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The Lead with Jake Tapper
100 Million Americans Now Fully Vaccinated; Florida Passes Bill that Adds New Voting Restrictions; Mass Shootings In Other Countries Met with Swift Legislation. Aired 4:30-5p ET
Aired April 30, 2021 - 16:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
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[16:30:54]
JAKE TAPPER, CNN HOST: Big news in our health lead today. As of today, more than 100 million Americans are fully vaccinated. The numbers of case and deaths in this country are going down, all proving one thing that these vaccines work.
Case numbers are at the lowest they have been since October. Deaths are down an incredible 80 percent since just January. States and businesses are taking this good news to push ahead with reopening. Tomorrow, fans will pack the stands at the Kentucky derby.
Today, Disneyland opens back up to Californians which is where we find CNN's Nick Watt.
Nick, the TSA has just made an announcement when it comes to mask requirements. What is it?
NICK WATT, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yeah, that's right, Jake. So this mask requirement for planes, trains and boats was set to expire May 11th. The TSA just extended it through September 13th. Masks also required here at Disneyland which as you mentioned just opened this morning listen, the theme of today has been shots in arms and doors creaking open.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
JEFF ZIENTS, WHITE HOUSE COVID-19 RESPONSE COORDINATOR: Today, we reached a major milestone on the number of Americans who are fully vaccinated. Today, 100 million Americans are fully vaccinated.
WATT (voice-over): That's about 30 percent of the population.
MAYOR BILL DE BLASIO (D), NEW YORK CITY: The people are getting vaccinated and fighting back COVID and it's working, and they are ready for a comeback. I've got to tell you. I think "the daily news" has it right. It will be the summer of New York city.
WATT: July 1, everything opens in NYC. May 1 tomorrow, no more outdoor restrictions in Connecticut. In New Orleans, now stores and restaurants are open 100 percent.
Nationwide, many lives are still being lost but the average daily death toll lowest it's been for more than nine months.
DR. MEGAN RANNEY, EMERGENCY ROOM PHYSICIAN, BROWN UNIVERSITY: I think that COVID is not going to go completely away, but I am overall quite optimistic for our health care system and country as a whole.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Are you ready?
WATT: The challenge now vaccinating the hesitant and hard-to-reach. This bar in Milwaukee now hosts a pop-up clinic.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Vaccine hesitancy right now, it might be easier for people.
WATT: Emergency use authorization for the Pfizer vaccine in younger teens could come soon. So what about schools come the fall?
JOSEPH R. BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Based on the science and the CDC they should probably all be open.
WATT: Cruises could be back mid-July says the CDC in a letter obtained by "USA Today" with safety measures.
Tomorrow, Delta will start filling those middle seats again, and tomorrow, there will be up to 50,000 fans at the Kentucky Derby. Actual fans.
MAYOR GREG FISCHER (D), LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY: People are really pumped up about getting a little bit back to normal. I've always thought as the Kentucky derby as the world's biggest fashion show hand certainly the rites of spring as well for all of America.
WATT: Fashion, eh. There will be hats but also still masks.
DR. DIANE SCHNEIDER, INTERNIST ATTENDING KENTUCKY DERBY: I think that people will be very dill vent as well in wearing masks. Otherwise they may be escorted out.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
WATT (on camera): And here at Disneyland, it's temperature checks on the way in. Look, this is pretty momentous. Disneyland has been closed for about 13 months now, and the CEO said today, we've waited so long for this.
Listen, we've all been waiting so long for so much. Let's just hope we continue on this slow road back to normal -- Jake.
TAPPER: All right. Nick, thanks so much. Appreciate it.
It's a state whose Republican governor bragged about how excellently and efficiently their election went, but now, Republicans in the state want to make major changes to the way people vote anyway. Does Florida's new voting bill go too far?
Stay with us.
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[16:39:07]
TAPPER: In our politics lead, more evidence that disinformation that public officials such as Donald Trump or Kevin McCarthy lying to the American people over and over, more evidence that it has an impact.
Take a look at this. A brand new CNN poll shows a whopping 70 percent of Republicans think wrongly that President Biden did not win the election fair and square. And in Florida, a rare swing state that Donald Trump not only won in 2020 but improved over 2016, a state where Republican Governor Ron DeSantis heralded how efficiently and expertly the election run -- well, in Florida, Republican lawmakers are nonetheless on the verge of changing election rules to make it in many cases more difficult for legal voters to cast their ballots, with Republicans, many of them citing the big lie about the election.
CNN's Dianne Gallagher is live at the state capital in Tallahassee.
[16:40:00]
Dianne, talk us through what this bill does.
DIANNE GALLAGHER, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yeah, Jake, it wasn't just Ron DeSantis praising Florida's election, the bill's sponsors as they were introducing it called for election successful, secure and something that they were very proud of, but then they started talking about adding guardrails for potential gaining of the system in the future.
