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New Coronavirus Variant Detected in Colorado; Top Senate Republican Blocks Vote on $2,000 Stimulus; U.S. Reels under Daily Virus Death Tolls, Tuesday a Record 3,700; U.K. Regulators Approve Oxford AstraZeneca Vaccine; Argentina Passes Bill Legalizing Abortion; At Current Pace of Vaccination, America Needs 10 Years to Complete. Aired 2-3a ET
Aired December 30, 2020 - 02:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
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PAULA NEWTON, CNN ANCHOR: Hello and welcome to our viewers in the United States and right around the. World I'm Paula Newton live from CNN's center in Atlanta. Where it's 2 am here on the East Coast, 11 pm on the West Coast.
The new coronavirus strain first found in the U.K. has now been confirmed right here in the United States. On Tuesday, officials said a man in Colorado was infected somehow, even though he had no travel history. And that's significant.
This news comes with the U.S. continuing to shatter pandemic records. On Tuesday, the country reported more than 3,700 new deaths for the first time. And there are now close to 125,000 hospital admissions nationwide.
And since the strain is thought to be more contagious, health officials now fear it could lead to more infections and hospital admissions in the weeks ahead.
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DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ALLERGY AND INFECTIOUS DISEASES: 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. I hope not. I hope that doesn't happen. But it certainly is possible.
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NEWTON: A similar warning from the U.S. president-elect, that the weeks ahead, weeks and months ahead, could be the toughest of the pandemic. Joe Biden says he is expanding his COVID response team and his administration will spare no effort to provide vaccines.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) JOE BIDEN (D), PRESIDENT-ELECT OF THE UNITED STATES: The Trump administration's plan to distribute vaccines is falling behind, far behind. A few weeks ago, the Trump administration suggested that 20 million Americans could be vaccinated by the end of December. With only a few days left in December, we've only vaccinated a few million so far.
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NEWTON: President Trump tweeted a response, "It is up to the states to distribute the vaccines once brought to the designated areas by the federal government."
In the meantime, Republican Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell could end up killing the effort to get Americans larger stimulus checks. On Tuesday, he introduced legislation that combines the COVID relief measure with two additional demands that Democrats, of course, oppose, instead of allowing a direct vote on just the stimulus.
But Democrats and President Trump want to increase checks from $600 to $2,000. And that's putting Senate Republicans in such a tricky spot. CNN's Kaitlan Collins explains.
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KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Republican senators are feeling the heat from the very top.
SEN. JOHN CORNYN (R-TX): We didn't expect to be in session this week but we are.
COLLINS: President Trump now says, "Unless Republicans have a death wish and it is also the right thing to do, they must approve $2,000 payments ASAP, $600 is not enough."
That tweet is forcing Senate Republicans to decide between defying the president or getting behind bigger stimulus checks, which many in the GOP initially resisted but a growing number are now supporting.
That includes David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, two Republicans just days away from a heated Senate runoff in Georgia, who both sided with the president today.
SEN. KELLY LOEFFLER (R-GA): I've said absolutely we need to get relief to Americans now and I will support that.
SEN. DAVID PERDUE (R-GA): I fully support what the president is doing right now.
COLLINS (voice-over): The fate of the stimulus checks is now in Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell's hands who offered no clarity today but blocked an effort by Democrats to vote on it immediately.
SEN. MITCH MCCONNELL (R-KY): This week, the Senate will begin a process to bring these three priorities into focus.
COLLINS (voice-over): Democrats are eager to take advantage of the Republican family feud.
SEN. CHUCK SCHUMER (D-NY): There's one question left today, do Senate Republicans join with the rest of America in supporting $2,000 checks?
Now some of my Republican colleagues have said they support the checks. But there's a major difference in saying you support $2,000 checks and fighting to put them into law.
COLLINS (voice-over): Senator Bernie Sanders is vowing to hold up a vote to override Trump's veto of the massive military bill unless they vote on the $2,000 checks. And his frustration spilled out on the Senate floor today.
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS (I-VT): Do we turn our backs on struggling working families?
Or do we respond to their pain?
COLLINS (voice-over): McConnell said the Senate will vote on whether to override Trump's veto of the defense bill, potentially setting the GOP up for its first major rebuke of the president during his last days in office.
MCCONNELL: Failure is simply not an option. I would urge my colleagues to support this legislation one more time when we vote tomorrow.
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COLLINS (voice-over): The House passed an override of Trump's veto on Monday, causing him to lash out on Twitter today, saying, "Weak and tired Republican leadership will allow the bad defense bill to pass. A disgraceful act of cowardice and total submission by weak people to Big Tech."
