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Biden Pledges to Speed Up Vaccine Deliveries to States; Biden to Sign Executive Orders Today to Combat Climate Crisis; Interview with Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) about U.K. COVID Variant Cases in His State; House GOP to Hold Call Amid Party Tension Over Impeachment; Forty Five GOP Senators Reject Constitutionality of Impeachment Trial; Biden to Sign Executive Orders Today to Combat Climate Crisis. Aired 9-9:30a ET

Aired January 27, 2021 - 09:00   ET

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

[09:00:36]

POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning, everyone. I'm Poppy Harlow.

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR: And I'm Jim Sciutto.

President Biden goes big on his administration's response to this deadly pandemic. Can he deliver on his bold new pledges?

The U.S. just bought 200 million more vaccine doses and is planning to ramp up distribution to get those shots into people's arms next week. President Biden says there will be enough to vaccinate every American by the end of summer or early fall. That's a remarkable -- that's good news. It's a remarkable goal.

HARLOW: Yes. Let's hope we can get there. The president says he has a detailed plan, one that is based on science. The question is this morning is what will it mean, especially for communities of color suffering from unequal vaccination rates so far? Urgency is clearly growing and January we now know is the deadliest month from COVID yet in the United States. More than 79,000 lives lost to the pandemic so far this year. A stunning rise in deaths per month from November.

The White House is holding its first official COVID briefing of the Biden presidency. That will happen a little bit later today. And that is where we begin at the White House. Jeremy Diamond joins us.

Good morning, Jeremy. Transparency has been promised from this administration. What can we expect today?

JEREMY DIAMOND, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: That's right. You know, you'll remember last week when President Biden laid out his national strategy for combatting the coronavirus. Restoring public trust in government and its response to the coronavirus was top, item number one in terms of the seven goals that they laid out for this strategy. And that's why we're going to see today the first in what will be a series of briefings about three times a week, we're expecting, from Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the new director of the CDC, and several other White House officials focused on the vaccine.

This comes just a day after President Biden announced that the U.S. government is in the process of purchasing an additional 200 million doses of those Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. Now this was something that when the Trump administration first purchased doses, they did have the option to purchase in increments of 100 million additional doses. So the Biden administration now moving forward with that.

This will be enough to vaccinate about 300 million people when all these doses arrive by the end of the summer. That would be enough to cover the adult -- the entire U.S. adult population and more. They are also increasing the weekly supply of vaccines to the states beginning next week. They will increase from about 8.6 million to 10 million vaccine doses distributed every week to states and territories across the country.

SCIUTTO: The president plans more executive actions today focused on climate change. He's of course appointed John Kerry to lead that charge in a Cabinet level position. What will the president be signing today?

DIAMOND: That's right. There will be a pair of executive orders and a presidential memorandum coming from President Biden today making clear that the climate crisis is top of mind for this administration. Calling it a national security problem for the country and also Biden will be halting all new leases on federal lands for oil and gas drilling.

On day one, when he came into office, he signed a 60-day moratorium. Now he's making that indefinite and starting the process of reviewing the federal government's approval of those types of leases.

There will also be an interagency working group to help this administration begin the process of moving away from fossil fuels. And we also expect there to be a focus today on creating new clean energy jobs. But we'll hear more from the president later today on all this.

SCIUTTO: The U.S. Military as well for some time has said climate change is a national security issue for all the repercussions it causes.

Jeremy Diamond, thanks very much.

Joining us now is Dr. Carlo del Rio. He is the executive associate dean at Emory University School of Medicine, Grady, Atlanta.

Doctor, always good to have you on. Thanks for taking the time this morning.

DR. CARLO DEL RIO, EXECUTIVE ASSOCIATE DEAN, EMORY UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE AT GRADY: Happy to be with you.

SCIUTTO: OK. So you have the Biden administration kicking in a bold goal. Having the whole country or at least vaccinations available to the whole country perhaps as soon as the end of summer. I mean, the issue leading up to this has been both the supply issue and a distribution issue. And I'm curious from your seat, does the Biden administration have a plan and the ability to correct those problems, to get shots in arms and quickly? To really accelerate how fast this country is vaccinating?

