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Stopping New Virus Strains; Accurate Information to get over Vaccine Hurdles; Biden's Executive Orders on Immigration; COVID Stimulus Plan; Judge Deciding Navalny's Case. Aired 9:30-10a

Aired February 02, 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]

JACQUELINE HOWARD, CNN HEALTH REPORTER: Brazil. One in the U.K., first identified in the U.K. and Brazil and one first identified in South Africa. The concern here is that as these variants circulate, we could see the risk of reinfection among people who have already had COVID-19 and as the virus jumps from person to person and it replicates and mutates, we could have the risk of more variants emerging.

That's something that Dr. Anthony Fauci has really emphasized. And that's why we really are pushing for more vaccine, not just for personal health to protect your -- or reduce your own risk of reinfection, but for public health, to reduce the risk of more variants.

So the weather's slowing things down but there is more of a push because of this risk.

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR: We need it.

Jacqueline Howard, thanks very much.

Well, the CDC says that while vaccinations are high among the residents of nursing homes, more than 60 percent of nursing home staff have turned down shots, even when they've been offered. Why? Concerns over how fast the vaccine was developed, approved, safety, frankly, just plain lack of accurate information.

I want to speak now to Christopher Graves. He's the founder and president of the Ogilvy Center for Behavioral Science. And he's been working to provide accurate information to get over some of these hurdles here.

Chris, thanks so much for joining us this morning.

CHRISTOPHER GRAVES, PRESIDENT AND FOUNDER, OGILVY CENTER FOR BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE: Thanks for having me, Jim.

SCIUTTO: So one of the issues getting in the way now, but really is persistent since the start of the pandemic, is the sad fact that big portions of the country either don't believe COVID's that serious or don't believe it's that serious to them in particular. You call that an optimism bias.

Can you explain what's behind that and how you get over that?

GRAVES: Yes, thanks.

Optimism bias, in fact, is in all of us. Even at banal (ph) things. If you ask people whether they think they're an above-average driver, probably 90 percent of people tell you they're an above average driver. We all think that we're better than average. And that includes escaping sickness, escaping harm.

And so there's an inherent bias (INAUDIBLE). It's stronger in some people who feel that, yes, I know that COVID might be a real thing for some, but probably won't be so bad for me or I won't catch it.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

GRAVES: How to overcome that, you know, that happens when somebody near and dear to you, somebody close to you gets very ill. When it's remote, it's much more difficult for people to figure that out.

You mentioned the nursing home workers.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

GRAVES: You know, I've seen that job pretty close. My mother passed away in a nursing home about four months ago. That's a tough job, low- paid job. These are not doctors. And I think they saw the pandemic chaos up close and are a little bit wary about how fast vaccines came online. So a major, major part of this is the story of how vaccines work and how we could make them so rapidly this time without cutting corners on safety.

SCIUTTO: You say that, you know, listen, the data, let's put it up on the screen so people know this, if anybody has questions as well. The data is very strong here about how well vaccines work. But if you look, 75,000 U.S. adults, COVID would have killed 150 -- sorry, wrong graphic. There we go. COVID would have killed 150 of them. A typical flu, five to 15, much less dangerous. And out of 75,000 people who received a COVID vaccine, how many have died? Zero.

So the data is on the side of getting vaccinated here. But you say people, they need social proof, just like they need someone to get sick to consider COVID real, they need someone to be fine after a vaccine to -- or many people do to take it themselves?

GRAVES: That's absolutely right. And that's what we're seeing now. When you see on the second and third reports in the nursing homes, you're beginning to see more uptake on the nursing home workers. Why? Because now that they see, you know, 6 million, 10 million people, they see their co-workers who are vaccinated having no harm other than soreness, maybe some fever, maybe some chills, but certainly they're not dying from the vaccine, whereas they are dying from COVID-19.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

GRAVES: So that social proof is going to lead.

I'm very optimistic that amongst the nursing home workers, as they see those around them and talk daily to those around them, some of this fear and disinformation is going to melt away.

SCIUTTO: Let me ask you a self-critical question, if I can. Do we, in the media or others, inadvertently contribute to these questions by the way we cover and discuss these things, and how can we do it better?

GRAVES: The answer is, Jim, all the time media contributes to that. And I can say that as a recovering newsperson myself. And that is this, that whenever, for example, you want to, you know, explode myths, by repeating the myth, you may do more damage. It doesn't mean you sensor. It means you talk about what you know and what the evidence is, rather than repeating the disinformation.

[09:35:02]

Repeating disinformation does not help. So that's one.

Second, when you look at what's working, just as you said, you know, when we look and obsess about efficacy, it's great. I can tell you, I've been working in vaccines, behavioral science for years and the American public, prior to the pandemic, wasn't talking about efficacy.

But when you look at it and you look at a blunt number like 95 versus 72, you say, oh, wow, that's a huge difference. But as many of the immunologists were pointing out recently, look at the hospitalizations, sickness and mortality rate post-vaccination. People are not going into hospital and they're not dying after vaccination.

