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Moderna to Apply for FDA's Authorization for Its Vaccine Today; Dr. Anthony Fauci Warns Thanksgiving Could Lead to Surge Upon a Surge; Biden Set to Receive First Presidential Daily Intel Briefing; Biden Announces All-Female Senior White House Communications Team; Seven States Certify Results as Trump Makes Baseless Fraud Claims; Florida Close to Hitting 1 Million Coronavirus Cases; Moderna to Apply for FDA Authorization for its Vaccine Today; Biden Set to Receive First President's Daily Intel Briefing. Aired 9-9:30a ET

Aired November 30, 2020 - 09:00   ET

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

[09:00:00]

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR: That it's vaccine is 94.1 percent effective against the COVID, 100 percent effective in preventing the onset of severe cases. This is very good news as this virus sadly spirals out of control in this country, and experts are warning of a surge upon surge after this Thanksgiving holiday.

Here's where the numbers stand right now. They are daunting. For the 27th straight day, the U.S. saw cases top 100,000. Nearly 267,000 Americans have died already, and the nation has hit a new hospitalization record, higher than at any point in this pandemic, more than 93,000 people hospitalized with COVID.

Despite those devastating facts and numbers, the president is keeping his focus simply on pushing outright lies about this election, which he lost, and while he's refusing to accept defeat, President-elect Biden is moving forward on assembling his team. He is set to receive his first Presidential Daily Intelligence Briefing today.

We are watching all the news this morning. Let's begin, though, with CNN senior medical correspondent.

So, Elizabeth, good news from Moderna. What would getting Emergency Use Authorization mean about the timeline for the rest of the country getting this?

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN SENIOR MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Right, Jim, so this could mean that people will start getting vaccinated in the second half of December, those would be high-risk people. And then people who are not high-risk probably in the spring would start to get vaccinated.

Let's take a look at Moderna's numbers. It's so important because this is a much larger data set. It's about twice as large as the one that they announced a few weeks ago that you and I talked about. So what this most recent data set shows is that this vaccine is 94.1 percent effective against COVID-19. That is a stunning number. And 100 percent effective against severe cases. In other words, the folks who got the vaccine, a few people, they did get COVID but it was nothing severe.

So here is how Moderna came to that number. What they did is they took a large group of people, tens of thousands of people, some of them got the vaccine and some of them got just a shot of saline, that's a placebo that does absolutely nothing. All those people went back to their homes, back to their cities and towns, some of them got COVID, some of them didn't.

Let's take a look at what happened. So 11 of the 15,000 people who got the vaccine got COVID so in other words just 11 out of 15,000 people who got the real vaccine got COVID but 185 of the 15,000 people who received the placebo got COVID. Look at the difference 11 versus 185. And as I mentioned, none of the folks who got the vaccine got severe COVID. Nobody ended up in the hospital, nobody ended up being severely ill -- Jim.

SCIUTTO: OK, so when we pick who those first most vulnerable, most essential populations are who get the vaccine, who falls into that category? Because you can imagine it's somewhat hard to define.

COHEN: Right. So, Jim, you've landed on the two important words. Vulnerable and essential, and in the beginning they're going to go with sort of one of each. What we're hearing from the folks at the CDC advisory committee that they're the ones who will make the decision and what we're hearing is that they are steering towards two groups to be the very, very first, that is health care workers who are frontline workers. These are folks who could be taking care of COVID patients. And of course we want to protect them.

And also in that other group, vulnerable nursing home residents. We know how this virus has just ripped through nursing homes, so the thinking right now is those will be the very first two groups, and then after that, will be essential workers like police officers, elderly, anyone over aged 65, people with underlying medical conditions that those groups will come later. And then if you're not in any of those groups which of course a lot of people aren't, if you're not in any of those groups, likely end of April is when you could possibly get vaccinated.

SCIUTTO: Understood. So time, but it's moving forward, it's good news.

Elizabeth Cohen, thanks very much.

COHEN: Yes.

SCIUTTO: Let's go to CNN's Ryan Young, he's is in Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, one of the busiest in the world.

Ryan, White House Task Force coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx, she's pleading with Americans who traveled for this Thanksgiving holiday to quarantine. I mean, it's quite a warning to hear. They're very concerned about the effect of all this travel on the outbreak. RYAN YOUNG, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, Jim, we started talking

about this last week. It seems like so many people just had fatigue when it came to the coronavirus, it's definitely a decision that people made that they were definitely going to fly this holiday weekend, and we've seen numbers, packed numbers here at the airport and airport security, people even showing up without masks and they're handing out masks here at the security checkpoint as well. And some people who are wearing masks have it below their face.

