right way? Should it go to anybody making over X number of dollars or Y? I'm open to negotiate those things. That's all. I picked it because I thought it was rational, reasonable, and it had overwhelming bipartisan support in the House when it passed.

But this is all a bit of a moving target in terms of the precision with which this goes. You're asking about unity, 51 votes, bipartisan, et cetera.

The other piece of this is that the one thing that gives me hope that we're not only going to sort of stay away from the ad hominem attacks on one another is that there is an overwhelming consensus among the major economists at home and in the world that the way to avoid a deeper, deeper, deeper recession, moving in the direction of losing our competitive capacity, is to spend money now.

[16:05:17]

From across the board, every major institution has said, if we don't invest now, we're going to lose so much altitude in terms of our employment base and our economic growth, it's going to be harder to reestablish it. We can afford to do it now.

And, as a matter of fact, the -- I think the response has been, we can't afford not to invest now. We can't afford to fail to invest now. And I think there's a growing realization of that on the part of all but some very, very hard-edge partisans, maybe on both sides.

But I think there is a growing consensus. Whether we get it all done exactly the way I want it remains to be seen.

But I'm confident that we can work our way through. We have to work our way through, because, as I have said 100 times, there is no ability in a democracy for it to function without the ability to reach consensus. Otherwise, it just becomes executive fiat or battleground issues that are -- get us virtually nowhere.

I don't want to hold the -- my colleague may know, the vice president, but I think there were very few debates on the Senate floor the whole last year on almost any issue.

Well, that benefits no one. Doesn't inform anybody. Doesn't allow the public to make judgments about who they think is right or wrong. So, I am optimistic that it may take some time. But, over the year, the way -- if we treat each other with respect -- and we're going to argue like hell. I'm confident of that, believe me. I know that. I have been there.

But I think we can do it in a way that we can get things done for the American people.

Gosh, they don't trust you with a mic, huh? I don't know, man.

(LAUGHTER)

QUESTION: No, that's fine. I wouldn't either.

(LAUGHTER)

QUESTION: Thank you, Mr. President. I appreciate you taking the question.

You mentioned just now that you might know in a couple of weeks. Can I ask whether it's more important for you to get something passed in a short time frame like that, or would you be willing to wait longer to get more bipartisan support? And might I also ask that -- one of the pillars is the vaccine

funding. When do you think any American who wants to get the shot will be able to get the shot?

BIDEN: Well, I will try to answer the three parts of your question as I heard them.

One, time is of the essence. Time is of the essence. And I must tell you, I'm reluctant to cherry-pick and take out one or two items here, and then have to go through it again, because these all are kind of -- they go sort of hand in glove, each of these issues, number one.

Number two, we are optimistic that we will have enough vaccine and, in very short order, we -- as you know, we came in office without knowledge of how much vaccine was being held in abeyance or available. Now that we're here, we have been around a week or so, we now have that.

And we have gotten commitments from some of the producers that they will in fact produce more vaccine in a relatively short period of time and then continue that down the road. So, I'm quite confident that we will be in a position, within the next three weeks or so, to be vaccinating people at the range of a million a day or in excess of that.

That is my -- I promised that we would get at least 100 million vaccinations. That's not people, because, sometimes, you need more than one shot, the vaccination, but 100,000 -- 100 million shots in people's arms of the vaccine.

I think, with the grace of God and the goodwill of the neighbor and the creek not rising, as the old saying goes, I think we may be able to get that to 150,000 -- 1.5 million a day, rather than one million a day.

But we have to meet that goal of a million a day. And everything points that we're going to have, A, the -- enough vaccine, B, enough syringes and all the paraphernalia needed to store, keep, inject, move into your arm the vaccine, three, a number of vaccinators, people administering the vaccine, which is not an easy task.

Of those who have those facilities, like the nursing homes and the hospitals, they have people who do it, but they don't have the capacity to do everyone. And so I think we're going to have -- we're leaning hard on -- in areas where we have produced more vaccinators.

[16:10:03]

We feel confident we can do that.

And, thirdly, it's really important that we have the fora, the place, the facility, the circumstance where people can show up, stand in line, and get their vaccine without having to stand in line for eight hours, being able to pick up the phone, call the pharmacy, and get your name on the list, et cetera. All those mechanical things are really -- they sound simple, but

they're all consequential when we're trying to get out a minimum of 100 million vaccinations in 100 days, and move in the direction where we are well beyond that in the next 100 days, so we can get to the point where we reach herd immunity in a country of over 300 million people.

