Return to Transcripts main page

CNN Newsroom

U.S. Companies Plot Course with New Vaccine Mandates; FDA Vaccine Advisers Meet Tomorrow to Debate Boosters; Pennsylvania GOP to Subpoena Personal Info of Voters. Aired 1-1:30p ET

Aired September 16, 2021 - 13:00   ET

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

[13:00:00]

JOHN KING, CNN INSIDE POLITICS: Don't go anywhere, a busy news day. Ana Cabrera picks up our coverage right now.

ANA CABRERA, CNN NEWSROOM: Hello and thanks for being there. I'm Ana Cabrera in New York.

Just minutes from now, we will hear from President Biden, and a White House officials tell us he will warn of a country at its inflection point as he pushes his massive economic agenda. His argument, Washington can perpetuate the policies and the politics that benefit the nation's wealthy, or it can choose to bolster the lower and middle class now languishing in pandemic uncertainty.

But even some Democrats aren't sold on the president's economic package and its $3.5 trillion price tag. This would be a historic expansion of the social safety net that could touch almost every American.

And I want to bring in U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo. Madam Secretary, thanks for being here. The president's build back better plan is critical to his economic agenda. What will be different about his remarks today?

GINA RAIMONDO, COMMERCE SECRETARY: Well, I think you'll hear the president really make the case with the sense of urgency, and he is insistent and he's right that this is a moment now. We have to meet the moment and make these bold investments.

I can tell you from my discussions with businesses, the build back better agenda is very good for business. They want investments in infrastructure, broad band, job training, child care, so their workers can be productive, and that's exactly what the president's package calls for.

CABRERA: But we are seeing sharp divisions even within the Democratic Party on how to pay for it. What do you think about that? Does that concern you?

RAIMONDO: It doesn't concern me. Look, the reality is these are investments that businesses tell me every day they want, that families want and need. We need to pay for them. The rub is they're not free. We need to pay for them to be responsible.

And the fact of the matter is the U.S. tax code is broken, right? Like, it's just not right that teachers and plumbers pay a higher tax rate than the wealthiest Americans. It's not right that small businesses pay a higher tax rate than our biggest businesses. By the way, many of our biggest, most profitable businesses paid nothing in corporate taxes last year.

So, it's time to fix the tax code, close the loopholes, and then use that revenue to make investments that will allow American businesses to compete on the global stage and allow our economy not just to go back to the way we were pre-COVID, but to build back stronger, better, and more equitably.

CABRERA: Just today, some mixed economic headlines. Retail sales for August were better than expected, but jobless claims last week, they went up, even as there are millions of job openings. So, what's the next move to get more Americans back to work in the short-term?

RAIMONDO: Well, first, we have to make sure everybody gets vaccinated and schools stay open and businesses can remain open. But, secondly, we need to make the investments the president is pushing Congress to make in child care, child care tax credit, health care, the care economy.

You know, you cannot hold down a job or take a job or take a promotion if you have to stay home caring for your elderly loved ones, or if you don't have reliable child care for your kids. So, we need these investments.

Job training, you know, the president is calling for enough money to create a million to 2 million apprenticeships. Right now, there's over half a million jobs open for cybersecurity technicians. So let's train Americans to take those jobs. It's good for America. It's good for business.

And I think that's what you'll hear from the president today. We can't miss this moment. It is an inflection point. We know what we need to do. Let's take action and deliver for the American families and American businesses.

CABRERA: But, again, right now there is a crisis for all a lot of Americans and a lot of industries. Restaurants, for example, are among those still hurting right now that haven't bounced back with the rest of the economy, even the part of the economy that's in some ways stabilized.

I want you to listen to this spokesman with the National Restaurant Association.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEAN KENNEDY, EVP OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS, NATIONAL RESTAURANT ASSOCIATION: The restaurant recovery is now moving in reverse. We still have 90,000 restaurants that are closed permanent or long-term. We're about 1 million jobs below where we should be before this pandemic. (END VIDEO CLIP)

CABRERA: He says the industry is moving in reverse. And now you have the president's new vaccine requirements. Could that make things worse?

RAIMONDO: No. I think that will make things much, much better. We were moving in a much better direction for restaurants, hotels, and then the delta variant started to spike.

