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Could Joe Manchin Switch Parties?; Jury Deliberations Continue in Daunte Wright Trial; FDA Authorizes First COVID Antiviral Pill. Aired 1-1:30p ET

Aired December 22, 2021 - 13:00   ET

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

[13:00:29]

ANA CABRERA, CNN HOST: Hello. I'm Ana Cabrera in New York.

We begin with breaking pandemic news, the FDA last hour granting emergency use authorization for Pfizer's antiviral pill to treat COVID-19. This is big, because this is the first pill of its kind that people can now take at home to treat COVID-19 before they get sick enough to need hospital care, a gift, a potential game-changer, as the Omicron variant complicates the COVID crisis now just three days before Christmas.

Let's get right to CNN senior medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen.

Elizabeth, what do we know about this pill? How effective is it? How soon will it be available?

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN SENIOR MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Ana, as you said, this really is a huge change.

And that's because, I mean, think about it right now. If you know that you have COVID, you're in the early stages, you want to do something, you want it to be easy, there really isn't much out there. There's the monoclonal antibodies, but those aren't all working so well with Omicron.

And they're hard to get. This is just a pill. You call your doctor, you get a prescription. So let's talk about this pill. It's called Paxlovid. And it's made by Pfizer. And when they -- in a clinical trial, they took more than 2,000 people. Half of them got a placebo, a pill that does nothing.

That half over the next month, 66 of them were hospitalized with COVID and 12 of them died. The half that were lucky enough to receive Paxlovid, only eight of them are hospitalized, and none of them died. You can see that really is a significant difference.

But I am going to give you a caveat here. And this is an important one. These results are when taken within eight days of symptom onset. You have to move quickly with this pill. You have to feel the symptoms, suspect you have COVID, go and get a test, call the doctor, get a prescription.

It can be really tough to get all of that done within five days of feeling symptoms. And if you wait too long, this pill is not going to work so well. And given the testing situation in this country, plus health care resources being so strapped, it's unclear whether this is going to happen quite as quickly as everyone would like -- Ana.

CABRERA: And, Elizabeth, is this design for any COVID patient? And how soon until we actually are able to order these pills, should somebody need one?

COHEN: So the president of Pfizer, the CEO of Pfizer, has said, hey, we're going to have lots of doses coming out in December and also in January, even more in January and February. We will see how that goes.

The government is in control of the distribution of this drug, as they have with all the COVID drugs. And that has not always gone as smoothly as people would like. So, there may not be as much of this as we would like, and they may need to prioritize. So if you're just a healthy person who knows that they have COVID, but probably you're going to do OK, you may not get to take this drug.

We're going to see if they prioritize. We will have to see how many doses they get out there and how quickly they get them out -- Ana.

CABRERA: Elizabeth Cohen, thank you for breaking it down for us.

Joining us now is Dr. Jonathan Reiner, professor of medicine and surgery at George Washington University. He was also a medical adviser in the George W. Bush administration.

Dr. Reiner, a simple pill to treat COVID, what kind of game-changer is this?

DR. JONATHAN REINER, CNN MEDICAL ANALYST: It's big news.

And this is just another reason why we're really -- despite the surge in cases now, we're not really in the same place that we were a year ago. We have vaccines that work. And now we have potent antiviral agents that you can take.

So if you think about, if you go to your doctor with influenza, we have an antiviral agent, Tamiflu, that can reduce the severity and duration of that illness. And now we have an oral medication that can also do the same thing. And in the pivotal trial, folks who took Paxlovid early, within three days of symptom onset, had a 90 percent reduction in hospitalization or death compared to those that took placebo.

So this is a very, very, very potent agent. And you're not going to need to go to a hospital to get an infusion like monoclonal antibodies. This is going to be an oral regimen. And, again, this is just another way that we're going to be able to live with this disease going forward.

CABRERA: And just to sort of underline the simplicity and ease and convenience of, this would be -- I'm reading it would be a three- tablet dose taken twice daily for five days in that early onset of symptoms and diagnosis. It's obviously great news. Where do you rank it in terms of the

toolkit we have now in this battle against COVID? We have masks. We have vaccines, obviously, which is the gold standard here in protecting ourselves. And we also have the monoclonal antibody therapy that Elizabeth brought up.

[13:05:08]

And now we have a pill.

