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Moderna Says, Vaccine is 94.5 Percent Effective Against the Coronavirus; Michigan Enacts New Restrictions to Slow COVID Spread; Activists Deliver Petition to GSA to Recognize Biden, Start Transfer. Aired 1-1:30p ET

Aired November 16, 2020 - 13:00   ET

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

BARACK OBAMA, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT: If you want at this late stage in the game to be remembered as somebody who put country first, it is time for you to do the same thing.

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[13:00:10]

JOHN KING, CNN INSIDE POLITICS (on camera): We'll see you tomorrow. Thanks for your time today. Brianna Keilar starts right now.

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

We begin with one of the best developments of the U.S. pandemic coming during its darkest time so far. Moderna's vaccine candidate is nearly 95 percent effective against the coronavirus, according to initial trial data. It is the second major vaccine breakthrough this month, the other from Pfizer. And these companies still need to submit detailed data to the FDA here in the coming weeks, but results of these trials are extremely welcome for government scientists and health officials like Dr. Anthony Fauci.

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DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ALLERGY AND INFECTIOUS DISEASES: The data are striking, Savannah, they're really quite impressive.

So now we have two vaccines that are really quite effective. So I think this is a really strong step forward to where we want to be about getting control of this outbreak.

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KEILAR (on camera): Developments on these vaccines are good news but we don't expect to see them widely available until the spring. Right now, coronavirus is spreading at an unprecedented rate and is going to get worse before it gets better. For the 13th day in a row now, the U.S. has reported more than 100,000 new infections in a day. Coronavirus has infected more than a million people here in the past week. And there are nearly 70,000 people in the hospital with COVID in the U.S. right now.

Testing lines, once again, they're hours long. This is a scene of cars queuing up in Illinois. And the nation's surgeon general describing the state of the crisis this way, quote, we are truly at war with this virus. Frontline troops are weary and the enemy has us surrounded.

In hospitals, doctors and nurses are battling conspiracy theories along with the virus. An emergency room nurse telling CNN that patients dying from COVID are denying they have it. She's in South Dakota, which is a state where 58 percent of tests are coming back positive.

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JODI DOERING, EMERGENCY ROOM NURSE: I think the hardest thing to watch is that people are still looking for something else and they want a magic answer and they don't want to believe that COVID is real. And the reason I tweeted what I did is it wasn't one particular patient, it is just a culmination of so many people, and their last dying words are, this can't be happening, it's not real. And when they should be spending time FaceTiming families, they're filled with anger and hatred. And it just made me really sad the other night.

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KEILAR (on camera): All right. Let's discuss this and this also incredible news of early Moderna results. I want to talk now to Dr. Peter Hotez, who is the dean for the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. He is on Baylor's team that is developing a coronavirus vaccine. And I'm joined as well by our Senior Medical Correspondent, Elizabeth Cohen.

Let's talk about the vaccine here first. A big benefit, Elizabeth, of this Moderna vaccine is the storage of it, right? It's not as demanding as Pfizer's candidate vaccine. Explain this to us.

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN SENIOR MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: That's right, Brianna. So, Pfizer and Moderna have very similar efficacy, over 90 percent, they are both appearing to be very safe with their early data, no serious side effects. But the way they are stored and distributed and shipped, very, very different, and it will make a big difference.

So let's take a look at the differences. Pfizer's has to be kept at minus 75degrees centigrade. That is way colder than any other vaccine currently in use in the U.S. And that means doctors and pharmacists don't have the freezers that go that low. After it comes out of that temperature, it can stay for five days in the refrigerator.

Moderna, on the other hand, needs to stay at minus 20 centigrade. There are other vaccines, like the chicken pox vaccine, that's stored at that temperatures, so doctors and pharmacists do have freezers that go down that low. And that one, when you take it out, it can last 30 days in the refrigerator.

Those are tactical differences that could make a big difference in which one of these sort of does well in the real world. Brianna?

KEILAR: Yes. I mean, you can definitely see that when you look at those side by side.

And, Dr. Hotez want to talk about some of the findings from Moderna. There is no significant safety issues from an independent review, and you say that there are more details in the Moderna vaccine regarding its efficacy in older people. Tell us about that.

DR. PETER HOTEZ, PROFESSOR AND DEAN OF TROPICAL MEDICINE, BAYLOR COLLEGE OF MEDICINE: Well, again, it's all coming from a company press release, so it's hard to know for certain. But according to the press release, they finding that it's also protecting individuals with serious infection. That's not specifically mentioned in the Pfizer press release, although it may also be the case. Again, it's it is like reading tea leaves with press releases.

