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33 Million In California Under New Stay-at-Home Orders; Biden Unveils Health Team to Lead Pandemic Response; Rudy Giuliani Hospitalized After Testing Positive for Coronavirus; AG Barr Considers Leaving Post Before Trump Exits Office; Surgeon General: People are Spreading Coronavirus While Showing No Symptoms; HHS Secretary: FDA Could Authorize First Vaccine Within Days; Wall Street on Edge As Lawmakers Debate Stimulus. Aired 9-9:30a ET

Aired December 07, 2020 - 09:00   ET

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

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

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

[09:00:00]

This morning, 33 million people in the state of California are under a strict new lockdown. The governor warning that hospitals in the state are at a tipping point as cases spike. That's a key here, the hospitals get overwhelmed.

We're not yet seeing the post-Thanksgiving surge yet and the nation is already setting new records, now averaging nearly 200,000 new infections a day. Dr. Anthony Fauci is worried that things will soon get much worse.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR, "NEW DAY": What are your concerns about Christmas, Dr. Fauci?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ALLERGY AND INFECTIOUS DISEASES: My concerns, John, are the same thing of the concerns that I had about Thanksgiving, only this may be even more compounded because it's a longer holiday. We are in a very critical time in this country right now. We've got to not walk away from the facts and the data. This is tough going for all of us.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: He's exactly right. Also the president's own personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, obviously the former mayor of New York City, is in the hospital this morning with COVID after spending weeks on the road flying from coast to coast, fighting the election results on the president's behalf. He is just the latest in a string of positive COVID tests in the president's inner circle.

Also this morning, President-elect Joe Biden announces the team that will take on this pandemic. His number one challenge. We'll get to that team in a moment. But let's begin in California, with our Stephanie Elam in Los Angeles.

I know a lot of folks there are not happy about basically everything being closed, even playgrounds for their kids. But that is how bad this is.

STEPHANIE ELAM, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes. No one wants this. No one's thrilled about this, right, Poppy. No one wants to hear about the fact that we have all of these cases. I'm actually at the point now where maybe I'm thinking we should stop calling them cases and actually saying people. Maybe if people hear that, maybe they'll respond differently, and to that point, looking at the nation as a whole, 1.2 million new people in the last week tested positive for the coronavirus.

We also have record hospitalizations, more than 101,000 people in the hospital battling this virus right now in the United States. This picture being painted very clearly here in California, when you look to see a record number of people testing positive for the coronavirus, more than 30,000 in just one day, according to the state of California. They're also saying that their seven-day positivity is now above 10 percent in the state, as well as hospitalizations also hitting record levels as well.

This is why they're saying that stay-at-home orders will fall into place when regions fall below 15 percent capacity for ICU beds. The state is now broken up into five regions and two regions, and San Joaquin Valley and Southern California, where I am, have now fallen into that area, and so as of just last night at about midnight, we are now in a renewed stay-at-home order.

And just to give you an idea of what that means, that means that you will see that playgrounds are closed, as you mentioned, restaurants are for to go and takeout only. You are also going to see that all personal care, barber shops, salons, all of those are closed now, and this is going to be like this for at least three weeks. It could be longer, but the whole idea is to bend the curve.

And while people are upset, you've seen restaurant owners in particular saying how can we survive this if we don't have money coming in. And a lot of people are pushing for the fact that the government really do need to work together to get some stimulus there. When you listen to Dr. Fauci, he makes it very clear which side he is on when it comes to this pandemic. Take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

FAUCI: I have been in discussion with the health authorities in the state of California, who called me and asked, you know, they said we feel we need to do this. What do you think? And I said, you know, you really don't have any choice, when you have the challenge to the health care system, you've got to do something like that.

(END VIDEO CLIP) ELAM: And just to really nail this down, here in L.A. County, the most populous county in the country, 10,528 new cases reported yesterday shattering 10,000 and shattering all the levels that we've seen here. This is not a good time. This is worse than we have ever seen it in the pandemic, Jim and Poppy. It is just scary.

HARLOW: Stephanie Elam, thank you for that reporting for us, from California this morning.

Well, as COVID-19 hospitalizations in the U.S. reach as we just talked about an all-time high, the president-elect is building out his team to try to tackle it.