With the stakes in Washington higher than ever and the financial stability of millions of Americans on the line, the president spent today, like he has many others in Palm Beach, on the golf course.
COLLINS: Now since he appeared on the Senate floor today, Mitch McConnell has made clear he's going to put everything that the president wants in one bill to try to potentially bring it up for a vote on the Senate floor.
But that's essentially guaranteeing that it's going to go nowhere because Democrats are against several other factors that the president has demanded be included, including that repeal of Section 230, which would affect Big Tech companies and social media and the liability that they've had so far, the liability shield that they've had so far.
And so whether or not it's actually going to make those $2,000 checks happen is another question because you are starting to see this growing support from Republicans. So the president hasn't responded to this. It is what he wants but it won't actually achieve what he wants when it comes to those $2,000 dollar checks -- Kaitlan Collins, CNN, traveling with the president in Florida.
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NEWTON: Now just a short while ago COVID claimed the life of a newly elected congressman, Luke Letlow. The Louisiana Republican announced he tested positive for the virus on December 19th.
Just two days later he tweeted from hospital that he was confident he would be, in his words, "on the mend soon." Luke Letlow was just 41 years old.
And that devastating news brings us to this tweet.
"We are way past a Pearl Harbor a day in death tolls, past even a 9/11 a day in death toll and the president remains AWOL, golfing while his party raises not a peep of complaint about his leaving cities, states and average Americans to fend for themselves amid the surge."
The author, none other than our own CNN senior political analyst, Ron Brownstein. And he is also a senior editor for "The Atlantic." He joins me now from Los Angeles.
Ron, I've been following your Twitter feed today, I could really feel the frustration and really rage that we don't get from you often, Ron, in the sense that you're so level headed. And yet it's that word, right, "not a peep" from Republicans, even though this virus has now killed one of their own.
We all know this would be different if it was a foreign adversary actually killing Americans.
RON BROWNSTEIN, CNN SR. POLITICAL ANALYST: We are watching what I think is the greatest example of the dereliction of duty of a president probably in American history. If you look at the magnitude of what we are now dealing with, as I said in the tweet, we are past a Pearl Harbor or a 9/11 a day in the daily death toll.
There are -- the projections from the University of Washington model, which is one of the most respected models, is that there may be 100,000 Americans dying in January alone.
Here in Los Angeles where I am, patients are being turned away from hospitals because they are running out of oxygen.
In Phoenix, the big hospital chains are talking about rationing care.
In Georgia, in Atlanta, they have reopened a field hospital because the hospitals are being overrun.
And the president has simply walked away from the public health challenge in the same way that he remained disengaged from the economic side of this, the legislation on that, until the 11th hour, 59th minute, coming in to try and torpedo the bill.
So he has essentially left American cities, states and average families on their own. And you really have not heard a word of complaint from other Republicans since he has walked away, which is probably sometime in late summer.
NEWTON: And that brings us to what went on in Washington today and Kaitlan tried to go through. There is very a complicated dance going on now there. This week and into this weekend, it's really Mitch McConnell, right, who's doing the choreography here? BROWNSTEIN: Right, and it's a complicated dance but it's a straightforward outcome. There should be no confusion. Mitch McConnell moved today to kill the $2,000 payments the president has called for. And to do it in a way that allows Republicans, who want to cynically act as though they're supporting it, the way he did that was by attaching it to what's known legislatively as a poison pill.
In this case, two poison pills, both, the idea of a commission to study nonexistent voter fraud in the 2020 election, on the same day that Georgia announced that a survey, as you know, an audit of absentee ballots, found two mistakes, possible mistakes, out of 15,000 ballots.
McConnell ties the payments to a commission that he knows Democrats won't accept as well as to the repeal of these protections for social media companies, which Democrats might be willing to go along with but through a normal legislative process, rather than this way.
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BROWNSTEIN: So the effect of what he has done is to virtually guarantee that these payments will not happen, while allowing, somewhat cynically, the two Republicans running in Georgia to claim that they support them.
This is probably a preview of what the Biden administration has to look forward to if McConnell maintains the majority after those Georgia elections next year.
NEWTON: Let's get to that. The poll still remain closed so let's not prejudge this. We don't know what the income (sic) will be.
But it's interesting that Republicans, if they do win both those seats in Georgia, would you say that Georgia voters are actually voting for McConnell, not the two senators?
Because what they're going to be doing, is they're going to be making that decision for all of America, there will be more of this.
BROWNSTEIN: Absolutely. That is -- look, our elections -- and this will be familiar to viewers around the world -- our congressional elections are becoming parliamentary elections.