KEILAR: Yes.

HOTEZ: And also it seems to protect older individuals as well, so, all good news all around.

[13:05:01]

But I think the bottom line is we are going to have some excellent vaccines coming out in the spring. Remember, the Operation Warp Speed, as others besides these two, we still have the adenovirus vector vaccines from J&J and AstraZeneca/Oxford. So, slowly, we're going to get enough vaccines to vaccinate the whole U.S. population.

So, in the coming months, things are going to get a lot better. The hard part is getting through the next few weeks and months, especially when you have defiant populations in much of the heartland, and to try to prevent needless deaths. The numbers coming out of the Institute for Health Metrics are just awful. The numbers indicate 150,000 more Americans will die, Brianna, between now and, say, the first couple of weeks of February, a couple weeks after the inauguration.

None of those 150,000 deaths have to happen. They all can be prevented if we could just get populations, especially in the heartland, in the Midwest and in Texas, where the numbers are rising, accelerating so much and putting surges on the ICUs, and that's why the mortality starts goes up, and just hang on and convince these individuals that we don't have to -- in the past, when we have these discussions, Brianna, we always said, it was always an indefinite period. And I would plead for people to social distance and wear masks. So I couldn't give a racket on the right-hand side to it.

Now we can. Now we can say, look, vaccines are coming. You have the opportunity to save lives of your father, your mother, your brother and sister if you just hang on for the next few weeks.

KEILAR: That's a very good point. We are in this critical phase with the holidays.

And also, I do want to say, you always bring up a great point, Dr. Hotez, which is these are press releases. We are waiting. And, look, I had the chief investigator for Pfizer on last week to talk about the strides they have made, and there are a lot of questions that can't be answered right now with what information they have publicly available. This is detailed data that needs to go to the FDA, and only then can we have a lot of questions answered about these vaccines that are critical.

Elizabeth, when can people who are not high risk expect vaccinations? I know this is something that a lot of people are wondering. Well, look, I am not a frontline worker, I'm not a health care provider, I am youngish. When am I going to be able to get the vaccine, people say.

COHEN: I actually asked Dr. Anthony Fauci that question last night, Brianna. And he said he thinks that those vaccinations for people who are not high risk will start at the end of April. And then he said, and they will go into May and June and July. He said it will take awhile. I got the feeling he was really trying to press the point that we need to be patient, not until end of April, and it will take several months.

I will note though that a lot of people fall into the high risk category, I mean, even supermarket clerks, for example, may be in the high risk category because they're considered essential workers, anyone over 65, that's a lot of people, people with underlying conditions, that hasn't been defined. But, again, that is a lot of people, policemen, firemen. So it is not as if it is this sort of small minority, and people should keep that in mind.

KEILAR: Dr. Hotez, before I let you both go, I want to ask you about -- you heard what that nurse said about people dying and still refusing that they have coronavirus. And, you know, this is someone who spent a lot of time, I am sure, over the course of her career where she has seen people in their final moments, and it seemed particularly distressing to her the way -- sort of this -- the frame of mind that some people were in, even as they died, because of the misinformation around this vaccine. And I just wonder how her comments struck you.

HOTEZ: Well, her comments are awful, of course, and let's remember where this comes from. This did not happen by accident. Starting in May and June, and this is when I really tried to stage a counteroffensive against it, the White House launched a deliberate disinformation campaign.

They claimed COVID was a hoax, they downplayed the severity of the epidemic, they tried to attribute COVID deaths to other causes or co- morbidities, they brought up these fake concepts of herd immunity, which are non-existent, they dismissed masks. And then a little bit later, they brought on Scott Atlas to be the lead spokesperson for the disinformation campaign.

This didn't arise in a vacuum. This is the product of what anti- science disinformation looks like. And I have been going up against them for years. But I was shocked to see how the White House had so organized this and really put it out there. And then many of the governors, especially in red states, saw that they had to adopt this as a form of political allegiance, and this is the consequence.

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And this is why I'm saying this is a time now where we can still prevent those 150,000 deaths if we can find a way to bring in the governors together, especially in the red states, which are predominantly in the Midwest, maybe cultivate some Republican champions to help us because, for me, the priority is absolutely saving lives right now.