SCIUTTO: Yes. He said this will be job number one as president. CNN's Jessica Dean is in Wilmington with more on Biden's announcement.

Jessica, he's going to tap a veteran of the health care fight to help lead this effort.

JESSICA DEAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: That's right, he's filling out this health team. This is their number one priority tackling the coronavirus pandemic and that is the challenge set before this team of health professionals and people involved in protecting the ACA, as you were saying.

Let's start with a look at the entire team. You see Xavier Becerra there. He is the California attorney general. He has been tapped to lead the Health and Human Services. We'll get back to some more details on him in just a moment.

[09:05:03]

But you also see there Vivek Murthy coming in as surgeon general, Rochelle Walensky, a familiar face probably to a lot of CNN viewers, she is on as a medical contributor, and will be tapped to head the CDC, and of course Anthony Fauci coming on as chief medical adviser.

Going a little bit deeper into Becerra's biography. He is, as I said, the California attorney general. That means he's led the efforts to preserve the Affordable Care Act in court. That's what he spent a lot of his time doing recently. He is a former member of Congress. And if he is confirmed by the Senate he will become the first Latino to hold this position. His nomination of course coming as outside groups have been putting pressure on Biden and his team to select more diverse nominees for those chief Cabinet positions. This of course being one of them.

Also Vivek Murthy who will reprise his role as surgeon general. He fulfilled that role under President Obama, and is a co-chair of the Biden transitions team, COVID-19 Advisory Board. He's also been advising President-elect Biden on this pandemic since really the beginning, so a key health adviser to Biden for a while now.

And guys, we're learning that we are expecting on Tuesday for President-elect Biden to formally introduce this team to Americans, that's typically what we've seen in these instances. They formally announce the people and then introduce them in an event in the coming days, so we're expecting that again tomorrow -- Poppy and Jim.

SCIUTTO: They got their work cut out for them. Jessica Dean, thanks very much.

Well, in a sign of the scope of this outbreak but also the cold, hard reality of it, President Trump's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, has now been admitted to Georgetown University Hospital here in Washington after he tested positive for COVID-19.

HARLOW: Let's go to our colleague John Harwood. He joins us now.

Good morning, John. Obviously we're hoping for the best for him. Do we know about his condition in terms of how serious it is? Is he in the hospital because it's really bad? Is he in the hospital as a precaution because of his age?

JOHN HARWOOD, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: We don't know, Poppy. It would make sense for him to be there as a precaution because of his age. We know that for example Chris Christie checked himself into the hospital before he had serious symptoms. He ended up struggling, but the bottom line is, we don't know how Rudy Giuliani is doing. We know he was on television yesterday morning.

Then he was tweeting later in the day that -- or President Trump tweeted that he had the coronavirus, and the tweet we've gotten from Rudy Giuliani says that he's getting great care, he's feeling good, but beyond that, we just don't know and we'll have to wait and see.

What it underscores, though, is how many people in President Trump's orbit have gotten coronavirus, and it's a reflection of the heedless approach they've taken to the pandemic both across the country and within their own circle of associates. You see it in the super spreader event that was held for Amy Coney Barrett, the new Supreme Court justice, when she was rolled out in September.

You've seen it in holiday parties, you've seen in Trump's rallies, and Rudy Giuliani's been of course traveling the country for this legal effort on behalf of the president, which isn't going anywhere, but he has been shown pretty consistently not to be practicing what public health authorities say we ought to do. So unfortunately, he's gotten COVID, as have members of the president's family, a couple of his children, many top aides, his campaign manager, David Bossie who worked with Rudy Giuliani on the effort or supposed to work with Rudy Giuliani on the effort to try to overturn the election.

So many people in Trump's orbit have gotten COVID. Fortunately, most of them have had mild cases. We did -- of course Herman Cain, who was a close adviser, died after going to a Trump rally, but others have recovered. Ben Carson had struggled and he has now recovered. So we'll just have to wait and see with Rudy Giuliani.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

HARLOW: Again, we hope he's doing all right. John, thank you for the update from the White House this morning. A major development overnight in terms of the Attorney General Bill

Barr. Normally a big ally of the president. Well, we're learning that he may not wait until the end of the president's term before leaving his post. A source close to Barr says he's not happy with the president.

