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Biden Delivers Emphatic Thanksgiving Message; Trump Repeats Baseless Election Fraud Claims; U.S. Health Experts Warn of Post- Thanksgiving Surge; U.K. Government Outlines Post-Lockdown Rules; France Sees Drop in Newly Confirmed Cases. Aired 4-4:30a ET

Aired November 27, 2020 - 04:00   ET

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

[04:00:19]

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PAULA NEWTON, CNN ANCHOR (voice-over): As Americans pause for Thanksgiving, the coronavirus rages on. More than 90,000 people are now hospitalized. That's a record, despite the staggering spike in virus numbers and deaths, President Donald Trump continues to focus on himself. And the election results. We'll look at his falsehood laced news conference in a moment.

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NEWTON (on camera): Live from CNN world headquarters in Atlanta, welcome to our viewers here in the United States and all around the world. I'm Paula Newton, and this is CNN NEWSROOM.

Thursday's Thanksgiving celebrations in the United States were perhaps the most difficult many Americans have faced in their lifetimes. The families of well over a quarter million people in the United States who've died of COVID-19 had to mark the holiday without their loved ones. More than 90,000 Americans, meantime, could not be with their families because they're fighting for their lives in hospital.

That's the highest number since the pandemic began and the 17th straight day of record hospitalizations. And the countless medical staff who care for them also had to sacrifice being at home with their loved ones. Current trends point to even more suffering as the nation and the world look ahead to a much different Christmas season and Hanukah.

U.S. President-elect Joe Biden and his wife spent part of the holiday making video calls with frontline medical and emergency workers. On Thursday, they posted this message to let Americans know they are not struggling alone.

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JOE BIDEN (D), PRESIDENT-ELECT: I know this isn't the way many of us hoped we'd spend our holiday. We know that a small act of staying home is a gift to our fellow Americans. Yes, it's a personal sacrifice that each of our families can make and should make to save somebody else's life. It is also a shared sacrifice for the whole country, a statement of common purpose that says we care about one another, and we're all in this together.

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NEWTON: The Bidens were among the many American families who chose to stay home this Thanksgiving. The former vice president explained why on CNN.com.

We get more from CNN's MJ Lee with the president-elect in Delaware.

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MJ LEE, CNN POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT (on camera): This Thanksgiving was a challenging one for so many American families across the country who couldn't travel, who couldn't get together with their relatives and family members, and do sort of their usual traditions that they would typically be doing, and the same was the case for the president-elect and his family.

Joe Biden has said that in past years, his family has traveled out of state so that they can have a big extended family gathering around this holiday, but instead, this week, they opted to stay back behind here in Delaware and only get together with a couple of members of their family and we heard Biden talk earlier this week in this national address that he understands the sacrifices that a lot of people are making across the country.

And he also wrote an op-ed for CNN.com, just a little part of which I want to read. He wrote, "Like millions of Americans, we are temporarily letting go of the traditions we can't do safely. It is not a small sacrifice. These moments with our loved ones, time that's lost can't be returned, yet we know it's the price of protecting each other, and one we don't pay alone, isolated in our own dining rooms and kitchens, scattered from coast to coast, we are healing together."

We've heard a pretty empathetic message coming from the president- elect, saying that he really understands the experience of looking around the dinner table and seeing that there's an empty chair, obviously a reference to how so many families across America have lost loved ones because of this pandemic. And then just a very urgent message from the president-elect as well, urging everybody to please act responsibly around the holiday season because he knows that we can get back to normal soon, particularly with vaccine distribution potentially being around the corner.

So this has been a pretty consistent message that we have heard from Joe Biden over the last couple of months.

MJ Lee, CNN, Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.

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NEWTON: President Trump meantime observed a Thanksgiving tradition by calling U.S. troops deployed overseas. But in a news conference with reporters, he remained preoccupied with a fictional view that he won the election.

[04:05:07]

CNN's Kaitlan Collins explains.