[13:05:02]

And so the single best thing that we can do quickly, immediately, to help restaurants, help hotels, help hospitality is for everybody to get vaccinated so that waiters and waitresses feel comfortable going back to work, people feel comfortable going to dinner, business travel can pick up again and business travelers can spend money in restaurants.

That, I cannot emphasize enough. Everybody needs to get vaccinated. and businesses should really consider requiring their employees to get vaccinated.

CABRERA: I know you've been urging businesses in the hotel and restaurant industries that deal with travelers to mandate vaccines for their employees. Should that extend to their customers, to passengers on airplanes, to hotel guests?

RAIMONDO: I think it's something they should take a very, very hard look at, yes. These vaccines work. We know they work. There is an antidote. It's the vaccine. And the quicker we get everybody vaccinated, the better our economy will be. So, yes.

CABRERA: All right. Thank you so much, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, for joining us today.

RAIMONDO: Thank you.

CABRERA: Our next guest was part of a White House meeting with President Biden yesterday. He and other executives at top U.S. companies are now faced with implementing the president's new vaccine requirements in the workplace.

Timothy Boyle is Chairman and Chief Executive officer of Columbia Sportswear. Good to have you here with us.

You have said you are thrilled with the president's vaccine requirements. Explain why.

TIMOTHY BOYLE, PRESIDENT, CEO AND CHAIRMAN, COLUMBIA SPORTSWEAR CO.: well, as you know, the only way we're going to get out of this horrible condition that the world is in is to get everybody vaccinated.

You talked to the prior guest, the secretary, about restaurants. When I was in downtown D.C. yesterday, it was basically a ghost town from my comparison to my prior trips, and that's because people don't feel comfortable going downtown. Businesses haven't reopened in D.C. And the way we're going to get restaurants and, frankly, the rest of the world operating in a normal condition is to get everybody vaccinated.

CABRERA: So you are a business owner welcoming these new requirements by the government. Some Republicans have called the president's actions tyrannical. What do you tell people who say this is government overreach?

BOYLE: Well, it's about being healthy, and I don't consider that to be overreach. This is a national travesty, frankly, that we haven't vaccinated more people. You know, there are states that are upset about the mandatory vaccination that have mandatory vaccinations in place for school children to enter schools, about polio and other diseases. So this is -- this is not about politics. This is about being healthy and getting ourselves back to a normal condition.

CABRERA: And you have said vaccine hesitancy has hurt your company with infections and the threat of infections actually forcing closures. I know you drafted a vaccine mandate months ago, right, but you waited out of the fear that people might leave and go to other companies that didn't have vaccine mandates. And so now this, in many ways, levels the playing field. Do you think the White House should have taken action sooner? Were they too slow?

BOYLE: Well, you could argue if the hindsight would say, yes, they should have acted sooner. But I don't think anybody understood that there would be in kind of hesitancy in what should be a rejoice about the science winning and getting ourselves ahead of the pandemic. But regardless of what the past actions are, we're talking about the future, and the future is only bright if we can get everybody vaccinated.

CABRERA: When do you plan to actually implement these new vaccine requirements within your company?

BOYLE: Well, we're waiting for the published results or the published rules by the secretary of labor, which the president said will be maybe a couple weeks away. But we're prepping for them right now, including researching where we might have testing if we want to have -- allow testing, how could we accomplish that, what are the prices, how is that going to fit into our future business. And, you know, then how do we backstop those employees who want to leave and not get vaccinated?

So there's lots of work going on, and we don't know what the rules are, but we know enough about them that we can plan for the resulting impact.

CABRERA: And I know all of that takes time. You have hundreds, thousands, actually, of employees and have many different locations. But I will say other companies didn't wait. United Airlines mandated employee vaccines before the president's announcement and the CEO there says his company is now 90 percent vaccinated and that they've only experienced single digits in resignations after they imposed a mandate. [13:10:04]

I'm curious, what percentage of your work force is currently vaccinated?

BOYLE: Well, we don't know, frankly. We don't -- based on the privacy rules, we don't have that kind of knowledge. But we know it's probably 80 percent or lower. And maybe we could be criticized for not imposing a mandate earlier ourselves. So I'm not discounting the impact of these changes on businesses.