SCIUTTO: CNN's Jessica Schneider covering the Justice Department.

And Jessica, I suppose I'm curious, why now? Right?

HARLOW: Yes.

SCIUTTO: I mean, the president has been very involved in many legal decisions, has applied a lot of public pressure to the attorney general. Why? Particularly so close to the end of the president's term.

JESSICA SCHNEIDER, CNN JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Well, one source I've talked with, Jim, says that, you know, we're just days away from the president's term ending, so why not now? Why not look like essentially you're pushing back and you're getting out before the end. So I am hearing, you know, that Barr is likely to leave the job as AG before January 20th, and one source wondering here, if this maybe was the attorney general sending a message that he will push back, as we saw in that AP interview. And as such, it really raises the specter that the president could even fire Barr in the coming days.

[09:10:03]

We've really been on watch ever since Barr told the AP last week that the Justice Department had seen no widespread election fraud, despite the president unrelenting on that claim, as we've seen even in just the past few days.

So our Jamie Gangel reporting last night that Barr is in fact considering leaving before January 20th, that's Inauguration Day, the day that Trump leaves office, but her source telling her that he has not made the final decision about departing. So we have reported that the president has been frustrated with Bill Barr for saying that the DOJ has found no fraud in the election, and even within the DOJ, they issued a statement shortly after Barr gave the AP interview, saying that while election fraud had not been found, they are still investigating.

So throughout this whole thing over the past week or so it's been somewhat of a push and pull and we're all trying to read the tea leaves about what might happen next. The questions are plenty. You know, will Barr walk in the next few days or weeks? Will the president fire him?

You know, Jim and Poppy, you know, this is an attorney general, as you mentioned, that has rarely pushed back on the president but he seems to be doing it now that his days are numbered anyway. So is this really a calculation on his part -- guys.

SCIUTTO: Perhaps. Reputation, management. Jessica Schneider, thanks very much.

Still to come this hour, how will the vaccine get from distribution sites to Americans like you and me and others who need it most, for key phases of that process, next, what you need to know.

HARLOW: Also, Georgia's governor and Georgia's lieutenant governor both Republicans pushing back against the president's baseless attempts to overturn the election results in their state. What does it mean for the Senate runoff there?

And critical this week on Capitol Hill, Congress hoping to avoid a government shutdown and also maybe finally pass a key stimulus bill that will provide relief for millions of Americans, just in the middle of the holiday season. Will they finally act?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[09:15:00]

HARLOW: Welcome back. This morning as health officials are bracing for a post-Thanksgiving COVID surge, an increasing worry about what is in store for the upcoming holidays. The nation's Surgeon General says Americans need to face the reality of this virus. Listen to what he said this morning.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JEROME ADAMS, SURGEON GENERAL: It's really concerning to me that we still have people out there who don't understand how much spread is occurring by people who don't have symptoms, who think they're fine, and that we find out a week later that they've tested positive and they've exposed other people. That is very concerning. I want the American people to know this virus is incredibly unforgiving. Cases are going up, hospitalizations are going up. My colleagues are dog tired.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HARLOW: Yes, they are. Listen to him, how you can spread this with having no symptoms. Our next guest is Jan Malcolm; she is the commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Health, she says her state has more cases per population than hot spots like New York, Florida, Arizona. She joins me on the phone. Commissioner, thank you very much for being with me this morning. The way that you put it recently in Minnesota is quote, "the floodwall is being breached." How close are your hospitals in the state to being overwhelmed?

JAN MALCOLM, COMMISSIONER, MINNESOTA DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH (via telephone): Good morning, Poppy, thanks for this opportunity. You know, the wonderful thing about our healthcare providers and our hospital system is they just work tirelessly and keep adapting so that they can take care of the most, the people who really need hospital level care. So they have been and they will keep adapting to be able to provide the care that people need. It doesn't come without some impact, though.

