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Shutdown Looms as Congress Struggles to Reach Relief Deal; CDC Meeting to Discuss Who will Get Vaccinated Next; Vote on $900 Billion Pandemic Relief Bill Expected Today; CVS Begins Giving COVID-19 Vaccine to Nursing Homes Residents. Aired 11:30-12p ET

Aired December 21, 2020 - 11:30   ET

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

[11:30:03]

DR. ASHISH JHA, DEAN, BROWN UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH: Again, I remain pretty confident that the vaccine will stand up to this variant, but, overtime, we are going to see more variants and we might even, at some point down the road, see a variant where the vaccine is a little bit less effective. This is why we've got to be vigilant.

And also the more infections there are, the more opportunity there are for mutations and variations. So, one of the things we can do to avoid long-term issues is keep infection levels down, and we know how to do that. So I think if we stay on that message, we will really make a big difference.

KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR: And probably, hopefully, saw on the screen just all of the countries that are pausing travel from the U.K. because of what we're learning about this. Do you think it would be smart for the United States to do the same? I mean, there's a growing list of countries here that are pausing travel. Do you think the U.S. should?

JHA: This is a really good question. The general evidence on travel bans is that it tends to slow things down a little bit. If that variant really ends up becoming dominant, it will find a way into every country. I think travel bans would slow that down for a while, give us more time. So I wouldn't be opposed to it. But, to me, the most important thing is continue to do the things that we're doing in the United States to protect the people.

BOLDUAN: Dr. Jha, thank you.

JHA: Thank you, Kate.

BOLDUAN: Coming up for us, an attorney known for pushing election fraud conspiracy theories was spotted at the White House twice this weekend. New reporting now on what has even longtime Trump allies worried.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) [11:35:00]

BOLDUAN: Let's turn now to Capitol Hill, where the first votes on this $900 billion COVID relief bill are expected today. But what's actually in this bill and what is not?

CNN's Manu Raju is on the Hill, he's been tracking all these details all along for us. Manu, they announced a deal late yesterday. What is the latest that you're hearing on timing and such?

MANU RAJU, CNN SENIOR CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: The bill is actually released, Kate. We have not seen the bill text yet of the $900 billion proposal that Congress wants to approve today. Members of Congress have virtually no time to read the bill before they actually vote on it and it will be attached to a $1.4 trillion spending package to keep the government open through next September because money is going to run out for the government by midnight tonight if they don't act. And they have still not seen the details on that proposal either.

So we do expect the bill language to be introduced in a matter of moments then, eventually the House Rules Committee you will take it up, begin its first step, it will be sent into the House floor. That full House chamber will vote some time later today, into the evening, into the night. And then it will be kicked over to the United States Senate.

A big question is whether the Senate can agree to a quick vote. All 100 senators need to agree to a vote. And at that point, presuming it gets passed tonight in the Senate, it gets over to the president's desk. And that's a process that could several days itself because of all the paperwork associated with it, Kate.

So it could take some time before the American people see relief. But this is a significant proposal that includes direct payments of up to $600 for individuals, people who make under $75,000 -- up to $75,000 a year would get that relief, as well as $300 in enhanced unemployment benefits that will start to kick in on December 27th, so many people at risk of losing those benefits, more than $280 billion for the Small Business Administration Paycheck Protection Program, more than 80 billion for schools and colleges, 25 billion for rental assistance.

So, Kate, a lot in this proposal that will help all sectors of the economy, but we need to see the details, there needs to be a vote and the question is, when will that happen and when will the American people get the relief they've been seeking. Kate?

BOLDUAN: And they're already saying it's not enough. Manu, thank you very much.

Okay. Let's turn to the White House now where the reporting is, frankly, stunning when it is impossible to be stunned anymore. Screaming matches in the Oval Office, presidential advisers pushing for martial law to rerun the election, and an attorney who is constantly spreading conspiracy theories over the election is seen at the White House then twice this weekend. The situation around the president taking such a turn, sources familiar with what has happened are now alerting reporters. One of the sources described to CNN's Kevin Liptack and Pamela Brown an escalating sense of concern among Trump's aides, even those who have weathered his previous controversies about what steps he might take next as his term comes to an end.