KEILAR: Yes. And these folks can't be robbing people of the chance to fight this disease and in the worst cases robbing them of their dignity in their final moments, which clearly we are seeing as that nurse attested to.

Peter, thank you so much. Elizabeth, thank you so much to both of you.

President Trump is largely checked out when it comes to the coronavirus, states are pushing forward with new restrictions to try to stop the spread heading into the holidays. Some states like Washington, Michigan and New York are restricting restaurants again and others like Utah are issuing new mask mandates.

But at the federal level, President Trump hasn't been to one of the meetings of his own coronavirus task force for months. Here are Dr. Fauci and Admiral Bret Giroir, testing czar on the task force.

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FAUCI: You know, it was months ago. But when we have our task force meeting, it is run, as you know, by Vice President Pence, and the vice president then translates that to the president himself. But the last time the president was physically at a task force meeting was several months ago.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The Washington Post is reporting this morning that the president has not attended a coronavirus task force meeting in at least five months. Is that accurate?

ADM. BRETT GIROIR, ASSISTANT SECRETARY FOR HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES: that's true.

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KEILAR (on camera): Now, we should note, the president didn't give up on fighting coronavirus when he lost the election, he lost the election in part because he gave up on fighting coronavirus and he continues to stand idly by while Americans are dying. Vice President Pence does have a call scheduled for the next hour with governors around the country, but he has not held one of those calls since late September.

Michigan waging war on the coronavirus right now, they are pausing indoor dining in restaurants, they are stopping in-person learning for the time at high schools and universities. Michigan is seeing major spike in daily cases, and Governor Gretchen Whitmer is sounding the alarm.

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GOV. GRETCHEN WHITMER (D-MI): We are in the worst moment of this pandemic to date. The situation has never been more dire. We are at the precipice and we need to take some action.

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KEILAR (on camera): On the precipice, dire, the worst moment so far, and yet the president's preferred coronavirus task force doctor, Dr. Scott Atlas, tweeted this, quote, the only way this stops is if people rise up, you get what you accept.

Now, Atlas later tried to clear that up, as he usually does when he says something stupid or anti-science in his desperate efforts to curry favor with the president. Atlas tried to explain that he wasn't actually advocating violence, just peaceful protests and for people to vote. Here is what Dr. Anthony Fauci said about the Atlas tweet.

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FAUCI: I mean, I don't want to say anything against Dr. Atlas as a person, but I totally disagree with the stand he takes, I just do, period.

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KEILAR (on camera): Joining me now is Michigan's attorney general, Dana Nessel. And thank you so much, Attorney General, for joining us.

The FBI, which you are well aware of, you were the face of it as you announced it to the world that they had thwarted a plot to kidnap and possibly kill Governor Whitmer just weeks ago and to target other state officials also. Do you worry that people may take what Dr. Atlas said and that they could act on it?

DANA NESSEL (D), MICHIGAN ATTORNEY GENERAL: Yes, absolutely. It is a grave concern to us. As Governor Whitmer indicated, we are at a crisis tipping point in this state, so much so that there are projections that if we don't take these measures that the state government has now put into place, we're looking at a thousand people in our state that will die of COVID each and every week.

There's no plan and no assistance from the federal government. States have been left to their own devices, whether they are run by Democrats or rum by Republicans. And these public health orders are absolutely necessary to preserve human life. But, once again, here you have members of the Trump administration that are so much more hurtful than they are helpful. So if we look back and we see -- re-watch this movie, because we have seen it before, the governor, in order to address these serious issues, puts these policies into place, which work. We know they work. But at the same time, you have the federal government saying things like rise up or liberate Michigan or try to negotiate with people who are known domestic terrorists.

And what it does is it encourages people to commit crimes, whether the crime is violating the public health orders, which is a crime, or whether it is actually acts of domestic terrorism.

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It is so harmful in our state and it doesn't help save people from COVID but it does put people in jeopardy of assaultive acts. And I just -- it is so tragic.

KEILAR: What happens if you mention it might inspire someone to violate the public health order, what happens if they violate public health orders that have been announced in Michigan?

NESSEL: Well, technically like all other public health orders, I mean, these are misdemeanor offenses. But the thing is what we're not looking to do is to prosecute anyone for this. We're just looking for compliance because people should understand no matter where you are in the state now, this is a tremendous problem.

