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Source Says, Trump Still Doesn't Get Pandemic's Severity; CNN's Gupta Interviews Fauci As U.S. Death Toll Surpasses 157,000. Aired 1- 1:30p ET

Aired August 05, 2020 - 13:00   ET

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

[13:00:03]

JOHN KING, CNN HOST: More on that story in the hours ahead. Thanks for joining us today. We'll see you back here this tomorrow. A busy news. Brianna Keilar picks up our coverage right now. Have a good day.

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: Hi there. I'm Brianna Keilar and I want to welcome our viewers here in the United States and around the world.

For the tenth time in two weeks, the U.S. is reporting more than 1,000 deaths from coronavirus in a single day, marking more than 10,000 American deaths since July 22nd. And yet the president, quote, still doesn't get it. That is from a source familiar last night's coronavirus task force meeting, the first meeting the president has attended since April.

The source says the president still does not have a grasp of the severity of this pandemic six months in. When experts attempted to explain just how dire the situation is, the president kept changing the subject.

In an interview on Fox this morning, he downplayed, he continued downplaying the crisis.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Some states are going up a little bit, but they will very shortly, they're under control, they'll be coming down.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: CNN also learning this hour that the pandemic is dramatically altering a look at the national political conventions, which are just weeks away now. Three Democratic officials tell CNN Joe Biden is no longer expected to receive his presidential nomination at the party's convention in Milwaukee. Instead, Biden will accept it from his home State of Delaware. And President Trump says he is weighing giving his convention speech from the White House.

Now, to the decision that is facing millions of parents, what to do about school? Yesterday, we compared it to the president telling you to jump out of a plane without telling you how to use a parachute or even providing one. Actually, the president doesn't think you need a parachute at all because he thinks he knows how to fly and he thinks he knows better than the health experts who are telling us the children can contract coronavirus and transmit it.

Here is how he made the case for kids going back to school in an interview on Fox this morning.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: In my view is that schools should be opened. If you look at children, children are almost, and I would almost say definitely, but almost immune from this disease, so few. They've got stronger -- hard to believe, I don't know how you feel about it, but they have much stronger immune systems than we do somehow for this, and they do it, they don't have a problem. They just don't have a problem.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: Now, just a note before we talk about this, the president also said in that interview that older teachers should stay home. Fewer teachers would mean, of course, more crowded classrooms, which goes against the advice of his own government health experts like those at the CDC.

Our Kaitlan Collins is at the White House. We have Elizabeth Cohen, our Senior Medical Correspondent, with us as well.

And, Elizabeth, let's start with you for this fact-check here. This claim that he is making about children being basically immune, it's not only wrong, it's irresponsible.

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN SENIOR MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Completely. It's completely wrong. I don't know where he is getting this. He seems to be just pulling things out of his hat. Children are not immune to this infection. We know that they get infected. And that they get as sick as adults? No. They get more mild illnesses, or sometimes no illness, but they are getting infected. And, Brianna, what's really important here is that they transmit it to other people.

My husband and I used to call our daughters lovingly our little disease vectors. They are little disease vectors for COVID-19 as well. Trump's own surgeon general, his own surgeon general said last month that children can get other people sick. He needs to listen to his medical experts.

KEILAR: And, Kaitlan, the president is claiming that the country is doing just fine and that it's just Democrats who want schools to stay closed. Let's listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: But to Democrats, they're standing in our way. They don't want their states open. Even if the state is in good shape, because you know, much of country is in really good shape. We see the red spots and we have them in red, you know, the COVID areas, but the country is in very good shape, and we're set to rock and roll. But the big problem we have is Democrats don't want to open their schools. (END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: Now, the president met with his coronavirus task force in the Oval Office yesterday. CNN has some new reporting on what happened inside, Kaitlan.

KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Yes. Basically, sources in that meeting did not think that the president is taking the coronavirus seriously, and you can see that from his public comments, where he is saying things like, things are going to be fine by November when it comes to concerns about voters going to the polls and people being in the president's own age group being worried about going there. And so that's really the question here. As you know, he's still not taking this seriously. And so what is going to change that, if anything? And that doesn't seem to be the case.

And so that's really the question going forward about, you know, the president's strategies here. He is now going and attending these task force meetings, the first one, we should note, that he attended since April.

[13:05:04]

But as the president was talking, as he was saying in that clip, talking about it going away, talking about these things, that's not backed up by anything his own health experts are saying.