Does that answer your question?

QUESTION: My question was, at what date or roughly when do you think anyone who wants one would be able to get it? Is it summer? Is it fall?

BIDEN: No, I think it'll be this spring. I think we will be able to do that this spring.

And -- but it's going to be a logistical challenge that exceeds anything we have ever tried in this country. But I think we can do that.

I feel confident that, by summer, we're going to be well on our way to heading toward herd immunity and increasing the access for people who aren't on the first -- on the list, all the way going down to children and how we deal with that.

But I feel good about where we're going. And I think we can get it done.

(CROSSTALK)

BIDEN: Now, wait, wait, wait, wait.

I know he always asks me tough questions. And he always has an edge to them. But I like him anyway.

So, go ahead and answer -- ask the question.

QUESTION: Thank you, Mr. President.

So, you just said that you think, within three weeks or so, we will be at the point where there are a million vaccines per day. But it seems like--

BIDEN: No, I think we will get there before that. I said -- I hope -- I misspoke. I hope we will be able to increase as we go along until we get to the 1.5 million a day. That's my -- my hope.

QUESTION: And then my -- the follow-up to that would be, now that you are president, and you're saying there is nothing we can do to change the trajectory of the pandemic in the next several months.

What happened to two months ago, when you were talking declaratively about, I'm going to shut down the virus?

BIDEN: Oh, I'm going to shut down the virus, but not -- I never said I'd do it in two months. I said it took a long time to get here. It's going to take a long time to beat it.

And so we have millions of people out there who are -- who have the virus. We're just, for the first day, I think -- correct me if I'm wrong. I have been doing other things this morning, speaking with foreign leaders.

But one of the things, I think this is one of the first days that the number has actually come down, the number of deaths, and the number on a daily basis, and the number of hospitalizations, et cetera.

It's going to take time. It's going to take a heck of a lot of time.

And we still have -- as Dr. Fauci constantly points out, it's one thing when we have mass -- how can I say it politely? -- mass disregard of the warnings about not wearing masks and wearing masks and social distancing and failure to social distance and people getting together on holidays in ways that weren't recommended, et cetera?

We see -- first thing that happens is, we see the number of infections go up. Then you see the hospitalizations go up. Then you see the deaths go up. And so we're in this for a while.

I mean, we're -- what at are we now, at about 410,000 deaths? And there's going to be more. The prediction, as I said from the very beginning to getting here, as -- after being sworn in, was -- the predictions were, we're going to see somewhere between a total of 600,000 and 660,000 deaths before we begin to turn the corner in a major way.

So -- and, again, remember, the vaccine, most of the people taking the vaccine, or a vast, significant number, require two shots. And they're an average of three weeks apart. And it takes time for it to be sure that you're at -- you get to that 95 percent assurance rate.

And so it's beginning to move. But I'm confident we will beat this. We will beat this. But we're still going to be talking about this in the summer. We're still going to be dealing with this issue in the early fall.

And last point I'll make -- and I know you're tired of hearing me saying it. Particularly, you may be tired of hearing me saying it.

And that is that, if we wear masks between now and the end of April, the experts tell us we can save 50,000 lives, 50,000 people that otherwise would die.

Thank you so very much.

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

You have been watching president Biden at the White House moments ago.

[16:15:00]

He said he's confident that the administration will soon reach one million coronavirus vaccine shots a day, but that he may be able to reach, the administration, 1.5 million a day, if not more.

President Biden also signed an executive order aimed at strengthening American manufacturing and announcing he plans to replace the entire fleet of federal vehicles with American-made electric cars, Biden saying it's part of his plan to rebuild Americans' backbone.

Also part of that plan, a $1.9 trillion economic relief package.

He just said a lot, a lot to chew over.

Let's start with CNN's Phil Mattingly.

And, Phil, let's start with the relief package, because it's going to be the first major test of Biden's pledge to be bipartisan and also whether or not he can pass anything.

PHIL MATTINGLY, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Yes, and it's the cornerstone legislative proposal of his first year in office.

It's the one his administration has made very clear is the focal point of all of their efforts related to COVID relief, whether on the economic side or whether on the public health side. And it is a proposal that has been received by Republicans in some mix of either cool to ice cold over the course of the last several days.

