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Johnson & Johnson Vaccine is Single Dose But Less Effective than Pfizer and Moderna; Trump Targets Congresswoman Liz Cheney As He Unites with McCarthy; GOP Under Pressure to Rebuke Congresswoman Greene for Shocking Rhetoric; GOP House Members Who Voted to Impeach Trump Face Backlash at Home. Aired 9-9:30a ET

Aired January 29, 2021 - 09:00   ET

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

[09:00:05]

ANNOUNCER: This is CNN Breaking News.

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

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

The breaking news this morning regarding coronavirus, Johnson & Johnson says that its coronavirus vaccine, the third in line around the world, is 66 percent effective, 85 percent effective against preventing severe disease. It is submitting for its Emergency Use Authorization next week.

Now let's contrast that data with what we know so far from the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines which preceded this. They're both already authorized for emergency use and both far more than 90 percent effective. Experts have been banking on the Johnson & Johnson candidate because it requires just a single dose. That's of course a lot easier to get one shot in the arm than two a few weeks apart.

HARLOW: Yes.

SCIUTTO: And would be easier to administer.

HARLOW: That's right. So the question this morning is, what does this all mean for you? Obviously, these numbers are going to give people some pause in terms of choosing perhaps this vaccine. Dr. Fauci says vaccines, though, still, whatever you can get, the best way to keep this virus from evolving further.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

HARLOW: Officials in South Carolina also have just confirmed the nation's first cases of the South Africa variant. The new model shows the pandemic could claim nearly 654,000 lives by May 1st.

Let's begin with the J&J breaking news. Our senior medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen is with us. Can you explain what the 66 percent versus 85 percent means for

everyone watching?

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN SENIOR MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, Poppy, the bottom line for what this means is, if the Johnson & Johnson vaccine gets authorization from the FDA and you're looking for a vaccine, and you've looked for Moderna and Pfizer, which are better, there's no question, but you can't find them because there's not enough of them but you can get Johnson & Johnson, experts are telling me, get it. Do not hesitate to get it.

It's still a good vaccine. It still gives protection. It's just not quite as good as Pfizer and Moderna. But it is still good. And remember, there are plenty of vaccines out there that have the level that Johnson & Johnson is giving for other things. You know, the flu shot, for example, sometimes only 50 percent effective. And Johnson & Johnson is way better than that.

So let's take a look at what Johnson & Johnson found. When they were looking at the ability of Johnson & Johnson's vaccine to prevent moderate to severe cases, they found it was 66 percent effective. Moderna's was about 95 percent effective in that realm. Now when you look at what matters even more which is preventing severe cases, keeping people out of the hospital, keeping people alive, Johnson & Johnson was 85 percent effective.

Let me tell you, six months ago if we thought we'd have a vaccine that was 85 percent effective at that, we would all be jumping up and down in joy. Moderna and Pfizer they're 100 percent effective or nearly 100 percent effective at preventing severe disease. So, again, Johnson & Johnson's vaccine is quite good, if you can get it. Once it's approved, if it's approved, you should for sure get it.

You can always get Moderna and Pfizer later. There is nothing that precludes you from doing that. And one expert I talked to said that's what I'd do. If I could get the J&J one now, I'd get it and then I would get Moderna and Pfizer later when I was able to get it -- Poppy, Jim.

SCIUTTO: Elizabeth Cohen, thanks for breaking down the data here.

OK, joining us now to speak about this more is the infectious disease expert, Michael Osterholm. He's director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and policy at the University of Minnesota.

Dr. Osterholm, always good to have you on.

MICHAEL OSTERHOLM, INFECTIOUS DISEASE EXPERT: Thank you. Good to be with you, Jim.

SCIUTTO: OK. So help us break through this data a bit for folks listening here who are constantly bombarded with information and this goes in the good news character. There's another option coming out there from Johnson & Johnson with the advantages of being one shot versus two. Do you agree with the guidance that, listen, if this is the one that comes available to you first, take that one, take what you can get, even though it's slightly lower efficacy than Moderna and Pfizer.?