Democrats say that in addition to them believing that this is a racist bill, it's also a necessary.
I want to tick through some of the changes it does allot. It adds new identification requirements for who votes by mail, limits who can return a completed mail-in ballot. It requires a voter to request their mail-in ballot annually instead of every two years like it is now and expands the powers of observers during ballot tabulation and it creates additional restrictions and limits on drop boxes.
Now, again, Democrats have said that this is completely unnecessary because Florida's election was so successful, Jake.
TAPPER: And this is actually as happened in Georgia as well, a less onerous of the bill that many originally proposed.
GALLAGHER: Yes. It is -- it is words of many of the people who were against it, it is not a good bill you it is a better bill than initially what it was. Initially, the language banned drop boxes completely and created very difficult signature matching and would have made it incredibly difficult for people to vote. I can tell you that through this entire way that the election supervisors, 67 of them, they are bipartisan in the state of Florida, they have opposed this legislation saying it will make elections messier. It's going to make it harder for them to do their jobs.
In addition this is unfunded they say. There's no extra money for election supervisor, and there's a lot of extra work and manpower needed.
TAPPER: All right. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.
And Abby Phillip is here to talk about this with us.
So, we all remember Governor Ron DeSantis aptly, I mean, I had no issue with it, taking a victory lap after Florida's election. Trump won. They ran it efficiently. They had election results that night. There was early voting.
Why would they change it? I mean, it seems like it went well.
ABBY PHILLIP, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: I mean, there's a long history in Florida of Republicans using vote by mail. This is a state where there are a lot of older voters, many of whom prefer to vote by mail because it's easier. It's more convenient, and they did it well in the last cycle, and yet they are doing this in part because they know that this is what Donald Trump wants.
This is the direction that they have to go in, even though there was actually nothing wrong, and it really belies something that, you know, we heard this past week from Senator Tim Scott who claimed falsely that Republicans are not trying to restrict investigate as Dianne just pointed out. Not only do they -- are they trying to restrict voting, but they tried harder in an earlier version of this bill and then it was pared down to something more simple.
TAPPER: So, these new Republican laws that we're seeing across the U.S. focusing a lot on mail-in ballots where Democrats did have a huge advantage.
PHILLIP: Right.
TAPPER: And also we should point out that once the pandemic is over, which it isn't, there will be less of a necessary reason for people to vote by mail, you know, because there won't be the threat to their lives if they vote, but it's hard not to look at the fact that the Democrats had so much success with vote by mails and Republicans didn't because Trump was telling them not to.
PHILLIP: Yeah. I mean, look, when I was covering this issue last summer, Republicans faced a choice. Do they convince their voters or encourage their voters to utilize vote by mail just like Democrats had or do they try to fight back against vote by mail. They chose to fight back, but mostly because Donald Trump had convinced himself that this was a way that he was going to lose the election.
This was months before he actually did lose the election, but that was the choice that they faced and they chose the other path. That's why we're in a position, the position that we're in right now. It was not a foregone conclusion that Democratic voters would actually even successfully use vote by mail because many of them, you know, are more transient.
They don't have -- maybe they are in college. Maybe they changed their addresses. It wasn't a foregone conclusion. It became one because of former President Trump.
TAPPER: Take a look at this from the CNN poll conducted last week asking voters which is a bigger problem in U.S. elections. Forty-five percent say investigate rules make it too hard to cast a ballot and 46 percent say voting rules are not strict enough. Now we know, of course, voting fraud exists, but there is very little evidence that it is a major problem in the United States and in fact the biggest incident of voter fraud in the last few years was that Republican consultant in North Carolina and the voter fraud he caused.
And yet this really seems to be -- this is a partisan breakdown of those numbers, as you might imagine.
[16:45:02]
This really seemed to have seeped into the Republican mindset. This is a major problem even though there isn't any evidence that it is.
PHILLIP: I mean, this is a major political skill that former President Trump had which was convincing people, particularly Republicans, to buy into whatever his version of reality is, and that's what we're seeing here with voting. Republicans now believe the big lie, am I'm not just talking about Trump Republicans. Up and down the ticket, all the way to Capitol Hill, they are buying into the big lie.
TAPPER: Of course, the Republicans that were elected on the same ballot in all those states, all those House members.
PHILLIP: Their elections are --
TAPPER: Their elections were fine, of course. Nothing wrong with those.
Abby Phillip, thanks so much.
Catch Abby on her show "INSIDE POLITICS" Sunday morning, at 8:00 a.m. Eastern.
Other countries, it's usually followed by swift political action. But in America, thoughts and prayers are often toured what should follow mass shootings. And then stalled politics, so why is this a distinctly American problem?
Stay with us.