Here's what the takeaway was from that. President Biden is not done trying to negotiate with congressional Republicans. And I think that is a different spot than you hear from a lot of Democrats, both in the House and the Senate, who are ready to move forward with a procedure that would require just Democratic votes, because they believe that is the only pathway forward.

Biden making clear and citing his past work, both when he was President Obama's vice president, when he was a senator for 36 years, that there are options and opportunities to negotiate, including bringing up one of the issues Republicans have mentioned as potentially problematic, the $1,400 increase in direct payments.

Republicans have raised concerns about the cutoff thresholds for that, Biden's saying he's open to negotiating that. But there are a couple pieces there that I think are worth pointing out.

One, he said the idea of moving on a partisan basis will be up to House and Senate leaders. He also noted he is not keen on breaking apart his proposal. He wants to keep it together. And the reason for that is because many of the pieces on the public health and economic side are really closely intertwined and are designed to work together in kind of a quilt as you try and address the outstanding concerns.

But he also made very clear that unity, as he defined it, does not necessarily mean that Republicans and Democrats are all voting for something. But, instead, it's something that the public supports.

And this is something I have heard from both administration officials and Democrats on Capitol Hill, that they believe, on a lot of these issues, whether it's more money for vaccines, more money for testing, more money on unemployment insurance or the direct payments, that they believe they hold the upper hand in terms of public sentiment there.

So, keep an eye on that as well. And the last thing is, he made very clear he wants to continue negotiating with Republicans. But he put a timeline on it, said it'll probably be a couple weeks, so a couple weeks for those negotiations to really start to bloom. At this point, Jake, they haven't yet.

TAPPER: He may have to choose -- or I suspect he will have to choose whether he wants it to be big, $1.9 trillion, or whether he wants it to be bipartisan. It's unlikely he's going to be able to get both.

Phil Mattingly, thanks so much.

I want to bring in CNN senior medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen now, because, obviously, President Biden spoke a lot there about the coronavirus.

So, Elizabeth, Biden was asked, when will every American who wants a shot be able to get a shot? And he couldn't say. What are the complications in making this happen? Shouldn't he be able to say at this point? I realize he hasn't even been president for a week yet. But, still, shouldn't he -- shouldn't they have an idea of when they think they could project that every American who wants one can get a shot, even if it's July or August?

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN SENIOR MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: You know, Jake, a lot of the experts I'm talking to say that they think he's actually pretty smart not to be making that kind of projection, because we saw what happened when the Trump administration said last fall and at the end of last year, oh, 20 million shots in arms by the end of the year.

And they didn't even get close to that. It's very difficult to predict the future. And so he may be sort of taking a wise road there.

There's basically two things that make it difficult to move as quickly as anyone would like with this vaccine campaign. The first is, is that no one has ever mass-produced an RNA vaccine. That's what Pfizer and Moderna's vaccines are. It is tricky. It is a tricky thing. It is not a chemical. It's a biological entity they're trying to produce.

And making these vaccines is tricky. You have a shortage of one out of one ingredient or something goes a little bit wrong in your production line, and all of a sudden you can be having real output issues.

And now, secondly, as we have seen, is that even once those doses are made, we have not been great at getting those distributed in an organized way, like they have in some other countries. So, those are the two challenges that sit before the Biden administration.

TAPPER: Biden didn't really answer a question about teachers in Chicago, and whether they should return to class, as the Chicago public school system wants them to. The teachers union in Chicago voted against it. They're not going to follow the orders of the Chicago public school system, arguing that there is a lack of vaccination for educators. It seems like Biden is refusing to acknowledge the fact that there is

increasingly a conflict between school districts that are trying to make schools safe, so kids can get back to class, in-class learning, with PPE and better ventilation and more, and teachers unions, who are concerned about their teachers getting COVID, and are basically just refusing what the health officials say they should be doing.

[16:20:29]

COHEN: Yes, Jake, you're absolutely right. The president really punted on that question.

When asked about this, he said, we should have safe schools, so that the students are safe, and the teachers are safe.

Well, that's not really saying anything, because, obviously, the school system thinks it's safe, or they wouldn't be asking them back. And, obviously, the teachers don't think it's safe because they're refusing to go.

It will be interesting to see as things evolve. At some point, will the president say, you know what? We totally understand that teachers, many of whom are -- might have underlying conditions, might be older, that they have understandable concerns about getting back in classrooms with children or young people who are often asymptomatic. They could be surrounded by young people who have COVID and don't even know it.

So it will be interesting to see if he does sort of make a concession to that and say, I understand why these teachers are so concerned.