CNN's John Harwood is at the White House, he is joining us now, as always. John, Sidney Powell is the attorney that we're talking about. She was spotted at the White House again last night but this is after the reporting had come out about happened Friday night. And it's no small thing. I mean, martial law is being floated.

JOHN HARWOOD, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Kate, so much crazy going on in that building behind me. I think the situation we find ourselves in is this. We have a president who is not psychologically healthy, he is terrified of being labeled a loser, he is delusional, he is about to lose the protections and benefits of being president in 30 days and to return to private life facing very large debts, hundreds of millions of dollars in debts, facing the threat of prosecution at the state and local level, as well as the federal level although he might pardon himself.

[11:40:19]

And therefore, he is entertaining all of these kooky, crazy ideas, seizing voting machines, making Sidney Powell, this conspiracy theory lawyer, a special counsel on voter fraud, declaring martial law, the idea advanced by Michael Flynn, the retired lieutenant general who, of course, was his national security adviser until he was -- pled guilty to a felony for lying to the FBI about conversations with Russia.

This is what is surrounding the president right now. We heard from Bill Barr, as you showed on your air a few minutes ago, that he does not think there is reason for a special counsel. He does not see the need for widespread fraud. He is fleeing the scene of this craziness but the rest of us are going to be watching this president for 30 days. It will probably be no more than talk because the president tends to do more talking than acting in these situations. But we don't know, and everybody needs to fasten their seat belts.

BOLDUAN: John, thank you.

So, one thing the president is definitely not focused on and not taking any action against is the massive cyber attack on U.S. government agencies, the president now downplaying and openly contradicting his own secretary of state on this.

First, let me play you what the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, actually said.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MIKE POMPEO, U.S. SECRETARY OF STATE (voice over): I think it's the case that now we can say pretty clearly that it was the Russians that engaged in this activity. (END VIDEO CLIP)

BOLDUAN: Yet, and the president's first comments on this, and this is a week after this all became public, he did not condemn Russia at all. Instead, he suggested it may be China and also suggested that this whole thing is being overblown.

Joining me right now is Alex Stamos, he is the director of the Stanford Internet Observatory and former Chief Security Officer for Facebook and Yahoo. Alex, thank you for being here.

First, there's a list of things I would like to get through with you. Do you see any credible suggestion that this is anyone other than Russia?

ALEX STAMOS, DIRECTOR, STANFORD INTERNET OBSERVATORY: No, there's no credible evidence that it's anybody other than Russia. A number of organizations that have a lot of credibility on matters of attribution, of determining who is behind the cyberattack, have pointed the finger squarely at the SVR, which is one of the Russian intelligence agencies. This includes FireEye, Microsoft and multiple U.S. intelligence agencies. And so I've seen nothing that would make me doubt that they're attribution is correct.

BOLDUAN: Well, look, it's been close to a week since the -- since the Security Council has met on this. How widespread and, frankly, devastating is this to the U.S. government and the companies being targeted? Can you put that into perspective for people?

STAMOS: This is quite possibility the most effective cyber espionage campaign in history. We don't exactly know what the impact is going to be yet. But the fact that the Russians were able, through some very smart and careful and stealthy moves, to insert themselves into roughly 18,000 networks around the world meant they had a shopping list of government agencies, large corporations and companies tied to the defense industrial base that they could choose to break into.

Now, which ones they chose to break into, we're not totally sure yet. And that's the kind of question that's going to take months or perhaps even years to answer.

BOLDUAN: And I can tell you, we keep hearing people say that the hack could be still ongoing, and for some reason, that is almost the most striking to me at this moment, why don't they know that yet at the very least?

STAMOS: Yes, so this is a complicated one. To simplify it a little bit, there's really two steps that the Russians took here. The first step they took in March, which is they put a backdoor into a very popular piece of software that lots of government agencies and corporations use to manage their network. Once that backdoor was inserted and was downloaded by these victims, the SVR had a choice to make of whether or not they then themselves went on their keyboards and took control of computers inside of those orgs to go find and exfiltrate information. That second step -- the first step has been closed. The FireEye and Microsoft working together have figured out how to stop the Russians from walking into that backdoor. But the question is how many of those backdoors did they walk into?