KEILAR: And he says he may actually do his nomination speech from the White House, Kaitlan. Speaker of the House says that he can't do that. You tell us.

COLLINS: Even Republicans are asking that question, if it's legal for the president to give this kind of a major political speech from a taxpayer funded venue like the White House. I don't think that's ever been done before. The president floated it today during that interview but he seemed to hint that there is a chance he could get backlash for doing it.

It seems that's already happening. You saw the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, saying that he could not give a political speech from the White House. That could only fuel him to want to give it there because aides planning behind the scenes how for him to do this. But it would really speak to how the president views this.

And, the hashtag, that law that prevent political aides inside the White House or aides from inside the White House doing political events, that doesn't apply to the president and to the vice president, but it could apply to other aides. But even if they're found to be in violation of it, like Kellyanne Conway was, it's the president who -- it's up to him president to reprimand them. And, of course, he did not take any action against Kellyanne. It's not likely that he would do it against any other aides either.

KEILAR: And, Elizabeth, tell us about testing right now, because that's such a big topic. This lag time between testing results that can be as much as ten days, and then there are rapid tests, the ten- minute tests that are using at the White House. The president says they're doing great there. Let's listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: We're 50 percent on the tests, the Abbott test or its equivalent, where it's a five-minute test and goes up to 15 minutes. It's a great test. By the way, that test didn't even exist until we came up with that test.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: So you fact check that for us. What's reality here on rapid tests, Elizabeth?

COHEN: Well, first of all, it's unclear exactly what the president is saying. It sounds like maybe he's saying that 50 percent of the tests that are out there in the United States are rapid tests. If that's what he's saying, I don't know where he's getting that from. We have not seen any tally that says 50 percent of this kind and 10 percent of this kind and 20 percent of this kind. So we don't even know where that's coming from.

Secondly, rapid tests have a problem. Yes, they're speedy. But experts have told me, what you get in speed, you forsake in accuracy. The Abbott test has had some documented problems with it. It has too many false results. And that is a problem. The tests that take longer are more accurate but, of course, we would much rather have a rapid test.

So what we need to do and, we're so many months into this, you would think that we would have done this already, is come up with a rapid test that is rapid and accurate.

KEILAR: All right. Thank you to both of you, Kaitlan and Elizabeth.

Let's listen in now, Dr. Anthony Fauci of the White House Coronavirus Task Force speaking now with CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta. Let's listen in.

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: -- questions that are coming in from all over. We're going to get to those. But, first, let me introduce the man of the hour. We're honorably (ph) joined by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the NIAID, as you all know. We'll be taking questions from Facebook and to me (ph), but also from the distinguished faculty at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. It's also streaming on cnn.com for people that want to watch that there.

So, go ahead and start sending in those questions. We want this to be as engaged and interactive as possible. This the latest installment for Harvard, When Public Health Means Business.

Dr. Fauci, welcome.

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ALLERGY AND INFECTIOUS DISEASES: Thank you, Sanjay. It's great to be here. And thank you, Dean Williams, a real pleasure. Thank you for having me.

GUPTA: I've got to -- I have so much to ask you. Every time we get together and you're so generous with your time when I call and I appreciate that. There's so much that people want to know.

Well, let me just ask for a second how are you doing? I know that it's been a very long six months. You've been doing just amazing work tirelessly. How are you?

FAUCI: You know, in general, Sanjay, I'm fine. I'm adjusted to what's called just chronic exhaustion. I think one of the good things about having done my internship and residency during a period of time when we were on every other night and every other weekend before those rules were changed, I think this is my internship on steroids here. So, I'm doing fine. So I can't complain.

I think the energy and the adrenaline rush and the focus comes from what you said, the importance of the problem and what the dean and the president said that this is a historic situation we're facing. So we just got to focus in on our jobs and worry about relaxing later, but not now, for sure.

GUPTA: And I should point out you were seeing patients earlier today. You're still staying clinically active. I am as well. It is one of the great joys of continuing to be able to practice medicine.

[13:10:01]

You have told me, and you've told others, that you have no intention of not staying in this job, as tough as it's been, frankly, lately. So let me ask the question a little differently because you and I also share, we both have wives and three daughters. How is Christine dealing with all of this? Is she worried about you? Does she suggest that maybe you pull back at all?

FAUCI: Well, she doesn't suggest I pull back. She's fine. The girls are fine. They're geographically distributed. They're young women now, and have their own jobs and their own professions in three separate cities. So I miss seeing them.

