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Biden Meets with House Democratic Leaders on COVID Relief Bill; University of Oxford Says, AstraZeneca Vaccine Effective Against U.K. Variant. Aired 10-10:30a ET

Aired February 05, 2021 - 10:00   ET

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

[10:00:00]

POPPY HARLOW, CNN NEWSROOM: Good morning, top of the hour. I'm Poppy Harlow.

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

Happening right now, a major meeting at the White House underway, President Biden sitting down with House Democratic leaders, this is as Congress pushes forward with his $1.9 trillion COVID relief package. Republicans so far have pushed back on the size and scope. They proposed less than a third of that value.

But Democrats do have the votes to pass their own bill, putting the president's call for bipartisanship and unity to the test.

HARLOW: We are also watching less than an hour from now, the White House COVID-19 team holds a press conference as we're getting new warnings on coronavirus variants rapidly spreading across the country.

Let's begin with Manu Raju, he joins us on the Hill, John Harwood joins us from the White House.

Manu, it is really interesting, Jared Bernstein just made very clear to me, no, no, no, we're still negotiating but at the same time, they're still full steam ahead into not needing a single Republican vote.

MANU RAJU, CNN CHIEF CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes. It is very unlikely that this bill that the Democrats is going to win over any Republicans, certainly not any Senate Republicans based on the size and scope of the legislation that they are pursuing this morning, early this morning after a marathon session in the Senate.

They took the first key step towards passing a bill without Republican support. They passed a budget resolution. That essentially would set the stage for moving forward with the larger package, that $1.9 trillion package that includes what Joe Biden has been looking for, getting that through both chambers and avoiding a Republican filibuster by using the budget process.

Now, the next few weeks are absolutely critical, because while they just passed the budget in the Senate, they're going to get final approval in the House and they can begin -- formally begin the drafting and writing of that legislation.

This first part that happened was the easy part. The tough part really begins, which is why this meeting in the White House is important. The Democratic leaders and the key chairman will be talking with the president, the president and his team, to discuss exactly how they want to move this legislation forward, that process and their plan.

But then they're going to start getting into the details writing out $1.9 trillion in federal spending is a very complicated and not to mention the politics internally in getting a conservative Democrat like a Joe Manchin on the same side as a liberal independent Bernie Sanders who sides with the Democrats. That is going to be a complicated task and something they're going to have to continue to navigate.

So, some big decisions, how to structure relief checks for individuals in particular, among many, many other details, but that is the next couple of weeks here to get that sorted out here, guys.

SCIUTTO: John, the politics for Republicans are not exactly easy either here, right, because they'll be put in the position of voting no on money going out to people who need it, right? I mean, George W. Bush did this in 2001 with the tax package and went through reconciliation and got Democrats on board who said, well, actually tax cuts are pretty popular.

I wonder is that the White House kind of bet here, right, that even if they don't get agreement, they'll get some Republican votes?

JOHN HARWOOD, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Well, it is possible that they'll get a small number of Republican votes. After all, some of the polling has shown that a significant chunk of Republicans respond favorably when elements of the Biden proposal are described.

But even if there is a political discomfort for Republicans and opposing big checks for people, there is also a partisan imperative and the strong sentiment within their base is not with Joe Biden. And so it is not going to be all that difficult for most Republicans to vote against it.

But Joe Biden is going to make the case and he's going to make a speech this morning that given the fact that we had this week and more than 700,000 people filing first-time unemployment claims, yes, the unemployment rate went down but 400,000 people left the labor force. We're still down 10 million jobs for what we had pre-pandemic. They're going to make the case we need this bill to get to the other side of the pandemic and get this economy going again. All indications are, as Manu said, that they're going to be able to hold Democrats.

[10:05:02]

They will be making changes. It is clear that they're going to change the -- they're going to tailor the qualification for those $1,400 checks. That may drop $1.9 trillion down to, say, $1.7 trillion, but it is not going to be a large scale change in the package. Republicans simply aren't willing to meet them anywhere close to what Biden has proposed and that is why the legislative version of bipartisanship isn't going to -- isn't likely to work even if the popular support version of bipartisanship is there to some extent.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

HARLOW: Politics of it all. John Harwood, thanks, Manu, always good to have you guys.

Next hour, we are expecting to hear from Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. She was stripped of her committee assignments last night. 11 Republicans joined Democrats to remove her from those committees for all of the things that she have said, about support for QAnon conspiracy theories, support of violent rhetoric, et cetera.

SCIUTTO: CNN's Jessica Dean joins us now with more. Jessica, Democrats wanted accountability here and Republicans wanted to kind of put this behind them, right? But based on her public comments, it doesn't seem like Greene is going to silent here, right, including on the big lie of the election being stolen.