We know already it's probably at least in the hundreds out of the 18,000 possible. The big question will be, will that number grow and will the number of organizations that are really, really sensitive, such as the Nuclear Stockpile Administration, the number of the really top organizations grow as well?

[11:45:01]

And at this pace, it looks like that continues and it takes a lot to find that. There's not enough teams in the United States, really around the world, to go and look at all these organizations and figure out in what situations did the Russians decide to walk through that door.

BOLDUAN: I mean, Alex, how did it get so far without anyone noticing?

STAMOS: Yes, that's a great question. And so there're a couple things that happened here. The first this was a backdoor that was placed in software that I.T. administrators intentionally went and pulled down and installed in their network. So it wasn't an outside attack. And a lot of defenses that have been built over the last decade are looking for the actual attack phase. The Russians didn't have to do that. The people running these networks intentionally downloaded the software and installed it.

The second is, of all the Russian intelligence agencies, and there're three major ones, this is the really good, subtle one. We talk a lot about the activities of the GRU, which is military intelligence. They're the ones that broke into the DNC and such. Those guys are like a sledge hammer. The SVR is like a scalpel. And if you look at all of the different ways that they controlled this software once it was inside the network, it was incredibly, incredibly really subtle.

BOLDUAN: That's really interesting. So, looking forward, and you've got a president who is making clear he's not going to really be doing anything in the 30 days that he is still in office on this, I'm curious if you think how critical these 30 days could be and how critical timing is.

But even looking forward, we heard the incoming chief of staff, Ron Klain, say that this is going to go beyond sanctions, it's going to be -- we're going to take on things to degrade the capacity of foreign actors to repeat this sort of attack. And I'm curious as to what you think that actually would be?

STAMOS: Well, for the next 30 days are critical. The last two weeks have been critical, because the Russians now know that we know, and they are likely cleaning up their tracks at all of these different victims.

And so the first couple of days of an incident response like this are really, really important because that's the time in which you can kind of freeze things in place, you can gather up data before it's been deleted and that you can be confident that you have caught everything. The longer we go from the initial announcement, the harder and harder it's going to be to find the backdoors that are being planted in these networks.

As with the response of the Biden administration, they have talked about that kind of responding to Russia, obviously, there're lots of reasons we need to respond to Russia around them putting bounties on the heads of American soldiers, and kinds of other espionage activity. In this particular circumstance though, the United States is generally not considered cyber espionage to be an act of war. In fact, this is exactly the kind of thing we have done over and over again in using -- breaking into computers to steal information.

And so while I think there's going to be a lot of language, in the end, this will probably not be the thing that triggers a lot of sanctions because it is the kind of thing we have reserved for ourselves in the past.

BOLDUAN: Alex, thank you very much. I know begin to understand a little bit better because of you. Thank you very much.

Coming up, CVS rolling out its vaccination program for long-term care facilities, the chief medical officer for CVS Health join us with an update.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[11:50:00]

BOLDUAN: Right now, HHS, the Defense Department and Operation Warp Speed are holding a briefing on the coronavirus vaccine distribution, how it's going. HHS, the health secretary, Alex Azar, he just said that he will be receiving the coronavirus vaccine in the coming days. Listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ALEX AZAR, SECRETARY, HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES: I look forward to receiving this vaccine myself in the coming days as part of our efforts to demonstrate to Americans that these vaccines are safe and incredibly effective at preventing COVID-19.

This first wave of Moderna shipments will be sent to more than 3,500 sites, a greater number than the Pfizer vaccine was sent to, in part because the Moderna vaccine can be accommodated in more sites, including harder to reach and more rural places.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BOLDUAN: This comes as the vaccine rollout is really ramping up across the country, as the United States now has two authorized coronavirus vaccines. And some of the most vulnerable to COVID-19 residents of long-term care facilities, they are now going to begin to get the first doses of the vaccine, really starting today. And CVS and Walgreens, they are the major pharmacies that are delivering vaccines and focused squarely right now on these long-term care facilities.

Let's get an update on how that is going and going to go. The Chief Medical Officer for CVS Health, Dr. Troy Brennan, is with us. Doctor, thank you for coming back in.

So you're just starting with the vaccines in these long-term care facilities. How is this going?

