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Trump Trashes Dr. Fauci as Coronavirus Cases Spike Across the U.S.; Final Presidential Debate Set for Thursday Night; Presidential Debate Commission Says They're Going to have the Microphones of Trump and Biden Muted During Parts of the Final Debate; Futures Up As Pelosi's Stimulus Deadline Approaches. Aired 9-9:30a ET

Aired October 20, 2020 - 09:00   ET

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

[09:00:11]

POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning, everyone. I'm Poppy Harlow.

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR: And I'm Jim Sciutto.

Fourteen days, two weeks out from election day, and as the country battles a deadly pandemic, and let's be frank, many of you are already voting.

The president trashes the nation's top infectious disease expert again. And this morning Dr. Fauci, well, he responds.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ALLERGY AND INFECTIOUS DISEASES: Many, many states that had been doing reasonably well and now showing upticks, that's what we should be concentrating on. All that other stuff is a distraction. It's like in "The Godfather," nothing personal, strictly business, as far as I'm concerned. You know? I just want to do my job and take care of the people of this country. That's all I want to do.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HARLOW: Like "The Godfather." Well, here are the facts. Hospitalizations are sadly hitting record highs. Record highs in this entire pandemic in at least 14 states. Cases are surging. More than 220,000 Americans have died from COVID-19, and health officials are warning things could get a lot worse. Still, moments ago, the president said this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Well, we are living with it and we're having the vaccines coming out very soon. With or without the vaccines, we're rounding the turn. We understand the disease. No, there will be no shutdowns. Well, we have to open up. And we live with it and we open up our schools. (END VIDEO CLIP)

HARLOW: Let's go to our John Harwood to kick us off this morning. John joins us outside the White House.

What else did we hear from the president this morning?

JOHN HARWOOD, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Well, Poppy, what we've got is a president who has given up on fighting the coronavirus outright and he is now trying to cast that as a virtue. Hence, you get the embrace of Scott Atlas, who has been pushing under one name or another a strategy of herd immunity to allow more Americans to get the virus and get through it that way as opposed to herd immunity developed through a vaccine.

It also requires discrediting Anthony Fauci, who, of course, has more credibility than the president does. He is being used in the president's own campaign ads. So what that means is when the president discredits him, he's got to do it gently as he did in this comment to FOX.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: He is a nice guy. The only thing I say is he is a little bit sometimes not a team player, but he is a Democrat and I think that he's just fine.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HARWOOD: To be clear, Anthony Fauci is not a partisan. He has served for decades under presidents of both parties including or beginning with Ronald Reagan, but this is how the president is trying to make himself feel better as he gets toward the end of the campaign. He is trailing. Most Americans don't trust his approach to the coronavirus, but he is pushing a message that he's been right.

He's going in front of mask-less crowds where they affirm his view that he's been right, laugh along at his jokes about Anthony Fauci, and that's how he's going to close his campaign whether it helps him win the election or not.

HARLOW: Yes. It looks like the strategy here in the final 14 days.

John, thanks for the reporting at the White House this morning.

Well, 31 states are seeing an increase in new cases of COVID just from a week ago, over that same period. As we'd mentioned, 14 states, the ones you see in red there, have record hospitalizations.

SCIUTTO: Yes. It means folks get really sick. That includes Kansas where CNN has just learned that all 62 residents of one nursing home have now been infected. Ten residents have already died.

CNN's Martin Savidge is in Salt Lake City, Utah, a state that is also seeing a huge spike in cases. And I wonder there, Martin, the story we hear, of course, is

exhaustion with the various measures needed to keep this in check. Is that what you're seeing on the ground there?

MARTIN SAVIDGE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: It is. When you talk to health officials here as to what they think is driving the outbreak here in Utah, they'll point to two things. One, return to school. The other thing is they say that there's a general fatigue on the part of many in the public who've just gotten tired of following the safety procedures that we all know makes a big difference in all of this.

You know, in Utah here, they are really, really struggling. This hospital here and many of the other hospitals in this state right now are frantically trying to find more ICU rooms. They're trying to make the staff work longer and harder hours because they know, they know what is coming.

And as you point out, let's just take a look at some of the national numbers here. 58,000 new cases of coronavirus reported on Monday. Monday is usually a down day for reporting cases. That number is quite shocking to see. 31 states seeing a rise, as you pointed out. Midwestern states, of course, seem to be the ones that are struggling the most at the moment, but we know that that picture is constantly shifting. 14 states that are seeing hospitalization peaks. They're seeing record levels of hospitalization due to coronavirus here in Utah right now.

[09:05:03]

And it's a problem because what they know is that their best hospitals are in the city areas, but they're seeing many cases in rural areas. So it means that you're not only having the high populations of people who get sick in the city, but it's being supplemented with those that are coming in from the rural areas as well.