The only stress I think more on the children, Chris is a rock. She's my anchor. It's the -- the really unseemly things that crises bring out in the world. You know, it brings out the best of people and the worst of people. And, you know, getting death threats for me and my family and harassing my daughters to the point where I have to get security is just -- I mean, it's amazing.

I wouldn't have imagined in my wildest dreams that people who object to things that are pure public health principles are so set against it and don't like what you and I say, namely in word of science, that they actually threaten you. I mean, that, to me, is just strange.

So, other than that, which they're handling well, I wish that they did not have to go through that.

GUPTA: Well, I'm sorry that you're going through that and your daughters and Christine. I know it can't be easy. Dean Williams referred to this war on science, Dr. Fauci. We're going to talk a little about that, but you are the face of science for so many right now, not just here in the United States but around the world. But I am sorry that you're going through that. There isn't an excuse for that. We have a public health crisis through which your helping us navigate ourselves.

And let's get to that. I want to show this animation here of what's going on in the world with regard to COVID in several countries around the world. You'll get an idea if you look at the timetable. Obviously, things started off in China, we're in middle of March there. And then the United States just sort of takes over there. Dr. Fauci, as you can see, I think you can see this graphic, this will take us up to August 5th.

As Dean Williams sort of asked, how did we get here?

FAUCI: You know, as she also said, it's such a complicated situation, Sanjay, of how we got here. First of all, we got hit really hard by a historic pandemic that has characteristics that make it very difficult even under the best of circumstances to respond adequately, and that is an outbreak of a virus that has extraordinary, unprecedented capability of transmitting efficiently from human to human.

You know, when viruses jump from an animal host to a human, as we see with the original SARS, which we're able to contain by public health measures, or with the bird flu which jumped to human that had no capability of really going from human-to-human, we now have one that jumped from an animal, in this case, a bat, certainly, and then maybe an intermediate host, that evolved and developed an extraordinary capability of spreading from human-to-human, so that by the time you really got your arms around this, you had penetration into the community, and every country has suffered.

We, the United States, has suffered as -- as -- worse or, you know, as much or worse than anyone. I mean, when you look at the number of infections and the number of deaths, it really is quite concerning.

And, again, the factors that got us there, we can go over one by one. I don't think -- I'd have to give a soliloquy here to go through them. So I --

GUPTA: No, I understand, sir. And I think that the idea that this is a very contagious virus is true. I think the graphic was really meant to show the United States sort of comparison to the rest of the world and I realized that there was a lot in there. But when you say we're one of the worst, it is worth reminding people we're not quite five percent of the world's population yet represent 20 percent to 25 percent of the world's infections cumulatively, 20 percent to 25 percent of the world's deaths as well. I mean, that has to be worst? Is it not the worse?

FAUCI: Yes, and it is. Quantitatively, if you look at it, it is. I mean, the numbers don't lie.

GUPTA: Let's get to some questions right away and we'll keep coming back to this topic. Dr. Arni Epstein has a question specifically that relates to this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) DR. ARNOLD EPSTEIN, CHAIR, DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH POLICY AND MANAGEMENT AT HARVARD T.H. CHAN SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH: Dr. Fauci, the title of the series is when Public Health Means Business.

[13:15:01]

And this far, it seems we haven't meant business at all. The United States has 4 percent of the world's population but 25 percent of the world's COVID cases and deaths. For a country that is the most affluent and influential, that is a catastrophe.

My question is, knowing what you now know, what would you do differently before the next pandemic or during it?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

FAUCI: Well, I think there's two parts to that question, sir. One is, you know, how we might explain how this happened and what I would do different, and then what you would do different for the next pandemic. I think preparedness. We put together a pandemic preparedness plan as we were trying to respond to the threat of the pre-pandemic bird flu back in 2005. And, again, it was a plan that was a reasonable plan. And, in fact, when it was evaluated independently by Johns Hopkins, it stated that it was our preparedness for a pandemic was essentially number one in the world.

But what happened when the rubber hit the road on this, and we did get hit, we had the kind of response that was not as well suited to what the dynamics of this outbreak is. And what happened is that we had a bit of a disparate response. We live in a very big country and we often leave the decisions about the implementation of things at the local level. And what we've seen a great disparity in how individual states, cities, et cetera responded.

