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President Trump Vetoes Defense Spending Bill; U.S. Makes Deal For 100 Million Additional Pfizer Vaccine Doses; Trump Sabotaging COVID Relief Bill?. Aired 3-3:30p ET
Aired December 23, 2020 - 15:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[15:00:01]
KYLIE ATWOOD, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY REPORTER: And we have heard from the National Security Council on this topic, who have said that whomever carried this out is going to face a cost.
But the U.S. has still imposed no cost on Russia for this, the State Department saying nothing on that today. The U.K. and the E.U. sanctioned Russian officials for this more than two months ago -- Brooke.
BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN HOST: Kylie, thank you very much at the State Department.
Let's continue on.
Top of the hour here. You're watching CNN. I'm Brooke Baldwin. Thank you for being with me.
Look at every single coronavirus metric you can possibly imagine, right, cases, hospitalizations, positivity, deaths, and the data gives a clear and scary message, that the next few months are going to be like nothing this country has ever endured, 3,400 American lives lost yesterday to this virus.
Millions more are facing financial uncertainty, including potential eviction, as months and months of unpaid rent come due.
So what does President Trump do? Say the relief bill that Congress has been working on the past six months to pass and the one he has shown no interest in the entire time, says it's not good enough for him.
CNN's Alexandra Field has more.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
ALEXANDRA FIELD, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): A crisis now on the verge of a horrific new milestone. By the end of the week, it is likely that 330,000 Americans, roughly one in 1,000 Americans, will have died from the COVID-19. For the fifth time in the U.S., deaths climbed higher than 3,000 on
Tuesday. It was the second deadliest day of the pandemic. California is on track to be the first state in the nation to hit two million cases.
DR. SEEMA YASMIN, CNN MEDICAL ANALYST: It's so bad here that if our state was its own country, we'd be ahead of the U.K., India and Germany in terms of the number of new infections. So this situation is dire.
FIELD: The little relief that could be on the way to Americans is now in jeopardy, with President Trump casting doubt on the future of a $900 billion stimulus bill in a surprise Twitter video.
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I'm asking Congress to amend this bill and increase the ridiculously low $600 to $2,000 or $4,000 for a couple.
FIELD: The chaos surrounding this deal coming as the government strikes another deal to purchase 100 million more doses of the Pfizer vaccine.
Nine days after the first shots in arms, just over a million doses of Pfizer vaccines have been administered, according to the CDC's Web site.
There's no data yet on how many Moderna shots have been given, but it's likely the country will fall well short of a big goal, 20 million vaccines given by the end of the year.
DR. FRANCIS COLLINS, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH: If we don't quite get that 20 million people being vaccinated this month, I hope people will understand this is a logistic challenge of enormous proportion.
FIELD: A pressing question about those vaccines: Are they as effective against the variant of the virus identified in the U.K.?
COLLINS: We would expect that the vaccine should still be effective against that. So, I want everybody to sort of take a breath here. One of the things we are worried about is, it appears to be more transmissible.
FIELD: And possibly more infectious for children, but more study is needed. Researchers suggest the U.S. may already have hundreds of cases.
DR. ROCHELLE WALENSKY, CDC DIRECTOR NOMINEE: We have been saying loud and clear to the entire American people we need to be limiting our mobility, period.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
FIELD: Brooke, all across the country, the high priority remains vaccinating those front-line workers who desperately need those critical doses. That job is continuing here at Lenox Hill Hospital. They say they will
go through the holidays until every front-line worker who wants a vaccine gets a vaccine. And, Brooke, right here in New York City, in light of concerns about the U.K. strain of virus, some stepped-up restrictions going into effect.
Travelers coming in from the U.K. will now be getting an order to quarantine from the Department of Health, and it will be enforced by sheriff's deputies. They could show up at your hotel room or at your home to make sure you are abiding by that quarantine. Violators will be fined as much as $1,000 starting on just day one of a violation -- Brooke.
BALDWIN: Alex Field, thank you very much.
And I'm going to continue this conversation.
With me now, CNN's John Harwood is live at the White House.
And, John, back to the president's role in all of this. We know his temper tantrum means Americans in the middle of coronavirus recession might have to wait for money they desperately need. What do your sources say about why the president got involved in negotiations he showed zero interest in for months and months?
JOHN HARWOOD, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Brooke, he's cracking under the pressure of having lost the election.
All his life, he has been terrified of losing and being seen as a loser, damaging to his psyche, damaging to his reputation. Now that's happened. He lost the election to Joe Biden. And, in this case, being a loser means, in a few weeks, he's going to leave the White House owing hundreds of millions of dollars to other people and being vulnerable to criminal prosecution.
So, he is right now lashing out against his fate, against people who recognize the reality of his fate. And that includes people in Congress, people in his own party.
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Mitch McConnell and other members of the Republican leadership have acknowledged that Joe Biden is the president-elect. They have said that the efforts to challenge the certification of electoral votes in January is not going anywhere. That made him angry, and he is now lashing out at this piece of legislation.
