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West Virginia Touts Vaccination Success: Unemployment Numbers for Last Week; GameStop and AMC Stocks Soar; Brazil's Health System is Collapsing. Aired 9:30-10a
Aired January 28, 2021 - 09:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[09:30:00]
JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR: West Virginia quickly became a benchmark for how to do it right. How did they do it? CNN will take a closer look.
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POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: As the Biden administration is working to try to speed up coronavirus vaccinations across the country, the state of West Virginia is outpacing the national average by nearly two times.
[09:35:00]
SCIUTTO: Yes. To their credit, Governor Jim Justice says he expects his state to continue to lead on this, but he needs more vaccine doses. We're hearing that a lot around the country.
CNN's Miguel Marquez has more on what's working there and why.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: All right. If you just want to relax your arm just like that.
MIGUEL MARQUEZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice over): One shot, one arm at a time.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You're welcome.
MARQUEZ: Today, a hospice nurse.
MARQUEZ (on camera): How difficult was it to schedule this?
HOLLIE JEFFREY, GETTING SECOND MODERNA SHOT: It wasn't hard at all. They sent you the link and then you got online and just picked your place and your time and it was pretty easy.
MARQUEZ (voice over): A parole officer.
MATT MEADOWS, GETTING SECOND MODERNA SHOT: I would have gone to the end of the earth to get the vaccine.
MARQUEZ (on camera): Right. But it was ten minutes down the road?
MEADOWS: Right, ten minutes.
MARQUEZ (voice over): And a registered nurse, all in a state showing some of the best results nationwide in getting vaccines from manufacturers into arms.
NOREEN SHARKEY, GETTING SECOND MODERNA SHOT: There were so many other places in West Virginia providing it. We could choose.
MARQUEZ: Their vaccination destination, Kenova, West Virginia's local pharmacy, Griffith and Feil Drug, around since before the last pandemic in 1918.
MARQUEZ (on camera): How important is it to use places like this to distribute vaccines?
HEIDI ROMERO, GRIFFITH AND FEIL DRUG, KENOVA, WEST VIRGINIA: It's been a benefit because we had an existing relationship. A lot of the times, most of the local pharmacies already worked with the long-term care facilities.
MARQUEZ (voice over): West Virginia, which opted out of the federal government's distribution program, was the first state to administer shots to all residents and staff in all long-term care facilities statewide. Pharmacies like Griffith and Feil, a sort of unofficial community center, used local knowledge to get shots into arms. So far, they say, they've not wasted a single dose.
ROMERO: I've even driven to a patient's home just to give them a dose because it was going to go to waste. She was 99 years old. Her daughter said, she's ready to go. So I hopped in my truck, drove across town and gave it to her in her house.
MARQUEZ: This decentralized system of vaccination, in locations both small and large, along with highly organized distribution has proved an overwhelming success.
MARQUEZ (on camera): What is the most important number for you guys?
HOLLI NELSON, WEST VIRGINIA NATIONAL GUARD: The most important number is that administration rate. So how many shots are we getting in each week, how many are going into arms.
MARQUEZ: And what is that percentage right now? What's that number?
NELSON: Right now it's at 95 percent today.
MARQUEZ: Ninety-five percent.
NELSON: It starts over every week for us.
MARQUEZ (voice over): In what was a National Guard gym, the state is coordinating a sort of Amazon-like distribution system. Every week, vaccines delivered to five hubs, then distributed by the National Guard throughout the mountain state.
JOE PEAL, DIRECTOR, JOINT INTERAGENCY TASK FORCE: Right now we receive a little over 23,000 vaccines a week. We want to build a capacity that we can receive and vaccinate people over 100,000 per week.
MARQUEZ: He says they're ready to ramp up now, they only need more vaccine. Lots of it.
GOV. JIM JUSTICE (R-WV): If truly, today, we had an unlimited supply of vaccine, I would promise you beyond any doubt whatsoever, every single person in the third oldest state with the most chronic illnesses that are 65 and above in West Virginia, all of them -- all of them would have the vaccine in their arms by the 14th of February.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
SCIUTTO: Yes.
HARLOW: Wow. What a --
SCIUTTO: Credit -- credit to them for sure, right?
HARLOW: Yes.
