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All Up to Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Senate Now on $2,000 Checks, Defense Bill; Operation Warp Speed to Miss Self-Imposed Vaccine Goal; House Approves $2,000 Relief Checks, Overrides Trump's Veto of Defense Spending Bill. Aired 1-1:30p ET

Aired December 29, 2020 - 13:00   ET

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

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[13:00:00]

BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN ANCHOR: You are watching CNN on this Tuesday. I'm Brooke Baldwin here in New York. Thank you for being with me.

And we begin today with this message just last hour from the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, to the president. You can't always get what you want. McConnell promises a vote tomorrow on a defense spending bill and tells members to override the president's veto. But we still don't know how or actually whether he will call a vote and how much a new round of stimulus checks will put in your bank accounts.

Already, the $2,000 versus $600 debate is prompting strange alliances. Listen to this. Senators David Perdue, Kelly Loeffler, along with Josh Hawley, Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio, all find themselves on the same side of the issue as Senator Bernie Sanders.

And the president's demand for a vote is just part of this portrait of a mad president, mad he lost the election and spouting conspiracies about the November vote, mad at what he calls the pathetic, weak, tired Republican leadership that won't bend to his will.

And just notice that none of what the president is mad about has much of anything to do with the U.S. coronavirus response, the 121,000 patients in the hospital right now with COVID-19 or his own government's failure to roll out vaccines as promised.

But we did see the incoming administration today focused on promoting confidence in vaccines.

Vice President-elect Kamala Harris there getting her shot as one of the nation's top health experts has this dire warning.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ALLERGY AND INFECTIOUS DISEASES: We're in such a surge, as we call it, Jim, that has just gotten out of control.

That's what we're concerned about, that in addition to the surge, we're going to have an increase superimposed upon that surge which could make January even worse than December.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALWDIN: Well, let's start the hour on Capitol Hill and CNN's Lauren Fox. Lauren, do we know what Senator McConnell's timeline is for this vote on stimulus checks?

LAUREN FOX, CNN CONGRESSIONAL REPORTER: Well, we were anxiously awaiting that 12:00 speech that he gave on the Senate floor, but there's just not that much more clarity to report, Brooke. Essentially, he said that they're going to be looking over the president's values, the things that the president was asking for, including these $2,000 checks, but there are no promises on whether or not he will bring this up for a vote.

In fact, he objected to a unanimous consent agreement, that is fancy speak for essentially moving quickly to pass this bill on the Senate floor, when Chuck Schumer, the leading Democrat, brought it up.

So, now we are in a little bit of flux. We just don't know whether or not McConnell is going to bring this up, we don't know what the timeline is going to be, and adding in on top of that, the expectation was that McConnell would be able to vote tomorrow on a veto override of the National Defense Authorization Act.

Remember, the president vetoed that bill. There are enough Republicans to override that veto. But, essentially, Bernie Sanders is warning that he is not going to allow the vote to happen tomorrow unless he gets an agreement from McConnell that McConnell will put those $2,000 checks on the floor for a vote. That essentially plants (ph) us into New Year's Day for a potential vote on all of this.

So, Brooke, stay tuned. There just isn't as much clarity as I wish that I could give to people who are desperate to know whether or not they're going to be getting this money anytime soon.

BALWDIN: No. I was just talking to Matthew Cox, was his name, lost his job, his word was insulted, insulted by Congress and what they're doing. Lauren, thank you so much. We will stay tuned.

Republicans discontent with this president. It has always been there. We had four years of anonymously sourced quotes from members talking about how erratic and irresponsible this president acts. Well, now, more and more of what was private is being put on the record when it counts in votes. 130 House Republicans voted against the president's demand to raise stimulus checks to $2,000. 109 House Republicans voted to override the president's veto of that massive defense spending bill.

Joining me now to just help us all understand a little bit better the current moment we're in, former Republican Congressman Charlie Dent. And, Congressman, welcome. Help us understand what is happening because millions of Americans' livelihoods are on the line. Senator McConnell today on the floor not offering very much clarity, so much is still in limbo. McConnell essentially saying the Senate will take look at Trump's concerns, i.e., the $2,000 checks.

[13:05:00]

How does McConnell do this dance? Is he just buying time?

CHARLIE DENT, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Well, I think he is buying a little bit of time, Brooke. Look, the Senate will clearly override the president's veto on the defense authorization bill.