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KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT (on camera): The president has not taken a question in over three weeks since the day of the election. And he broke that streak on Thanksgiving finally taking questions from reporters after he held a call with members of the military. And as he spoke to us, he repeated his accusations of widespread fraud in the election, something his attorneys have been saying without evidence for weeks now. And the president really hammered it home, repeating it, talking about the secretaries of state in Georgia, criticizing those officials there and in other states.

And also saying that if the electoral college certifies Joe Biden's win in a matter of weeks as they are scheduled to do, he says that would be making a mistake. He also criticized that Biden is moving ahead with transitioning to the presidency by picking people who are going to be in his cabinet, and wouldn't say whether or not he's going to attend Biden's inauguration as of course is the precedent for past presidents in January.

He talked about whether or not he would concede once his win is certified. He would not say that, despite being asked multiple times, would he concede once the win has been certified. The president would not say yes, that he would.

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DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: It's got to be a very hard thing to concede because we know there was massive fraud. So as to whether or not I can get this apparatus moving this quickly because time isn't on our side. Everything else is on our side. Facts are on our side. This was a massive fraud. This should never take place in this country. We're like a third world country.

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COLLINS: One thing he did say is that he would leave the White House, he said, of course I would, of course should January come and push comes to shove, as there have been these theories about whether or not he'd actually leave the White House.

One thing he did say is he's going to be leaving the White House on Saturday, he says, to go campaign in Georgia ahead of that runoff that of course is going to determine which party controls the Senate.

And it's just really notable, I can't stress enough, the president has had such a quiet period in his presidency where he is not taking questions, and of course now after three weeks, he broke that streak and we'll see if that continues with these baseless allegations about fraud.

Kaitlan Collins, CNN, the White House.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

NEWTON: CNN senior political analyst Ron Brownstein joins me now. He is also the senior editor of "The Atlantic."

OK, Ron, we don't even really need to fact check this. There were no facts in there. They were just outright lies, and yet, Ron, there is a method to his madness, is there not? What is he trying to get at here?

RON BROWNSTEIN, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, look, I mean, he is succeeding at convincing a large share of the Republican electorate without any evidence that the election was stolen from him. And that has several implications. One is that it increases his leverage within the Republican Party. I mean, he can walk away on January 20th, and instead of Republicans feeling he led them into an electoral disaster where he will lose by, what, seven million, close to seven million votes.

In the end, he can argue, no, I didn't really lose, it was stolen from me. You know, there was nothing wrong with the direction I set for the party. It was just a theft by Democrats. And secondly, he is obviously making it tougher for Joe Biden to get a second look, any kind of honeymoon among rank-and-file voters, to the extent Trump is convincing them the election was stolen, which in turn will make it harder for Biden to leverage Republicans in Congress to work with him on almost anything.

NEWTON: And he seems determined, he said he's going to step into this, you know, runoff here in Georgia with those two Senate seats. A reminder that this is really going to set the stage for what the future of the next Congress will look like because the Republicans either win back the balance of power.

BROWNSTEIN: Yes.

NEWTON: Or they end up in a virtual tie. All that is at stake, he will go in there and do what, you think? Because he seems pretty serious about going to Georgia this weekend.

BROWNSTEIN: Well, that is interesting. I mean, he will rally the Republican base. I mean, you know, that is Donald Trump's superpower, his ability to turn out more noncollege and nonurban voters, and really anyone in either party expected again after adjusting all of their, you know, methodology from 2016 to 2020. He's still turned out more of these voters than last time. But he is obviously a very polarizing figure. He became the first Republican to lose Georgia since 1992 when Bill Clinton won it with a low vote total in a three- way race.

Really we should go back to 1976 for a Democrat to kind of win Georgia outright the way that Joe Biden, and the question is, in the past Democrats have had trouble getting their voters out in these runoffs in Georgia, which were designed in fact to make it tougher for candidates favored by minority voters to win. I don't know if that's going to be the issue this time. This feels

more, oh, like a Battle of the Bulge, in which both sides are going to see fairly substantial turnout.