OSTERHOLM: Well, first of all, let me just say that if I were in the general public right now, my first reaction would be, I want the one that protects me the most. And, you know, we haven't really done a god job, I think, of explaining to the public that the immune response that occurs with the vaccine sometimes takes months to mature. And what all of these studies you're hearing about are really what happened in the two months after the last dose was administered.

And for example in the Johnson & Johnson study, which hasn't really been discussed, this protection got better the farther you got out from the vaccination and that actually if we had followed this several more months, it might have been an equal, if not superior vaccine to what we're seeing with Moderna and Pfizer.

So we've got to do a better job of helping the public understand these are really in my mind, three almost equivalent vaccines. The advantage here is that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is much more stable.

[09:05:04]

We can keep it in our refrigerators longer. We don't have to worry about these extreme temperature issues. And for many clinics out there, this is going to be the ideal vaccine to have. One dose, stable vaccine. Use it.

HARLOW: That is so helpful, Dr. Osterholm. A key difference is that J&J is a little bit more like a flu vaccine because it is made from a weakened virus, right? It's not the MRNA or the RNA. Does that -- should that matter to people?

OSTERHOLM: Right. It's not actually like the flu vaccine but what it is, it's another vaccine where it uses another virus piece.

HARLOW: OK.

OSTERHOLM: Basically what we call an adenovirus to help cause the antigen or the material we were trying to vaccinate you against, how it enters into the body and how it then presents itself to the immune system. So it is a tried and true method and again, it has been well researched for many, many years. So from that standpoint, again we think this is a very positive development.

SCIUTTO: OK. Now I don't want to get ahead of ourselves here because right now we're still struggling to get a first vaccine option into the arms of Americans. But if it gets to the point where all of us, and it will get to that point, where it's widely available, any of these vaccines is widely available, do you agree with the guidance that, let's say you get J&J vaccine first, that does not preclude you at a later date from getting the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine to add to your immunity? Does that make sense for folks as they think about this longer term?

OSTERHOLM: Well, let me just say right now we're on a vaccine journey.

SCIUTTO: Yes. OSTERHOLM: You know, we're going to be learning a lot about these

vaccines over the course of the next three to six months. And what I mean by that is, for example, we've already seen that the variants in South Africa can surely have a big impact on how well these vaccines work. We're going to also have more information eventually on what's happening in Brazil with that particular variant.

And so I think right now, suffice it to say, get your first doses. We're going to have to keep sorting this out. Not sorting out to look at safety. Not sorting it to look at whether you should get it or not. Get it. But we're going to ultimately be constantly re-evaluating it. What's the best way to protect the most people over time? And that may be that you will be getting a booster dose on a routine basis with one or more vaccines.

So I know it's confusing right now, but I think, you, Jim, said a very, very important thing, get your first dose now. Protect as many people as possible.

HARLOW: For sure. Probably the most important message anyone is going to hear today on this is that. You said definitively the worst is still ahead of us in this. Can you put that into context with this J&J news that we just got today?

OSTERHOLM: Well, one of the challenges we have right now is time. You know, people are talking about running a race with these variant viruses to get people vaccinated. And if that's the case, we've already lost. There's no race. If you look at what we can deliver in the United States with vaccine, literally in the first 65 days after the inauguration, not 100 days, and make that the 100 million dose goal, if you look at that, that's only about 12 percent of our population will be vaccinated and protected.

And so from this perspective, if the variants take off, as I believe this one from the U.K. is going to do in the next three to four to five weeks, by the time we get into February and March we'll still only have 12 percent of the U.S. population vaccinated, and we can see case numbers far exceeding anything we've had to date. This really, I think, is the darkest hours of this pandemic. And we have to acknowledge that.

That's what we need to start getting ready for now. What happens when we go from 150,000 cases a day, far beyond 300,000 cases a day, far beyond 120,000 hospitalizations a day. Far beyond 4,000 deaths a day. And I think that's all likely to happen in the next upcoming months.