I mean, what that means is that people may have to be hospitalized farther from home --

HARLOW: Yes --

MALCOLM: Less time, urgent procedures will start to get delayed and pushed back, so the system will continue to adapt --

HARLOW: Yes --

MALCOLM: But it is absolutely under great stress, and as my colleague the surgeon general said, those healthcare providers as well as those in public health are really -- you know, just have been running flat out since early this year and they're very fatigued. And we all need to do everything we can to reduce the rate of growth in these cases --

HARLOW: Right --

MALCOLM: To help them keep us safe.

HARLOW: I ask because a few weeks ago, the head of the COVID program at the Mayo Clinic on who told us that they were having to fly in physicians from places like Arizona to help, and that was a few weeks ago. Have you seen the full impact of the Thanksgiving gatherings yet or the number is going to get worse?

MALCOLM: Well, those numbers, frankly, will start showing up probably this week.

HARLOW: OK --

MALCOLM: The good news is that over the last couple of weeks, we have seen a leveling off in a decrease in our rate of cases, it's still very high, between 5,000 and 7,000 cases per day. And about 200 hospital admissions a day. So those are very high numbers, but they're actually down from what they were a couple of weeks prior. I think that's because --

HARLOW: Yes --

MALCOLM: Our governor put a four-week pause into effect, really restricting gatherings, public and private, and trying to just target the areas where this transmission is really happening. But we haven't seen Thanksgiving impact yet. We expect to see, if there is going to be one and we frankly expect there will, those numbers will start showing up this week.

HARLOW: Well, that says a lot. We'll keep a close eye on them for the week. Let's talk about distribution, as I told you in the break, I've got, you know, a mother who lives in Minnesota, and I'm worried about her. And she asked a question over the weekend that I think everyone wants to know. What do you do if you want to get in line for a vaccine? Should people be calling their doctors offices, getting on lists? Will they get it at the local pharmacy? How will that distribution work for the most vulnerable, elderly in your state?

MALCOLM: We're going to be getting a lot more information out to the public in the very near future about what happens after this very first wave.

[09:20:00]

So, I think folks need to understand that it is going to take some time for the vaccine to roll out to the public. In the first wave, which will start really within the next couple of weeks, that will be immunization of healthcare workers who are working in hospitals and long-term care, and also the residents who live in skilled nursing facilities and --

HARLOW: OK --

MALCOLM: Assisted living facilities, so that's going to happen kind of automatically in those sites.

HARLOW: Right --

MALCOLM: We will be getting information out to the public, to folks who will be in the next priority group, which will be based on their occupation, there's also their age and their underlying health conditions. We'll be getting information out. I think it's a great idea though for people to call their normal place of healthcare and find out --

HARLOW: Yes --

MALCOLM: What plans their clinic, their doctor's office might have for that. But as I said, much more information is going to be coming in the near future about how to, how people will be able to access those vaccines when they're more broadly available, but frankly, that's probably a month or more off.

HARLOW: I have a very quick follow-up. We only have 20 seconds left, but just to your response to the Minnesota Senate Majority leader, a Republican, Paul Gazelka, he suggested it on Friday that members of the state legislature should be among the first to get vaccinated after those elderly and frontline workers, healthcare workers. Do you agree? Do you agree with that? Should they be near the front of the line?

MALCOLM: Well, I think, you know, that whole process of how we are going to set priorities is being as you know driven significantly by ongoing conversations at the federal level as well. We have scientific and ethical advisors here at the state level to help us work through that.

HARLOW: OK --

MALCOLM: But you know, I appreciate the importance of what the legislature does, but --

HARLOW: Yes --

MALCOLM: I think that will be really based on individual risk factors. HARLOW: Yes, he took some blow-back from others for that, but to be

determined, it sounds like. Well, thanks for all your work on this front, commissioner, and good luck.

MALCOLM: Thank you very much.

HARLOW: Sure, Jim?

SCIUTTO: With the FDA expected to approve Pfizer's coronavirus vaccine this week, the country is gearing up for a national vaccination effort that really has never been seen before. And the current issue of "The Atlantic", Juliette Kayyem, a former Department of Homeland Security official, senior official has an article entitled "The Month the Pandemic Started to End", a hopeful title. Juliette is also a CNN national security analyst, and she joins me now. Juliette, always good to have you on.

JULIETTE KAYYEM, FORMER ASSISTANT SECRETARY, DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY: Thank you for having me.