JESSICA DEAN, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Right, Jim. We do not expect her to be quiet or to fade into the night, so to speak, now that this vote has happened and she's been striped from her committees. In fact, she tweeted first thing this morning that she woke up laughing at what she said a bunch of morons, the Democrats and Republicans are to give, quote, someone like me more free time.

So, clearly, she anticipates being here and she told a newspaper earlier this week that she anticipates spending a lot of her time on whatever former President Trump's next venture is and also supporting very conservative Republican candidates.

Now, what do we expect today? Well, coming up here in just the next hour, we do expect her to have a press conference. We do expect her to take questions since that is typically how a press conference works. I've tried to ask her questions here at the Capitol in the hallways for the several days along with a lot of other reporters and she has not answered any of our questions really. So this would be an opportunity for us to hear from her and ask her some of the questions that we would like her to answer to.

We did see her on the House floor yesterday talking about her beliefs and walking back some of them, but not explicitly apologizing for any of them. This was before the vote. But that, of course, was her version of events and what she wanted to say. So, hopefully, we'll get a bit of back and forth with answers later today.

Important to note about the vote, Jim and Poppy, we did see 11 Republicans siding with the Democrats in that vote to remove her from her committees. Those 11 Republicans, not the same Republicans, it is a different group than the ten who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump, and, again, 11 there, so, more willing to go with the Democrats on this issue, Jim and Poppy.

SCIUTTO: Yes. Kinzinger one who straddled both groups. But it is not a small number when you think about within the party. Jessica Dean, thanks very much.

Joining us now to talk about this, Tia Mitchell, she's Washington Correspondent for The Atlanta Journal Constitution. Tia, good to have you.

Listen, all politics is local, right? And, by the way, Greene won a primary and she won her district. Tell us about that district here and is she -- are these views popular there?

TIOA MITCHELL, WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT, ATLANTA JOURNAL CONSTITUTION: So, Greene won a primary and a runoff against another Republican and then, of course, the general election. And the problematic comment were covered in media including the Atlanta Journal Constitution prior to the election. So we can't say that voters in her district were not aware of some of the comments she made.

I think there is a divide now. The district is very conservative. It is rural Northwest Georgia. There are Republicans who say they are troubled that Greene came to Washington and seems to be more concerned with, you know, raising cane and doubling down on her most problematic statements than she is on doing the legislative work that they sent her to Washington to do.

But she also still has a lot of support among far-right conservatives and Trump loyalists who like what she's doing and they think she -- you know, they're saying keep going, keep at it, keep raising hell. That is what we want to see from you. So it's that divide that kind of defines what she's doing, even what we're seeing today, that duality of showing remorse on the House floor but then tweeting more defiant this morning.

HARLOW: Those are such good points and I'm so glad you have a pulse, I mean, because you've covered all of the races and covered the district here, Tia.

[10:10:00]

You know, when Steve King finally got striped of his committee assignments, he didn't get re-elected. I wonder if you think this is different though, right? Because one of the points you made in your reporting is maybe she's not losing all of her power here.

MITCHELL: Yes, so this district is so deeply conservative. And, again, it is not like she wasn't known to have said racist, xenophobic, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic things before she was elected and that runoff was very telling because that runoff was, again, against another Republican who basically campaigned on, hey, guys, I'm just as conservative as she is but without the problems, and she still won.

And so I think it is unlikely that she would lose in a deeply conservative district like that. There is chatter about redistricting and how that could affect it the 14th, but it is such a deep red pocket of the state that it would be hard to make it less competitive for someone, again, because Trump remains popular in this part of the state as well. And also, she -- it is not like she was tied to the district, she moved there to run. So she could also just move somewhere else and run again.

SCIUTTO: Yes. It took a few years for voters to turn on Steve King, by the way, after years of racism. Tia, I wonder if I can ask you on a separate issue, because legislators in Georgia, they've already introduced legislation to roll back voter access there that expanded the vote in the 2020 election, including to black communities there and it led so such high turnout in 2020 and probably helped turn the state blue. Will these measured succeed? Do Democrats have a way? Does Stacey Abrams have a way to stand in the way of restrictions on voter access?

MITCHELL: I don't think -- well, Democrats don't have enough votes in the Georgia General Assembly to block Republican initiatives like this. And Governor Kemp, even though he stood against President Trump in the big election lie, as you guys have called it, he's still very conservative and it would be unlikely for him to veto these measures.