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[16:50:12]
TAPPER: In our national lead, there have been 50 mass shootings in the United States just this April, according to the Gun Violence Archive. Other countries are baffled why the U.S. has not done more to change gun laws.
CNN's Erica Hill has the latest in our series on "Guns in America".
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ERICA HILL, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Sixteen children, just 5 and 6 years old, and their teacher gunned down in an elementary school in Scotland 25 years ago. Weeks later, 35 people killed in a popular tourist spot in Australia, prompting massive buyback programs in both countries and strict new laws.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The people have spoken. Parliament has spoken. Handguns are banned.
HILL: New Zealand 2019.
More than 50 murdered in attacks on two mosques.
JACINDA ARDERN, NEW ZEALAND PRIME MINISTER: Australia experienced a massacre and changed their law. New Zealand had its experience and changed its laws. To be honest with you, I do not understand the United States.
HILL: Swift action after horror but not in the U.S. where thoughts and prayers quickly devolve into politics.
DAVID HEMENWAY, HEALTH POLICY PROFESSOR, HARVARD T.H. CHAN SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH: I think the big problem is the culture wars, that this is part of the U.S. culture wars.
HILL: Wars that leave little room for addressing the root of this violence.
DR. MEGAN RANNEY, EMERGENCY PHYSICIAN, BROWN UNIVERSITY: We can talk about making the guns safer, but we also have to talk about keeping the guns out of the hands of the people who are highest risk.
HILL: Despite grabbing the headlines, mass shootings already at least 168 in the first four months of this year, are just a fraction of gun- related deaths in the U.S. More than 60 percent are suicides, and addressing that recurring tragedy may hold the key to reducing gun violence overall.
JOE LIUNI, GENERAL MANAGER, SAFESHOOT: Suicide touches everybody. So many has a family member, a friend, we're losing veterans, so anything that we can do to help out.
HILL: Joe Liuni manages a gunshot and shooting range in Ulster County New York, and he's also an active partner in a local mental health program known as SPEAK, Suicide Prevention, Education, Awareness and Knowledge.
LIUNI: We were all reluctant in the beginning because every time there's a shooting and it seems to us that it's a mental health situation, we're the ones that take the hit for it, and so the discussion wasn't about guns. It was about what we could do.
HILL: SPEAK unites public health officials and gun owners to help them recognize the signs of a person in crisis. Among them no prior gun experience, or coming to the shooting range alone. The goal: to start a conversation.
LIUNI: Talk to them a little bit, see if we can make a phone call. Any of the hotlines for SPEAK, or any hotlines for mental health.
HILL: Inspired by a project from the New Hampshire Safety Coalition, the successful model has spread to several states.
KIM MYER, ASSISTANT DIRECTOR, UTAH DIVISION OF SUBSTANCE ABUSE AND MENTAL HEALTH: Eighty-five percent of gun deaths in Utah are suicides. Half of all suicides are with a firearm so this is a community that's really impacted by firearm suicide so getting right messenger is critically important.
HILL: While less than 5 percent of suicide attempts in the U.S. from 2007 to 2014 involved a gun, nearly 90 percent of those ended in death.
Has there been an experience where you felt you've been able to make that difference for someone?
LIUNI: Oh, yeah, I think a couple of times. Bumping back into the -- into a couple of people that I talked to, and they said, thanks a lot.
HILL: Do you think this could be mod for Cooperation and other areas of conversation?
LIUNI: Yes. If you want a serious discussion about gun control, gun violence, you need to sit down with all the players involved and that means us.
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HILL (on camera): And Joe says he's not the only one in the community who really wants to be a part of those discussions. He emphasized how important safety is to the gun community as a whole and that that is something he feels could real be a point of conversation. The woman you just saw from Utah there said what we all need do is be open. People need to be open to having these difficult conversations, Jake, to talking to people whose ideas, whose values they may not think align with theirs and they may honor that moment and really think of the things that make you feel uncomfortable.
And I do want to note, that it's so important that we all try to work out for one another and recognize the signs. And I just want to put up on the screen there, the suicide prevention hotline. It is staffed 24/7. If you or someone you know is in crisis or having a challenging time, 800-273-8255 -- Jake.
TAPPER: 800-273-8255. Thank you so much. Appreciate it, Erica.
Coming up, why Liz Cheney fist bumping President Biden is triggering so many Republicans. Here's a hint: it's not because of social distancing.
Stay with us.
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[16:59:36]
TAPPER: Welcome to THE LEAD. I'm Jake Tapper.
This hour, returning to cruises and full flight and Disneyland. The pandemic reopening spree continues as we get news that some children may soon be eligible for the vaccine.
Then, we're live in Israel, a disaster at a religious festival where dozens were killed in a crush of people. And then on Capitol Hill, internal fights continue to tear the House GOP apart.
