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Slow Start Hinders U.S. COVID-19 Vaccine Rollout; British Prime Minister Predicts Return to Normal by April; U.S. Congress Meets Wednesday to Certify Biden Victory. Aired 12-12:15a ET
Aired January 02, 2021 - 00:00 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 (voice-over): Hello and welcome to CNN NEWSROOM. I'm Paula Newton. Our top story. The calendar may show a new year but the challenges of the old one clearly have not turned the page or rounded that corner. COVID-19 battles persist right around the globe but especially here in the United States.
Take a look at this. A litany of grim figures reported on day one of 2021. The nation surpassing 20 million cases. More than 100,000 hospitalizations recorded for the 31st straight day. Several states now reporting record numbers of new cases and deaths.
While the vaccines offer some light at the end of this long pandemic tunnel, getting doses into the arms of Americans has been fraught with problems. The Trump administration wanted 20 million people vaccinated by January 1st but the CDC reports just under 3 million have gotten the shot.
CNN's Nick Watt has more details on the state of the pandemic as this new year begins.
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NICK WATT, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): From Wuhan, where all this began, to New York, not much fondness in the farewell to a terrible year.
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN HOST: And 2020 is gone.
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ANDY COHEN, CNN GUEST HOST: 2020 is freaking gone.
WATT (voice-over): 2020 was tough but:
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We are still going to have our toughest and darkest days.
WATT (voice-over): A L.A. County official says hospitals are, quote, "on the brink of catastrophe." UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's like treading water from 100 feet below the
surface. You're already drowning but you just have to keep trying because that's what you can do.
WATT (voice-over): In Atlanta, a field hospital reopens for business at the Georgia World Congress Center. Meanwhile:
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: In many parts of rural Georgia, both in the north and the south, there is vaccine available and literally sitting in freezers. That's unacceptable. We have -- we have lives to save.
WATT (voice-over): They're just not getting the hoped-for uptake from medical workers. In West Virginia, 42 people were given antibodies, not the vaccine, by mistake. In Wisconsin, a pharmacist now in custody after destroying 500 doses, taking them out of refrigeration.
The administration projected 20 million would have had vaccine dose number one by now.
The reality?
Not even 2.8 million reported.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: States and localities need resources. They need funding. I expected that we would see bumps in the road, but I didn't expect that we'd see this lack of consistency across the states.
WATT (voice-over): And that new faster spreading coronavirus variant now detected in Colorado, California and maybe Florida.
DR. SAJU MATHEW, CNN MEDICAL ANALYST: I think we have to assume that this strain has been in the U.S. for a long time.
WATT (voice-over): December, by the numbers, was the worst month of the pandemic, the most confirmed cases, the most deaths, 10,000 lives lost in the last three days alone.
MATHEW: We do have these vaccines. We just need to hunker down and get there.
WATT (voice-over): In 2020, 345,737 people confirmed killed by COVID- 19 in America.
In 2021, how many more?
WATT: And here in California, a grim start to 2021, a record death toll reported New Year's Day, 585 lives lost, beating the previous record, which was set on New Year's Eve -- Nick Watt, CNN, Los Angeles.
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NEWTON: The U.K., in the meantime, has recorded more than 50,000 new cases of the virus on each of the past four days. Most of England is now under the toughest level of lockdown. That's tier 4. But that didn't stop people from partying for New Year's; 217 people
in London were fined for breaking social distancing restrictions; four people were arrested. Police responded to 58 unlicensed parties and events across the city.
The British government has decided to keep primary schools in London closed. That was after announcing earlier that they would keep a number of them open. The U.K. is adding a new coronavirus vaccine, thankfully, to its arsenal starting Monday. The country will be administering the first dosage of the Oxford University AstraZeneca vaccine.
Things are looking up but the U.K. is absolutely not of the woods yet. Phil Black has more.
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PHIL BLACK, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The British prime minister has a reputation for prematurely predicting an imminent return to normal life.
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BLACK (voice-over): His latest forecast:
BORIS JOHNSON, U.K. PRIME MINISTER: April the 5th, Easter, we really are confident that things will be very, very much better.
BLACK (voice-over): During one of the darkest moments of the pandemic, Johnson and his government are telling the British people, it will be behind us by spring.
Could he be right this time?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Maybe. It's about logistics more than anything.
BLACK (voice-over): The government's optimism is fueled by this vaccine.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: OK. So, I will need a scratch.
BLACK (voice-over): Developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca, it's the most low-maintenance vaccine option so far because it doesn't need ultracold storage. And the British government got in early, speeding up the regulators' scrutiny and securing supply.
One hundred million doses are coming plus another 30 million doses of the vaccine produced by Pfizer and BioNTech. Together, it's more than enough to protect every British adult.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The U.K. government has made a lot of mistakes in this outbreak. But the thing it's done really well has been the vaccine development.
BLACK (voice-over): Public health experts say the U.K. has another big advantage for pulling off the next phase of the plan, which involves getting the vaccine to around a third of the population, including everyone over 50 and everyone at greater risk due to an underlying condition.
LINDA BAULD, UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH: We have a National Health Service that is funded through general taxation and is highly integrated in a way that is not the case in so many other countries.