SCIUTTO: Yes. And that's, listen, that's the outcome we want, of course, especially given the death toll that is on the side of our screen here.

Christopher Graves, thanks for helping us break through it all.

GRAVES: Jim, thanks for having me.

HARLOW: Wow, that was such a great segment and so helpful. Our thanks to him.

Ahead, President Biden is taking aim today at his predecessor's immigration policies. He'll issue several executive orders. Ahead, what these mean for families who have been separated at the border.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ILSE MENDEZ, DACA RECIPIENT: We've lived four years of Trump stringing us along.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[09:40:40]

SCIUTTO: President Biden will sign three executive orders today to roll back several hardline immigration policies from the Trump era. Among them, one of the most controversial and derided, establishing a task force designed to reunite families separated at the U.S./Mexico border.

HARLOW: Our Ed Lavandera takes a closer look at how these policy changes could impact everything from construction of the border wall to the future of DACA recipients.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ED LAVANDERA, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice over): Ilsa Mendez came to Laredo, Texas, with her parents at the age of two. She's now 33. Everyone in her family, including her four children, are now U.S. citizens, except her. Mendez is one of the hundreds of thousands of people known as dreamers. President Biden is proposing a pathway to citizenship for these immigrants who have been able to live in the U.S. because of the Obama-era program known as DACA.

ILSA MENDEZ, DACA RECIPIENT: We've lived four years of Trump stringing us along with that fear and anxiety. So I'm hopeful that something will -- something positive will come out of these different legislations or these executive actions that Biden has brought.

LAVANDERA: The Trump administration rolled out four years of controversial programs that critics have often described as inhumane, but that many conservatives have celebrated. There are still 611 children separated from their parents as part of the Trump administration's zero tolerance policy. The Biden administration is proposing a task force to reunify those families.

JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I will accomplish what I said I would do, a much more humane policy based on family unification.

LAVANDERA: On other issues, Biden will face legal challenges. The president issued a 100-day pause on deportations, but a federal judge has temporarily blocked that move. And there are still about 28,000 migrants sitting in Mexican border towns seeking asylum through the controversial remain in Mexico policy. Advocates have pushed for these migrants to be allowed into the country while their cases are handled in immigration courts.

Former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Ronald Vitiello warns that Biden's immigration policies could create another surge of migrants at the southern border.

RONALD VITIELLO, FORMER ACTING DIRECTOR OF ICE: My warning would be, learn from the history that we already have. When you roll back those elements of what's in place now, then you're going to -- you're going to encourage people.

LAVANDERA: And then there is the issue of the border wall.

LAVANDERA (on camera): How much do you enjoy this view?

JOSEPH HEIN, TEXAS LANDOWNER: I'm going to see it through bars. It's going to be horrible.

LAVANDERA (voice over): Last year, Joseph Hein was bracing for construction of the border wall across his ranch on the bank of the Rio Grande in Texas. We returned to see him after President Biden halted all construction.

HEIN: Along the road that they built, they've put these markers.

LAVANDERA: But now Hein feels like he's won the border wall fight, at least for four years anyway.

HEIN: The way I saw it, it was a hostile takeover of my property and I was being treated like a second class citizen. And they were fine and dandy with it.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

LAVANDERA: So all of these issues, and President Biden is also pledging to support a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants already in the United States. A path that would include criminal background checks, as well as proof that the immigrants are learning English. So it's just one in a wide array of issues -- controversial issues that the president will be weighing into later today.

Jim and Poppy.

HARLOW: Ed Lavandera, thank you very much for that important reporting.

Well, in Washington, the battle over stimulus continues. Will the size of those stimulus checks be key to helping struggling Americans or not? A non-partisan economist with the numbers, next.

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[09:48:53]

HARLOW: President Biden and Republican senators are still pretty far apart on key details of the next COVID stimulus plan. Bottom line, Democrats want to go big. Is that better?

With me now is the leading expert on poverty in America, Dr. Raj Chetty, professor of economics at Harvard.

It's very good to have you.

And I wanted you to come on the show, Raj, because you crunched the numbers and I should say you make a point of being independent, nonpartisan. You don't even vote. So there are optics of leaning one way or the other. You looked at the numbers. Bottom line, what did you find?

RAJ CHETTY, WILLIAM A. ACKMAN PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS, HARVARD UNIVERSITY: Yes, so, Poppy, thanks for having me.

What we did in our most recent work is look at the impacts of the $600 stimulus checks that were sent to many Americans on January 4th. And what we asked basically is, did people spend that money when they got it?

And what we found using data on credit card and debit card spending for millions of Americans is that lower and middle income folks, people making less than $50,000 or $75,000 a year, they spent most of that money almost immediately very quickly. But for people making higher levels of income, more than about $75,000, they ended up saving most of the money.

[09:50:05]

And so, as a result, those stimulus checks didn't really end up impacting the amount they spent -- they'd spent.

