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Biden Tours Kentucky Tornado Damage; Lawmakers Grill Airline Execs Over Handling of COVID Relief Funds; Cornell University Shuts Down Campus Amid COVID Outbreak; Talks Between Manchin and Biden at Standstill on Build Back Better Plan. Aired 3:30-4p ET
Aired December 15, 2021 - 15:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[15:30:00]
KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN CHIEF WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: It does make it more real to see it in person and to actually around this damage. As President Biden said, he also wants to listen to people. He wants to take about what they've gone through. Because a lot of the people that we've spoken with today, they're overwhelmed by this because in a matter of moments, they lost so many of their life's memories.
This home here, this neighborhood where were standing in Dawson Springs, you can see behind me has essentially been leveled. Where the trees were snapped in half. You walk around, we're standing in what used to be a garage here, and it is just completely gone. Now it's just a concrete slab, and so what we've been talking to people today is they're walking around looking for memories of their childhood, of their lives growing up in these homes, in this neighborhood.
Because they don't feel like they have a lot of time to find them before, A, they start to clean up a lot of the debris, because there are cars wrapped around trees over here. There are nails with boards in them. There's everything really you can imagine after a tornado comes through.
And so, these people though are in that kind of a stage of grief and being overwhelmed by this. And so, the president's attention is putting a spotlight on that as well. And he is going to be over here soon. He's touring the neighborhood. He's getting briefings from local officials and then you'll actually hear from President Biden himself on what he's seen today and what he's heard from people of Kentucky.
VICTOR BLACKWELL, CNN HOST: All right, again, we're seeing the president on the right side there speaking with some people who lost their homes, who escaped this with their lives. Kaitlan Collins, thank you so much for the reporting.
ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN HOST: All right, happening right now on Capitol Hill, Senators are questioning airline CEOs to find out where the bailout money from tax taxpayers went. We'll tell you their answers, next.
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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That being next to someone on an airplane, sitting next to them ...
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BLACKWELL: A Senate panel is questioning leaders of the country's biggest airlines about the billions in COVID relief they received and why it has not translated into better customer service.
CAMEROTA: Lawmakers want to know why there are still staff shortages, flight disruptions and other operational issues particularly as travelers get ready to hit the skies for the holidays. CNN aviation correspondent Pete Muntean is here with today's testimony. What did they say -- Pete?
PETE MUNTEAN, CNN AVIATION CORRESPONDENT: Well, Alisyn, the central question here is that airlines accepted $50 billion in federal aid over the beginning of the pandemic. The whole point was to keep thousands of airline workers on the job but then why were there staffing shortages that left a massive schedule melt downs and cancellations at Spirit, American and Southwest throughout the fall and in the summer.
Testifying now are executives from American, Southwest, United and Delta. And American Airlines CEO Doug Parker just spoke. He acknowledged those issues that it had back in October, thousands of cancellations. But, he says, all of this money was worth it even still. Here's what he told this oversight committee.
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DOUG PARKER, CEO, AMERICAN AIRLINES: Like other airlines and numerous other businesses we have experienced operational challenges in recent months. Which we've worked to manage as deathly as possible, and with the utmost care for our customers and our team. While various pandemic related factors have caused our operation to run tight when extraordinary disruptions occur, these events have been the distinction exception, not the rule.
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MUNTEAN: Now American says it is now able to hire employees to try and fix this problem long-term. 16,000 employees, it say it has hired in 2021. 18,000, it says, it will hire in 2022. We will see if this argument works on this committee hearing and if airlines are truly out of the woods as we go into the holiday travel season.
The TSA says the numbers will be huge. United Airlines says its numbers will be 20 percent higher than what we saw during the Thanksgiving travel period. That's when we set a pandemic era air travel record, 2.45 million people through security at America's airports the Sunday after Thanksgiving. So, we will have to see how this all works out -- Victor and Alisyn.
CAMEROTA: Yes, we will, Pete. Come back to us with any developments. Thank you. BLACKWELL: Cornell University has shut down its main campus after
hundreds of people tested positive for coronavirus with a high percentage of them the Omicron variant. Cornell's provost joins me next.
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BLACKWELL: NYU and Princeton are the latest in a growing list of universities moving back online after a rapid COVID surge that may be tied to the Omicron variant. Cornell University announced a shutdown of its main campus, more than 900 students tested positive this week, and the school says many of its cases are the Omicron variant, and they are almost entirely among students who are fully vaccinated including some who have received the booster.
Michael Kotlikoff is the provost of Cornell University. He's with me now. Mr. Provost, thank you for your time here. Listen, early on, Cornell was the model of how to open a campus, have students there, and you re-imagined how the students would be on campus. What went wrong here?
MICHAEL KOTLIKOFF, PROVOST, CORNELL UNIVERSITY: Well, I don't know that anything went wrong, Victor. I think that what happened was after Thanksgiving we saw students come back to campus. There was a spike as we expected, and we identified those students through our surveillance testing.
What was different was that that spike kept going up and we saw a degree of infection amongst our students and the contact -- the high percentage of contacts being infected that surprised us and was different than what we'd seen before. We had prepared by preparing this proxy test for the Omicron variant, and when we looked at our -- at the positives, we saw a very high percentage of those that were really -- that had the S-gene drop out of this proxy for the Omicron variant. So, I think what we're dealing with is something that's more infectious and a little different biology.
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BLACKWELL: OK, so more infectious. We now know that the booster is the optimal protection, just the two shots of the mRNA or the single shot of J&J is not enough. There is a vaccine mandate on campus. Will you mandate a booster as well?
KOTLIKOFF: Well, we've been urging our students already to get vaccinated, to get boosted, and we've had several clinics on campus. We'll make the decision over the next several days as to whether to mandate the booster.