Now of course, this is all happening as 16 states across the country are treating a record number of coronavirus patients, and you think about that, the higher spikes they believe are coming. United States has reported more than 100,000 new coronavirus cases for each of the last 27 days. It's a warning that health officials are quite concerned about.

[09:05:08]

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. DEBORAH BIRX, WHITE HOUSE TASK FORCE COORDINATOR: If your family traveled, you have to assume that you are exposed and you became infected and you really need to get tested in the next week, and you need to avoid anyone in your family with comorbidities or over 65.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

YOUNG: Jim, I talked to two young ladies this morning who showed up with full PPE. I mean, they had the entire get-up on. They were going to Hawaii. They said their trip was too expensive to cancel. We talked to other people who said they hadn't seen their family members in months and they felt like this was the weekend to do it. With all of that being said, some people said they got tested before going on vacation, and it will be interesting to see if those same people get tested on the way back.

The big question now, though, is the people who had success during this Thanksgiving holiday, do they do it again during the Christmas holidays as well?

Jim, a lot of numbers we're going to have to be watching over the next few days.

SCIUTTO: Yes. That would be quite a double blow Thanksgiving to Christmas.

Ryan Young, thanks very much.

President-elect Joe Biden will receive his first scheduled intelligence briefing today. It's a big step, a natural one under any other circumstances, in a transition that has been delayed four weeks by President Trump.

Let's go to CNN's Jessica Dean, she is in Washington.

Jessica, first tell us more about this briefing, who will be present, how extensive, et cetera.

JESSICA DEAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Right, Jim, and as you mentioned, this has been delayed by President Trump refusing to concede the election. He only relented last week, agreeing to allow President- elect Biden to have access to a president's daily briefing. Of course, this is all of the classified information that Joe Biden is going to need as president. This is long-term, short-term threats, all of these assessments and information put together by intelligence officials across the U.S. government.

Joe Biden now going to have access to that. Of course he's no stranger to this sort of information. We know that he got these when he was vice president under President Barack Obama. We know that he's a voracious consumer of this sort of intelligence, that's a big reader. Again, quite a contrast to President Trump, who we know preferred oral briefings and didn't always read the briefings. So he's going to take -- Biden is definitely going to take a very different approach to these daily briefings and to this intelligence information.

It's also interesting to note, Vice President-elect Harris also of course going to get access to this as well, and it ends this kind of odd period where Harris actually had more access to classified information as a sitting member of the Senate Intelligence Committee than Joe Biden did, but again he'll be getting that first briefing today -- Jim.

SCIUTTO: Yes. I mean, biggest change might be that it will actually be a daily briefing which it was not under President Trump.

DEAN: Right.

SCIUTTO: All right, Biden had something of an accident playing with his dog yesterday? What's his condition after fracturing his foot?

DEAN: Right. So we now know that he has some hairline fractures in his midfoot area which ultimately means he's going to be in a walking boot we're told probably for several weeks. He was playing with his dog over the weekend. We got word yesterday he was going to see a doctor out of an abundance of caution. They took some x-rays, couldn't see enough on that, did a further CT scan. That's when they found those hairline fractures.

What was interesting about all of this, Jim, is that we in the media were updated to his condition kind of throughout the day, and we saw a video of him leaving where he got that scan last night, as he was heading home. That stands in stark contrast again to President Trump. We still don't know why he went to Walter Reed Medical Center about a year ago, instead last night, we really did get that information as it came with President-elect Biden. Again, expect to see him in that walking boot for a little bit.

SCIUTTO: Yes. Again, one more return to what was normal prior to Trump, which would be to share such information.

Final thing, unusual, Biden announcing an all-female senior White House communications team. DEAN: Yes, this is history-making. Senior staff, senior communications

team made up of all women. And if you take a look at the women that he named for these various positions, they're going to be very familiar to a lot of people who followed along with the Biden campaign. People like Kate Bedingfield, Symone Sanders, Jen Psaki, Karine Jean-Pierre. All these people have incredibly long resumes and experience within their fields.

They bring a wealth of experience, a lot of them were involved with the campaign, have worked for the Bidens before. So again history- making there with the women who have been named to lead that White House communications team, and also, Jim, I want to note, we're just getting word Biden has named his leadership for the Inaugural Committee. And we know that the CEO is going to be Tony Allen, a former speechwriter for Biden when he was a senator. He's now currently the president of Delaware State University.

Of course he'll be serving in a personal capacity, but a number of people charged with putting together this inauguration that is going to be again unprecedented, like so many things this year, because of the pandemic, how will they do all of this? How will they social distance? How will they make sure they don't spread the virus?