TAPPER: Yes. But the White House can have a position of like, we're going to go by the health experts, except when it comes to teachers unions. I mean, that's -- you can't have a carve-out.

COHEN: Right.

TAPPER: Either you listen to the health experts or you don't.

Elizabeth Cohen, thanks so much.

Let me bring in Nia-Malika Henderson and Phil Bump.

Nia-Malika, let's talk again about the COVID relief deal. President Biden would not say if he would use reconciliation to get it passed.

Just to explain for our viewers, that's a process by which you only need 51 votes, as opposed to 60 votes. The 60-vote threshold is normally how you do it. But there's a way to weasel your way around it. If it's an economic package, you can do reconciliation. He's making no promises.

But it has to be pointed out one of his key campaign selling points would that he would be able to work together with Republicans.

NIA-MALIKA HENDERSON, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL REPORTER: And this will be a big test.

Of course, there were conversations this past weekend with some Republicans who you would think would be on board with this, people like Susan Collins, Mitt Romney. Their concerns are about the size of the package. They just spent $900 billion. Not all of that money has been disbursed.

So, asking Republicans to get on board for this $1.9 trillion package at this point is a heavy lift. So they are expressing concerns about that. But you do also have Democrats who went through the Obama years, including Biden, and saw how long it took to negotiate Obamacare, with Obama trying to get Republicans on board.

That, of course, never ended up happening. So, you have got some progressives saying, oh, listen, Democrats now have the Senate by a slim, slim majority, with Biden providing that -- or with Harris providing that 51st vote, and there he is kind of broad support among Americans for some sort of relief.

And so would that be enough to essentially just go forward? Or is that kind of already scuttling his big promise that Biden has made, which is that he can work across the aisle and get these sort of negotiated deals and get some support from the GOP?

TAPPER: Philip, let me ask you about this schools thing, because I really think that the Biden administration is going to have to face facts here, that there is a conflict between health experts and teachers unions throughout the country.

Now, there are exceptions, places like Cobb County, where they are not providing safe schools for the teachers to go back to. But, on the other hand, there's like Virginia. In Virginia, teachers said they wanted to be bumped up and get vaccinations ahead of other people.

They were. And still, in Fairfax County, Virginia, the teachers unions are saying, even though teachers are getting these vaccinations, they are not ready to commit to go back to school in the fall.

At some point, aren't they going to have to make it -- side with either the health experts or the teachers unions directly?

PHILIP BUMP, "THE WASHINGTON POST": Yes, I mean, there's that great report in "The Times" as well about schools in Nevada and concerns that they have for young people there who've been out of contact with their peers for so long.

And, yes, you're exactly right. I mean, look, what we're seeing is, this isn't administration that is less than a week old. And we're seeing this is the part where you actually have to start leading. You actually have to step up and be, OK, I'm the president, I'm going to resolve these issues.

It's easier on the campaign trail, when you have 1,000 things going on at once to make these sorts of claims. Yes, I will deal with this. I will deal with that. It's much harder to actually do that from the Oval Office. So, now, I mean, that said, it is the case that the Biden

administration came in and sort of established itself as, look, we are going to cut through the noise here, we're going to follow the science on this and we are going to be the ones to sort of move forward on what's happening with this pandemic.

Now, that's -- the issue of schools is sort of tangentially related to actually addressing the pandemic itself, but this is very much the sort of place where voters should have expected a President Joe Biden would be able to say, OK, we can figure out how to manage the middle of between these two sides here.

[16:25:12]

Again, we're, what, five days into this administration. We could probably give them a couple more days than that. But, that said, this is absolutely the sort of thing that I think voters would have expected by them to be able to resolve.

TAPPER: Yes, unless, of course, he's in the pocket of the teachers unions.

But Fauci and others have been very outspoken for months and months and months that kids going back to in-person education is a top priority. And as long as teachers are wearing PPE, and students too, and there's ventilation improvements, the risk is minimal. It's safer than in the population at large.

Nia-Malika Henderson, Philip Bump, to be continued. We will have you back again soon. Thanks so much.

In just a couple hours, the House will send the article of impeachment to the Senate, as we learn new details now about an alleged plot to help President Trump overturn the election through his own Justice Department.

Plus, $1.3 billion, that's how much Rudy Giuliani's election conspiracy theories might cost him. We're going to talk to the lawyer behind a massive lawsuit against former President Trump's attorney.

Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)