[09:05:01]

DEL RIO: I mean, I think so. I think if indeed they have the commitments of industry to provide them the number of millions of doses that they say they're going to get. I think what states desperately need right now is vaccines, but they also need the steady supply. They need to know how much they are getting each week because if you know how much you're getting, then you can plan and then you can decide how you're going to distribute and what you're going to do.

Now I will say, though, that what we need to ensure is that not only do we vaccinate people, but we do it with equity. We need to make sure that we get vaccines to the right people. And up to now, if you look across the country, we're vaccinating more white, wealthy individuals and in fact the disease is more in poor African-American and Hispanic individuals.

HARLOW: Also globally. I mean, Bill and Melinda Gates warning in their annual letter this morning that we are facing as a globe immunity inequality. Right? And it doesn't solve the problem for the U.S. if the poorest countries aren't getting vaccinated until months and months later.

And you add the variants on top, Dr. Del Rio. You tweeted after you went through a Webinar yesterday something that really struck us. "We need to turn swiss cheese into a hard block of cheddar." How do we do that?

DEL RIO: Well, you do it by really hunkering down on the different things that we're doing, right? In other words, we need to really wear your mask. You really need to socially distance. You really need to avoid being in crowded places, in places with poor ventilation, and you need to get your vaccine as soon as you can. If you do that, those holes in the swiss cheese become smaller and smaller and then the virus doesn't transmit.

And if the virus doesn't transmit, mutations stop. The only way viruses mutate is when they are replicated, when they're transmitting, when they're multiplying. If we stop the virus from multiplying, mutations will stop.

SCIUTTO: A big part of the Biden plan, a big focus, is to get schools open. And the CDC has guidance now that says, if schools follow these steps, we put these on the screen, they can do so safely. Require masks. Social distance. Keep students in limited groups. Increase air ventilation, test for COVID frequently.

And there's a lot of data now that schools and school districts that have done this have been able to open and safely. I just wonder, are we going to see more of this now, right? Now that there's a plan, confidence in the data, are we going to see schools begin to open up across the country consistently? DEL RIO: I think the one thing missing in that plan that you have up

there is we need to also ensure that all the teachers and the people, the adults that work in the school, are vaccinated. If we vaccinate the teachers and we vaccinate the administrators and everybody that works in the schools, in the cafeterias, et cetera, and we do all those other things, I think schools is going to be open safely.

HARLOW: Dr. del Rio, let's hope so. Thank you very, very much.

The state of Kentucky has now confirmed its first two cases of that more contagious coronavirus variant. The one first identified in the United Kingdom.

Joining me now to discuss all of this is Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear.

Thank you so much for being with me this morning.

GOV. ANDY BESHEAR (D-KY): Thanks for having me.

HARLOW: I want to know that your state, by all the metrics I've read, has actually done quite a good job relatively speaking of vaccinating people. Your problem has been on the supply side. The Biden administration thinks that they can solve that. We heard from Jeffrey Zients yesterday. You're going to get three weeks' notice of how much supply you're going to have. Next week you're going to have 16 percent more.

But New York's governor and Maryland's governor both said yesterday it's good but it's not enough. Is it enough for you guys?

BESHEAR: Well, it's good. Let me start there. We got three great announcements from the Biden administration yesterday. First, the very first increase in supply we've seen. 16 percent. We'll take any amount that we can get. Second, we're going to know three weeks in advance the minimum amount we're going to get so that we can schedule people and not have to cancel their appointments. And third, the purchase of hundreds of millions of more doses which is desperately needed.

I mean, to give you an idea of whether it's enough, last week we vaccinated about 82,500 Kentuckians. But we only received about 56,000 first doses. Now we have some left over from the very first weeks when we were ramping up, but you can see our ability to vaccinate is far outstripping the supply we have.