It's not because he wants to improve the legislation. He doesn't care about that. He's not really functionally involved in being president. The only question now, Brooke, is whether or not he is simply ranting in a momentary way to let off steam and to try to make himself look good at their expense, or whether he's actually destructive enough to try to take this bill down, which he could do if he's determined to.
And we don't know the answer to that yet.
BALDWIN: So, TBD on that.
At the same time, John, he is pardoning his friends and his allies. Tell us who got a pardon and who might still get one.
HARWOOD: You had three corrupt former Republican members of Congress who supported Donald Trump. So, he's pardoning allies. You have got four Blackwater guards who murdered civilians in Iraq in 2007.
Their boss at that time was Erik Prince, who's the brother of Trump's education secretary, Betsy DeVos, so another friend and ally pardon there. But, most importantly, Brooke, he pardoned two people who became felons as a result of lying to investigators in Robert Mueller's probe of his contacts with Russia.
Donald Trump's overarching mission has been to absolve himself politically and legally of liability for connections with Russia. And we may yet see, in that pursuit, pardons for Paul Manafort, his campaign chairman, who, of course, did not give Robert Mueller all the information he had.
So, the president would be protecting himself by shielding Paul Manafort. He also may try to pardon himself. Don't know if that would stand up in court, but this president is interested in himself above all other things. And I think no one would be surprised if he attempts to use that presidential power he has for 28 more days to shield himself.
BALDWIN: And we thought 2020 was wild.
John Harwood, thank you.
Still ahead here on CNN: The Trump administration reached a deal to buy another 100 million doses of Pfizer's coronavirus vaccine, but will that be enough?
And President Trump, as he just mentioned, pardons these four men convicted in connection with the killing of Iraqi civilians. I will talk to one of the lead FBI agents who helped convict them.
And why restaurant workers say the latest stimulus deal is too little, too late. Could last-minute intervention from the president provide relief or make things worse?
We just got reaction from vice president-elect Kamala Harris, after dropping off toys at a D.C. firehouse.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SEN. KAMALA HARRIS (D-CA), VICE PRESIDENT-ELECT: We need to get the relief to them immediately.
And the one thing he should not be doing is, after the work went into the bill, holding up, when, by the end of the month, people are going to -- their benefits are going to end.
(END VIDEO CLIP) (COMMERCIAL BREAK)
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BALDWIN: Welcome back. You're watching CNN. I'm Brooke Baldwin.
The U.S. is trying to beef up -- beef up its vaccine supply. This morning, the Trump administration announced a deal to purchase 100 million additional doses of the Pfizer vaccine. But it's not like we're going to be getting all of those at once or even anytime soon. The deal entails Pfizer providing at least 70 million doses by the end of June and all 100 million to be delivered no later than the end of July.
And just keep in mind, 100 million doses does not mean 100 million people get vaccinated because the vaccine requires two shots, right? So, divide it in two, and the reality is that purchases is enough for 50 million Americans.
This is where we are right now. So far, more than nine million doses have been delivered. Just over one million people have received their first dose.
Let me bring in Dr. Megan Ranney. She's an associate professor of emergency medicine at Brown University.
So, Doc, good to have you back on.
When you hear 100 million doses by August, how close does that get us back to normal in terms of herd immunity?
DR. MEGAN RANNEY, CNN MEDICAL ANALYST: So, the first thing is that, even with that extra 100 million doses, we're still going to be about 60 million doses short for adult Americans.
So, that does not get us yet to herd immunity. The second part is, getting those doses is just step one. Doses sitting in a warehouse do nothing. They actually have to be shot in arms. And they have to be both the first shot and the second shot, which are about three weeks apart.
So, you're looking at about a month in a best-case scenario after you get those doses, getting them into people's arms the first and second time, before we get to immunity.
We know that we need around 70 percent of adult Americans vaccinated in order for things to go back to normal. So, this is just another piece of the puzzle that suggests to most of us in public health that we are looking at mid to end of summer or maybe even the beginning of next fall before we feel like things are back to normal in the United States.
BALDWIN: Got it.
And then also speaking of just getting the shots in arms, there are a number of people in this country who say they're nervous to even get the vaccine because of the potential side effects. I know you have had your first dose.
Let me just ask you, how are you feeling? Are you feeling anything funky? And you actually posted about that earlier, comparing the side effects of the COVID -- of COVID itself to the side effects of the vaccine, saying it could be a lot worse.
RANNEY: Yes, that's exactly right.
So, I got the vaccine about a week ago. I had a little bit of a sore arm for about a day, actually far less than I had -- a reaction than I had to the flu vaccine or to tetanus. And I have felt fine ever since.
I have heard similar reports from most of my fellow health care workers. There have, of course, been people who get a little more fatigued, have headaches, and a few allergic reactions. But all of those things been treated.