REINER: Right.

So, we have strategies, both nonpharmacologic and pharmacologic strategies, vaccines, to help prevent people from getting ill. We have -- now we have a very potent strategy to keep people from being hospitalized. And we actually have some strategies once folks are in the hospital, like steroids, to try and keep them from needing ICU management.

So we have sort of a tiered layer now approaches to either prevent you from getting ill or to keep you from getting super sick should you contract the virus. So it's a very, very big deal, an enormous step forward.

CABRERA: The news couldn't come at a better time, with Omicron, with the holidays.

REINER: Yes.

CABRERA: President Biden says people who are fully vaccinated and, better yet, boosted should feel safe gathering with families and celebrating the holidays. Do you agree?

REINER: Well, only partially.

I think that, first of all, fully vaccinated means boosted now. And I think -- I don't understand the administration's reticence to actually say that. If you're more than six months out, I think really more than four months out from your second mRNA shot or two months out from your J&J, and you're not boosted, you're no longer fully vaccinated. So you need to do that.

But if you're fully vaccinated, the other thing you need to do before meeting with people you love or with anybody is to get tested. That's the way we maximize safety this holiday season. We need to make sure we're vaccinated and then everyone gets tested the day of your get- together on the way there.

And the people who you're visiting should also be testing. We're doing -- we're visiting friends on Saturday, on Christmas Day. My whole family's going to test that day. The folks who are visiting are going to test that day. And then we're going to enjoy ourselves. And that's really the strategy that I think should work best in this country.

CABRERA: We keep hearing from you, from other doctors I have spoken with that that testing component is a key tool in order to gather with family.

REINER: Yes.

CABRERA: But we have seen the long lines. It's a problem for people to have access to tests right now. It's not that simple.

REINER: It's not that simple. It's not that cheap. So a box of two BinaxNOW rapid antigen test costs $24.

So a family of four, it's going to be $50 for that one testing encounter, if you can find them, and they're hard to find. There are other tests on the market. They're also hard to find.

So, look, I think the Biden administration's plan to acquire half-a- billion of these tests and to allow folks to order them online is great. It's just not enough. These tests need to be available everywhere you look, drugstores, gas stations, libraries, bank. They need to be free and easy to get, because, look, if you develop a scratchy throat today, you don't have to order the test, which may arrive in a couple of days.

CABRERA: Right. Right.

REINER: You need to you need to know today whether you're infected.

And this is the way we're going to keep people at work. If you don't feel well, get tested before you go to work. If you're positive, stay home.

CABRERA: How soon could we realistically get to that point in which the vision you described comes to fruition, the tests that are easy to pick up at the drugstore or the gas station or are mailed to you, so that it isn't a wait and see and the days and weeks tick by?

REINER: Yes.

Look, administration was wrong-footed about this. And I'm grateful that they realized that and now they're changing their posture. But it's not just about ordering these tests online. You need to make it easy for people to get them. And we need to understand, and it's surprising to me that it's taken so many months.

The EUA for the BinaxNOW test was issued in March of last -- of this year. So it takes -- it's taken a long time for us to understand the importance of testing. But now that we do understand that, this administration needs to embrace it and make it an essential part of our strategy for living with this virus and moving to a -- basically back to a more normal society.

CABRERA: There is being proactive and then there's being reactive. It seems like this administration has largely been reactive, while we're seeing places like Israel kind of on the other extreme, talking about boosters now, going ahead with a fourth shot for people who are 60- plus, medical workers, those with suppressed immune systems in Israel.

REINER: Yes. CABRERA: While a lot of people here in the U.S. haven't received that

third shot yet.

Doctor, as we talk about how Israel has been out front row this pandemic, I wonder, are you surprised by this move, given Israeli officials admit they don't even have the data about what a fourth shot will do and whether it's even needed?

[13:10:10]

REINER: Well, what the Israelis understand and which I think a lot of people understand is that the longevity of the booster is also probably somewhat limited, and that, after three to four months, we may start to see a lack of durability of the booster shot.

So the Israelis are going to boost people that are most in harm's way now. So, with more cases mounting around the world, it makes sense to take care of the health care system, take care of the nurses and the docs, and the people that run the hospitals and the clinics, and so you maintain the integrity of your health care system.