DR. TROY BRENNAN, CHIEF MEDICAL OFFICER, CVS HEALTH: Well, we did a few over the weekend and on Friday. And the big start really is today and will be more than a dozen states. And, so far, everything seems to be going quite well.

BOLDUAN: That's great to hear. You said it's going to be in a dozen states. How many shots do you think you'll be able to administer in this first week?

BRENNAN: In this first week, really difficult to say, but somewhere over 50,000.

BOLDUAN: That sounds hugely promising. I mean, there are so many long-term care facilities. I mean, what's your -- as things ramp up, Dr. Brennan, what's your hope on how many you'll be administering week to week? Do you have a goal?

BRENNAN: Well, we figure that there's about 4 million people in long- term care facilities and the people who work in those long-term care facilities. And we're looking at sort of an 8 to 12-week process for the portion that we're doing, which is over 40,000 out of about 70,000 locations that have been identified. So, if you do the math, we have to get out to plenty of locations every week. But, so far, we've got that well mapped out and our operations teams are very confident being able to accomplish that.

BOLDUAN: And that's why Operation Warp Speed is leaning on you.

One of the things that we have heard from Alex Azar actually recently was that he believed that the government has capacity to give the vaccine to all residents of long-term care facilities by Christmas. That doesn't seem feasible at this point, correct?

BRENNAN: No, I don't think that's feasible, not by Christmas, no. We're going to be working through the 24th. A lot of places don't want us on the 25th. But then we'll be back out there again on the 26th. But that will be too soon to get to all the skilled nursing facilities in the country. Some of the states won't even start until the 28th.

BOLDUAN: Got you. One of the issues I wanted to ask you about, starting to hear is concerns or issues around consent with some of the residents in these care facilities. You have residents, of course, many residents that have dementia or Alzheimer's patients and, of course, require family or even attorneys to provide consent for things. How are you handling this? BRENNAN: Well, initially, we wanted to get written consent. But working with the facilities, we found that just wasn't going to be possible in many circumstances. And so we're going to be taking verbal consent and we're also going to be taking email consent from individuals and then we'll be documenting that on the backend.

But the idea is to get the vaccinations done in skilled nursing facilities for all the patients that want to have them, to not have hang-ups because we have been unable to get written consent.

BOLDUAN: This may seem like a small thing, but now that there is a second vaccine that has received authorization, Dr. Brennan, how does that work for CVS? And how does it work now that you have two vaccines authorized and how it rolls out in various places through CVS?

[11:55:00]

BRENNAN: Well, we'll work with Operation Warp Speed on that. We don't anticipate significant logistical problems associated with the Pfizer vaccine, even though it has to be kept at much lower temperatures. For instance, some going with some teams in Northern Vermont over the course of the middle of the week, and we will be using the Pfizer vaccine in really quite rural settings there.

So, logistics aren't something that sort of concerns us. Moderna is a little bit easier, and what it will do is provide obviously more supply. And some states will get Moderna, some states will get Pfizer. Operation Warp Speed works that with us.

The major thing for us is just that the Pfizer vaccine is 21 days. We have to be back there 21 days later, and Moderna is 28 days. But our systems are capable of identifying who has gotten which vaccine and when they need to get their booster.

BOLDUAN: Thank you so much, Dr. Brennan, for coming on for an update. It's a big day for so many families with people who are in long-term care facilities. Thank you.

BRENNAN: It is a big day. Thank you so much, Kate.

BOLDUAN: Coming up for us, President-elect Joe Biden and Jill Biden rolling up their sleeves. They are set to receive the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine today.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BOLDUAN: Hello, everyone. Thanks for sticking with us. I'm Kate Bolduan. We begin the second hour right now.

Soon, President-elect Joe Biden and Jill Biden, they will be rolling up their sleeves and receiving their first doses of the coronavirus vaccine. They are joining a growing list of political leaders now getting the vaccine publicly as part of a major effort to show and convince other Americans that the vaccine is safe, is easy and is effective.

HHS Secretary Alex Azar, just moments ago, said that he is going to be doing the very same.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

AZAR: I look forward to receiving this vaccine myself in the coming days as part of our efforts to demonstrate to Americans that these vaccines are safe and incredibly effective at preventing COVID-19.

[12:00:08]