As I like to say, the name on the back of the jersey no longer matters as much as the color on the front of the jersey. People are voting for which side they want to see in control of Congress.
And Georgia is a state where Democrats have elected a senator since the year 2000. Now they have to elect two senators in one day in order to reach a 50-50 tie. But they do see promising signs in the early returns of who has voted, both absentee and in the in-person early voting.
All the indications seem to be that turnout is higher so far in Democratic congressional districts, Democratic counties. African Americans are a larger share of the vote so far than they were in the general election.
It doesn't mean the Democrats are going to win. But it does mean that Trump, in his last-minute appearance on Monday night, coming up in Georgia, is likely going to have to inspire a significant day of turnout among Republicans for them to keep the majority.
But, no question, that is what is on the ballot, not Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler. It is which party is in control and whether Biden has a fighting shot --
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NEWTON: And it will be election night in America once again next Tuesday. Ron Brownstein, thanks for joining us.
BROWNSTEIN: Thanks for having. Me
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NEWTON: Now at the same time the U.S. is seeing a record number of COVID deaths, many hospitals nationwide are now at near capacity. The situation is so dire in California the state is now extending a stay- at-home order. CNN's Nick Watt has more.
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KAMALA HARRIS (D), VICE PRESIDENT-ELECT OF THE UNITED STATES: Yes, I'm ready.
NICK WATT, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): There is a reason the V.P- elect just got vaccinated live on TV. To reassure black Americans, all Americans that it's safe.
HARRIS: It's about saving your life, the life of your family members and the life of your community.
WATT (voice-over): The outgoing V.P. did it. The president-elect did it. Lame duck Donald Trump has not. His administration projected 20 million doses in arms by New Year's. We're two days away. A little over two million shots logged. Not even close.
DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ALLERGY AND INFECTIOUS DISEASES: Even if you undercount, two million is an undercount, how much undercount could it be? So, we are below where we want to be.
WATT (voice-over): The federal government ships the doses but leaves the logistics from there to others. Here's the optimistic take.
DR. WILLIAM SCHAFFNER, DIVISION OF INFECTIOUS DISEASES, VANDERBILT MEDICAL UNIVERSITY CENTER: Think of it like a locomotive getting started. Those first few wheel turns are slow and difficult and then things move faster.
WATT (voice-over): Meantime, more than 2,000 Americans on average are killed by COVID-19 every day.
FAUCI: I think we just have to assume that it's going to get worse.
WATT (voice-over): The stay-at-home order for much of California was extended.
BARBARA FERRER, DIRECTOR OF PUBLIC HEALTH, L.A. COUNTY: On average, nine to 10 people in L.A. County test positive for COVID-19 every minute.
WATT (voice-over): And ICU capacity across the region is at zero percent.
SCHAFFNER: What's going to happen in California when you run out of capacity? Physicians and bio ethicists in these hospitals will need to decide which patients are salvageable, potentially salvageable and which patients aren't.
WATT (voice-over): Nationwide, more patients are hospitalized with this virus now than ever before. And December is already the deadliest month of the pandemic. Then came Christmas. The travel, the gatherings.
FAUCI: In addition to the surge, we're going to have an increase superimposed upon that surge, which could make January even worse than December. I hope not.
WATT (voice-over): Nick Watt, CNN, Los Angeles.
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ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news.
NEWTON: Some breaking news now in to CNN and thankfully it is good news. The U.K. has now authorized the COVID-19 vaccine from AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford. It is something that we have been waiting for and that the British government had said that its regulators would in fact authorize likely this week.
That has now happened. I want to go straight to CNN's Salma Abdelaziz in London.
This is a long time in coming.
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NEWTON: There had been some confusion about the clinical tries here, Salma. But given what's going on in the U.K. right now, there still must be incredible relief that this also now has been authorized as a vaccine.
SALMA ABDELAZIZ, CNN PRODUCER: Absolutely, Paula. It's a matter of national pride, right?
This was developed right here in the U.K. by Oxford University. It is the homegrown vaccine. The one that the U.K. wants to tout as one of their own. So there's a lot of excitement around. That
But there has been some debate about its efficacy. In clinical trials. It was found to be 70 percent effective. Which is obviously lower than Pfizer's BioNTech, which is the 90 percentile.
However the researchers behind the Oxford vaccine say that they can increase that efficacy by changing around the dosage. By changing the formula of that dosage. So essentially, remember how we need two doses. One of those two doses would be half a dose. And that could bring the efficacy up to 90 percent.