BLACK: That's a structural institutional advantage that other countries don't have.
BAULD: That's correct. Many other countries, particularly larger, more complex countries, where health systems, for example, we have multiple partners, insurance companies or many more private providers, when you have a system like that, it's much more complex to deliver at scale and nationally batimo load (ph).
BLACK (voice-over): But nationalized health care hasn't prevented the U.K. from recording one of the highest numbers of deaths in the world.
BLACK: Britain's track record through the pandemic also shows that it does not guarantee success in handling a complex operation.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Well, quite. Quite. I'm slightly more confident in their ability to do this than their ability to do this than other big parts of this pandemic simply because it's been that they have been pushing.
BLACK: So, there are good reasons why the U.K. finds itself in a hopeful place. And we will see needles plunging into arms relatively quickly. But to meet that Easter deadline and effectively end the threat of the pandemic in this country, that will take a medical logistics operation unlike anything seen here before -- Phil Black, CNN, London.
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NEWTON: In the meantime, France was previously planning to ease some coronavirus restrictions next week. Now instead it will be adding new restrictions. The French government announced that about a dozen areas in the eastern part of the country will have a much earlier curfew starting Saturday.
The nationwide curfew runs from 8 at night to 6 in the morning. But these 15 areas will have a curfew that actually now will begin at 6 pm. The health minister tells local media that infection rates in those places are making all of these new restrictions necessary.
This time last year, much of the world had never heard of Wuhan, China. It's, of course, a very different story right now. A year after local officials started looking into a new and mysterious disease, we now know it to be COVID-19. And after all this time, some whistleblowers are still running into trouble. CNN's Steven Jiang explains.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) STEVEN JIANG, CNN SENIOR PRODUCER, BEIJING BUREAU: After seeing thousands of COVID deaths and going through a brutal lockdown, the city has largely come back to life in recent months, which is why the Communist leadership under president Xi Jinping now wants to showcase it to highlight their success in containing this virus within its borders in contrast to what is going on in the U.S.
Many people, though, remember a very different storyline about Wuhan in 2020, including a whistleblowing doctor being silenced by local police last January and he later died of COVID.
Also during the last week of 2020, a citizen journalist was sentenced to four years in prison for basically documenting the harsh reality in Wuhan in the height of the pandemic.
And the city itself may soon be under a global spotlight again with a WHO team expected to arrive in the city later this month to investigate the origins of the COVID virus -- Steven Jiang, CNN, Beijing.
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NEWTON: On Friday, the U.S. Senate voted overwhelmingly to override President Trump's veto of the sweeping defense bill. Now it was a rare Republican rebuke for the president. The bill includes pay rises for American soldiers and equipment upgrades.
It does not, though, repeal section 230, which gives internet providers and others some protections regarding how they manage their content.
After the vote, the president tweeted, "Our Republican Senate just missed opportunity to get rid of section 230, which gives unlimited power to big tech companies. Pathetic."
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NEWTON: Also, Friday a federal judge tossed out another last-ditch effort to try and overturn the U.S. presidential election. Some Republican lawmakers filed suit hoping to force Vice President Pence to ignore some electoral votes when Congress meets next week to certify the election.
The judge said the Republicans lacked standing to sue. Kaitlan Collins has more from the White House.
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KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: President Trump skipped his annual New Year's Eve party in Mar-a-Lago to cut his Florida vacation short and come back to Washington early. Though the White House never publicly explained exactly why the president was doing that.
But many sources believed it was ahead of that showdown that's expected on Capitol Hill next week, when the House and the Senate do meet to certify Joe Biden's win as the next President of the United States, something that we know that the outcome will not be any different.
But how we get there might, given that several of the president's Republican allies are preparing to dispute that. But of course, as that is coming, the president is also looking to his vice president, Mike Pence, and what his role is going to be in that because, typically, it's just procedural, ceremonial, largely.
But of course, now the vice president has found himself at odds with some of the president's allies, including congress man Louie Gohmert, who filed that lawsuit against the vice president, that many thought was frivolous and not going to go anywhere because it was basically arguing Pence had the authority to change the votes, which he does not.
So we're still waiting for the president himself to weigh in on that though it does come as he was at the White House and we did not see him on New Year's Day. But of course, what happened on Capitol Hill was that massive rebuke of the president coming from Senate Republicans during his final days of office as they voted to override the veto that he had administered of the defense bill -- Kaitlan Collins, CNN, the White House.
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NEWTON: Now the coronavirus pandemic tore up, literally torched the calendar for much of 2020. Japan's prime minister says the Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games will now take place from July to September, of course, a year later than planned.
The world's largest climate change conference has also been bumped forward a year. COP26 will not take place in Glasgow in November.
The UEFA Euro 2020 football championship is keeping its name but now moves to June and July of 2021.
And, of course, the much-delayed James Bond film, "No Time to Die," will play in cinemas starting in April, a year later than planned.
Finally, this is the one that shocks me actually, 71 percent, that's a lot, of all weddings globally were postponed for at least a year, according to a survey from wedding company, the, not worldwide.
I'm Paula Newton. Thanks for watching. Stay tuned now for "MARKETPLACE AFRICA."