SCIUTTO: So big picture for people watching right now, and I'm sure you're used to getting this question. But for those who are not in high-risk health categories or healthcare workers, what is the most reasonable time frame that a vaccine is available widely in this country?

KAYYEM: Jim, yes, for the general population, it's -- I think May would be optimistic, and June and July would be hopeful or would be more realistic, and that's just for the general population. Lots of people are going to be vaccinated before that, and I think that's the challenge right now.

We're also excited to get out of this misery of 2020. But this is going to be what we call rolling recovery, where demand exceeds supply and we have to build this thing as it's being shown, and though you're going to have different challenges depending on what the category is of who is going to be vaccinated, where people are rural or urban environments and how the vaccines work, whether they have to be frozen, and how many times you have to get a vaccination. So patience is key.

SCIUTTO: Yes, OK. Listen, it's an enormous operation. You got to get to about 70 percent of the population right to be effective, and we're talking more than 200 million people in a short time frame. You line it up into four phases here, allocation, distribution, demand, verification. I mean, just in simpler terms, simplest terms for folks at home, what is the hardest part of all that?

KAYYEM: That they're all hard, and that's why it's going to take a while, and it's going to seem sort of brutal sometimes, uncaring, I don't mean that in harsh words, it's just -- look, if we decide that 65-year-olds go first or in the second wave, that means someone from 64 years old and 200 days won't be in that pool. So lines are going to have to be drawn. I think one of the biggest challenges though, is going to be what we call the last mile, which is, you know, the military, National Guard or UPS, FedEx, they can move things really quickly in bulk.

It's that last sort of intimate moment of making sure someone comes in, making sure they come in again, where are they getting it, in their doctors offices or CVS? And remember, this is going to scale over time, so how it looks today is --

SCIUTTO: Yes --

KAYYEM: Very different than how it will look in April.

SCIUTTO: So, did we learn lessons from the uneven testing program in this country? Because I mean, you get to the last mile issue. I mean, you could talk all you want about hundreds of millions of tests here and all that kind of stuff, but at the end of the day, do you get it to people when and where they need it?

[09:25:00]

Did we learn lessons from that, that are going to make the vaccine roll out more effective?

KAYYEM: So, this is the question of the transition. And what we learned, I'm not sure the Trump administration learned, which is you have to -- when you think about global supply chain, you have to be thinking two or three months ahead. Because it takes a while for things to turn, right?

In other words for manufacturers to change what they're manufacturing. So, the question we don't know is to what extent are there going to be enough needles, syringes, all the other apparatus that we are going to need because the manufacturing of the vaccine is being done by the -- essentially the private sector, although you know, different countries are doing it different ways.

So one of the biggest questions from the Biden transition team on this is, what does my stockpile look like as the numbers begin to surge. We know the president never really -- although he pretended that he did never really invoke the Defense Production Act.

SCIUTTO: Yes --

KAYYEM: If I -- you know, if I had my druthers, Trump would do it right now to make sure that we have enough needles and syringes. It's that ancillary stuff that the Biden administration is going to be stuck either figuring out how much there is or invoking --

SCIUTTO: Yes --

KAYYEM: The Defense Production Act to get companies to do it --

SCIUTTO: Right, it's not going to happen in this administration, right? So, we'll have to wait for big moves --

KAYYEM: No --

SCIUTTO: Like that in the next one sadly. Juliette Kayyem, good to have you on, I'm sure we'll be talking about this again in the coming months.

KAYYEM: Yes, it's nice to see you.

SCIUTTO: Well, two major battles right now in the state of Georgia. Republican senators fighting to keep their seats as we close in on -- it's a high stakes runoff. Can't underestimate that. And the Republican governor has rejected the president's repeated demands to overturn the state's election results. I didn't make that language up. That's what's happening, we're covering it all.

HARLOW: It really is. We're also moments away from the opening bell on Wall Street. Taking a look at futures right now, pretty flat across the board, a little bit mixed there. Wall Street on edge as investors look to Capitol Hill for any final news on a stimulus deal. Key senators signaling there could be an agreement very soon as in days. That would help millions of Americans facing so-called -- the so- called benefit cliff, right? Their benefits expiring around right around Christmas. We'll keep a very close eye on that.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)