Now, with respect to the $2,000 checks, I think what the president has done, he has divided Senate Republicans. And I do believe that if a vote is allowed on the substance of the bill, I believe it will pass simply because if you're Kelly Loeffler or David Perdue in Georgia, you really only have one option here, and that is to vote for this bill. They will do (INAUDIBLE) between now and the runoff election in January if they do not vote for this.

So I think you'll see a significant number of Republicans in the Senate prepare to vote for the $2,000. But, again, McConnell has numbers who don't want to bring it up. So he is trying to manage his internal caucus dynamics right now. Democrats have some leverage and they're using it. As Lauren pointed out, Bernie Sanders is using whatever muscle he has to delay the NDAA, the defense bill, because that's very important for many of the Republicans. So, Democrats are playing hard ball right now. They want the 2,000 and they want it now.

BALWDIN: Let me just read for everyone watching. This is how The Wall Street journal editorial board writes of this -- the demand from the president on the $2,000 checks. Quote, it amounts to a Donald Trump in kind contribution to Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden. If republicans lose, you mentioned this, Charlie Dent, that the two Georgia seats and their majority, Republicans across the country should know to thank Mr. Trump for the 2021 tax increase.

I'm curious your thoughts on that, and you just mentioned Loeffler and Perdue, today, both out there doing interviews, backing the president's push for $2,000 checks. You think it will pass? You think Americans will get that amount of money deposited in their bank accounts?

DENT: I actually do. Because if Loeffler and Perdue are on board, people like Josh Hawley have been pushing it, even Marco Rubio, yes, I think they will need that many. I think it is hard, it would be difficult for Republican senators to vote against this now that the president has endorsed it. The vote out of the House was overwhelming. It was more than a two-to-one majority.

Now, we can have a great policy debate whether or not the $2,000 checks are the best ways to stimulate the economy. Frankly, there might be better ways to target relief to people who need it most. Hey, but we are where we are. And so this is a totally political question right now. So I think the politics of this right now is for these Senate Republicans to support the measure, even though some will oppose it. It's that simple. It will help the Georgia senators (INAUDIBLE) at this point. Ossoff and then Warnock will just beat them to death over this if they vote against it.

BALWDIN: They will and all of that happening in a week from now, determining control of the U.S. Senate.

I want you to listen to something that your former colleague, Republican Congressman Kevin Brady, said on the House floor on Monday.

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REP. KEVIN BRADY (R-TX): Well, what we know is that much of this extra $1600 will go to pay down credit card debt or savings or even make new purchases online at Walmart, Best Buy or Amazon.

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BALWDIN: Congressman, what do you think of what he just said?

DENT: Well, again, depending who is receiving the money. If the person is unemployed and receiving this money, well, guess what, they're going to use this to pay rent, they're going to use this to buy groceries, they're going to use it for basic needs. For somebody who is employed but is eligible for this relief, they may use it to pay down credit card debt or they may use it for other purchases for whatever they need. So I don't think that he is completely wrong by what he said.

But at the same time, like I said, this money is untargeted. But the politics of this is such that I don't know how these folks can vote -- I don't know how you vote against this right now, particularly if you're in a state where a lot of people are struggling, many of these Republican members represent states. There are significant numbers of lower income people, whether it's in West Virginia or Arkansas or Mississippi, so tough vote to vote against this right now.

BALWDIN: Charlie Dent, thank you so much. We'll stay on all of this and watch to see what happens with Mitch McConnell as he talks to members of the conference, see where they stand on the $2,000 checks.

Still ahead here, I'll talk to Democratic Congressman Tim Ryan about whether these $2,000 stimulus checks actually have a chance of becoming reality. We'll see if he agrees with Charlie Dent that they just might.

And as the U.S. lags behind on getting vaccines into people's arms, 500 doses had to be tossed out at this one facility in Wisconsin. We'll tell you why.

And U.S. troops serving overseas have started to receive the vaccine with military and civilian health care workers first in line at bases in South Korea.

You are watching CNN. I am Brooke Baldwin. [13:10:00]

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BALWDIN: Welcome back. You're watching CNN. I am Brooke Baldwin. Thank you for being here.

CNN is learning more about why this vaccine rollout here in the United States isn't happening as quickly as government officials have promised. By the CDC's own count as of Monday, some 2 million doses have been administered thus far. That is not close to Operation Warp Speed's goal, 20 million by end of the year.

And even with more than 11 million doses distributed, as in shipped out to states, it is not a question of whether the operation's self- imposed deadline will be missed but rather by how much.