I will point out that many of our students are not yet eligible to be boosted. You need to be six months after the last vaccine shot. So many of our students had that shot in August or September and won't be eligible until the spring semester starts. I would want to point out one thing, which is we've had no disease --
no serious disease, not a single student at Cornell has been hospitalized, so that's sort of, you know, when you say what went wrong, I think we were prudent in making sure this infection didn't spread and kept it -- kept our community safe.
BLACKWELL: That certainly is good news that these are not severe cases. No one's been hospitalized. Of course, no deaths there from these cases.
Let me ask you about what you do in the spring? Because we know that there's just the minority of people who have gotten the flu vaccine, and there's been the fear of this twin-demic, the spread of Omicron, Delta is still going strong, and potentially the flu all coming together at once. So how do you prepare to go back in the spring if what you did in the fall ended up with 900 positive cases in a week?
KOTLIKOFF: Right. Well, what we'll be doing from now until we open is really planning and understanding more about the biology of the Omicron variant. It's very important for us.
You may know that Cornell was, as you implied, we had our students come back. We optimized the experience for our students, have had safe semesters starting in the fall of 2020.
What that was based on was modeling that was based on the science behind the virus, and we're going to spend the next several weeks really intensively looking at the data around Omicron, and understanding whether we can, for example, have safe classrooms with mass students and not transmit the virus.
BLACKWELL: Is it possible that going back into spring that you will stay online only?
KOTLIKOFF: I think anything is possible until we understand, you know, from the beginning we've allowed the science to drive our decisions. So, I think what I want to do is understand what the infectivity of the Omicron variant is. And the other side of this is if the -- if the path pathogenicity, if the seriousness of disease of the virus is lower, as has been reported, if that's substantiated that will also influence our thinking about what we do for the spring.
BLACKWELL: All right, Cornell Provost, Michael Kotlikoff, thank you, sir.
KOTLIKOFF: Thanks, Victor.
CAMEROTA: OK, Senate Democrats are expected to push back their timeline when it comes to the Build Back Better Plan. Talks between Senator Joe Manchin and President Biden are apparently at a standstill. So, we are live on The Hill with these developing details next.
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[15:50:00] CAMEROTA: So, Christmas was the self-imposed deadline for Senate Democrats to come up with a deal on the Build Back Better Plan.
BLACKWELL: But discussions between Senator Joe Manchin and President Biden, they're at a standstill. CNN's Manu Raju is live on Capitol Hill. So, what's the latest, Manu?
MANU RAJU, CNN CHIEF CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, they've been talking, Joe Manchin and the president, and they are nowhere near a deal, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.
Now Manchin, of course, is hugely significant here because 50 Democrats are in this caucus in the Senate. They all need to vote yes to proceed to this bill. They all need to vote yes to get this bill passed and Manchin is the biggest holdout yet in large part because of his concerns over the cost of this bill.
He wants to keep it at $1.75 trillion. He is concerned about some of the temporary provisions that are in this bill, including a one-year extension of an expansion of the child tax credit, which could help millions of families, assuming they can extend it past the end of the year deadline. Otherwise, that expansion will go away by the end of this year.
But Manchin is concerned about a one-year extension. He says that that hides the true cost of the bill. Arguing that instead, a realistic picture is that it should be extended over a ten-year time frame. But to extend it over a ten-year time frame would add hundreds of billions of dollars, potentially over a trillion dollar more to the price tag which will go higher than what Joe Manchin actually wants.
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So, what he is telling the White House is that he wants to essentially pull this out of this bill, move it on a separate track altogether because of his concerns about the expensive nature of this sweeping package which will deal issues such as climate change, health care, housing and childcare and the like.
So as a result, it looks increasingly likely, almost certain they're going to punt this bill until after Christmas, until after the New Year and have to deal with it again next year. And can they get it passed? That is still an open question -- guys.
BLACKWELL: All right, Manu Raju, thank you.
RAJU: Thank you.
CAMEROTA: OK, any moment now President Biden is going to speak about what he has seen after he has spent today touring the tornado damage in Kentucky. So, stay with us for that.
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CAMEROTA: OK. Now to "Two to Four Things" grocery edition. Some soda makers are getting rid of the word diet and replacing it with zero sugar. Canada Dry and Schweppes Ginger Ale and 7-Up and others will cut the word diet. The word diet has apparently fallen out of fashion, especially for Millennials and Gen-Zers.
Victor, do you drink diet soda?
BLACKWELL: I don't really drink soda at all, I stick to water and hard liquor, but I get this.
CAMEROTA: Never mix.
BLACKWELL: No. It's kind like in the '80s. Remember when they stopped calling gum sugarless and it became sugar-free.
CAMEROTA: Yes.
BLACKWELL: I get it. Yes.
CAMEROTA: It didn't change your life?
BLACKWELL: No, it didn't really.
CAMEROTA: I think it would trick me. I think zero sugar would trick me into thinking it was better than diet soda.
BLACKWELL: I get that.
OK, how about this. Kraft Foods wants to pay you 20 bucks not to make holiday cheesecakes because its supply of Philadelphia Cream Cheese is low because of supply chain shortages.
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The company would rather you buy something else, send them the bill, up to 18,000 people can get this deal online. What do you think?
CAMEROTA: OK. Well, let me just understand this. They're going to pay me 20 bucks to eat a different dessert.
BLACKWELL: Chocolate cake, apple strudel, all yours.
CAMEROTA: How is that not a win-win for me?
BLACKWELL: I think it is.
CAMEROTA: OK. Solved.
"THE LEAD" with Jake Tapper starts right now.