And we're simply trying to save people's lives. And that is the purpose behind these relatively simple orders that by now we should understand how effective and impactful it is, whether you're just limiting indoor gatherings, limiting the number of people who can be together in any particular area, wearing a face covering over your face, a mask. These are simple policies but they are abundantly necessary.

But what it does is it breeds non-compliance with these orders because what we've seen time and again is, you hear these statements made from the federal government, from Trump or from one of his appointees, and thereafter, you have members of our state legislature that then call out.

We just had a number of them call to impeach the governor over this today instead of asking their constituents to comply, and then instead of COVID rates going down, they go up, because the only way these orders work is if people actually comply with them.

KEILAR: I do want to ask you, while I have you here, you have been certainly keeping your eye on the election and some of the things that have happened in the wake of it. In one of these instances, you've actually charged a man for allegedly filling out his daughter's absentee ballot and forging her signature on it. Have you seen any indications of widespread voter fraud?

NESSEL: Absolutely not. We do see minor incidences here and there, but there are so many levels of review in the system that whenever anyone tries to commit election fraud or voter fraud, they're caught and we prosecute them. We take those cases very seriously.

But when you're talking about the cases that were brought by the Trump campaign, the fact is they're flailing, they are losing in court each and every time. We had one that was just withdrawn this morning that had been filed last week. And we don't expect any of them to be successful in stopping the certification process.

KEILAR: Yes, they are definitely struggling on their legal battles. Thank you so much for joining us, Michigan's attorney general, Dana Nessel. We appreciate it.

NESSEL: Thanks for having me.

KEILAR: The president is growing increasingly erratic, he is refusing to concede and start transition of power. And now he is claiming he won the election that he very clearly lost.

Plus, the president has a pattern of pretending he didn't lose and failing to take responsibility for it, all the way back to his school years. We'll roll the tape.

And as the president is losing legal fights in court, he is now putting Rudy Giuliani in charge, America's mayor turned conspiracy theorist.

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RUDY GIULIANI, PRESIDENT TRUMP'S PERSONAL ATTORNEY: They start doing ballots like this.

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KEILAR: Right now, protesters are gathered in front of General Services Administration headquarters demanding the Biden transition officially begin. GSA must sign off on funds for the transition team to move forward. So far though, the GSA administrator has refused. And CNN's Pete Muntean is with us right now.

Pete, tell us what you have been hearing from the crowd there.

PETE MUNTEAN, CNN AVIATION CORRESPONDENT: It's a pretty simple message here, Brianna. The GSA can release these funds and kick-start the transition process to the new incoming Biden administration but it is dragging its feet for no good reason.

I just want to show you here what MoveOn has set up. It's a group that you may have heard from via text messages during the election season, the Get Out and Vote, they have these boxes here set up, which they say signify about 250,000 signatures that they have gathered in the last five days, to send a message to GSA Administrator Emily Murphy, that she needs to release about $6.3 million to the Biden administration which would lead to a smooth transition of power. They say it is not just these 250,000 signatures which they say they have gathered from people all over the country in all walks of life, but 79 million votes for President-elect Joe Biden. Here is what one of the organizers told me.

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REGGIE HUBBARD, MOVEON ORG., SENIOR POLITICAL LIAISON: That's 250,000 now. So, in five days, it has gone from zero to 250,000.

MUNTEAN: What does that say about the groundswell of interest in here?

HUBBARD: I mean, I would say that there are also 79 million who signed a petition on November 4th, right? So, like the election results with this petition show that there's a groundswell of people saying, can we get past enough of the Trump administration, like you lost.

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MUNTEAN (on camera): Brianna, this is about much more than just behind the scenes of what's going on here at GSA, this is about real people from real life trying to make their voices and votes heard. Back to you.

KEILAR: All right. Pete, thank you so much, from GSA.

President Trump's own national security adviser today saying something the president so far has refused to say, at a global security forum, Robert O'Brien all but declaring Joe Biden the clear winner of the presidential election.

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ROBERT O'BRIEN, NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER: If the Biden/Harris ticket is determined to be the winner, you know, obviously, things look that way now, we'll have a very professional transition from the National Security Council. There's no question about it.

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KEILAR (voice over): Now, O'Brien's boss, President Trump, remains largely out of the public eye, though he is coming through loud and clear on Twitter.

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A lame-duck president hold up in the White House, rehashing his false claims that the election was stolen from him. Trump bookended his night of sleep, as he so often does, tweeting a sad lie. I won the election, he said, but tweeting it twice, once in all caps doesn't make it real.