NEWTON: Yes, they certainly have been able to rally both sides, as everyone knowing what's at the stake. Just for the president to continue to come here even given the loss in Georgia is going to be an extraordinary weekend if it ends up happening.

BROWNSTEIN: Yes.

NEWTON: I want to talk to you a little bit, Ron, about the contrast to Joe Biden's day.

[04:10:03]

He spent the day largely with his family and out of sight except there was an editorial by the President-elect Biden and his wife, the incoming first lady, Jill Biden, in which they write, "We are grateful for the faith and trust we have been given to continue to serve this beautiful, brave, complicated nation." You can say that again.

You know, the contrast is real but given the fact that Donald Trump seems to be determined to continue to insinuate -- to basically make his stake in the coming politics of the nation, what do you think is going to be the hurdle for Joe Biden? Because he's taking a very clear road here. He's saying, I'm going to rise a above this.

BROWNSTEIN: Yes.

NEWTON: Is Donald Trump going to make that difficult?

BROWNSTEIN: Donald Trump will make that difficult. I mean, Joe Biden is betting that there is a majority of the country that wants to lower the temperature, that understands that even if we disagree, none of us are going away. The evangelical south is not going away, and Brooklyn and Berkeley are not going away, and he is betting there are enough Americans who have been kind of terrified, horrified, by the level of acrimony they have seen in really kind of every dimension -partisan acrimony, urban versus rural acrimony, racial acrimony -- and they want to lower the temperature.

It's not guaranteed that there is in fact a kind of sustainable majority that wants to pull back from this brink. Donald Trump, I think, was the first president who affirmatively thought that widening America's divide was in his interest and he has convinced a big section of the country that they are being victimized by their fellow Americans, by kind of diverse cosmopolitan, info-age, metro America. So whether Biden can reach across that curtain, especially given how much of that audience has retreated underneath kind of a dome of, you know, conservative solely news information sources, we don't know. But that is what Biden is betting, and he is going to go I think quite a bit down that road before he gives it up.

NEWTON: Yes. And again, so much of how far you can go down that road depends you can get done with the lame-duck Congress or what happens afterwards.

BROWNSTEIN: Yes.

NEWTON: Ron Brownstein, as always, thanks so much.

BROWNSTEIN: Thanks for having me. Happy Thanksgiving.

NEWTON: And we will play more of the president's outrageous claims later this hour.

Plus, health experts warned Americans not to travel for the Thanksgiving holiday, and now they are warning about a post-holiday virus surge. We'll discuss that after the break.

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[04:16:30]

NEWTON: The U.S. confirmed more than 110,000 new COVID infections Thursday. That's according to Johns Hopkins University, and more than 1200 Americans lost their lives. Now the U.S. now has confirmed almost 13 million infections and more than 263,000 deaths since the pandemic began. And the U.S. now on Thursday set a new hospitalization record for the 17th straight day. The COVID Tracking Project reports more than 90,000 Americans were in hospital Thursday, sickened by the virus.

Joining me now is assistant professor in emergency medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Dr. Erik Blutinger.

Dr. Blutinger, thanks so much for joining us. Listen, the United States took a pause for a holiday. We all know COVID took a pause for no one. On the frontlines, what is going on day-to-day here? And is it real in terms of the crisis that so many people have been talking about now?

DR. ERIK BLUTINGER, EMERGENCY MEDICINE, ICAHN SCHOOL OF MEDICINE, MOUNT SINAI: Paula, it is so real. You know, I'm sitting here in New York City, one of the few spots that first fell to the initial outbreak of COVID-19, and we are starting to see a slow rise in cases. But what's happening in New York City is very different than what's happening across a lot of the country.

We are seeing that in even the most rural parts of America, people are not safe outside of their homes, talking to people without masks on, and keeping less than six feet apart, and during a festive holiday like Thanksgiving, which is the one opportunity we have throughout the year to be with our family and our close friends to celebrate, especially after such a tiring year, it is a real test of maturity, and also of safety to see whether or not we are able to keep our distance, continue to wear masks, because we are so close given the vaccine candidates and where things are headed.