[09:10:01]

Jim, those are the questions before this leadership committee who will plan this inauguration.

SCIUTTO: Yes. Difficult circumstances, no question. Jessica Dean in Washington, thanks very much.

Well, today seven states certify their election results, three won by the president, three by the president-elect, and one state that is split, but the current president is challenging the results across the board, continuing what are unfounded claims of election fraud that have been repeatedly, we should note, rejected in court.

White House correspondent John Harwood joins me now.

John, the president dealt another blistering defeat in court this week. And I mean, the language in the judge's opinion, a Trump appointee, were blistering.

JOHN HARWOOD, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: And Jim, it's all the more striking because that judge with the blistering language was a judge appointed by President Donald Trump. This was a case in the Circuit Court -- Federal Appeals Court in Pennsylvania that dealt with his challenge to the Pennsylvania results. Of course, President Trump lost Pennsylvania and that case was thrown out on Friday, as you mentioned. Seven states are due to certify their election results today.

The curtain is gradually coming down on this abnormal presidency, and this crazy act that he's been putting on post-election. This legal challenge from the president doesn't have a small chance of succeeding. It has a zero chance of succeeding. Case after case after case has been laughed out of court by judges, and the only question is how long does it go on? We've got these certifications that go forward today.

All of this is leading up to December the 14th, when electors appointed as a result of the votes and various states meet and cast their votes. That may be the case or the deadline by which more than just a small fraction of Republican members of Congress stop the game and come out and say that Joe Biden is the president-elect. We've already of course had the transition moving forward.

The question everybody asks as the president continues this morning to tweet out, "No way we lost this election," of course, he did lose the election, is does the president actually believe this stuff or is he delusional? The answer may be in a dialogue that Ted Cruz, the senator from Texas, gave a few years ago when he was losing his challenge to Trump, he said, President Trump or Donald Trump is a pathological liar who when the moment the lies come out of his mouth, he actually believes them. So you could be both.

Of course Ted Cruz now is one of those Republican members who has not acknowledged that Joe Biden is president-elect, which just shows how Donald Trump has exacted a grip over the Republican Party, gradually loosening, probably by the middle of December we will be on with the next act in American politics.

SCIUTTO: Well, whether he believes them or not, they're lies.

John Harwood at the White House, thanks very much.

Florida the latest state on the verge of crossing one million infections from COVID-19. We're going to go live to a testing site there. It's busy.

Plus millions of Americans remain out of work. Businesses closing down, some on the brink. Biden has his work cut out for him on an economy still reeling. More on the team he just put in place to take on this major task.

And 15 members of a single family contract COVID-19 after just a small birthday party. Now they have a message this holiday season, simply, don't do what we did.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[09:15:00]

SCIUTTO: Welcome back. In Florida's Miami-Dade County, the daily positivity rate, the percentage of people who test positive when tested is an alarmingly high 10 percent, that is the highest it has been in two weeks now, the number of COVID patients in the hospital, and on ventilators rising, too. CNN's Rosa Flores, she's at a testing center in Miami Beach. Rosa, are you already seeing people taking tests who traveled for the holiday because that is a recommendation we're hearing from Dr. Birx and others today.

ROSA FLORES, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes, absolutely, Jim, both because people traveled and because people gathered during Thanksgiving. Take a look behind me and you'll see that this line wraps around the corner, and as it wraps around towards the convention center here in Miami Beach, you'll see that the line goes into a double line.

Here is a reality in the state of Florida right now. It is about to hit 1 million cases, with 992,000 cases reported so far, 190,000 just this month, that is 19 percent. Here is the reality in the state of Florida.

Hospitalizations like in other parts of the country are increasing, in the past two weeks in Florida, the number of hospitalizations has increased by 30 percent, with more than 4,000 people hospitalized in this state. Here in Miami-Dade County where I am, there's been an increase of 29 percent in hospitalizations in the past two weeks. Ventilator use is up 33 percent in the past two weeks, but here is what has local authorities very worried. The positivity rate continues to increase.

The two-week average is 8 percent, but yesterday, the positivity rate was 10 percent. And when you just look at Jackson Health, one of the biggest health systems in this county and definitely in the state, the positivity rate was 17 percent.

Now, there's also a lot of frustration mounting here in Miami Beach, and in the city of Miami, from local mayors who are asking Governor Ron DeSantis to do more, to stop the spread of this virus. Dan Gelber; the mayor of this city, Jim, sent the governor a letter on November 18th, asking him for help, asking him to do things like require a mask and issue a mask mandate statewide. According to Mayor Dan Gelber and also city of Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, they still have not heard back from the governor of this state. Jim?