We know that there's going to be impact. And -- but we're prepared to embrace the rules and, frankly, I would encourage even employers who have less than 100 employees to adopt them. This is the only way we're going to get back to any kind of normalcy here.

CABRERA: You've said workers in warehouses and some retail spots across the country have been more reluctant to get the vaccine. Is it tougher to get through to employees in certain parts of the country? What have you found?

BOYLE: Well, you know, I don't know that we have the issue everywhere in the United States. The company does have about half of its employees outside the U.S., and I know that we have employees in Asia and parts of Europe that are clamoring for the vaccine and can't get it because of availability. And here, we have reticent employees. So, it's concerning. But I don't know that we have particular information about geographic impacts inside the United States.

CABRERA: Well, Timothy Boyle, I appreciate your insights. Thank you so much for joining us today.

BOYLE: Thank you.

CABRERA: Do you need a booster or not? That key question to face a critical debate tomorrow as a big split emerges among the experts.

Plus, Capitol Hill in a cage again ahead of a far right rally supporting the January 6th insurrectionists. What police are saying about the potential for violence.

And the South Carolina lawyer accused of staging his own botched murder plot for insurance money just surrendered to police. Now, they're also looking into the death of his former housekeeper.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[13:15:00]

CABRERA: Today, the FDA's Vaccine Advisory Committee is preparing for a meeting on boosters. Now, it's up to this committee to tell the FDA if it should authorize a third dose of Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine for the general population, that it suggests they are both safe and needed and President Biden wants the green light. He also wants to roll out doses next week. But some experts are not sold on their necessity right now. And the messaging even from the nation's top doctors is confusing at times. Listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: Is there a clear answer to whether or not a booster is necessary?

DR. FRANCIS COLLINS, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH: There is not, which is why we are having this public discussion on Friday with all of the data out there that everybody can look at.

I will tell you, I was one of the biggest skeptics of the docs in the White House about boosters, and I've become convinced particularly looking at the Israeli data.

People who got immunized in January, by the time you got to July, their protection would really had started to drop off. And not just against any infection, but even against severe infection. And that's the signal you want to watch for to say it might be time to do something like a booster.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CABRERA: Joining us now, Dr. Jonathan Reiner, CNN Medical Analyst and Professor of Medicine and Surgery at George Washington University.

I mean, Dr. Reiner, even in that interview, the director of the NIH seems to be saying a couple of different things. On one hand, he says there's no clarity. On the other, he says he's been convinced that there's a need for the boosters. Why is there a lack of overarching clarity on this?

JONATHAN REINER, CNN MEDICAL ANALYST: Well, because there's not an overwhelming amount of data, at least not from the United States. There is a significant amount of data that the Israelis have accrued, that's what the NIH director was referring to.

This is what we know, Ana. We know that the efficacy of the mRNA vaccines do appear to wane over several months. The Pfizer vaccine data suggests that the efficacy of that vaccine declines about 6 percent every two months. Now, we started vaccinating people almost nine months ago.

Data out of Israel suggests that the highest risk for severe infection as the efficacy wanes is in people over the age of 60. And booster data from Israel suggests that once you start boosting folks, the neutralizing antibody titers rise dramatically. And then about two weeks after people have gotten their booster, the risk of severe illness or hospitalization drops dramatically, 11-fold, right. And that's really the movement.

And I think what we're going to hear from the FDA Advisory Committee is a go ahead to boost people over the age probably of 60, because that's where the data is most solid. The question is what does this really mean for people who are younger? And do we need to start boosting them now? And we probably have some time to wait, because we didn't really start boosting younger people until the spring. And many of those folks will still have relatively high levels of neutralizing antibodies.

CABRERA: Okay. So, that makes sense. And what I'm hearing you say is there's a lot of data that suggests that there is a positive impact to the booster shots, even if it's not known exactly how long that boost lasts. If this is about risk versus reward, what is the harm of someone getting a booster if it is not necessary?

[13:20:01]

Is there any real downside?

REINER: We don't really see much of a downside, particularly in the age group that appears to be most vulnerable. I mean, the question is some of the side effects that have been reported rarely have been seen in young people, things like myocarditis, a very rare side effect in younger people. But, again, we just started really vaccinating younger people in the late spring. And the vaccine efficacy should be quite good right now.