Also, should you get a breakthrough infection, it makes sense to protect the people who are most vulnerable to severe illness. And that's the older population or people with preexisting illnesses or who are immunocompromised from medical treatment.

And that's what the Israelis are going to do. And it's clear to me that's what we're going to do. We're just going to take an unnecessary, unacceptably long period of time to get to the point where we give a fourth dose. And I want to see a sense of urgency. Even more than urgency, I want to see a sense of nimbleness.

I want to see us being able to react to changing facts on the ground, not to be surprised and then to wait and to sort of get the bureaucracy moving. I want us to be able to react very quickly. It's clear that we're going to boost. We're going to we're going to give a fourth dose to at least a big portion of this population. Best for us to start to get to that now.

Also, let's make people understand that you are not fully vaccinated if you are not boosted. Why is that so hard to say?

CABRERA: Yes, let's end here, because it's two years almost in this pandemic. We just have the final data from the CDC for the year 2020. And COVID-19, it turns out, was the third leading cause of death in the U.S. in 2020.

It lowered life expectancy by nearly two years. Again, that's with the final data showing COVID-19 was the underlying cause of death for 350,831 people in the U.S. in 2020.

Doctor, we're at more than 810,000 deaths now and still climbing. What does this mean for 2021?

REINER: You know, it means that we have become numb to this kind of horror, right? How is it possible that we're looking now at a million Americans dead,

a million Americans dead, and this is not the screaming full front page headline in every newspaper in the United States, and people just shrug it off?

We have to understand that until and unless we vaccinate the entire country, death is going to continue, and it's going to be disproportionate. It's going to disproportionately affect the folks in this country who are unvaccinated, who have made that choice. It's a bad choice. I'm not giving up on them. We shouldn't give up on them. We should reach out to them, because almost every person right now who's dying of COVID is dying unnecessarily.

Even with the surge in cases now, the vast majority of these -- of the people who gets really sick, need to be hospitalized or die will be people who are unvaccinated. So...

(CROSSTALK)

CABRERA: And the U.S. is averaging more than 1,300 deaths a day still.

REINER: Right.

CABRERA: Dr. Jonathan Reiner, thank you for all of your dedication again for years now and for being a guiding light for all of us throughout this. I know it's got to be very challenging for you and your colleagues to continue on day after day in this.

REINER: That means a lot. Thank you so much, Ana.

CABRERA: We also have this breaking news. President Biden has just announced he is extending the moratorium on student loan payments until May 1.

CNN's Jeff Zeleny is at the White House for us.

And, Jeff, this is a 180 from what the White House was saying just a couple of weeks ago. What are we learning about this decision?

JEFF ZELENY, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: Ana, it absolutely is.

The student loans, which have been really under freeze, were supposed to resume, the payments of them, the beginning of February. Now that is going to be pushed back to May 1, largely because of Omicron, largely because of the pandemic still deepening here as we head into the holidays.

The economy, yes, is showing signs of strength, the president said in a statement released a short time ago. But he cited the Omicron variant and the surge of cases into his decision. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki explained it like this a few moments ago.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) JEN PSAKI, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: We know some student loan borrowers are still coping with the pandemic and need some time before resuming payments.

So this pause gives the administration time to manage the ongoing pandemic and further strengthen our economic recovery. In the meantime, the Department of Education -- and they also issued a statement that hopefully you will have seen -- will continue working with borrowers to support a smooth transition back into repayment and advance economic stability.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

[13:15:10]

ZELENY: And so the president saying very, very clearly there in his statement that students should use this time as a time to prepare to begin repaying their loans, to work with the Department of Education and other lenders.

That does not necessarily comport with what many Democratic senators, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Senator Elizabeth Warren and others, are calling for, forgiveness of $50,000 per student. So they want more than just a temporary freeze, but the White House showing no indications that they are going to go that far.

But, Ana, for now, at least, right before Christmas perhaps, an early gift, at least a temporary one, putting a freeze on those student loan payments now until May 1 in the spring -- Ana.

CABRERA: Jeff Zeleny at the White House for us.

Thank you, Jeff.

Straight ahead for us: the fate of ex-Minnesota cop Kim Potter remains in limbo on day three of jury deliberations. And there are signs the jury may be having some trouble.