[13:15:07]

And experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci can only hope things will speed up very soon.

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FAUCI: Well, we certainly are not at the numbers that we wanted to be at the end of December.

I believe that as we get into January, we are going to see an increase in the momentum, which, Jim, I hope allows us to catch up to the projected pace.

I can't personally guarantee that we're going to catch up. I hope we do.

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BALWDIN: CNN's Kristen Holmes has some new reporting for us on what's taking so long to get the vaccines into the arms of Americans. Kristen, what do you know?

KRISTEN HOLMES, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, Brooke, we're talking about a huge discrepancy here, right? You have 20 million vaccines in arms versus this 2.1 number. Now, I talked to a senior administration official today who said that they expected there to be lower numbers at this point because of the usual lag in reporting data.

What exactly does that mean? Well, this is a statement I got from Operation Warp Speed, one of the senior officials there, who says, there is expected lag between shots going into arms and the data being reported because according to the CDC, health care providers have to report doses to state, territorial and local public health agencies up to 72 hours after administration. Then they report it to the CDC.

But the problem with this idea of undercounting is just how much is this undercounted. We heard Anthony Fauci on our air earlier today talking about how even if it was another 2 million or 3 million, even if we tripled that number, we still would be nowhere near this 2 million doses of the vaccine in arms.

Now, I've talked to several health experts today who outlined for me some of the reasons that this could be an issue, one of them being the supply chain, it is just not quite there. 330 million Americans are going to need to get that vaccine. We, clearly, are nowhere near that number in terms of production.

The other issue here is how you actually handle the vaccine and making sure that these local health agencies, the hospitals know what they're doing because this is different than anything we've ever seen, talking about the ultra-cold storage and transportation. And there is room there for human error to slow things down.

I want to note, one of the things we have been following today is something out of Wisconsin, which is a medical center there in which 500 doses of the vaccine were simply thrown away and that was human error, because someone had taken them out of that pharmacy refrigerator and forgotten, or, for whatever reason, didn't put them back in the refrigerator, and therefore they rendered them not working.

And that is what we are dealing with right now. And these are just some of the reasons that we're going to see slower rollout here with the vaccine like this.

BALWDIN: Painful to think of those 500 vaccines just have to be chucked. Kristen Holmes, thank you for all of that and the context there from those health experts.

I've another one waiting in the wings, Dr. Peter Hotez, he is Professor and Dean of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. So, Dr. Hotez, always a pleasure to have you on, welcome.

DR. PETER HOTEZ, DEAN OF TROPICAL MEDICINE, BAYLOR COLLEGE OF MEDICINE: Thank you, Brooke. Good to see you.

BALWDIN: I am curious just, too, from your perspective, initially, they had said 20 million doses, and now, we're down to just above 1 million, as they're change the goalpost, it had gone from something like numbers -- let's say, the numbers were -- in October, we were told, 100 million, then 40 million, then 20 million. In actuality, just under 12 million doses have been distributed. Why do you think it's the holdup?

HOTEZ: Brooke, as part of a recurring theme that's been happening all year that we just do not have a health system that can accommodate much in the way of complexity. Look, we still haven't fixed everything with diagnostic testing, we still have long lines.

We're almost a full year into this. We now know we're not doing any virus genomic surveillance to speak of. We've done full sequencing on less than 0.5 percent of virus isolates compared to 50 percent in Australia or even 70 percent in the U.K. So this is going more or less by the same play book, unfortunately. And in fairness, there are complexities around the logistics, of having that deep freezer requirement for the Pfizer vaccine and a freezer requirement, in general. I understand that. And I understand that a lot of this is being left to the states. And the thing that I am worried about, and I'm not on the inside on this, is that I just worry that the FedEx trucks and UPS trucks are dropping off vaccines to states without a lot of direction.

And, remember, this is the easy part, going to the hospitals, which should be able to accommodate this. What happens when we have to get vaccines out to tens of millions of Americans through the pharmacy chains? Remember, we don't really have a health system like the U.K. does or others. We have -- our health system is CVS and Rite-Aid and Walgreens and Amazon Pharmacy and the supermarket chains. What's going to happen at that point?

So, I mean, I worry --

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BALWDIN: You said it is unbelievable, to your point, about these Walgreens and pharmacies that America's health security is largely dependent on those companies getting us the shots.

HOTEZ: Yes. I mean, it is almost like dropping off 40 million boxes of IKEA furniture and realizing after the fact that assembly is required. And that's where we're at right now. I think we're just realizing this. And that's a real issue.