We never know what the full effect of a vaccine is in terms of side effects until you administer it, and that's why the FDA is requiring data, and we want the FDA to require data, but you have to balance the need for safety data with also the apparent increase in severe illness and infections. And this is what the FDA advisory panel will review tomorrow.

We want them to do this. We welcome this, but my guess is we're not going to hear sort of a blanket opening of boosters for the entire population based on just time from vaccination.

CABRERA: And I want our viewers to know that you are not the first doctor to say that, that I've now heard from a couple of different experts in recent days saying that maybe an age cutoff or who needs to get the booster shot, 60 and older is the age group that you just mentioned. That's the same. I heard that from Dr. Faust yesterday as well.

Dr. Reiner, I appreciate your time and your expertise. Good to see you. Thank you.

REINER: My pleasure. Thank you.

CABRERA: Even the pope is perplexed over the anti-vax movement. Well, he has been a consistent advocate of COVID vaccines. Today, Pope Francis dug in more, saying, quote, humanity has a history of friendship with vaccines. And when we were children, we were all vaccinated against polio, measles and nobody said anything.

The pope says nearly everyone in the Vatican is vaccinated, though he noted one prominent U.S. cardinal now hospitalized with COVID has been an outspoken exception. Just a quick programming note for you, join us as Dr. Sanjay Gupta talks with scientists about the origin of COVID-19. This new CNN special report is Sunday night at 8:00 here on CNN.

Now, the big lie and a big push for personal voter information. In Pennsylvania, Republicans there targeting millions and millions of people in the state for things like driver's license numbers, the last four digits of social security numbers. Why and how? That's next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[13:25:00]

CABRERA: The big lie now creating major privacy concerns for millions of Americans. Pennsylvania State Republicans just voted to subpoena the personal information of voters as they continue to investigate the 2020 election results, even though judges and election officials on both sides of the aisle have repeatedly stated that there was no widespread voter fraud.

CNN Political Correspondent Sara Murray joins us. Sara, exactly what kind of data are Pennsylvania Republicans looking for and what will this achieve?

SARA MURRAY, CNN POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, it's a lot of personal information. This is a handful of Republicans on a Pennsylvania state senate committee, and they voted to subpoena the Pennsylvania Department of State, which oversees elections. And they want all kinds of information for all registered voters. So, we're talking about some 9 million people. They want the names. They want addresses. They want driver's license numbers. They want partial social security numbers and also some voting history for all of these registered voters in the state of Pennsylvania.

And the senator who is leading this effort, a Republican, Senator Cris Dush, was asked why do you need all of this information? He said they want to verify the identities of voters. He said there have been some allegations that people voted in recent elections who may not exist. Of course, there's no indication that this was widespread issue, whatsoever, but he says he wants to check it out.

And this hearing was really remarkable because he faced a lot of questions from Democrats on the committee, essentially saying, what are you going to do with this information? He wants to do a kind of Arizona-style election audit. But they haven't chosen vendors who are going to oversee it, and he couldn't offer assurances to Democrats who are on this panel that they wouldn't choose, for instance, a firm that was very sympathetic to Donald Trump, that they wouldn't choose a firm that had been connected to Sidney Powell, Donald Trump's former lawyer.

So, there are still a lot of questions, and I think the biggest one is whether the Pennsylvania Department of State is going to comply with this request, Ana.

CABRERA: So, what happens next? MURRAY: Well, Democrats on this committee say that they are going to file a lawsuit later this week to try to block it. We've also heard from the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania who says that he certainly doesn't approve of this measure and they want to try to figure out a way to block it as well.

So far, though, none of those things have taken place. So, we're kind of just waiting to see what this lawsuit says from the Democrats, and, certainly, we're waiting to see what the Pennsylvania Department of State has to say about this.

CABRERA: Sara Murray, thank you.

Capitol Police taking no chances ahead of Saturday's rally in support of those charged in the January insurrection. Fencing is back up around the nation's Capitol.

[13:30:01]

And Capitol Police have requested the National Guard be on standby.

CNN Crime and Justice Correspondent Shimon Prokupecz join us now.