SCIUTTO: I mean, listen, you know, some places, they're figuring it out.
HARLOW: Yes, for sure.
OK, ahead for us, something really significant just happened this morning. Robinhood, a big trading app, just said you can't buy GameStop anymore. This is bigger than a company. It's a big move. What it means for you, ahead.
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[09:42:37]
HARLOW: In the first week of Joe Biden's presidency, another 847,000 Americans have filed for first time unemployment claims.
SCIUTTO: CNN business correspondent -- chief correspondent Christine Romans joins us now.
Christine, you know, those unemployment claims but also just a devastating 2020 in terms of GDP.
CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN CHIEF BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: Yes. I mean there's a big, flashing red light here on where we are to start the New Year. You saw those jobless claims. You add in the pandemic unemployment benefits programs. They already have more than 1.2 million people for the first time filing for unemployment benefits. Just unheard of.
The annual rate of growth of the economy last year, it contracted 3.5 percent. That's the worst we've seen since we've been keeping records all the way back to World War II. I mean that is a really tough performance.
And even quarter by quarter, at the end of last year, the economy grew, you guys, about 4 percent. In normal times, that would be good, but you can see that the recovery has slowed down dramatically as the virus has proven to be resilient here at the end of the year. So this is an economy really still, still very fragile.
HARLOW: It certainly is, Christine, and something remarkable is happening in this economy as well, and that's what we talked about yesterday, what's happening this morning with GameStop. This video game store up 2,500 percent this year. But then this morning something huge happened. And that's this trading app Robinhood just halted anyone's ability to buy Game Stop, to buy AMC Movie Theaters, to buy Nokia stock.
Can you explain why it matters so much? And, also, isn't this really just a pushback against the establishment?
ROMANS: Yes.
HARLOW: Big picture?
ROMANS: It absolutely is a pushback against the establishment. It's almost as if the social media platforms, there's this online populism that is pushing back at the Wall Street insiders and the Wall Street elite and they're -- they're actually piling on into some of these stocks to really hurt the professional short sellers. And the more these stocks go up, the more the big guys are getting creamed and losing billions of dollars. So it's being cheered as sort of this democratization of Wall Street.
Remember, over the past year or two, most of these online brokers, they don't even charge a brokerage fee anymore of $7.99 or $10.99. So it's free for someone to be on one of these Reddit, you know, Wall Street Bets forums and get together with a whole bunch of other people and start buying this stock.
You know, I talked to somebody today whose son is 25 years old and made $20,000 in three days on GameStop and paid off his student loans, half of his student loans.
[09:45:04]
That's the kind of story that they're spreading and they want a piece of that.
HARLOW: Yes.
ROMANS: Buyer beware. I'm really worried here that as they start to put restrictions in on what you can buy and where you can buy it, that, you know, when the music stops, you're not going to have a chair. So please be careful out there, guys.
HARLOW: Yes.
ROMANS: This is a big game that's being played on some of these social media sites.
SCIUTTO: Yes.
ROMANS: And I love the little guy getting in there and beating the big guns when they can, but just be careful.
SCIUTTO: Yes, I mean, it --
HARLOW: But how is it -- go ahead, Jim.
SCIUTTO: The get poor stories always outnumber the get rich stories in these scenarios.
HARLOW: Yes, how --
ROMANS: A lot of these folks feel like this whole thing is rigged against them and this is their chance, with social media, their chance to actually have a voice.
HARLOW: But how is it fair for them then? I mean I read -- Reddit is saying, look, we want to protect our investors. But, by the way, if you cut them off from making the moves that they want to make with their own money, for whatever reason they want to make it, and you don't cut off the hedge funds and you don't cut out Wall Street, how is that not rigging the game?
ROMANS: That's exactly -- exactly what people are complaining about this morning. You know, why is it distortion when it's small traders banding together and buying up a stock --
SCIUTTO: Yes.
ROMANS: Where they may see legitimate glimmers of hope about a restructuring or something and it's not gaining the system when a short seller can, you know, sell shares of a company they don't even own, you know, and punish those investors, including retirement funds that maybe invested in a company.
SCIUTTO: Yes.
ROMANS: It's a -- it's a fascinating story, guys. It really is.
HARLOW: OK.
SCIUTTO: Christine Romans, thanks for staying on top of it.