SCIUTTO: Yes. Just such a shame all the lost time in getting a handle on this. Final question, if I can. Dr. Ashish Jha, who I know you're familiar with had an interesting thread on Twitter yesterday just talking about variants here and making the point that variants tend to show up in countries that have not gotten this under control. That have let the virus sort of do its work and mutate to a point where they could become more transmissible and possibly, we don't know yet, more deadly.

I wonder, do we have a handle on what's happening in the U.S.? Right? Because we don't do a great job of tracking, you know, the genetic signatures of these variants. Are we get anything better at seeing if we're developing our own more transmissible variants?

OSTERHOLM: Yes, well, in fact, wherever this virus is is reproducing, which right now is worldwide.

[09:10:02]

You're going to see variants develop. And we've had a number of variants. Variants are not uncommon. What we're most concerned about are the variants that cause more frequent disease transmission, more severe disease or evade our immune response from either vaccine or natural infection. And so we are worried about all of those.

Here in the United States, we do not have a good understanding of what's happening with the variant movement. We're right now 47 in the world by countries in terms of doing sequencing of this virus. I know this is a high, high priority for the new administration to basically up our games substantially. We need those data very, very badly. And so right now, we don't have a good handle on what's happening in our country.

HARLOW: It is such a hill to climb to get everyone vaccinated, distribute it and sequence the way we should be.

Dr. Osterholm, we're grateful for you this morning especially this morning.

OSTERHOLM: Thank you.

HARLOW: Thank you.

SCIUTTO: No question. So much lost time.

HARLOW: Yes.

SCIUTTO: Well, still to come this hour, fractures inside the GOP have many Republicans asking, is it still the party of Trump? Is that a good idea?

Plus, the Capitol riot suspect, insurrection really, who sat at Speaker Pelosi's desk, has been denied bail. More on new security efforts around the Capitol.

HARLOW: And later this hour, we speak with four young women all members of a club no one wants to join. Each of their husbands only in their 30s or 40s have died from coronavirus.

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UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: For weeks after he passed, I would wake up suddenly in the middle of the night, and I would reach for my phone thinking I missed the call. I missed a call from the hospital. And then you realize, no, you know, he already passed. You have to like tell yourself the story again.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HARLOW: Their strength is remarkable as they raise their young children without fathers anymore. You'll hear their stories ahead.

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[09:15:00]

HARLOW: This morning, a growing battle for the direction and the soul of a fractured Republican Party. Former President Trump out of office, but clearly not out of power at least when it comes to his own party. He and his allies are now targeting the ten house Republicans who voted for his second impeachment, including ramping up attacks on the number three ranked Republican in the house, that is Congresswoman Liz Cheney.

SCIUTTO: Well, Republicans though are staying mostly silent despite pressure by Democrats to rebuke the QAnon supporter and peddler of just the most ridiculous conspiracy theories you could imagine. Congresswoman -- she's a sitting Congresswoman, Marjorie Taylor Greene. Greene under fire for stunning often abhorrent comments calling the Parkland shooting a false flag operation.

She's also talked about a giant laser from space that caused the fires on the West Coast. We're not making this up. CNN's Lauren Fox is on Capitol Hill for more on this. You know, and I wonder, we talk about Kevin McCarthy is saying he's going to have a conversation with Taylor Greene now, sort of reminds me of the way I might talk to a 9-year- old, right, if they spoke back to me.

Is there any real effort within the party to do something about her or is she going to just go on and they're going to hope we forget about it?

LAUREN FOX, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, we're not seeing a big effort in the Republican Party at this moment. Obviously, there are some Democratic efforts to both remove her from -- Congress, excuse me, or try to kick her off of her committees.

Now ultimately, a decision to kick her off of the committees that she serves on, that would be a decision for Kevin McCarthy, the house minority leader. And we should note that in the past, he has taken those kinds of actions against former Congressman Steve King. He kicked him off of his committees and eventually King could not win his re-election.

So that can have a massive impact on a member's ability to fundraise, on a member's ability to win votes back home in their own district. So that's certainly an option if Republicans wanted to take it. But look, the Republican Party is doing a lot of soul searching right now.