Right now we believe we have the infrastructure to vaccinate about a quarter million people a week. But again, getting somewhere between 56,000 and even with the increase, maybe mid-60,000 vaccines. All this comes down to supply.

HARLOW: Right.

BESHEAR: Each state will work out its distribution issues. It all comes down to supply.

HARLOW: OK. So then the question becomes equitable distribution and vaccination. And CNN's analysis of 14 different states -- I'm not sure if Kentucky is one of them, I just want to note that. But 14 states showed that black and Latinos are being vaccinated about half the rate as white people in those states. There are states that release the data by race and ethnicity. Kentucky is not one of those states.

Are you tracking this data, and if so, are you going to start making it public?

[09:10:05]

BESHEAR: We're working on it, and we want to be transparent, and make every piece of data that we have public and hopefully we'll be able to track that as we move forward. We've got to be intentional about the --

HARLOW: But it's necessary, right, Governor?

BESHEAR: Yes, absolutely.

HARLOW: I mean, really if we're talking about true equality, it's not just that we hope to, it's a we have to, right?

BESHEAR: And we're working on it. We do it with testing, we do it with cases, we do it with fatalities. We've made a strong push in Kentucky to sign everyone but specifically, those in our black and Hispanic communities for health care. We have reduced the disproportionate death in Kentucky, especially for our black communities from about double the rate that they make up of the population to just about that regular percentage.

And we've got to do the same with vaccines. Part of the variants we've seen right now is following the CDC's 1A, 1B direction. But as we move forward, we've got to be very intentional. And so we've got to think big regional centers but we also have to think in many ways small. How we get into specific churches and areas to make sure we get this vaccine out equitably. It is a requirement. It is a must.

HARLOW: The fact that you now have two documented cases, unfortunately probably more by now, of this U.K. variant. It's much more transmissible, I wonder what that means in terms of actions you might take. For example, you have this mask mandate in your state for the end of January. Are you going to extend it? And what does this mean for schools? I mean, you guys have done -- been able to keep some of the schools open there and have a relatively successful, what I've heard, hybrid model. Do you fear this changes that?

BESHEAR: Well, we are -- had anticipated that this variant was coming. It's coming at a time when we actually believe we have more mask compliance than we've had in a while. And we're certainly going to keep the mask mandate in effect until it is no longer needed. That means next month and the month after and the month after that.

We're going to keep capacity restrictions which we have in place for things like indoor dining and other areas in place until it's safe. On opening of schools, we are currently on track to be the fastest state to vaccinate our educators and those who work in our school buildings. To make sure that we not only can get kids back in the classroom but it is safe for everybody who is working in that building.

We've made that a priority because our kids are our priority. And as a dad of a 10-year-old and 11-year-old, they need to get back full time as quickly as possible for their mental health and for mine.

HARLOW: Hey, my child's school just closed last night, you know, last minute and we were able to work it out as a family, but we're lucky. Most people aren't. You know, most people would have to call out from work, et cetera. So it's a really -- it's really important.

I appreciate you being here and wish you guys a lot of luck, Governor Beshear. Thank you.

BESHEAR: Thank you very much.

HARLOW: All right. Well, a lot of questions, a lot of answers tonight in our new global town hall.

"THE RACE TO VACCINATE AMERICA." Dr. Anthony Fauci, top doctors from the Biden administration's COVID-19 team, joining Anderson Cooper. Dr. Sanjay Gupta tonight for "CORONAVIRUS FACTS AND FEARS." That's live at 8:00 Eastern.

SCIUTTO: Great way to get the best information.

Still to come this hour, House Republicans are set to hold a call today over impeachment tensions within the Republican Party as one GOP senator calls a whole effort dead on arrival in the Senate. There are those who disagree.

Plus, President Biden confronts Russia's Vladimir Putin in their first phone call after the election. Did he just set the tone, a very different one from President Trump, for the next four years?

HARLOW: And the climate crisis is the focus for the Biden administration today. But there's a lot of work ahead of them.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BILL WEIR, CNN CORRESPONDENT: A certain kind of heat-trapping pollution belches unchecked and invisible.