Hours earlier, the president seemingly and grudgingly acknowledging defeat, he tweeted Joe Biden won because the election was rigged, half correct anyway. Joe Biden did win, perhaps revealing the president can't fully escape reality, but, no, the election was not rigged.

Of course, the president continues with his baseless claims of election fraud. So, let's get the facts from CNN's Daniel Dale, who is joining us to go through these claims.

Okay, let's take this methodically, as often works here, Daniel. The president insists that vote watchers and observers were not allowed in the rooms where votes were being counted. What about that?

DANIEL DALE, CNN REPORTER: Brianna, that's simply false. President Trump has previously made this claim specifically about Philadelphia, where his lawyer subsequently went in court and told the judge that it was not true, the lawyer admitted, that Trump observers were allowed in. He's also made this accusation about Detroit where CNN had a reporter, Annie Grayer, watching Republican watchers watch the count.

And so this is baseless. Anywhere that Biden observers were allowed, Trump had people as well.

KEILAR: Watchers watching watchers watching count. Okay.

So what about the president's claim that millions of ballots were altered by Democrats for Democrats?

DALE: This, again, is just completely made up. We have no evidence that millions of ballots were altered. In fact, we don't have any evidence that any ballot was improperly altered. But people might be watching, thinking, well, the president must be basing this on something, it must be a stretch. No, this is completely, Brianna, conjured again out of thin air.

And I'll remind you that the president also made a false claim of millions of illegal votes in the 2016 election he won. So this is a pattern, it seems, every election, Trump is inventing millions of improperly altered votes, millions of illegal votes, it is completely imaginary.

KEILAR: What about the president's claim that votes were cast after the election was over?

DALE: That didn't happen, at least on any large scale. A ballot or two might have slipped through the cracks, I can't be sure. But, in general, here is what happened. More than 20 states, as usual, accepted ballots that were received after Election Day, those include military ballots. However, those votes had to be cast, had to be mailed on or before Election Day. So the voting happened by the normal deadline. It is simply that the mail arrived afterward. That's the fact.

KEILAR: Yes. And those actually had to be counted by law. It would have been illegal to not to count them. So we should definitely point that out. These are people exercising their rights, in many cases, they are serving around the country.

And then the president has been raging against Dominion voting machines, he and his supporters claiming that these machines deleted votes for Trump or they switched them to Biden. What are the facts on that?

DALE: This is just a bonkers conspiracy theory. There is no evidence that there was any issue with Dominion Voting Systems that resulted in votes being lost. There is certainly no evidence there was any deliberate, nefarious behavior by this company, Dominion Voting Systems.

The fact is this is software and hardware that is widely used around the country, in red states, blue states, red counties, blue counties. There were a couple issues in Michigan but those were caused by human error, by people using the software, not the software itself. There was one insignificant issue with the software in Georgia that resulted in the delay in the reporting of results, but not in the counting itself.

And I need to point out, the Trump administration's own Department of Homeland Security issued a statement last week, in which they said, in bold, typed, there is no evidence that any voting system altered or lost any votes. This is, again, completely, Brianna, imaginary.

KEILAR: Completely imaginary. All right, Daniel Dale, thank you so much for that. We appreciate it.

With each day, the president's refusal to concede makes Americans less safe on the national security front and also in the battle against coronavirus. But President Trump's history as a sore loser is well documented, even from the time that he was young, which we're going to look at here in a moment.

He baselessly shouted fraud and rigged election in every contest since at least 2012, from presidential elections to primaries, to midterms, even a special election. In the Obama/Romney election, he went on a tweet storm, pushing baseless claims and conspiracies about the Black Panthers, voting machines, stolen votes, switching votes. And then once the election was called, he said it was a total sham and a travesty.

In the 2016 Republican primaries, then candidate Trump baselessly accused Senator Ted Cruz of stealing the Iowa caucuses, even though it was he, Donald Trump, he blew off the Republican debate, just didn't go, which Iowa caucus-goers, it turned out, did not like. But Trump took no responsibility for that and he demanded that the results be nullified. This was before Trump said, Senator Cruz's wife was ugly and that his dad was involved in JFK's assassination.

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Now, Senator Ted Cruz is riding afloat in Trump's fraud parade.

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SEN. TED CRUZ (R-TX): Well, I think that it is way premature at this point.