A thousand plus new cases reported every day in this state for the past six days, and we've already pointed out the positivity rate in this state hovering around 15 percent, and that's a leading indicator. In other words if you know that you've got that high amount of positives in the society, pretty much in about two weeks you're going to see them flooding here.

Well, most of the ICUs are already at peak performance and they're now starting to open up in the southern part of the state, what they call a kind of surge ICU, these are the tents in the parking lots. And then they're also preparing for perhaps having to open one up here, maybe more. They know the worst is yet to come.

And then you pointed out already in Kansas the horrible story of 10 people who have died and 62 people, all of the residents of that private nursing home facility became infected with COVID-19. It is not over and we are not turning any -- coming around any bends on this one, that's for sure.

HARLOW: No.

SAVIDGE: Jim and Poppy.

SCIUTTO: Yes, the facts are stubborn and in this case they're disturbing.

Martin Savidge, thanks very much.

Joining us now, Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital, Philadelphia. He's also a member of the FDA's Vaccine and Related Products Advisory Committee.

Dr. Offit, good to have you on. I want to dive right into your expertise on vaccines. This morning on NPR, the NIH director said very unlikely a COVID-19 vaccine approved by late November. That said, we are moving in that direction. Dr. Fauci and others have said as soon as the end of this year.

For folks at home, what does that mean about when a vaccine will become widely available in this country so that Poppy and I, our relatives, et cetera, can get one?

DR. PAUL OFFIT, DIRECTOR, VACCINE EDUCATION CENTER AT CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL OF PHILADELPHIA: Well, widely available I would say, you know, the middle to end of next year. I think that the Food and Drug Administration rightly decided to make sure that we had at least two months of clear safety data after the last dose of any vaccine. That drove the vaccine timeline more to the end of this year.

And so then, you know, the FDA and Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices at the CDC will look at these data I think at end of this year, and then early next year you'll start to see these vaccines rolling out to the highest risk groups first. And then by the middle of next year, the end of next year hopefully we'll be getting it more to the general public.

HARLOW: Dr. Offit, you are not only a specialist on this stuff, you actually sit on the committee, the FDA advisory committee, that any approved vaccine is going to have to go through. That's a big responsibility and it's one that's in the spotlight for sure right now. As I understand it, you guys are meeting, is it starting this week, October 22nd or shortly thereafter? What are you going to do?

OFFIT: It's the 22nd.

HARLOW: OK. So what -- so what happens?

OFFIT: Well, right now we're not going to be looking at any specific data for any vaccine. To my knowledge that's not going to be presented to us. What we're going to talk about are sort of our general beliefs about what we want to see from these vaccines -- with these vaccines in terms of safety, in terms of efficacy, how robust the data do we want to see before we're willing really to approve its use for the public.

SCIUTTO: Dr. Offit, I want to go big picture. I don't want to amplify the president's criticisms of Dr. Fauci any further. I want to focus on the public health effect of this because this is part of a pattern. You know, months, weeks, weeks and months long of the president and other senior administration officials contradicting the best experts and the best science on this.

What is the health damage of that? And have we seen it already? And are we seeing it now as cases surge around the country, of that contradictory messaging?

OFFIT: Right. Over the next five or six months, I think up through February or March of next year, we are heading into the worst part of this pandemic for this country. One state, one of the models suggested that probably about 80,000 lives would be saved if people -- 95 percent of the population wore masks, social distanced, washed their hands. That's the message. That's the only tool we have right now, are these hygienic measures.

And you have on the one hand somebody like Dr. Fauci who is doing everything he can to protect the American public by getting that message out there. And on the other hand you have President Trump who's basically just saying, enter my cult of denialism. Just let's ignore this. Let's embrace it. Let's live with it. I mean, which is actually inexplicable.

I mean, he -- this, in many ways, I really think that this was an enormous opportunity for President Trump. I mean, you know, you look to your leaders during times of crisis. This is a major crisis. We wanted leadership. We needed leadership. And instead, what we get is sort of magical thinking, you know, it's all going to go away if we use hydroxychloroquine or convalescent plasma, or bleach or, you know, UV light.

[09:10:02]

You've got magical thinking, and instead of the hard thinking that you need to get through this, which he could have done. He could have been a dramatic leader (INAUDIBLE), instead what we get is this kind of denialism. Let's just close our eyes tight and hope it goes away.

HARLOW: Don't waste a crisis, right? What do you do when you're handed a crisis and how do you lead through it? I mean, for sure there was major opportunity there to help lead in that way.

You know, you look at New Mexico, a state I hadn't heard a lot about or read a lot about in this crisis, and all of a sudden the governor there is saying that on Saturday they saw a 101 percent increase in COVID cases, and that if it continues like this they won't have enough health care or hospital capacity for every New Mexican who needs care. And couple that with some major concern about elderly folks. You have Senator Maggie Hassan saying she doesn't think enough older people are being tested in these trials.