They are trying to figure out where to go in a post-Trump era. Obviously, you saw Kevin McCarthy down in Florida yesterday taking that photo with the former president, a sign that he's not ready to move on as he eyes 2022 and trying to take back the House of Representatives. Now, we also saw this playing out in Wyoming yesterday.

You had Matt Gaetz; a conservative member of the freedom caucus who was literally campaigning against Liz Cheney, a member of his own leadership. Here's what he said in Wyoming.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. MATT GAETZ (R-FL): We are in a battle for the soul of the Republican Party, and I intend to win it.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes --

GAETZ: You can help me! You can help me break a corrupt system. You can send a representative who actually represents you, and you can send Liz Cheney home.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes --

GAETZ: Back home to Washington D.C.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

FOX: And we should note that there's just such a juxtaposition in what you're seeing out of House Republicans right now especially Kevin McCarthy, their leader and what you're seeing from Minority leader Mitch McConnell who has not spoken to the former president since December. A clear divide here in the party, between the house and some in Senate Republican leadership. Something to keep an eye on as they continue battling this out, not just for days and weeks, but potentially months and years.

SCIUTTO: Lauren Fox, just quickly, do Republicans have the votes to remove Cheney at this point from the leadership position or is that still an open question?

FOX: Well, I still have sources telling me that this is a very steep climb to remove her from her leadership position.

[09:20:00]

That doesn't mean they're not going to talk about it next week when they have a conference meeting to discuss this potentially and other issues, but I definitely think it is still a very steep climb, and it's a big question mark. And I think a large part of it is going to depend on where Kevin McCarthy lands. Clearly, he has stood by her side throughout this process. If he starts to get some pressure from the right to potentially move beyond her, I think that, that could have an influence on where the party goes.

SCIUTTO: We'll see. McCarthy has moved before on this, sometimes within the same day. Lauren Fox, thanks very much. Joining me now to discuss is Olivia Troye; former Homeland Security Counterterrorism and COVID Taskforce adviser to the former Vice President Mike Pence.

And Elizabeth Neumann; she's former assistant secretary of Counterterrorism at the Department of Homeland Security. They're both part of a group of Republicans and Trump administration alums forming the Republican Accountability Project which plans to support lawmakers who voted to impeach Trump and to go after Republicans who continue to support the former president. Thanks so much for joining us. Good to have you on.

ELIZABETH NEUMANN, FORMER ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF COUNTERTERRORISM AT THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY: Thanks for having us.

SCIUTTO: So the Republican Accountability Project, its main goals to try to protect Republicans who you say had the backbone to vote to impeach the president, give them resources, et cetera, but also hold Republicans accountable who have, you know, bought into the big lie about stolen election, et cetera.

I just wonder -- if I want to -- if I can begin with you, Elizabeth, given how much of the base is still loyal to Trump -- I mean, you don't have a 10 percent problem here within the party. You've got like an 80 percent problem, right? Do you believe you realistically have the resources and the backing to win this, to win this battle?

NEUMANN: Well, I have two answers to that. One, I don't know that 80 percent of the Republican Party are actually die-hard Trump supporters. I think the number is actually much less. There's a difference between holding your nose and voting for somebody or voting for policies and especially after January 6th, seeing where the rhetoric has led to realizing that character really does matter. I think there's a softening happening right now. And I think some of these leaders in Congress are misreading cues.

They're probably having a little bit of abused spouse syndrome where they're scared of his shadow. This is their opportunity to separate and redefine the party away from Trump. And aside from all of that, you know, the reason we did this project, it wasn't because we're trying to save the party.

It's because what they have done in participating in the president -- in President Trump's lies, it led to violence, and they need to be held accountable. They need to come clean and tell the truth that the election was not stolen and they need to apologize to their constituents if they want to have a political future.

SCIUTTO: Olivia Troye, what Republican lawmakers have said to me in private, though, as you know, it's only a handful willing to say it in public is, yes, all this is damaging. Yes, the old man is crazy, but if I say that in public, I'll never be elected again.