The critical issue that I think we need to look at, how we can get that down is that when you look at the curves and it relates to Sanjay's graph, that when we went up and then started to come down, everybody got hit badly. China got hit badly, Europe, particularly Italy, France and Spain. When they went up, and they responded, they came all the way down to a baseline so that when they started to reopen their countries in a very careful way, they had to deal with little blips that could easily be controlled.

When you look at our curve, it's telling. And that's the thing that bothers me. We went way up and when we came down, we came down through a plateau of 20,000 cases per day. That is not a good baseline. We needed to get further down, so that as we went along over weeks and months, we stayed at 20,000 per day.

Some parts of the country did very well. They came up and they came way down. Other parts of the country held it so it didn't even go up, but there was so many different players, as it were, in the country, that the totality of the country, the sum net of that was a flat line that was very high.

And then when we decided with the guidelines of how we can open America again, for reasons that we obviously couldn't stay shut down forever, it's having terrible economic consequences, terrible consequences on employment, we decided we would try to take steps to open.

And when we did, we didn't do it uniformly. Some states did not pay attention to the -- the benchmarks or the checkpoints. Others did it fine, but the citizenry within a state or within a city actually did it all in a phenomenon. They said, we're locked down, so now we're just going to let it fly.

Now, you could say, no, that didn't happen but the numbers tell you what happened. Because what happened is that as we began to open, we went from 20,000 a day to 30,000, 40,000, 50,000, 60,000 and we even peaked at 70,000 new infections. The deaths had gone down nicely. That was good. Now, they're starting to go up because of the cases that went up.

So we have a disparate response. We didn't all row together. We had some went up and some went down. And there are parts of the country you could look at that did very well. But, totally, as a nation, we are in that situation where we've got to get that control way down to a low baseline.

GUPTA: So, Dr. Fauci, let me just -- summarizing, we were ill-prepared to deal with this pandemic in the first place, sounds like, and then you called the response sort of a disparate response. But it sounds like it was a failed response. We never really fully implemented a therapy. I mean, in medicine, if you give a half a therapy, you wouldn't call it a disparate therapy. You would say you gave inadequate therapy to actually treat the problem.

[13:20:01]

Did we let the American people down with this response?

FAUCI: Sanjay, you know that if I make the statement that we let the American people down, it would be distracting, because that would be the sound bite, and I wouldn't want to get the message that I'm trying to get across where I think we can handle this if we have some fundamental principles that I hope and I know you'll let me get the opportunity to articulate, because we can do much better and we can do much better without locking down.

And I think that strange binary approach, that either lockdown or you let it all fly, there's some place in the middle when we can open the economy and still avoid these kind of surges that we're seeing. And I hope we get a chance to discuss that.

GUPTA: Well, maybe we can get right to that now, sir. You've made the list the other day, and I'll just rattle them off with the audience. If we wore masks, if we kept physical distance, if we shut down bars or at least indoor, close and crowded situations, large gatherings, and washed hands often. Out of those five things --

FAUCI: And outdoors, much better than indoors always. That's a good point. GUPTA: If we did those five things, that's not shutting down, but if we did those five things, what would the country look like in three or four weeks?

FAUCI: It may take a little bit longer than three or four weeks. I'd say, what it would look like in a month and a month-and-a-half, I think the kind of turnaround that when -- the southern states that got hit really badly, Southern California, Arizona, Texas and Florida. What Arizona did is that they finally did say, wait a minute, we're in trouble. We're going to institute those fundamental principles, and they came right down in a nice curve, which is really good.

So here is the point I want to make, is that -- and it seems simple, is that one of the things working against it. The good news about COVID-19 is that 40 percent of the population has no symptoms when they get infected. That's good. I mean, you get infected, you have no symptoms. The bad news for messaging is that 40 percent of the population get no symptoms.

Because if you want to get a unified response with this most unusual virus, Sanjay, I don't think anything has come close to that in my 40 years of experience. You've got 40 percent of the people have no symptoms, then you get some people, they get minor symptoms, some that get serious enough that they're in bed for several weeks and they even residual effects that I hope we can talk about later. Then there are those that require hospitalization, some intensive care, some ventilation and some death.

So then if you look at the population as a whole, to get a unified message that everybody understands, you have some people who they know statistically it's not going to bother them individually as a person, because the chances are they're not going to get symptoms. And even if they do, they're going to be mild.

Then you get others, the ones that we have spoken about on your show a lot, the elderly, those with underlying conditions, even young people with underlying conditions, who it is a significant threat of serious disease and death. So if you wanted to get control over it, it would be nice if everybody was singing from the same tune when you want to get it down.