(On camera): Unless you have a special infrared camera like this which can turn a Texas bluebird sky into this.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HARLOW: Wow. Leave it to our Bill Weir. We'll have his special report ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[09:15:00]

SCIUTTO: Well, just hours from now, tension among house Republicans over the former president's impeachment could be front and center during a GOP conference call. Multiple sources telling CNN that the purpose of that call to discuss the 2020 political landscape, how this split within the party affects all that, but the focus could quickly turn towards the 10 house Republicans who voted to impeach.

HARLOW: This is after just five Republican senators split with the rest of their conference yesterday when they were asked to vote on the constitutionality of impeaching a president who is out of office. Let's go to our Lauren Fox, she's on the hill with more on this call by house Republicans. Is it -- is it a -- like, autopsy, what happened call? Is it a what should happen to Liz Cheney call? What is it?

LAUREN FOX, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, essentially, this is really looking forward at how they can try to retake the house in 2022. But, remember, there's a reckoning that's going to have to come for Republicans both in the house and the Senate as to how much they want to tether themselves to former President Donald Trump.

I think it's very clear that President Trump is still very popular with his base. However, it's a question of where Republicans want to go from here. I am told by multiple sources that the outset of these topics is not supposed to be to talk about Liz Cheney. However, members can talk about anything that they want to on these calls.

So, if a member has questions or wants to turn to that subject, they could. Meanwhile, in the Senate, we are still watching to see how many Republicans might be willing to vote to convict former President Donald Trump. And we did see yesterday a little bit of a preview. You had five Republican senators joining with Democrats in this question about whether or not it was constitutional to proceed with an impeachment trial against an ex-president.

[09:20:00]

What those five people concluded was that they wanted to go ahead and allow this to move forward. But that is far from the 17 Republicans that you would need to actually convict former President Trump as well as potentially bar him from running for re-election again in the future. Now there are some Republicans who say this is dead on arrival. What is the point of doing this? It is time to move on. You heard from the assistant Speaker Katherine Clark earlier this morning saying that's just political talk from Republicans.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. KATHERINE CLARK (D-MA): These cries of victimhood would just, you know, induce some eye-rolling if they weren't so deadly dangerous. We were all there. We are witnesses to this violence and what the words of the president and his enablers did. What they caused. So it is long past time that we remember our oath and who we work for.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

FOX: And, of course, one of the key questions is going to be whether or not there will be witnesses as part of this Senate impeachment trial. Expect over the next two weeks, that's going to be a hot topic up here on Capitol Hill as the house managers and Democratic leadership in the Senate move forward with what their plans will be for that Senate impeachment trial slated to start on February 9th. Jim and Poppy?

HARLOW: Lauren Fox --

SCIUTTO: Lauren, can you help -- sorry, could you help us understand McConnell's position in this? Because McConnell, you know, explicitly held the president responsible for the Capitol riot. There was discussion of him being willing to vote to convict, but he just voted yesterday not even to have a trial. Why the flip flop?

FOX: Well, essentially, I think you have to sort of parse out that these are two parts of a question. The first is whether or not this is constitutional. I thought it was very interesting yesterday that Jonathan Turley who is a constitutional scholar, who has talked about this issue, and has said he doesn't believe it's constitutional, was invited to speak by McConnell at the Republican lunch yesterday.

Then they had this vote in the afternoon. I think you're seeing a lot of Republicans and potentially McConnell falls in this boat as well, using this question of constitutionality as a fig leaf for why they would not vote to convict the former President Donald Trump on this impeachment charge.

SCIUTTO: Got it.

HARLOW: Thanks --

SCIUTTO: Lots of fig leaves.