[09:20:00]

SCIUTTO: Rosa Flores in Miami, thanks very much. Joining us now, Dr. Ashish Jha; he's the dean of Brown University School of Public Health. Dr. Jha, good to have you on as always.

ASHISH JHA, DEAN, BROWN UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH: Good morning, thanks for having me on.

SCIUTTO: So, the U.S. is already in a very bad place with this outbreak. It is worsening, I mean, a 100,000 new infections a day has become the new normal. Given the holiday travel, what does the outbreak look like in the next two, three weeks? What kind of jump in cases and sadly deaths do you expect?

JHA: Yes, so Jim, first of all, the good news is that many Americans opted not to travel over Thanksgiving, as painful as that was, so I think we should acknowledge that and for the folks who did, I think we're all worried about what that's going to mean for them and for their families and for their communities. The problem is we won't really know the impact of that, for at least another five or seven days because that's just the dynamics of this virus. We are nearing almost 200,000 infections a day. I expect we're going to cross that at some point a week or ten days from now. You know, the big number that I think a lot of us are paying attention

to is the number of people dying every day, and you know, back in April, on the worst days of the pandemic, 2,200, 2,400 people died in a day, and I thought, boy, I hope we never get anywhere close to that. I'm worried that we are going to cross 2,000 and keep going. So that's a real area of concern.

SCIUTTO: Yes, listen, the president's has given up on this. President Trump doesn't want to talk about it, doesn't want to do anything about it, and we're still a little less than two months away from the inauguration of a new president who is taking this very seriously. What does that mean over the next two months, if you don't have national leadership at the worst point in this pandemic?

JHA: Yes, it -- boy, it makes it much harder, right? And it would be really helpful if the president would reengage, really re-engage with his coronavirus taskforce, Dr. Birx and Dr. Fauci, and use the power of the federal government to protect the American people.

Assuming that is not going to happen, we haven't seen much engagement from the president, at this point, the game really shifts to states, our Congress needs to get resources to states and then states have to do more. We're seeing some states, Rhode Island, Michigan and others step up, but it would be much more helpful if we had a true national effort.

SCIUTTO: Yes, OK, let's talk about the good news, folks need to hear it. There is progress on vaccines expecting emergency use authorization for Moderna's vaccine along with Pfizer's showing real promise here. Tell us your best guess for the timeline, for why distribution of vaccines. First, for the most vulnerable and most essential workers, but then for me and my family, folks who are watching and their families.

JHA: Yes. So first of all, absolutely great news, even more news out of Moderna this morning, it's looking really good, 90-95 percent effectiveness, efficacy preventing most if not all severe cases. This is much better than I was expecting or even hoping for, so I'm thrilled.

Late December, I think we're going to start seeing healthcare workers, first responders getting vaccinated. January and into early February, the rest of healthcare workers, all first responders, essential workers and high-risk individuals. I suspect if everything goes well, and we're going to have to see how it goes. Late February, March, April is when it starts getting available to the broader population. And by April-May, I think anybody who wants a vaccine should be able to get one.

SCIUTTO: Wow, late February, early by then, that's earlier than we had Dr. Azar on the air -- for instance, recently, he was saying April, perhaps that means more nationally, but you think as soon as February?

JHA: Well, so let me be clear. I think January-February is again that high-risk group and the first responders. Late February-early March is when the broader population begins.

SCIUTTO: OK --

JHA: But left until -- you know, a couple of hundred million people. So, it's going to take us well into April-May before, I think most Americans can get vaccinated.

SCIUTTO: Understood. Well, Jha, good to have you on. We'll try to focus on the positive as best we can.

JHA: Absolutely, thank you so much, Jim.

SCIUTTO: Well, for the first time since the election, the President- elect Joe Biden and the Vice President-elect Kamala Harris will get access to as is normal, the nation's key intelligence. But will this delay have an impact on the country's safety?

We're just moments away from the opening bell on Wall Street. The Dow looks to start the trading week a bit lower, but the Dow is on track for its best month in more than 30 years. Watching for any signs of progress on the stimulus talks. Tomorrow, the president-elect is set to unveil his economic team, a team that will look like no other, but it may not be smooth sailing. Christine Romans will join us next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[09:25:00]

SCIUTTO: We don't have to tell many of you the economic costs of this pandemic are real, and as millions of Americans struggle and an eviction crisis grows, President-elect Biden is assembling his team to tackle America's economic turmoil. And they're all women and all with very diverse backgrounds. CNN's chief business correspondent Christine Romans is with me now with more on these women, and the fight at least that one of them could soon face for confirmation. Tell us what you know.

CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN CHIEF BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: Well, this is a center-left team of professionals here who inherit a really tough position here.