OFFIT: You know, this is hard. I mean, in defense of the administration, it's hard. We have a large country, a large, diverse country that has a variety of different sort of settings, rural, suburban, urban. It's hard to do testing and contact tracing, it is. I mean, South Korea was great at this. They got control of this virus doing this, but at the very least assume everyone you come in contact with is asymptomatically infected and contagious.

Assume that and then wear a mask and social distance. You can at least do that. And to some extent we can crawl back into work and we can crawl back into schools, we can do that. But to deny it, to deny that this is a critical part of controlling this, these hygienic measures, is just utterly irresponsible. I mean, there are lives that are going to be lost and we'll see the statistics. We'll see 50,000, 80,000, 100,000, and we're numbed by those statistics.

But those are people, and very well people that, you know, you could know coming up in these next few months. It's just really utterly irresponsible.

HARLOW: Yes, no question. Well, thank you for being here. And I look forward to hearing more about the committee and what it's like going through that process starting this Thursday.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

HARLOW: Thanks, Dr. Offit.

OFFIT: Thank you.

HARLOW: Well, still to come, on the trail and on the attack, the president's closing strategy seems less about him and more about targeting others. Why?

SCIUTTO: Plus, the Supreme Court makes a decision that will allow more mail-in ballots to be counted in the critical battleground state of Pennsylvania. The impact of that important decision ahead.

And the FBI has now labeled QAnon a domestic terror threat for their dangerous conspiracy theories.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONIE O'SULLIVAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Pizzagate, it's a conspiracy theory. You don't believe it's a conspiracy theory?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: No, it's definitely not. Pizza is a code word for child pornography. Cheese pizza, child pornography.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SCIUTTO: CNN's Donie O'Sullivan takes you inside a QAnon event. You really have to see this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[09:15:00]

SCIUTTO: Welcome back. The president is hitting the trail for another rally tonight in the key battleground state of Pennsylvania, defying warnings from health officials all while taking on the nation's leading expert who is giving us the science and the facts. HARLOW: Yes, two weeks out from election day. Will this closing

strategy work for the president as it did in 2016? Josh Dawsey is here, White House reporter for "The Washington Post" and Jackie Kucinich; Washington Bureau chief for the "Daily Beast". Good morning guys, good to have you.

Josh, your reporting in the last 48 hours on this has all been really fascinating from inside the taskforce and what's going on there to the president's strategy. Could you just talk about this in terms of what you know about why the president continues to focus on attacking Dr. Fauci for example, instead of say the economy, which even his advisors say it will be much stronger closing message for him?

JOSH DAWSEY, WHITE HOUSE REPORTER, THE WASHINGTON POST: Well, the president was enraged Sunday night about Dr. Fauci's television interview with "60 Minutes". Fauci was impulsively critical of the administration on the virus, and said he wasn't surprised that the president had caught coronavirus because he had behaved -- yes, somewhat irresponsibly at a super spreader event. And said that the administration had tried to muzzle him, and the president has really disliked in the last few months how much television Dr. Fauci has been on.

SCIUTTO: Right. He may also dislike that Fauci has better trustworthy ratings than the president. Jackie Kucinich, what is the Biden-Harris strategy and message for the closing two weeks of this race?

JACKIE KUCINICH, WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF, THE DAILY BEAST: I mean, they've been saying listen to the doctors since the very beginning of this pandemic for the most part. And particularly in recent weeks as the president has continued to flout masks, you heard him in that -- he had a "Fox News" interview this morning where he was still talking about crowd size, so -- and trying -- and almost seeming to talk about the pandemic in the past tense.

Not quite there, but almost there. So the Biden and the Harris campaign have really seized on this, and talked about, you know, what a way forward would look like if perhaps there was some strategy to get through the pandemic instead of whatever the president -- instead of the president seems to be choosing to ignore it rather than try to get people through it.

And we know, as Peter often said in your last segment, the worst is yet to come. So trying to keep people prepared rather than just plow through it seems to be what the Biden-Harris campaign is saying --

SCIUTTO: Right --

KUCINICH: At this point.

HARLOW: Jackie, what do you make of the Debate Commission and the rule change that they're going to mute the mics of the other candidate when one is at least given the first part of their initial response to a question. I know the president said this morning, you know, he might not totally abide by that, he might talk over it, but it will certainly be harder to hear. And that couldn't have been an easy decision for them to make.

KUCINICH: I mean, the look of that first debate seems to have put this commission on their head. And then what --

HARLOW: Yes --

[09:20:00]

KUCINICH: Happened with the second debate, having to cancel it, having the issues with moderator Steve Scully, they really have been trying to kind of find their center here. And you saw this sort of -- that this might be something that they were going to do because President Trump did talk over Joe Biden basically the balance of that first debate, so that perhaps, you know, maybe those watching could hear, you know, some views rather than just yelling.