There's a lot of advantages to this. People are excited. It's pretty cheap. Only costs about 3 pounds, $4 U.S. And most importantly, it doesn't need that special refrigeration capacity.
You've seen the logistical challenges that have played out across the E.U. with getting the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine in people's arms because it needs to be kept at that extra cold temperature. You need to maintain that cold chain.
With this vaccine, that is not the. Case but that is the major advantage that everyone is excited about. We could see a rollout as early as January 4th, just a matter of days. It's already planned to get up to 2 million people vaccinated in the first 14 days.
That is a significant number there, of vulnerable people potentially getting vaccinated. So a great deal of positive news this morning. I know the British government will be very excited, especially as this is their own vaccine created right here in the U.K.
NEWTON: Absolutely. In terms of the expectations about who's going to get vaccinated. The U.K. has actually been doing quite well. This will only help.
In terms of what's going on though, right now. Let's just give the some context. I know you've been covering in the last few. Days an incredible spike in cases in the U.K. Authorities are saying that it is due to this variant. But it still seemed to take a lot of people by surprise.
What do you know about the decision-making going on right now with Boris Johnson and his cabinet about whether or not they need to do more, stricter lockdowns?
ABDELAZIZ: Paula, it is an absolutely concerning situation across the U.K. You have, for two days in a row, broken the daily record of the caseload of COVID-19. Two days in a row. You are looking at unprecedented infection rates. This country has not seen since the start of the pandemic.
You are looking at more patients with coronavirus in hospital, than at any time before. You are looking at a London ambulance service that is receiving a huge volume of calls. Thousands of emergency calls a day.
Essentially, you're looking at a hospital system, a health care system, that is feeling right on the edge, teetering on the brink. So what's going to happen today in Parliament is that all of these regional restrictions, remember, we're under a regional system here in the U.K., that regional system will be reviewed. And the expectation is that more restrictions will be rolled out.
So in London, the affected areas -- these are the areas where that variant emerged, that area that is more spread easily. These areas, London and affected areas are essentially under localized lockdowns. And that their variant is spreading across the country. So more areas will fall under tougher rules.
But the challenge for the government is to get people to follow the rules. There's been a lot of controversy with prime minister Boris Johnson. I think experts will tell you that people, the public are lacking confidence in the authorities. It's been of course, the holiday season where people have been more flexible to bending the rules.
So these restrictions, these rules need to be followed. You have doctors, nurses, essentially pleading with the population, look, the hospitals are going to be overwhelmed if people don't start staying at home, working from home, being vigilant.
NEWTON: Salma, I have to ask you just anecdotally -- because it has been puzzling, especially to see these cases. In one day 12,000 increasing cases. It is puzzling to many people, anecdotally.
What do you see in terms of people following the rules?
Whether it's social distancing, whether it's wearing masks, whether it's those all important indicators of mobility throughout the U.K., are people heeding the warnings?
ABDELAZIZ: Here's the thing we always have to remember, Paula, with the numbers. Is that there's generally a lag. There is a lag between getting the illness, getting infected with the illness, showing up in the hospital, there is lag in those numbers.
So I can tell you, yes, if you walk through the center of London a couple of days ago, I was there. It was empty. Absolutely empty.
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ABDELAZIZ: But here's the feedback, the weekend before Christmas when these new restrictions were announced, central London was absolutely packed. Shopping malls were packed. The stores were packed. People were running for the airports and train stations to get out of the city before new restrictions were put into place.
Essentially the argument is they were too late into putting these rules into place. Thinking about that lag, this is what has health experts. Concerned We have yet to see what they expect to be a spike from Christmastime celebrations. So yes, once London shut down in many ways everything is closed. You
can't go out. There's little to do. But where people are bending the rules at home, privately during Christmas celebrations, during holiday celebrations. Then it's about these restrictions coming in in time. And that's where the controversy lies, that prime minister Boris Johnson, quite often, according to his critics, acts too late to a spike in. Cases
NEWTON: Yes he was the man in fact who told everyone there would be a Christmas. And then he had to go back on that plan right away. Salma, thanks so much. I really am interested in hearing those anecdotal reports because it gives us more context into what's going on.
Salma, stand by for us there. We will get back to you for more on our breaking news. Right now we're going to a short break.
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NEWTON: And more breaking news this hour. Argentina's senate has approved a landmark bill legalizing abortion. It is, of course, a divisive issue in the predominantly Roman Catholic country, bringing out huge crowds of protesters on both sides.
