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Russian Strike Hits Grain Terminals At Odesa Port; Video Appears To Show Wagner Leader Prigozhin Greeting His Fighters In Belarus; Study: Nearly 800K Die For Become Permanently Disable Each Year Due To Diagnostic Errors; DOJ: Assessing Situation On Border Amid Reports Texas Trooper Were Told To Push Migrants Back In Water. Aired 3:30-4p ET

Aired July 19, 2023 - 15:30   ET

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

[15:30:00]

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: So we'll keep watching as you continue with these proceedings and listening to witnesses full heartedly as they are saying what they are seeing. Congressman Pete Sessions, thank you so much for your time today.

REP. PETE SESSIONS (R-TX): You bet.

BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN HOST: So just days after the huge grain deal was upended by Russia, Ukraine now says the Kremlin is targeting Odesa, its major port city. We have a report from there.

And a new study estimates that nearly 800,000 people die or are permanently disabled because of a wrong diagnosis. Details on this alarming report when we come back.

[15:35:00]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SANCHEZ: Russia's unleashed a second barrage of missile and drone attacks on the Ukrainian port city of Odesa. Defense officials accuse Vladimir Putin of deliberately targeting infrastructure associated with the Black Sea grain deal, the one Russia just got out of. Odesa's mayor described the overnight strikes as one of the most horrible nights since the Kremlin's invasion.

And take a good look at this dark and grainy video. This purportedly shows Yevgeny Prigozhin, the man who waged an armed rebellion against Vladimir Putin last month. He's reportedly been spotted in public for the first time since his attempted uprising. The apparently unedited video was post on Wagner's social media channels and appears to show the mercenary leader greeting his troops in Belarus. Now CNN cannot to confirm the speaker in the video is in fact Prigozhin or even when it was recorded.

CNN chief international security correspondent Nick Paton Walsh has been following this new development. So Nick, what more can you tell us about the video and Yevgeny Prigozhin's whereabouts? NICK PATON WALSH, CNN INTERNATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: Yes, I

mean, the video itself is pretty inconclusive. You can see parts of it. It's very dark, very grainy. It sounds like Prigozhin talking there, and if indeed, it is verified or verifiable, it would essentially suggest that Yevgeny Prigozhin after a 25-day absence from public view is really going along with the deal that ended his armed rebellion against Vladimir Putin. In which the president of Belarus said bring yourself and your fighters to Belarus.

It's taken a while, it seems, for him to get there, but some geolocation that CNN has done does appears to suggest that may be one of the camps where they were told perhaps Wagner fighters would go and some of the metadata in that file backs up the timing of its purported filming. So still some questions to be answered.

But it came out hours after here in Prague the head of Britain's foreign intelligence agency, MI6 gave a rare public speech. And questions after which he told me, when I asked if Yevgeny Prigozhin was alive or healthy, that, quote, he was thought to be floating about, which would have amounted to the first Western confirmation that frankly Prigozhin was still alive, let alone at liberty. So details certainly emerging today about where Prigozhin is, it seem, and the fact he may have gong along with the deal that ended his armed rebellion -- Boris.

SANCHEZ: And on the deal that may have saved Prigozhin's life and ended that rebellion, you heard directly from the head of MI6 about this and asked him specifics on the deal. What did he share with you?

WALSH: Yes, he said, look, this was a deal that Putin cut to save his own skin, very scathing, frankly, about the confusion clearly of that weekend, the weakness it displayed in Putin, particularly when it came to Putin's relationship with Prigozhin. Here's what Sir Richard Moore, the head of MI6 had to say earlier today.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

RICHARD MOORE, MI6 CHIEF: If you look at Putin's behaviors on that day, Prigozhin started off I think, as a traitor at breakfast. He had been pardoned by supper and then a few days later, he was invited for tea. So, there are some things and even the chief of MI6 finds that a little bit difficult to try and interpret, in terms of who's in and who's out.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