NEWTON: Yes. We are so close. All of us are. And yet, how long do you think we will know -- will it be before we know exactly the impact of this holiday on the numbers in the United States? BLUTINGER: It's very tough to tell, and that's a great question.

Generally speaking two to eight weeks is the time frame from when we start to see what exposures are looking like. So what we -- what happens today may not come to fruition for at least two weeks from now at minimum. So that makes it especially challenging being able to monitor and control and figure out what is working and what's not working. We all know that 14 days is the average incubation period. So that's why it's so tough to track.

NEWTON: You know, this issue about what's working, what's not working, it's been so confusing, and one of the reasons that it's been so difficult for people to really follow the instruction. If we contrast even the United States with Europe, it seemed that Europe was being so much more careful, and yet they still went through a tremendous spike, and now they have lockdowns.

What have we learned? Have we solved any mysteries about this virus right now in terms of how it's transmitted?

BLUTINGER: Well, we are still learning a lot about the virus. What we are learning especially now more than ever are the long-term effects. What happens after you get hospitalized? What do you come home with? What happens when you are four or five or eight or nine months after your first hospitalization? I can tell you that I've had patients come into the emergency room where they still feel like they can't run that marathon.

[04:20:04]

They can't even walk up the stairs at home. And these are young adults who had a severe hospitalization. There was even an article in the "New York Times" the other day that many people across the country are requiring long-term rehab and therapy. And what's so tough is that we don't have a perfect regimen in place anywhere in the world currently that can fix hospitalizations and help cure us of the disease, so we have to continue to work hard at finding a long-term solution.

NEWTON: Yes, and that long-term solution will be, hopefully, a vaccine at this point. We had news, unfortunately, from the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca who has that U.K. vaccine, and there seemed to be some confusion. Some people would even say it was an error in the way they conducted these clinical trials and the dose that people received.

Do you think -- from when you saw the information, do you think it is of major concern and are you worried that it will impact the confidence that people will have in the vaccines?

BLUTINGER: So I think we all have to keep in mind where we are with the three vaccine candidates and we are all in a rush for time. We would love immediate results. We want to see the data, but what's challenging is the data that was released by AstraZeneca just like Pfizer and Moderna has only been released in the form of a press report. It has not been published in a peer review journal, and we badly need that. It is true that the AstraZeneca data preliminarily raises a few

eyebrows. Why is it that if you provide two normal doses of the vaccine the efficacy is less than when you receive only a half dose followed by a full dose? But there are some possible advantages with the AstraZeneca. It can be refrigerated in normal Fridge temperatures. It is arguably, I'm told, less expensive compared to the other vaccine candidates.

And the company also mentioned that they would be selling it without a profit involved at least for the duration of the pandemic. So I would caution your viewers to just take a deep breath, let's see what the data shows once it gets released in a peer review journal, and then we'll take it from there.

NEWTON: Yes. Medicine and science by press release is never a good idea, Doctor, so we will definitely wait for those journal articles and that all-important peer review.

Dr. Erik Blutinger there for us in New York. Appreciate it.

BLUTINGER: Thank you.

NEWTON: Meantime, Europe's most populous country is struggling to turn back the tide of coronavirus. Germany has now topped one million confirmed cases of COVID-19. It also reported its largest single-day death toll ever on Thursday.

Now there is a glimmer of hope. That would be in France. The Health Ministry says a national target of just 5,000 new cases per day could be reached by mid-December. And in the U.K., it is now set to reintroduce a tiered system of restrictions when a national lockdown expires on December 2nd. London will be placed in the second most restrictive tier.

Now, with us for more on this is Melissa Bell, who's live with us in Paris, and Salma Abdelaziz is with us from London.

Salma, we're going to start with you, and I was just mentioning the tier that London would be in. It is a reprieve of sorts, but is it going to be enough to really take burden, that strain, off hospitals and health care systems in general?