The proposal would allow for abortions up to 14 weeks. They had been permitted only in cases of rape or when the mother's health was in danger. Now women's rights groups say the bill's passage could set the stage for wider reform right across Latin America. We are going to head to Rome and CNN's senior Vatican analyst, John Allen, on this.
It is interesting to see the Vatican's influence and, more specifically, lack of influence from Pope Francis at this point in time.
Does it surprise you, what is going on in Argentina right now with this vote?
JOHN ALLEN, CNN SR. VATICAN ANALYST: Hi, there, Paula. Happy holidays to you.
Obviously not quite so happy for Pope Francis because this is a rather stinging setback in his native country. In terms of whether this was a surprise, not so much. You will recall that the abortion debate came up in Argentina two years ago, in 2018. The difference is at that time the country was led by a center right government, that did not back the measure, merely permitted the debate to occur.
This time, the measure had the full backing of the center left government of the President Alberto Fernandez, who, of course, brought some of his own party members with him into the senate. So I think this was probably expected. But nevertheless, it is a somewhat bitter pill for Pope Francis to
swallow. He had intervened rather energetically on several different occasions in the run-up to this vote, to appeal for the prolife decision. So it can't help, to some extent, Paula, be seen as a bit of a snub to the most famous Argentinian in the world, perhaps after Messi.
NEWTON: It will make such a consequential difference, right?
To Catholics, not just in Latin America but all over the world, in terms of where those predominantly Catholic countries are moving now.
ALLEN: Yes, that's right. Let's remember, Latin America is home to more than 40 percent of the world's Catholic population, it traditionally has been an almost homogenously Catholic continent. Clearly this is an indication that the plates are shifting in terms of Latin America's political topography.
In terms of the church's influence here, we should remember that Argentina, a number of years ago, actually voted to legalize same-sex marriage. And it has been moving in the direction of a legalization of abortion for some time.
In that sense, Paula, I think the church in Latin America is simply going to have to follow the path of the Catholic Church in western Europe, where it has to adjust from being the tone-setting the majority that calls the shot to being an important, traditional but minority group that has to accept that the civil order of the societies in which it operates aren't necessarily going to reflect church teaching.
NEWTON: The other issue here, though, of course, is women's rights and women's movements. And where we talk about that within the Catholic Church, Pope Francis has hasn't exactly been a trailblazer.
ALLEN: Well, he has and he hasn't. He certainly has been a champion of women's rights on multiple occasions. He has, to some degree, boosted the stock of women in the Vatican, giving them positions that they hadn't held before and so on. He certainly has said a firm no to the idea of women priests.
Although it has been recommended to him a couple of different times, he also has not given a yes to the idea of women deacons. So I think most observers here would say that the record is a bit mixed.
I think it's worthy of note that one of Pope Francis' arguments in this abortion debate was precisely that he didn't feel that poor women in Argentina actually wanted this bill. He felt it was sort of being rammed down their throats. So he was positioning his own opposition as a pro-women stance, Paula, rather than one intended to get in the way of their rights.
NEWTON: That is an interesting point. When you see everything going on in Argentina right now, really how divisive it was but also how close it was. You certainly see the emotion on the streets. There and it is coming from both sides of the argument. John Allen, I want to thank you for being with us as we have that breaking news out of Argentina. Appreciate it.
Now British hospitals are at their breaking point and we will get an update from London on the fight against the coronavirus. Stay with us. We'll have more news after the break.
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NEWTON: And I want to welcome back to our viewers in the United States and around the world. I'm Paula Newton, live from CNN Center in Atlanta.
I want to update our breaking news from the U.K. Government regulators there have now approved another COVID-19 vaccine. The Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine is set to be ruled out early in the new year. We want to go back to London and Salma Abdelaziz to get the background on this.
Obviously good news here, Salma. And the government really betting that this will be in fact an accelerator to the progress already made in rolling out vaccines.
ABDELAZIZ: That's true, Paula. I'm sure it's an expectation that this will be an accelerator. But it's important to remember that this is for a limited segment of the population that will be looking to get this vaccine. The elderly, those living in care homes, nursing homes, front line health care workers. For the rest of us, life will not. Change.
For the rest of us, you're still months away from being vaccinated. So there is a great deal of excitement about events that they could potentially into the number of jobs given in the first 14 days looking at potentially vaccinating up to 2 million. People
So a lot of excitement about that. But the rest of the population have to balance this out with yes, vaccines are being rolled out, yes, jobs are being given, we're seeing grandparents and grandmothers being vaccinated.
But for the rest of us, you have to still follow the rules. You still have to follow the restrictions. We're looking right now across the U.K. at a health care system that is essentially on the brink, teetering on the edge, begging for some sort of relief. They are feeling that they could easily be overwhelmed next year.