BALWDIN: How are we just realizing this?

HOTEZ: Yes, it almost looks that way. Well, hopefully, there's more to it than that but we'll find out. But as Dr. Fauci says, we have got to fix this because we do not have a national COVID-19 containment program. We have got to vaccinate the country. We have got to do it in a hurry. And we're going to have to figure this out very quickly. Because, otherwise, you look at the rate of lives lost in the United States right now, 3,000 lives lost every day. We just cannot be -- this part, we can't mess up. This is -- we've got our backs to a corner and this is where we have got to solve this problem now.

BALWDIN: Yes, Dr. Hotez, let me switch gears a little bit. The coronavirus variant, which appears to be rapidly spreading, has now been detected in at least 27 countries and Hong Kong. Here is what Dr. Fauci has said to Jim Sciutto about this just a couple of hours ago.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

FAUCI: I would be really surprised if we did not already have isolates like this circulating, not the dominant isolate. My feeling would be that if it does get into this country, which I believe it will, if you look at what's going on in Europe, started off looking like it was only in the U.K., and now several European countries, Canada has it. I mean, I cannot imagine that we're not going to get it. The question is prevent it from becoming the dominant strain. And you do that by preventing spread of infection. (END VIDEO CLIP)

BALWDIN: Well, what does this mean for the American people? If we go out and get this current COVID vaccine, Dr. Hotez, are we covered against this variant?

HOTEZ: Well, we're going to find that out pretty soon. Because our vaccine, we're looking at and, of course, the other -- the big companies are doing that with their vaccine. And I'm less worried about whether the vaccine will cross-protect against the U.K. variant or even the South African variant, just looking at there are very few variations in the receptor-binding domain of the spike protein.

Well, I am worried about is the fact that the U.S. is not looking for emerging virus variants. We've only sequenced 50,000 virus genomes, according to Centers for Disease Control. That's simply not adequate. When you consider that the U.K. has already done 200,000 and Australia has done half of their virus genomes, w e should be at least a million, maybe several million virus genome sequences. And once again, we come up small on the public health side.

And there may be home grown variants that are just as bad or worse than the U.K. or the South African variant, but no one is looking for it. So we have, again, got to step up our virus genome surveillance, just like we have to vaccinate the U.S. population. We need U.S. health system to function at this point.

BALWDIN: Thank you for calling on that out loud on national T.V. Dr. Peter Hotez, always a pleasure. Thank you very much.

HOTEZ: Thank you, Brooke.

BALWDIN: In just a couple of hours, President-elect Joe Biden is expected to call out the Trump administration for falling short of its pace of vaccinations. This is what we were just talking about. I'll talk to Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan about what can be done to turn that around.

We are also live today in California, where a stay-at-home order may soon be extended. I'll talk to a doctor about whether the surge in cases there is impacting the care patients receive.

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BALWDIN: All eyes are on the Senate today and these two key pieces of legislation. Last night, the House voted both to increase relief checks to qualifying Americans to $2,000 and to override President Trump's veto on the defense bill. The political maneuvering in the Republican-controlled Senate over these bills has already begun.

And with me now from Capitol Hill, Ohio Democratic Congressman Tim Ryan. Congressman Ryan, welcome, sir.

REP. TIM RYAN (D-OH): Always good to be with you, Brooke. BALWDIN: All right. So Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, he says there will be a vote tomorrow on whether to override President Trump's veto, the defense bill, but when it comes to these $2,000 checks, kind of like elephant in the room, there wasn't exactly a lot of clarity on that. And I think he is maybe trying to buy a little time to see where his members of his conference stand. Do you think it will ultimately pass?

RYAN: We have got to keep pushing. I think there are some senators that are up for re-election in two years that are going to be very concerned about this vote. They know that the average American is going through a hell of a lot, whether a small business owner or owns a restaurant, or you're someone that's really worried that you're going to miss your rent payment or your car payment. Those people need help and they need it now, and they know $600 bucks isn't going to get it done.

The House passed it, Trump wants it, so the lights are on for some of these senators up for re-election. I think they've got to make a tough decision. They know where the public is, so there's still a chance. And I think McConnell is trying to feel it out. But I hope we can get this thing done. It would be a great, great way to end the year.

BALWDIN: It's maybe a tough decision in one sense, of course, to be able give more to Americans, it's also tough because, in a sense, it is a loyalty pledge, right, to maybe the more old school fiscal conservative Republicans versus to the current president.

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