So activists like Stacey Abrams and the other Democratic organizations, voting organizations, they're only remedy would be the courts. I think the courts could probably give them some reprieve and if nothing else could maybe delay some of the implementations, but it is unlikely.

Some of these proposals are unpopular with the Republican leadership, including, for example, eliminating excuse-free absentee voting. That is not really popular at the upper levels of the GOP. So that is less likely to pass. But requiring, for example, more identification, driver's license numbers and things like that to vote by mail is more likely to pass. And, again, I don't think the Democrats could do much to stop it.

SCIUTTO: And those are deliberately targeted at certain communities. I mean, it is transparent. Sad to see.

HARLOW: Tia Mitchell, thank you -- go ahead.

MITCHELL: I was going to say, Republicans have said that, even in Georgia. Republicans have said, you know, they think that it will help their chances of winning if they pass some of these measures that limit access to voting. So it is not conjecture, it is what Republicans themselves have said.

HARLOW: Out of their mouths. Tia Mitchell, really go to have you. Come back soon.

MITCHELL: Thank you.

HARLOW: So, Johnson & Johnson is asking the FDA for emergency use authorization for their one-dose COVID vaccine. Dr. Sanjay Gupta is with us next to discuss.

SCIUTTO: Plus, former President Donald Trump has refused to testify in his second impeachment trial next week. Will Congress subpoena him? Will other witnesses be called?

And as President Biden pushes for more schools to reopen for in-person learning, new data shows that many black parents are not ready to send their children back to school. Ahead, why and how it goes deeper than the pandemic.

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SCIUTTO: This was just moments ago in the White House, President Biden meeting with Democratic House leaders, the president, the speaker, Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, Jim Clyburn, the whip as well, discussions there, of course, on the way forward on COVID relief. We'll bring you any updates from that meeting. That is the president speaking there.

HARLOW: There is also some encouraging new data suggesting the AstraZeneca COVID vaccine is effective against the COVID variant first identified in the U.K. This is according to Oxford, which, of course, collaborated with AstraZeneca on that vaccine.

It is good news coming as the threat of emerging variants pushes officials to speed up on vaccinating people in the U.S. and around the world.

The pace of the vaccinations in the U.S. outnumbered new COVID cases ten to one, which is fantastic news, Jim.

SCIUTTO: That is a fascinating figure. And we should take some comfort from that. We all need some comfort.

CNN's Athena Jones joins us now from one of these mass vaccination sites here, New York City's Yankee Stadium.

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Athena, we're seeing this around the country, sports stadiums being used, Fenway Park in Boston, Yankee Stadium here in New York. Who is eligible and what is the turnout like?

ATHENA JONES, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Jim. Yes, that is right, Yankee Stadium, perhaps the Bronx's most iconic landmark, is now going to be known for something else. This is going to be a mass vaccination site open only residents of the Bronx. So if you make an appointment here, what you have to do is by appointment- only. You also have to bring proof that you are a resident of the Bronx.

And so you have National Guard members, the National Guard going along these lines and people have been lining up now for about two hours before the site opened at 8:00 A.M. this morning. Now, National Guardsmen are going down the line, making sure they have appointments, that they are residents of the Bronx, separating out people who don't have appointments so they can get help getting appointments. This is a site that's going to open from 8:00 A.M. to 8:00 P.M. Monday through Friday. There are 15,000 appointments available this first week. We're told that today, there are only going to about a thousand and they will be ramping that up.

Now, this is a site that is very important for city officials when it comes to fairness and equity. They want to make sure they can get vaccines into more people faster and more evenly. They've chosen the Bronx for this site because this is the borough that has the highest COVID test positivity rate in the entire city. Just by comparison, we're talking about over 6 percent here in the Bronx when you're talking about 3.5 percent in Manhattan.

This is also the borough that has the highest poverty rate in the city and there is a large population of black and Latino and poor residents. And we know not just here in New York but all across the country that these communities have been hit the hardest by COVID. They're more likely to get sick and more likely to die. We're talking about essential workers, and so that is why they have launched this site here today.

And so far, so good, we're told by SOMOS, which is running this, that 13,000 of the 15,000 appointments available over the course of this week have already been taken. Jim?

SCIUTTO: Folks, go take advantage of it. You're lucky if you have the opportunity to get vaccinated. Athena Jones, thanks very much.

Well, this just in, the drug maker AstraZeneca says it expects results from its U.S. COVID-19 vaccine trial in the next four to six weeks. This comes as the University of Oxford, which developed this vaccine, published this morning a non-peer reviewed study, so an early study, which says that the vaccine is effective, this is key, against the U.K. variant of the coronavirus, which has been shown to be more transmissible. That's good news as well.