More patients with coronavirus in hospital than ever. Before the U.K. breaking its daily record of new COVID cases in a 24-hour period. For the second day in a row, yesterday.
[02:35:00] ABDELAZIZ: A variant that right now is plaguing parts of London and spreading further into the country that the government says spreads more easily, is more transmissible. So it's not a pretty picture. You have these moments of hope, this ray of light.
But it's important when the authorities say we're getting people vaccinated, this is a great moment for national pride. But please follow the rules. We're still far away, we're not there yet -- Paula.
NEWTON: Something all of us should remember. Going back to this vaccine though and how it's been developed, it should be noted that many countries, including here in the United States, are really leaning on this vaccine candidate now approved in the U.K. helping them out.
The United States it wants to -- this will be one of the vaccines that helps them inoculate hopefully 100 million people at the end of the first quarter of 2021. Yet there has been some controversy over the efficacy.
Could you fill us in on the latest on that?
Because I know that continually, AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford are trying to update the information they have on that.
ABDELAZIZ: Yes, so there was controversy on the efficacy because when the preliminary results of the trials came out, there were pretty different numbers in. There
The overall efficacy, just to be clear, the overall efficacy is about 70 percent. If you look at the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine, they're in the 90th percentile. So that is disappointing in that sense.
However, the scientists and researchers behind it, behind this Oxford vaccine, say they have a winning formula to get that efficacy better.
What's the winning formula?
You know how we need two doses. The first dose. Instead of being a full dose is a half. dose and then a second dose would be a full. Dose we're expecting more information on this to come out. But that's what happened during the trials. And it was a mistake. It was actually an accident. They didn't mean to give the participants half dose.
But the researchers at the time said it was a happy accident. Because they believe it maybe affects the body the way it actually works. So a half dose, followed by a full dose. So you'd be getting a little bit of the viral load and then the full thing. That's the idea behind it. We're waiting for more information.
But that winning formula is really key. Once you bring us that efficacy, there are so many more advantages to this vaccine. It's cheap, only cost about $3, 4 pounds. It's as much as your morning latte really, a cheap, cheap vaccine. And quite critically, it doesn't need a special refrigeration capacity. So we see some of the drama play out with the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine,
particularly in the E.U., where vaccine rollouts have already been delayed. They were delayed a day in getting started because of the need to keep the cold chain.
So that's not going to be needed. Now that's a very exciting part. You can just put it in a normal refrigerator. And then a lot of the hurdles, the logistical hurdles that we see with the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine, like getting it into a nursing home rather than a hospital, that might be resolved with this vaccine.
That's why people are so excited about. It not why it's being a point of national pride here for the British government. As you said, this can get exported. This goes to other countries like the United States and this becomes branded with Oxford University. We've sort of cracked the secret here, we've figured out a way to at least make it at least logistically easier to get the vaccine out.
NEWTON: We should point out that FDA approval here in the United States is still pending. Even though the United States has already preordered these doses. They had indicated that perhaps this really interesting development, with the doses not being right first off, might have been some of the data that the FDA wanted to pore over a little bit more. Before they give. Approval
Salma, I don't have to remind you that this is coming at a completely critical point in the U.K. and the rest of Europe and of course, right here in the United States with the questions about this new variant and obviously another surge in cases. Salma, let us know what you think may happen today. Another pivotal day in the U.K. in terms of what they may decide needs to be done in order to combat this virus.
ABDELAZIZ: I cannot overemphasize just how dire things are here. Paula, by some indications, the worst it's ever been in terms of the coronavirus pandemic. You are looking right now at more patients in hospital with coronavirus than at any point before.
The U.K., again, for the second day in a row yesterday, broke its daily record of new COVID-19 cases. Doctors and nurses are essentially pleading with the public to follow the restrictions, follow the rules. They are even facing short staffing at their hospitals. So
we expect more restrictions to be rolled out today. But again, people have to follow these rules. It's no good for these new restrictions being rolled out in other parts of England, if people don't follow the. Rules Paula?
NEWTON: A reminder that what is causing a problem in the U.K., the variant has now been found here in the United States as. Well in the state of Colorado. Salma Abdelaziz, thanks so much for the update on. That We will continue to follow this breaking news. And we will be back with more news in a moment.
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NEWTON: Back to our breaking news. British government regulators have now authorized the Oxford AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use. Now this comes weeks after the country was the first to start vaccinating people with the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine. Which has already been given to hundreds of thousands of patients in the U.K.