WALSH: I mean, sort of startling I think in his expressions, essentially saying that even with the resources of Western intelligence it was hard for us to work out what on earth had been going on. But clear in his believes that Russia's elite certainly feeling pressure, feeling officious of that extraordinary weekend. And a rare and odd appeal, frankly, abnormal, directly appealing to dissident Russians, disaffected Russians, to spy for Britain, give MI6 their secrets and essentially I think hoping that we may begin to see yet more dissent emerging from Putin's inner circle. SANCHEZ: Yes, a lot of disaffected folks, you must imagine, given the

dysfunction at the Kremlin at this point. Nick Paton Walsh from Prague, thank you so much -- Brianna.

KEILAR: We are following a developing story coming to us out of North Carolina. A tornado has ripped through a major county. It has left this incredible trail of destruction. We are keeping our eye on this. We are getting more details as we can. We're going to have much more on this next.

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KEILAR: You trust that your doctor will know what is wrong with you or what is wrong your with your loved one when they are sick or injured. But an unsettling study, to say the least, from Johns Hopkins University found close to 1 million people in the U.S. either die or become permanently disabled every year due to wrong diagnoses.

[15:45:00]

CNN's chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta is going to be joining Jake Tapper to talk more about this next on "THE LEAD." And we have Jake here with us now. You know personally about how common this is.

JAKE TAPPER, CNN ANCHOR, THE LEAD: Yes.

KEILAR: And just what's at stake when you're dealing with this kind of thing.

TAPPER: Yes, because obviously what happened to my daughter, Alice, who's now 15 and thriving and very strong. But what happened to her in the fall of 2021 was an eye-opening event for us. She had a perforated appendix that was misdiagnosed. The doctors were convinced that she had a virus.

And that misdiagnosis almost killed her because her body -- she started to develop sepsis, which is one of the harms that is discussed in this study by Dr. David Newman-Toker. And Dr. Newman Toker actually is somebody who after this whole incident happened and after Alice recovered from it and she had her appendix out, looked into her case on behalf of Johns Hopkins. And it's harrowing.

I mean, what happens is -- so in this study the Dr. Newman-Toker takes a look at 800,000 Americans either died or severely disabled because of diagnostic error, which he says happens about 11 percent of the time. Now most of the time it's not death or serious disability, but 371,000 people died according to this study, 424,000 sustained permanent disability such as brain damage, blindness, loss of, limbs, or organs, or metastasized cancer. And so, this is a very serious issue. It's one that doesn't make the doctor popular among his colleagues, but it's a very serious issue and I'll be talking about it with Sanjay coming up.

KEILAR: It's hard being told that you're messing up. But it's still -- I mean, we look at your daughter, and in this case, when it was really something as simple as needing a different test or a different image to look at a possibility that they were not considering. I mean, isn't that really what it comes down to in so many of these cases, is that doctors need to be thinking outside of this idea of what they think it may be. They need to testing that hypothesis.

TAPPER: Well, what happened with Alice was really horrific. Because first of all, they wouldn't give us imaging. We were asking for imaging, can we get an x-ray, can we get a sonogram, and they would don't it. We don't need that data, is what they said.

And Sanjay and I have talked about this before. And he talked about something called diagnostic momentum. Which is basically, for want of a better term, buying into a narrative. You know, believe being there. We believe this is a virus, therefore we don't need that data because we've decided it is this. And then just getting on that train for it's a virus, it's a virus, and ignoring all countervailing evidence that might suggest it's something else. Well, why is her white blood cell count so high, et cetera, et cetera.

This has become an issue, a cause for my daughter, Alice. She talked about this on air a year ago with Sanjay. And in fact, while we were on vacation in Idaho, a family in Massachusetts found her on Instagram and started writing about their daughter who had a situation similar to Alice's, misdiagnosis. Doctors messed up, they made the wrong decisions. And before you knew it, me and my wife and my daughter, we were all involved with this family telling them what to do. And thank God that little girl is recovering.