So I get that -- you always have overreach, right? You have parties always overestimate, you know, to some degree their mandate here. But how do you fight that dynamic, right? I mean, because -- I mean, the ten who voted to impeach him, seven already are going to be primaried.

OLIVIA TROYE, FORMER HOMELAND SECURITY COUNTERTERRORISM & COVID TASKFORCE ADVISER TO FORMER VICE PRESIDENT MIKE PENCE: Well, I think that's why it's important to hold the people accountable. The main players who enabled the narrative of the big lie and who led us down the path of what happened on January 6th. And I think it's important also to remind these Republicans who

elected officials in office that this is a culmination of four years under Donald Trump. But this didn't happen overnight. And so these -- behind closed door conversations that I have personally witnessed while working in the White House with a lot of these Republicans and other political operatives and the politicals that work there, can only go so far.

But you have to at some point take a stand. Having a behind-closed- door conversation is actually not going to do what's right for the country when this moment really matters. And we've just had an insurrection on the U.S. Capitol, and we have a whole scenario of a population out there who believed the lies of these elected individuals and, you know, that is important. We need -- we need to, you know, hold these people accountable for what they've done.

SCIUTTO: You know, there's that principled argument, Elizabeth, there, right? There's also the political argument. And it's interesting, Amy Walter made the point yesterday about McCarthy's visit to Trump and Trump's potential help in 2022 that the fact is, Trump doesn't help a lot in these races when his name is not on the ballot.

Didn't help in 2018, as you know, Republicans lost 40-some odd seats in the house. From a purely -- let's set aside principle for a moment, so easy to do in Washington. And just go at the politics here. You know, is there a political argument you make to these candidates, saying, guys, it's not going to work for you?

[09:25:00]

NEUMANN: Well, I think you've heard many commentators talk about nobody can beat Trump but Trump. And all of -- like even what Matt Gaetz did yesterday is a clear attempt to try to be like Trump. Marjorie Taylor --

SCIUTTO: Yes --

NEUMANN: Greene, her -- you know, the stuff that she tries to do online, the little video clips that she posts, I mean, she's clearly trying to build a brand and a following like Trump. Nobody is going to be able to repeat what Trump did, and I think they're eventually going to fail in their attempts and what they -- my argument to them would be, look, now is the time. There's white space if you will. There's this --

SCIUTTO: Yes --

NEUMANN: Pause before the real campaign starts. You could actually lay out principles and lay out policy positions and gather a following. You could actually do something called lead as opposed to following your base. And --

SCIUTTO: Yes --

NEUMANN: There are a lot of serious issues in this country that if they would focus less on their video viral feeds and the outrage and more on the policy, I think the country wants that. I think most Republicans want to get back to normal dialogue about politics and policy.

SCIUTTO: Yes, well, I think they do. You know, the trouble is the current process doesn't seem to reward that. Olivia, before we go, I wonder, you do have something of a push, if you can call it that within the Republican to somehow hold Marjorie Taylor Greene responsible for, you know, propagating the big lie about the election, but a whole host of whack-a-doodle crazy conspiracy theories.

I mean, the favorite yesterday was this giant laser from space that caused the wildfires in California. Anyway, it's real. It's out there. What does it accomplish for the GOP, though, to, you know, disavow her, but still embrace the number one peddler of the big lie, the president himself -- the former president?

TROYE: Well, I think that speaks to the future of the Republican Party and what direction they want to go in. And do they want to continue to be the enablers and the subscribers to conspiracy movements like the QAnoners who they've elected to office and they've allowed to gain office, or are they going to hold them accountable and ask them to resign and purge the GOP of these types of entities, beginning with Donald Trump which is why we've actually called for his conviction.

We need to remove him from coming back again, and we need to show the example of holding someone like that accountable in this situation so that we can get rid of the rest of these people --

SCIUTTO: Yes --

TROYE: Who are part of the same problem.

SCIUTTO: Well, it is remarkable. And we should -- we should remember that, that here we have two Republicans serving the administration who says, listen, you know, this shall not stand. Olivia Troye, Elizabeth Neumann, thanks so much to both of you. And we'll be right back.

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