Developers had said this Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine had an average efficacy of 70 percent. We all know that is below Moderna or Pfizer at this point. The British government said its authorization follows what it calls rigorous clinical trials.
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NEWTON: Now vaccines of course usually take years, even decades to develop, but this year a handful of shots as we've seen for the coronavirus were produced and authorized really in record time.
Health experts say the breakthroughs were years in the making though and that previous research on other viruses helped in fact lay the groundwork for the shots we have today.
For more on this, I'm joined by Jason McLellan. He's an associate professor of molecular biosciences at the University of Texas at Austin.
And thanks so much for your time.
And I bet at this point you want to take a deep breath. It is so interesting to hear what your last year has been like when you first heard about what they had possibly found in Wuhan. I mean what were you doing and how quickly did you get into the lab?
JASON MCLELLAN, UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS/AUSTIN: Yes, we were tracking and we're aware of these pneumonia breakouts in Wuhan and it was actually early January. I was snowboarding with my family in Park City.
I got a call from Dr. Barney Graham at the National Institutes of Health. And he let me know that it looked like this -- the pathogen causing pneumonia was a coronavirus, similar to the SARS coronavirus from 2002.
And he wanted to know if we are ready to crowd collaborate and try and quickly make a vaccine.
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I said yes and immediately contacted my lab. And we only had to wait a few more days for the genome sequence of the virus to be made available online. And then we are able to get to work.
NEWTON: And what was the platform that was already in place? Because we heard from so many people now that this was really years in development, even though we have been able to get a vaccine inside of a year.
MCLELLAN: Yes, there's actually two separate pieces that have been actively developed. One was all the prior knowledge on coronaviruses. We've known about coronaviruses since the 1960s. A lot of research dedicated to coronaviruses since the first SARS break in 2000.
We knew about the spike protein, that it was the target of antibodies. It's a good vaccine antigen, my lab worked with Barney Graham to determine how to stabilize the spike protein in the particular confirmation that was good for vaccines.
We knew all of that about the coronavirus and vaccine development. And then a lot of the vaccine platforms like the mRNA platforms from BioNTech and Moderna, the adenoviral vectors from Johnson & Johnson and then Oxford, protein sub-unit -- all these vaccine platforms were really mature.
And so as early as January we knew what antigen we want to use. how the platforms needed to be developed quickly. And those two things came together and humans were vaccinated in March, I think for the first phase one clinical trial.
NEWTON: Yes, it's incredible isn't it?
A total Mach speed, at least that's the way it seems to us. And yet given all of the research here and given the fact that we now coming up with the new variant perhaps, maybe more than one.
Given the way these vaccines work, do you have confidence that it will work no matter how the strain may change or how it may mutate?
MCLELLAN: We are confident that the vaccines will be effective against some of the current variants, ones in U.K., South Africa. What we don't know is whether they're be some modest decrease in efficacy, maybe going from 95 percent to 85 or something like that.
And that's what's being actively investigated now and tested. If a new viral variant occurred that did drift too far away, some of these mRNA vaccines could be reformulated within six weeks and produced at scale.
But we're pretty confident that these current variance will be protected against by the vaccine.
NEWTON: Wow, incredible. It really is breathtaking just to hear you speak about this. And given that and given all the work by so many scientists all around the world, is it upsetting to you to know that right now there are vaccines in storage, instead of in people's arms just because we're not quite as efficient as we need to be in so many different places right now, to get people vaccinated?
MCLELLAN: It's upsetting. Obviously we want everybody to be vaccinated as soon as possible. But we understand that these are difficult times. There's a lot of logistics with some of the storage.
I'm confident everybody is working as hard as they can. And hopefully soon these hurdles will be overcome and more and more people will be vaccinated.
NEWTON: So Dr. McLellan, it must be gratifying to you to know that eventually you and your family members will get vaccinated, hopefully.
MCLELLAN: Yes, my wife was actually vaccinated last week. She's a health care worker, treats cancer patients. And so that was a really exciting that she was immunized with a vaccine that my lab helped create with a protein we helped design.
I think we're part of phase Ib or phase Ic and so I should be vaccinated in the next few weeks. It's all really exciting and no serious side effects for my wife.
NEWTON: That is so amazing to hear. And again it must be so gratifying to you just to really see a lot of your labor for so many years in the lab, really helping your family out that way and so many people around the world. Gosh, that's incredible. Dr. McLellan, thank you so much. Appreciate it.
MCLELLAN: Thank you.
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NEWTON: That's some good news all around about the vaccine and we will continue to have more on our breaking news in a moment.