ROMANS: Yes.
SCIUTTO: Well, dwindling oxygen supplies, a health care system in free-fall, an entire country now in distress. This is a look inside devastation in Brazil as a new COVID strain worsens the pandemic there. It's really an alarming tale. It's coming up.
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[09:51:13] SCIUTTO: Brazil's health care system is now collapsing as a new strain of coronavirus that was first detected there, in fact, wreaks havoc across the nation. More countries are now suspending flights in and out of Brazil. And I believe, Poppy, this has been detected now in the U.S.
HARLOW: That's right.
On one of the most impacted areas that lies in the heart of the Amazon, the city of Manaus now forces to build vertical graves. Look at those images. Vertical graves to keep up with all of these deaths.
Our Matt Rivers takes us inside of the devastation.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
MATT RIVERS, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice over): The tense quiet outside the small hospital in Urandubra (ph), Brazil, can change so fast. An ambulance suddenly pulls up in front of the hospital as a woman inside is given CPR. Medics desperately trying to save her. But a hospital source told us she died soon after this video was shot. The woman was the third COVID patient to die here this morning alone.
The overwhelmed hospital is a small example of a massive outbreak here in Brazil's northwest. Its epicenter known as the gateway to the Amazon, the city of Manaus.
The city of about 2 million is replete with scenes like this, patients packed into unsanitary hospitals with a startling lack of ventilator or even just oxygen. Recovery is a mirage.
And what's been the city's deadliest month of the pandemic by far, many here are just simply waiting to die.
This doctor says we've got 15 patients and there's two beds. It's difficult to say that we choose who lives and who dies, but we do try and save the ones with the best chance to live.
Health officials at all levels have acknowledged short comings and doctors and nurses are clearly doing their best with the little they have.
But Manaus has been here before. In April and May, last year, the health care system collapsed for the first time during the first COVID-19 wave. Some studies suggested up to 75 percent of Manaus got the virus. Thousands of newly dug graves pock mark the city cemetery, but now even those aren't enough.
RIVERS (on camera): So that's why the government is quickly building these, so-called vertical graves. They're basically coffin-size sections that will stack on top of one another and they're doing it this way because they're running out of space. By the time this project is ultimately done, the government says they will have built 22,000 vertical graves to meet the expected demand.
RIVERS (voice over): So many people got sick the first time many here simply believe that herd immunity would prevent another round. Despite many warnings from experts that that might not be true, Brazil's COVID skeptic president, Jair Bolsonaro, said there wouldn't be a second wave. Things opened up, life got back to normal, and then came a new COVID variant, P-1, originating right here in Brazil, a kind of a perfect storm.
SCOTT HENSLEY, VIRAL IMMUNOLOGIST, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA: I'm usually not an alarmist about these kind of things and I'm -- I'm concerned about what we're seeing in Brazil right now.
RIVERS: A recent study in Manaus found two-thirds of recent infections are caused by the variant, prompting fears that this variant spreads faster.
Back outside the small hospital in Uranduba (ph), we meet Maxileia Silva da Silva. Her brother has been inside with COVID for weeks, in desperate need of better care that just doesn't exist here right now. Next to the hospital, a refrigerated container was brought in to store bodies.
Take our cry for help to the world, she tells us. Tell them that this system is killing Brazilians. People who can't get into hospitals are dying.
Halfway through our interview, though, we had to pause. There was a new suspected COVID patient arriving, crying as he's admitted because everybody here knows what can happen once you go inside.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
[09:55:13]
RIVERS: And, Jim and Poppy, in the first three weeks of January here in Manaus, four times as many people died as compared to any other month during this pandemic. The country's health minister is now under criminal investigation for his role in this latest calamity and yet what have we heard from President Jair Bolsonaro? He said that the federal government has done more than its obliged to do here in Manaus. It is a stacking lack of empathy for the people, the citizens, that he purports to represent.
SCIUTTO: Yes.
HARLOW: Wow.
SCIUTTO: No question.
HARLOW: Wow. Wow. Wow, Matt, that story is so important. Thank you so much for being there and bringing it to us.
Well, ahead, you're going to see new video that shows Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene before she was elected to Congress stalking and harassing a Parkland school shooting survivor. And Republican leaders, mostly, so far, silent on that, next.
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