Plus, a hospital nurse on the COVID front lines in Nebraska will join us. Why she says she's at a breaking point.

And, later, Michael Flynn is suing congressional investigators looking into the Capitol riot. What he's hoping to keep secret.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[13:20:40]

CABRERA: Day three of deliberations are under way right now in the manslaughter trial of former Minnesota police officer Kim Potter.

But there are signs the jury may be deadlocked. Yesterday, they asked the judge -- quote -- "If the jury cannot reach consensus, what is the guidance around how long and what steps should be taken?"

You will recall Potter says she mistook her firearm for her Taser when she fatally shot Daunte Wright during a traffic stop back in April.

Let's discuss with criminal defense attorney Sara Azari.

And, Sara, first, what do you make of this jury question about reaching a consensus? Do you think we're looking at a hung jury?

SARA AZARI, CRIMINAL DEFENSE ATTORNEY: Yes, Ana, I think it tells us a couple of things, and not just by itself, but interconnected with the other question about unzipping the Glock and then even the question the day before.

What it tells us is that they're either deadlocked as of a few hours ago yesterday or they're on their way to being deadlocked and they're asking the judge what -- how long do they stay deadlocked? But also it tells us that they're struggling with the reasonableness of the mistake.

There's no dispute that Potter made a mistake in pulling our her Glock, in lieu of the Taser. But the idea is, was she conscious of that mistake? Was it reasonable for an officer like her to make that mistake? And they're struggling with that, which is exactly what the defense strategy was here in putting on that raw emotional testimony.

So unzipping the Glock, which was the second question, Ana, is so that they can actually feel and observe the physical evidence firsthand, not just rely on the testimony that they heard, to determine whether -- is that mistake reasonable or not? So that -- I think the questions were very telling.

And the fact that they came up with the first question a couple days ago about that action error expert that testified for the defense is also part of the same scenario, which is, was her mistake reasonable? Was she conscious of having pulled her Glock vs. the Taser?

CABRERA: Right.

And we know they have been deliberating another four hours or so today. I wonder, at what point would a judge allow the jury to just stop deliberations if they can't reach a consensus and really are deadlocked?

AZARI: Yes.

So, Judge Chu yesterday didn't do what some judges do just after the 14 hours, which is an Allen charge. So she just lightly reminded them that they are -- they have the duty to come up with a unanimous verdict, and they should try harder.

But the Allen charge is going to be a firmer encouragement. You have heard the evidence, you have been a great jury, you have paid attention, you really ought to talk this out amongst yourselves and come up with a unanimous verdict, so please go back and try again.

That kind of firm encouragement, or Allen charge, as we call it, has not occurred yet. So we might see that from this judge before she finally puts on the brakes. CABRERA: OK. We will be watching closely for any new development.

And, Sara, I know you're going to stick with us in case there is a verdict as our show continues here in this hour.

AZARI: I will. Thanks, Ana.

CABRERA: Thank you.

Jury deliberations are also continuing in another high-profile case, the sex trafficking trial of Jeffrey Epstein's former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell. No verdict yet, but the jury did ask to see transcripts of the testimony of three women who accused Maxwell of facilitating their abuse as minors.

Maxwell has pleaded not guilty to six federal accounts, including sex trafficking of a minor, enticing a minor to travel to engage in illegal sex acts, transporting a minor with the intent to engage in criminal sexual activity, and three related counts of conspiracy.

Now, if convicted on all six, Maxwell faces up to 70 years in prison.

Up next, an emotional plea from an ICU nurse who has been treating and at times losing COVID patients for nearly two years now. She says she's finally reached her breaking point. And she joins us next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[13:29:14]

CABRERA: Senator Joe Manchin's flat-out rejection of the president's Build Back Better plan still rippling through Washington, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer telling fellow Democrats last night he will call a vote anyway next month, saying this is too important to give up.

Now, meanwhile, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell is sensing an opportunity here. McConnell says the door is wide open if Manchin wants to switch parties. And there may be some incentives on the table.

Let's bring in CNN's Manu Raju live on Capitol Hill for us.

Manu, McConnell has been talking about Manchin switching parties for years. Might we see that happen now?

MANU RAJU, CNN SENIOR CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: There's no indication that that's going to happen.

But Manchin is always careful in how -- his wording in dealing with this, saying that he is a Democrat for now.