HARLOW: In fact, you found that $200 billion of government spending only added $15 billion to the economy, right? But the pushback from other economists that I talked to, to that, is, look, it's good for people, even who make up to $75,000 to have a cushion, some sort of cushion and their argument is they may be saving it in the near term, but the data showed they spend it in the long-term, right, when they're -- when there's no more moratorium on rent, for example.

CHETTY: Yes, so, you know, that's, I think, a reasonable point. So, concretely, what we're estimating is, if we have another round of $1,400 stimulus checks, which is what currently discussed, we estimate that if that money went to households making more than $75,000 a year, that would cost the federal government about $200 billion. And in the first month or two, people would spend only about $15 billion of that.

Now, it's true that in the longer run eventually they might spend that money. But the key thing I would note is that lots of those folks who are higher up in the income distribution, they've gotten their jobs back or didn't lose their jobs to begin with when COVID hit several months.

HARLOW: Yes.

CHETTY: And they've been kind of building up a stockpile of savings because they've been cutting back on the amount they're spending because, you know, you can't go out to eat, you can't go out, you know, you don't want to go out to travel, et cetera. And so when you've got a big stock of savings giving you an extra $1,400, it may not be the most critical use of government resources.

HARLOW: OK. So, Raj, I want to get your reaction to what I heard on this program yesterday from the Republican governor of West Virginia.

Here he is.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GOV. JIM JUSTICE (R-WV): They're trying to be per se fiscally responsible. At this point in time with what we've got going on in this country, if we actually throw away some money right now, so what. We have really got to move and get people taken care of and get people back on balance.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HARLOW: Chairman Powell seemed to echo that. Janet Yellen said you've got to go big. Even Ben Bernanke, a Republican who led us through the last big downturn, warned this summer, don't make the mistake we did in 2008. You've got to give more. You've got to go big on state and local aid.

Do you think they're right?

CHETTY: I totally agree with that sentiment. I think it's important to be aggressive, to not worry about being fiscally prudent or conservative at this time. But, that said I think the way we spend the money really matters as well.

And so extending unemployment benefits further, increasing unemployment benefit levels for people who have lost their jobs, shoring up the social safety net, carefully targeted state and local aid, I think all of these things could have a big bank for the buck. And by that I mean money that actually gets spent, Poppy, right?

HARLOW: Yes.

CHETTY: That that's what restores the economy. Businesses have more revenue. They start to hire more workers. If people take the money and just save it, that's not the most effective use of resources. So I completely agree with the sentiment, we should go big but we should go big in the right way.

HARLOW: It sounds like maybe they're call you back into the White House. I know you briefed then President-elect Biden on all of this in August. Maybe they'll call you again on all of this.

Raj, your research and the nonpartisan approach is critical. I urge everyone to read it. Thank you for being with us.

CHETTY: Thank you. A pleasure.

HARLOW: :Jim.

SCIUTTO: Facing years in prison, Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny, the victim of an attempted deadly poisoning, is not backing down. We're live outside the Moscow courthouse where he launched a new, very personal attack on the Russian president.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[09:58:05]

HARLOW: Well, right now a judge is deciding whether Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny will serve jail time. He has been in jail since returning to Russia last month. SCIUTTO: Remember this, he spent months in a German hospital after

being poisoned with what experts say was a Russian powerful nerve agent Novichok. Russian officials say that that hospital stay was a parole violation. It's the finding of the U.S. intelligence that he was the target of an assassination attempt.

CNN's Fred Pleitgen is live outside the courthouse this morning.

Fred, today, Navalny went right after Putin himself.

FREDERIK PLEITGEN, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, he certainly did, Jim. And he said some things that are almost unheard of, almost impossible to say here in Russia. He said that he believed that Vladimir Putin -- the reason why he's being put on trial is that Vladimir Putin is angry that he survived his poisoning.

He even referenced that investigation that CNN and Bellingcat did, which essentially he showed that it was apparently the FSB, the Russian intelligence service, that was behind the poisoning of Alexey Navalny. Navalny saying, look, my poison was investigated and it turned out that it was Vladimir Putin and the Russia intelligence services who did that.

But by far the thing that's raising the most eyebrows here in Russia and from anybody whose observing that in this courtroom is that he said that Vladimir Putin wants to be a big geopolitical politician but now he is simply known as, quote, Vladimir the poisoner or Putin the poisoner. At one point he even called him Putin the poisoner of underpants, of course referring to the fact that apparently that chemical nerve agent was put on the seam of his underwear to poison him. So some pretty strong stuff coming there from Alexey Navalny.

The judge seemed absolutely shocked by this as well. He kept trying to interrupt Navalny and Navalny then yelled at the judge and said, I don't need your objections and continued with what was a 15 minute speech as he was in the docket.

As you've already said, he faces up to 3.5 years in prison because they say the fact that he was in rehab in Germany and getting back on his feet, though, that that was something that was a parole violation.

[10:00:04]

One last thing, Jim, we also asked the Kremlin about this.