SALMA ABDELAZIZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Paula, that's really the question, and that's really the debate here. Even if you live under this country's highest level restrictions, even if you live under tier three, all nonessential shops will reopen for you starting next week. That means let the Christmas shopping begin and that's exactly what has so many scientific advisers and members of the medical community worried.

The British Medical Association saying this three-tier strategy is full of risks and could very well reverse the game under lockdown, and it's important to remember we haven't turned the corner here yet. Yes, hospitalization rates are down. In the last seven days they dropped by 7 percent. Yes, case numbers are down but you still have a very high death toll this week. Earlier this week, we had a single day in which almost 700 people lost their lives due to the virus, the highest daily death toll this country has seen since the start of May.

So you can argue maybe there's a lag in the numbers, but the medical community is saying that's not enough. This virus is still very much active, it's still very much out there at a time that you're pushing people to go out and spend and live their lives at least somewhat normally, and you have to remember there's also that special Christmas time dispensation which up to three households can come together. So yet again another relaxation of the rules.

But actually the debate here, Paula, yes, while scientists are saying it's not strict enough but the debate that's actually going to take place in parliament is that they are too strict. You have a lot of MPs from Prime Minister Boris Johnson's own party, essentially rebelling against this new three-tier strategy, saying that the economic consequences of it are too high.

[04:25:04]

So there's a lot here on the prime minister's plate when he goes to parliament next week to vote on this. He's going to have to explain this to the public, he's going to have to explain it the National Health Service, and he's going to have to explain this to his own party -- Paula.

NEWTON: Yes. It is a debate that has echoed right around the world really.

Melissa Bell, you're there in Paris and I know of course there is great concern for the economy, but what would you say, especially as we've been hearing in the last few weeks that, you know, the government is very concerned about the strain on hospitals and what it would mean if those businesses reopened too soon.

MELISSA BELL, CNN PARIS CORRESPONDENT: That's right, Paula. I mean, it was when Emmanuel Macron announced this second partial lockdown that came into effect on October 30th. It was because of that strain on the hospitals. It had gotten to a point, Paula, that they just felt that the hospital system wouldn't be able to cope because it had been such a virulent spread of this second wave and France had been so hard hit, with the number of people in hospital just over a week ago, a couple of weeks ago, above what we'd seen during the first wave.

And there comes a point when they simply can't cope. So those fairly strict measures that were then brought in on October 30th really made a big difference. We saw a drop in the number of new cases, and of course what happens inevitably several days after that, a week after that, 10 days after that is that you start to see the numbers of people entering ICU, the number of people entering hospitals more broadly falling.

And that is what has happened. If you look at the last three days, the net number of people in hospital here in France, the net number of people in ICU is now negative. So there are more people leaving than there are people coming in. And that was the place where the authorities wanted to get. Now the key is learning those lessons from the first wave which was no

doubt executed too quickly, restrictions lifted too fast, and hence this strain that we saw then on the hospital system. So what they hope is with the staggered lifting of restrictions that they're going to manage to avoid the third wave, as what the French president explained on Wednesday when he announced the plans, so what happens from Saturday, some nonessential shops will reopen from December 15th, the partial lockdown, that is the restrictions on people's movements if you like, Paula, more specifically will be lifted if those numbers are down to 5,000 or no more than 5,000 new cases a day.

But some businesses are going to be staying closed until January 2021, and that means restaurants, bars, cafes, and those businesses -- this is what the government announced yesterday -- will be getting fresh help, fresh economic help to try and help at least some of them survive.

NEWTON: Yes, definitely a realization that the economy will suffer.

Melissa Bell for us in Paris and Salma Abdelaziz for us in London, thank you to you both. Appreciate it.

Now it's a fact that Donald Trump lost the election to Joe Biden. Yes, facts matter. But the U.S. president appears stuck in a fictional universe where they don't matter. We'll have more on his latest truth- bending claims. It's ahead just after a break.

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