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NEWTON: And updating our breaking news story for you now, the U.K. has another weapon in its arsenal against the coronavirus. The British government says regulators have authorized the use of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine. A statement says it went through rigorous clinical trials and met strict safety standard.
Meanwhile the U.K. prime minister Boris Johnson tweeted that it was fantastic news and a triumph for British science. Britain is already using the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine. And that rollout will continue as well.
Now this news comes from the U.K. as experts in the United States warn America's vaccine rollout just isn't moving quickly enough. I spoke earlier with CNN medical analyst Dr. Leana Wen about those concerns here in the United States.
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NEWTON: You are a public health professional. This is something that I know shakes you to your core when you see that vaccines are not being rolled out here in the United States at the pace at which they need to be rolled out. I've been really interested to hear from you, because you're not
trying to blame people or point fingers. You're saying, look, we need to find out what's wrong, right, and fix it.
DR. LEANA WEN, CNN MEDICAL ANALYST: That's exactly right, this is not about blame, it's about introspection and having humility to say, this is the most ambitious vaccine program that we've ever undertaken as a country.
So we know that there are going to be hiccups along the way. But let's not over promise and under deliver. Let's figure out what went wrong, if the original expectation was 40 million people, that 40 million doses that were supposed to be distributed by the end of the year, but now we've only been able to administer 2 million doses?
What happened?
Where are the mistakes?
What can we do differently moving forward?
NEWTON: What is the difficulty of moving forward?
There seems to be, really, the federal government, saying that look this is not our responsibility, the states need to be able to do this.
In your experience, do the states have the apparatus?
Is it all they need, is the money?
Or do they lack also some of the logistics help that they may need or the expertise?
WEN: Well, those are tied together. So state and local health departments know how to do vaccinations. This is their bread and butter in the same way that testing and contact tracing and quarantine, that's the bread and butter of public health.
But you can't do that in a vacuum. Even prior to the pandemic, local health departments were severely under resourced and understaffed. The local health departments in the U.S. lost about 25 percent of their workforce in the last 2 decades because of lack of funding.
So then the pandemic, in addition to their daily normal duties, these individuals have also had to stand up testing and contact tracing and do public education.
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WEN: Now they're also told that they have to do vaccination on top of it. So they needed to have resources months ago in order to do the logistics, the administration, the coordination.
That needs to come now.
NEWTON: I've been hearing anecdotally from the U.K., which has been doing a better job of rolling out the vaccines, that older people in the community are getting their vaccinations. This is happening in a more timely way.
Your back of the envelope calculations at this pace would take 10 years. OK, the pace will increase.
But what do you think needs to be done in terms of how many vaccinations need to be done per week?
WEN: Well, it depends what our goal is. The initial goal that was set out by the Trump administration, to have most Americans, let say 80 percent of Americans to reach herd immunity, to get that number vaccinated within six months, if we're going to have that rate then we need to have vaccinations at 3.5 million a day.
We're a long way off from that. We're at 1 million a week. So in theory, something that we can achieve but we need to ramp up substantially. We need to ramp up every step of the way, from production to better distribution, to also critically that last mile of what happens once, between the time that a vaccine is given to a state and the time that it actually goes into someone's arm, whether it's at a hospital, a nursing home or in a pharmacy.
NEWTON: Right, you can't put it more plainly than that.
Before I let you go, I have to ask you about the exponential growth in the U.K. They are incredibly concerned about it, they are assuming that a lot of this is coming from the different variant.
How much of a wake up call should this for the rest of us, all those measures, all those restrictions, all the mask wearing, everything that we've done, do we now have to do more?
Do we have to question even what we're doing now, if that variant is truly going to take hold in other parts of the world?
WEN: The variant is more transmissible but it hasn't changed fundamentally how we think about the virus. It's still spread exactly the same way, it's still a respiratory virus, it's still aerosolized, airborne. So it's still the same measures. We just have to double down and do them.
As difficult as it is, as much of that pandemic fatigue has set in, in the U.K. and all around the world, we have to keep up these measures of masking, physical distancing and, really, important avoiding indoor gatherings, including with extended family and friends, where so much of that kind of transmission here in the U.S. occurs through that route.
NEWTON: Yes, you certainly seem indefatigable, Dr. Leana Wen, so we will try and take some energy from you, because you certainly are concerned about all of us and you've been giving us this message for so many months now. Dr. Leana Wen, again, thank you for your time.
WEN: Thank you.
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NEWTON: Now we have lots of breaking news here up ahead on CNN. I want to thank you for watching me. I'm Paula Newton. The news continues with CNN's Isa Soares after the break.