But what's happened, Sanjay? Look at the reality. What has happened is that we have a situation where we say, open up in a measured, prudent way.

GUPTA: Yes.

FAUCI: And you get some that do it fine, and then you see the pictures of people at bars with no masks, not social distancing. I'm not blaming them because I think they're doing that innocently, because what they're saying incorrectly is that if I get infected, I'm in a vacuum. It doesn't bother anybody else. I'm not bothering them. Don't bother me. That's incorrect. Because even though you are likely not going to get symptoms, you are propagating the outbreak, which means that you're going to infect someone who will infect someone who then will have a serious consequence. So, let me get to what I think is the major point. I was trying to think about some sort of a metaphor and analogy to kind of get people to understand, and you mentioned my daughters, as I think I've bragged about to you once.

One of my daughters was a pretty good varsity crew member at a Division I college, and there were eight people on the boat. And the thing I learned -- I knew nothing about crew, but the thing I learned when watching every one of their meets was that you have eight people.

[13:25:06]

The only way you're going to win the race is that when all eight are rowing in unison. You get one that catches a crab, as it were, with the oar goes that way or don't row, you don't win. So as long as you have any member of society, any demographic group who's not seriously trying to get to the end game of suppressing this, it will continue to smolder and smolder and smolder, and that will be the reason why, in a non-unified way, we've plateaued at an unacceptable level.

Now, I'm sorry for the long-winded answer, but I think that's the problem.

GUPTA: So we will keep this line of conversation going, because I think it does then raise the question, if we can't get to that point where people, either because of trust or because of diligence, with these basic public health measures, if it just isn't happening, do we need to do something that's more aggressive in this country?

And before you answer, think about that. This leads (ph) into our next question from Dr. Sarah Fortune. So let's play that as well.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. SARAH FORTUNE, PROFESSOR OF IMMUNOLOGY AND INFECTIOUS DISEASES, DEPARTMENT OF IMMUNOLOGY AND INFECTIOUS DISEASES AT THE HARVARD T.H. CHAN SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH: Over the last several months, I've spent a great deal of time talking to the community, to the lay press about the COVID pandemic and advances in SARS-COVID-2 research. And I know you've done the same times ten. I have been disheartened by threads of mistrust in the public towards science. I have received questions about the legitimacy of scientific studies and potential political motivations of the scientists conducting those studies. And I am in sort of despair about the state of relations between the scientific community and the public.

And I was wondering if there are lessons you have learned about building trust between the scientific community and the public that could help us move forward now?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

FAUCI: You know, that's a very good question, Sanjay, and a very good comment. Yes, there is a degree of anti-science feeling in this country. And I think it is not just related to science. It's almost related to authority and a mistrust in authority that spills over, because in some respects, scientists, because they're trying to present data, may be looked at, looked upon as being authoritative figure. And they're pushing back on authority, they're pushing back on government, it's the same as pushing back on science.

Unfortunately, that's not what scientists are. And I think we need to be more transparent in reaching out to people and engaging society and understanding why science and evidence-based policy is so important.

But the person who just made that comment is absolutely correct. That is really a very difficult thing to do. And I know when I say that if we follow these five or six principles, we can open up. We don't have to stay shut. We can push and open up if we do this.

There are some people that just don't believe me, they don't pay attention to that, and that's unfortunate, because that is the way out of this. We can continue to go towards normality without doing the drastic things of shutting down if we follow some fundamental principles.

GUPTA: Just because we're talking about things happening real-time and trying to look to the future, and I want to be optimistic about this, as do you, Dr. Fauci, but we've tried this. And I think you've made the case about the benefit of these simple public health measures. I've made the case. But, look, these basic public health measures have helped eradicate diseases off the face of the earth. And yet we're still not doing it in this country.

FAUCI: Right.

GUPTA: So just in the interests of where are we going, what do we have to do, if that doesn't happen over the next few weeks, do you think we'll have to go into shutdown mode?

FAUCI: I don't think we have to go into shutdown mode. Sanjay, I am -- you know, I'm cautiously optimistic. I do have an abiding faith in the American spirit. And that's the reason I invest the time and I love being on with you in any forum because we can start talking about the science. and the more we give a consistent message, the more people are going to start to understand what we need to do.

I think the most part we've been through some terrible times.

[13:30:03]