But this does -- you have to wonder, I mean, what else were they going to do. But this does put this in a tough position because it gives the president another reason to say the system is rigged against me, which he's been doing from go. I mean, criticizing Kristen Welker who is a pro's pro.

HARLOW: Totally.

KUCINICH: It's just another way to look at the -- make the president seem like he is the victim here and lower expectations as he's going into this final debate.

SCIUTTO: Yes, I mean, those attacks are never about the record. They're about a strategy, they're about undermining confidence in the journalists involved. Josh, in your reporting, you talk about how advisors, you know, they want the president to focus on the economy, what the negative effects of a Biden victory would be in their view, and yet he maintains focus on this rally strategy, attacking Fauci, et cetera.

I just wonder, you know, for four years, we've heard of, you know, pushes within the president's inner circle for a more coordinated message, a message to moderates, et cetera, which the president almost all the time ignores. I just wonder, does anyone in the inner circle expect these final two weeks to be any different?

DAWSEY: Not particularly. I mean, he's done it his way the whole time. When they get the polling back, it shows that the only place where he has advantage over Joe Biden at least in the RNC and Republican and campaign polling and some of the internal stuff is on the economy, and they want him to really hammer that home in the final stretches of the race. But the president has had a lot of other attacks from, you know, talking about Hunter Biden, he's talking about Fauci, he's talking about how the coronavirus is behind us.

You know, the campaign, relentlessly sees that coronavirus is a political albatross here. And the president even after being hospitalized has not moderated his message really at all.

I mean, the president has continued to say, this is ending, he's going to listen to Scott Atlas -- you know, what he's doing now, I'm going to stretch, and what his campaign advisors are trying to tell him is, you already have your base, you already have your supporters. So, people who like the kind of hard-core message you're saying, they're voting for you anyway. What you need to do is bring new people into the tent.

And whether there are that many undecided he can't bring in on, it's unclear, but his messaging in the past few days has not been what his team would want to see on some of these fronts.

HARLOW: Good to have you both. Josh Dawsey, Jackie Kucinich, thank you very much.

KUCINICH: Thank you.

DAWSEY: Thank you.

HARLOW: Well, a big win for Democrats overnight as the U.S. Supreme Court rules that Pennsylvania can indeed count mail-in ballots for up to three days after the election. There's an issue here about if you can tell what the postmark says, we'll get to that in a moment. But what does this mean for other states?

SCIUTTO: And we are moments away from the opening bell on Wall Street. Futures are up, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says a deal must be made by the end of today if a stimulus package is going to be approved before the election. Senate Republicans on the other hand working on a plan of their own. Investors keeping a close eye on Capitol Hill, we'll have much more on this just ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[09:25:00]

SCIUTTO: Welcome back. A big blow for Republicans in Pennsylvania. The Supreme Court is rejecting a GOP attempt to require mail-in ballots be received by election day. Instead, ballots can be counted as long as they are received within three days of election days. CNN Supreme Court reporter Ariane de Vogue joins me now. Ariane, significant decision, you get actually a 4-4 decision, so the lower ruling holds. How significant?

ARIANE DE VOGUE, CNN SUPREME COURT REPORTER: Well, this was an unusual order for a couple of reasons, Jim. First of all, a little background, right. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court, it granted this three-day extension in this battleground state because of COVID. And Republicans raced to the Supreme Court and said, look, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court went too far here, and this has to be reversed.

It would have taken five Supreme Court justices to step in here, and instead the court deadlocked, 4-4. And Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the liberals here. And we've heard already this morning, President Trump is calling this a ridiculous decision because it is a big loss for the Republicans. But what's interesting, Jim, here, is that the court really pondered

this for several days. And we all thought that the justices were going to come up with maybe a lengthy opinion to describe when -- how far state courts can go when it comes to voting accommodations.

But, instead, it seems like they were working on that and they couldn't come up with a consensus, and instead they were left to deadlock. And that brings up two things. First of all, we're going to have a lot more of these kind of challenges because we didn't get a lot of clarity.

But, Jim, also, it really heightens the tension around Amy Coney Barrett because she could have been the fifth vote here if she gets on the bench at the end of this month as she is expected to do, she will once again be that key vote.

SCIUTTO: Yes, OK. Wisconsin has a similar decision before it. Would this Supreme Court decision be relevant there?

DE VOGUE: Well, this is what's interesting because actually you're right, they're both about voting extensions, but Wisconsin's case comes up through the federal courts, right. Pennsylvania had to do with the state Supreme Court. And that is differently -- that's different when it comes to Supreme Court, because the Supreme Court has more of a supervisory role over federal courts.