(LAUGHTER)

HARLOW: Thank you, Lauren. All right, let's bring in Renato Mariotti; a former federal prosecutor and CNN legal analyst. Let's start on that issue of witnesses. I want your response to what Lindsey Graham -- Senator Lindsey Graham said sort of trying to warn against it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM (R-SC): If there's an effort by the Democrats to call a single witness in the United States Senate, they had no record in the house, there will be delay of this trial. There will be a Pandora's box being opened. We will want witnesses and this thing could go on for weeks if not months.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HARLOW: But you wrote in your op-ed in "USA Today", they should call witnesses. What do you make of what Graham is saying?

RENATO MARIOTTI, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: Well, I think if this is going to be a serious inquiry, and if you're going to try to get to the truth of the matter, you need to call witnesses. There are witnesses, for example, the Republican members and officials in DOJ who Trump tried to, you know, fire and get out of the way so that he could actually use DOJ to change the result in Georgia, for example. There are also witnesses, people who were there that day.

People who were around Trump who know what he -- what his intentions were, what his knowledge was when he was talking to that crowd that ultimately became a mob that stormed the Capitol. So I do -- what I take Lindsey Graham to be saying there is a threat. Which is essentially, if you -- if you bring -- call witnesses, we're going to call so many that we're going to gum up the works and we're going to waste a lot of your time and make it so that the Biden administration is distracted by this.

HARLOW: Well, how about these folks? Listen to a number of the rioters pointing to the president.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We'll lose everything.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Man, we're going to -- lose it all.

TRUMP: We've got to get Nancy Pelosi the hell out of there.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Speaker Pelosi. Yes, we're coming bitch!

TRUMP: That's treason. That's treason.

CROWD: Treason!

TRUMP: This is our country.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is our house. This is our country. This is our country.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HARLOW: I wonder if you think digital evidence from the Democrats, from the house impeachment managers might look something like that.

MARIOTTI: Yes, I do think that the most powerful evidence, Poppy, is going to be video. There's actually video of rioters saying that they thought Trump was there with them. That they actually thought he was within the crowd. I think that's really important because --

HARLOW: But just because they thought that -- sorry to interrupt, but doesn't mean -- I mean, I wonder how much that would hold up, right? I mean, he wasn't --

MARIOTTI: Well --

HARLOW: There with them.

[09:25:00]

MARIOTTI: He was definitely not there, but they suggest they thought that they were acting with his authority. They thought that he was part of what they were doing. In other words, there were some of them that said, for example, the Capitol police, you know, our boss work here.

We were invited by your boss, the president of the United States. You know, it's essentially indicating that the audience understood Trump to be directing them to do this. And you can't always get in Trump's mind, but in terms of figuring out what the meaning of his words were when they're ambiguous --

HARLOW: Yes --

MARIOTTI: I think the understanding of the people who heard them is no --

HARLOW: So, isn't the key then, Renato, going to be the Supreme Court precedent set in -- I think it's Brandenburg versus Ohio, what a Ku Klux Klan member said versus what happened? Isn't that -- isn't it all going to hinge on that then?

MARIOTTI: Yes, I do think that's important. Just so the listeners and viewers here understand. It is -- what the Supreme Court said is that if you're inciting someone to commit imminent lawless action, it's incitement. And that's a very high bar that's usually almost never met. It wasn't met in the Ku Klux Klan rally, but here of course, the crowd actually did storm the Capitol and Trump did talk about the Capitol in the speech. It's really the sort of thing that, you know, could arguably fit in with that definition.

HARLOW: OK, Renato, good to have your legal mind on this. Thank you.

MARIOTTI: Thank you.

HARLOW: Jim?

SCIUTTO: So many big legal questions. Well, from hurricanes and wildfires to flooding and droughts, President Biden set to kick off an ambitious plan to fight the climate crisis and create jobs in the process. We're going to have a live report next. It's a big priority for this administration. Plus, we're just moments away from the opening bell on Wall Street.

Stock futures down slightly this morning. The Federal Reserve is set to announce its interest rate decision this afternoon. Rates are expected to stay at near zero as the economy recovers from the coronavirus pandemic. And as investors wait for any movement on stimulus, corporate earnings are in full swing with several major companies reporting today after the closing bell. We're keeping an eye on all of them.

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