[15:15:00]
And when you compare those reactions to the vaccine to the actual effect of COVID, I would take the vaccine any day. I will take one or two days of mild to moderate symptoms over the potential for being hospitalized in the intensive care unit or dying.
BALDWIN: Yes, yes. Me too.
Dr. Ranney, a couple of weeks ago, you said you had never seen so many COVID patients in your emergency room. How is your hospital coping as we head into Christmas, where I know officials say, don't gather? But people will totally gather still, which could lead to get another surge.
RANNEY: Yes, we are seeing right now in my emergency department folks that were infected over the Thanksgiving holidays. People got infected then, a week or so later had a positive test, and now are getting sick enough to need to be hospitalized.
We are seeing surges of patients. Many of our hospitals in my region are going on diversion, running out of intensive care unit beds. And we continue to see deaths mount every day. We're tremendously worried. We warned about the Thanksgiving surge. We're now seeing it come to pass.
And it's setting us up for an even worse period two to three weeks from now, after families get together over Christmas and New Year's.
For health care workers, we're getting the shots, which is great. Many of us are going to be protected in about a month. But that doesn't help us right now. And it doesn't help the general public right now either. We're still really in the midst of this, and we need people to stay home and follow these public health precautions.
BALDWIN: Dr. Megan Ranney, thank you for all that you do, as always. Appreciate it.
RANNEY: Thank you. BALDWIN: Coming up next: Restaurant groups say the stimulus deal
doesn't go nearly as far as -- enough to keep struggling businesses from going bankrupt. We will talk to a chef forced to shut down her restaurant. That's coming up.
And Joe Biden announces his pick for education secretary, Miguel Cardona.
And now CNN is learning about another key Cabinet pick. Might be announced after the holiday. We have a live report ahead.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
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ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news.
BALDWIN: Here's the breaking news just in to the CNN. President Trump has vetoed the National Defense Authorization Act. That is the bill that funds the military.
CNN's John Harwood is at the White House.
John, what are you learning?
HARWOOD: Brooke, this was expected.
The president has been threatening for some time to veto the National Defense Authorization Act because of the lack of an unrelated provision that would take away protection for tech companies he thinks are biased against them.
Republicans had rejected that as unrelated to the defense bill. The bills passed both chambers with more than enough votes to override. In fact, members of Congress have made arrangements to return next week to override this expected veto.
But one significance of this is, the president has in the past sometimes ranted against bills, threatened to veto, and then let them become law anyway. Some people have speculated that may be his intention the COVID relief bill, which he ranted about in the video last night. He didn't explicitly threaten to veto and hasn't said he will veto it.
But if somebody was thinking that the president was simply blowing off steam on the COVID relief bill, this gives you more reason to think that he may actually be trying to take this bill down. Republicans are on a conference call right now.
Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader, has said the president hasn't decided -- on that call, that the president hasn't decided whether he's actually going to veto the COVID relief bill. But there's serious danger that that could happen.
BALDWIN: John, what does this say? Between the COVID relief ranting video yesterday and now this veto, what does this say about the relationship the president has with Republicans in Congress?
HARWOOD: Well, the president has a bad relationship with anybody right now who acknowledges the reality that he lost the election to Donald Trump -- excuse me -- to Joe Biden in November--
BALDWIN: To Joe Biden.
HARWOOD: -- and that he's going to be leaving office in four weeks. He is not accepting that, whether out of delusion or whether he's pretending to not accept it.
Nevertheless, he is insisting that he's continuing to challenge the election. He wants Republicans to stand up for him. Some in the House are doing that. Republicans in the Senate have signaled they don't want any part of the effort to try to challenge the certification of electoral votes on January the 6th.
As a result of that, he's been lashing out at Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, at John Thune, another member of leadership.
Again, on COVID relief and the omnibus bill that passed, which is necessary to avoid a government shutdown in a few days, the president has not decided what he's going to do. But he has the potential to burn the house down on the way out of the office by causing a government shutdown and denying COVID relief to millions of Americans who are desperately waiting for it.
BALDWIN: Which is precisely what leaders, including, as we heard the reporting this week from Barbara Starr, top brass in the Pentagon, are all making lists and are worried about.
I'm also curious, to the best of your knowledge, is the president still planning on heading to Florida next hour?
HARWOOD: Yes.
The White House press office just told me a few minutes ago that the president still plans to leave at 4:00 p.m. to head down for the holidays at Mar-a-Lago. That will come as a relief to people inside the White House and on the Hill, in the belief that a change of scene, getting him outside of the White House, getting him down to Florida might reduce some of his exposure to the crazy ideas he's getting from the crazy advisers that he is now increasingly leaning on, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Mike Flynn, others who are encouraging him to try to challenge the election.
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But -- so, we do expect him within the hour to head off to Mar-a-Lago and try to have a little Christmas time.
BALDWIN: John Harwood, thank you for the update there. We will look for the president to leave for Mar-a-Lago next hour.
In the meantime, quick commercial break. We will be right back.
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