But, you know, you really have to be fierce. And people out there need to know they have rights as patients. Look, my dad's a doctor, my mom's a nurse. I revere the medical profession. But people make mistakes and patients are allowed to say, I really would like a sonogram, I really would like a CAT scan. I don't think you're taking this seriously enough or I need a consultation. I really would like the surgical team to come in. I need to talk to them.

KEILAR: Look, it saves lives to talk about -- and you see it there even just in that one instance.

TAPPER: When you and I mess up, we correct ourselves on air. We don't have the luxury of a mess-up like what doctors and nurses do. But doctors and nurses need to understand that diagnostic momentum could be a real problem.

KEILAR: This is so important you're talking about this, Jake. We look forward to it.

TAPPER: Thank you.

KEILAR: Boris.

SANCHEZ: The Justice Department says a trooper's report on how migrants are being treated at the border is, quote, troubling. They're now assessing the situation at the southern border. We have details on that straight ahead.

[15:50:00]

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SANCHEZ: First on CNN, the Justice Department says it is assessing the situation along the southern border amid reports that Texas troopers were told to push migrants back into the Rio Grande River and ordered not to give them drinking water in scorching heat.

CNN's Priscilla Alvarez has been following these developments. Priscilla, the details from these troopers sent out in emails, they're really eye-opening.

PRISCILLA ALVAREZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT: They are. And really it speaks to the injuries that some migrants have endured because of some of the actions of the Texas governor. Now I'm told now that the Justice Department is working with the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies to assess the situation.

This is significant. This is the first public acknowledgment by the DOJ that they are looking into the situation. I have been talking to sources for months and they have told me there have been internal discussions with DHS and DOJ over a situation that they were watching play out along the Texas-Mexico border since last year.

Of course, this is the governor that has sent migrants to Democratic led cities without coordination. He now set up buoys in part of the river that has the potential of drowning risk for many migrants. And now we are learning that there were some orders that troops were to push migrants back to Mexico. Now the White House has responded to this and they're calling it atrocious. Take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

[15:55:00]

KARINE JEAN-PIERRE, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: I saw these reports and I think one of the things and I've been very clear about this, that this governor has done over and over again is treated this situation that we're seeing at the border in an if inhumane way. It is atrocious, the actions that he decides to take. He takes this, instead of dealing with this issue in a way that we can get to a resolution and working together, he turns it into -- you know, he turns it into a political stunt.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ALVAREZ: Now, Boris, I want to make clear, the DOJ is not investigating it. Their assessing the situation. That could be the first step toward an investigation. But for now, clearly it has escalated to the point where the administration is paying very close attention.

SANCHEZ: And Governor Greg Abbott is essentially denying that there was any wrongdoing.

ALVAREZ: Correct. SANCHEZ: Priscilla Alvarez, thank you so much -- Brianna.

KEILAR: Well they were adrift in the vast Pacific Ocean for months. But somehow a man and his dog survived.

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SANCHEZ: If life imitates art, this next story could get an Oscar. 54- year-old Australian fisherman and his dog were discovered, rescued after three months at sea. Timothy Shaddock was found with his dog Bella on his catamaran in the Eastern Pacific more than 1,200 miles from land.

KEILAR: He was spotted by a tuna boat and a crew from that tuna boat brought him aboard. They actually spotted him at first from the helicopter. So they bring him on board, they give him medical attention. And Shaddock said that he was able to survive by eating raw fish. But he will probably take a break from the ocean for a while.

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[16:00:03]

TIM SHADDOCK, AUSTRALIAN SAILOR: I love being alone on the ocean. You know, and a lot of it is about the love of it. You know, the love of being there.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: So, we'll find you out there again soon?

SHADDOCK: Probably not.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SANCHEZ: This is like looking at a crystal ball. I've always said that if TV didn't work out for me or I got bored of it, I would just get a boat, get a dog and head out into the ocean.

KEILAR: All right, I'll keep track of you. Better than he was kept track of.

SANCHEZ: "THE LEAD" with Jake Tapper starts right now.