HARLOW: That is great news. Joining us now, our chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta, good morning, Sanjay.

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Good morning.

HARLOW: Promising news on this time line for Oxford-AstraZeneca, if it gets approved here, and, yes, it is not peer reviewed but encouraging, right, that Oxford says, and, by the way, it works against the U.K. variant, too.

GUPTA: Absolutely. I mean, this is the key question I think a lot of people are asking right now. We know the virus is mutating and these variants are emerging. Do these vaccines, which induce all sorts of different immunity in the body, do they provide enough coverage for the variants? And I think, just as you said, I looked at some of this data, it is early data out of AstraZeneca, we've been following the trial since its inception, and it does seem to be effective against these variants. We're obviously going to want to see the final data to confirm that. Why four to six weeks from now to get some of this data? That is typically sort of dictated by the fact that you need to have at least two months of safety data as well as you remember. This is a back and forth that occurred before Pfizer got authorized. That is what is typically dictating when these first see the results. But if it holds up, then that will be another vaccine that I think could potentially have authorization. It is already been authorized in other parts of the world.

SCIUTTO: Yes, our cup runeth over almost at this point, Sanjay, because you also have the Johnson & Johnson vaccine coming through, it's asking the FDA to authorize its vaccine. What do we know about it? I guess a big picture question for me is, from your vantage point, when is it most likely that most people in this country will have access to any of these vaccines?

GUPTA: Yes. Well, let me talk about the Johnson & Johnson one because I think this is instructive, for a second.

What do you expect when you take a vaccine? I had this conversation with my parents, they're in their late 70s. I'm going to get vaccinated and what? Like what's the expectation? I think the expectation, the hope is that I don't have to worry as much about getting really sick and possibly needing to be hospitalized or dying, right? That is the thing that filled most of our conversations over this past year. Now, they've been vaccinated, I think that they can be pretty comfortable with that.

I focus on the right side of the screen here, because I think the idea that there were no hospitalizations or deaths in the people who received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine in the clinical trial, I think, speaks to that very issue. In fact, if you look at five vaccine trials, 75,000 people received vaccines in these trials, nobody died in those trials.

[10:25:04]

So, I think, in many ways, the vaccine is accomplishing what people care about the most in terms of getting sick or being hospitalized or dying.

I think with Johnson & Johnson, it's interesting because it was trialed at a different time and in different places as compared to the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine. In some ways, you could say that it was a different disease, a more severe disease that Johnson & Johnson was being trialed against, because the virus was more widespread and there were more variants and it had 85 percent protection.

A lot of people will say, well, Moderna and Pfizer, 95 percent protection. But if you were to do the Moderna and Pfizer trials at the exact same time in the exact same places as Johnson & Johnson, it probably would end up being far more similar in terms of protection.

Either way, these are good vaccines. They accomplish what I think most people want to accomplish. And I think, as you point out, it's going to accelerate the timetable. Johnson & Johnson gets authorized, they'd start rolling out probably first or second week of March. We'll see what happens with AstraZeneca. We may have a lot of vaccines, and that would be a great thing.

HARLOW: It would be such a great day, Sanjay. There is also pretty promising news from the CDC this morning that COVID 19 vaccine doses outnumbered cases, new cases of COVID in this country ten to one. That is a great. That's a really big deal. Is this a sign that things are getting better? What does it mean, bigger picture, to you?

GUPTA: Yes. No, I think so. The ratio, first of all, of doses that have been distributed versus doses that have actually been administered has gone up. In the beginning, there was concern. It was 10 percent, 20 percent and then 30 percent, 40 now, I think closer to 60 percent are actually getting administered. So that process is going well.

And there has been stumbles and there are stuff to figure out. Just the number of people who can push the shots into arms was a rate- limiting step for a while. It has got to continue to go well. And people said, look the original target of a million doses of a day for 100 days was too low and I think the administration seems to have heard that. They weren't happy about it initially but have increased their projections. And, frankly, I think it can go up even more.

I mean, the faster we go, it is not just the amount of vaccine, now. It is become clear that we have to go fast, this race. Some people don't like the analogy but the race of the vaccines against the virus, I think, is an apt one. The faster we go, the less likely the virus will mutate, the less likely that these variants will become a problem.

SCIUTTO: Yes. (INAUDIBLE) is going to be upset if you exceed goals, right, or go faster than you said. But we'll be watching. Dr. Sanjay Gupta, thanks very much.

GUPTA: You got it, thank you.

SCIUTTO: President Trump is refusing a request to testify in his impeachment trial, the second. Is a subpoena from Congress next? What would happen with one? We'll have the latest on the trial just ahead.

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