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China Signals Softening Of Some COVID Prevention Measures; Calls For Action After South Dakota Bans TikTok; Study: Teen Brains Aged Faster Than Normal From Pandemic Stress; Biden Proposes South Carolina As First Primary State In 2024 Race; Man Who Fell Overboard On Cruise Ship Speaks Out. Aired 2:30-3p ET

Aired December 02, 2022 - 14:30   ET

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

[14:30:00]

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN HOST: And the top official in charge of the COVID response says China will look to soften some restrictions. He says the times has come to tweak measures.

Let's talk about this and more with Ian Bremmer. He's the president of the Eurasia Group. He's also the author of "The Power of Crisis, How Three Threats and Our Response Will Change the World."

Ian, great to see you.

IAN BREMMER, PRESIDENT, EURASIA GROUP & AUTHOR: Thank you.

CAMEROTA: So the fact these COVID measures are softened does that mean that the protests have worked?

BREMMER: They've had an impact, definitely. The same protests, if they had occurred three months ago, would not have had this impact.

That's because Xi Jinping did not get through the party Congress and had not yet secured his third term, hadn't yet packed the senior leadership in the Chinese Communist Party with his proteges and loyalists.

So he is in a stronger position now to back away from a policy he has personally been very strongly identified with.

But to be clear, these demonstrations were not organized by some opposition group or by students mobilizing across the country. This was spontaneous anger with extremely challenging conditions on top of poor implementation.

As you saw with the horrible apartment fire that killed over 10 Chinese and the firemen couldn't put it out because of the quarantine environment because they were locked out.

So, yes, I think that the Chinese government is backing down a little bit. They still have serious concerns about what happens if their hospitals are overwhelmed.

The most recent and best studies the Chinese government has done implies, if they just let it run, with American-type policies or European-type policies, they would end up with one to five million Chinese dead.

So they're not out of the woods yet. But they are going to make it easier for the average Chinese to live their lives.

CAMEROTA: Ian, is it significant that President Xi has been susceptible to public protests like this or am I reading too much into it?

BREMMER: Oh, no, I think it is significant. This is very different from what we are seeing in Iran where their demonstrations and the supreme leader says we won't listen to the people at all or Russia, where their demonstrations, people get arrested and they just proceed with intensifying the war in Ukraine.

The Chinese government definitely uses a stick when they see people demonstrating. The police visit the people, and they will either be taken off the streets or told, if you do this one more time, and we're watching you, we know where your phone is, we have surveillance on your face, on your body, you will be arrested.

So you're not going to see these demonstrations again next week, irrespective of how angry people still are.

But it's meaningful that the Chinese government also shows they will respond.

And Xi Jinping won't stand up and say mea culpa. He's going to blame local-level overzealous officials for poor implementation of his policy. And there may be some officials in some of these cities who end up having to fall on their swords as a consequence.

But it is meaningful that popular pressure in China has an impact.

CAMEROTA: That leads us to TikTok.

Everyone from Treasury Secretary Yellin to the South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem are saying that TikTok is a national security threat.

Oh, and by the way, the Chinese government is also trying to affect U.S. elections because they're putting out their propaganda via TikTok on the popular accounts they pretend are regular people accounts.

So is it time for every American to re-evaluate their relationship with TikTok?

BREMMER: I think it's time for every American to reevaluate their environment with -- their relationship with social media.

The fact that you have children whose thought processes and relationships are being driven by algorithms as much as they are by their parents and by their schoolteachers, that should concern us.

On top of that, you have a Chinese-owned app that has incredible A.I., very, very addictive. And it seems pretty clear that the Chinese government can get access

to the data and has used that platform. The Chinese government has also used Facebook to deliver disinformation as has the Russian government. So those are separate points.

And South Dakota, to be clear, you start with South Dakota and, pretty soon, North Dakota could be banning, too. That could be the end of TikTok. I accept that.

We are far from a ban of TikTok in the United States as a whole. And certainly President Biden's personal approach, as you saw in the meeting with President Xi Jinping in Bali, is the U.S. wants to go after issues of direct national security concern to the United States.

Like advanced semiconductors used by the military industrial complex in China. That's not all semiconductors.

[14:35:06]

I think they will take a more cautious approach on an issue like TikTok. I don't think the U.S. government will suddenly ban TikTok nationally.

CAMEROTA: Ian Bremmer, great to see you. Thank you.

BREMMER: You, too, Alisyn.

VICTOR BLACKWELL, CNN HOST: A new study says the stress of the pandemic not only had an emotional impact but it appears to have physically changed the brains of teenagers. We'll tell you how, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[14:40:06]

CAMEROTA: A new study says that stress brought on by the COVID pandemic caused teenagers' brains to develop faster than normal. It claims the actual size of their brains changed because of increased symptoms of anxiety and depression.

BLACKWELL: CNN's chief medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, is here.

This is fascinating. This is one of the first studies to look at the physical changes in the brain that the stress and anxiety created. What does it show?

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes. First, a lot of people, this is going to sound family. The symptoms that the teenagers have had over the past few years.

I have three teenagers at home. We have lived with this, as a lot of people have.

The symptoms of anxiety and depression have been going up even before the pandemic but were then accelerated significantly. This is a study that looked at that first year of the pandemic.

What they found is exactly what you're saying, is that there were definitive changes in the brain. I'm going to show you this here in a second.

But the study was going on even before the pandemic started. They were scanning adolescent brains every couple of years. When the pandemic happened, they continued the study to figure out, we have scans before the pandemic, in the pandemic, what happened?

They found that the cortex, which is the outer layer of the brain, sort of like the bark on a tree, thinned. Got thinner. That is something you typically see with aging.

Also, if you look inside the brain, near the brain stem, this area, which is responsible for your ability to regulate your emotions, for example, that also aged more quickly.

So there was these definitive areas that changed out of proportion to what you might expect during that same period of time.

Our brains age, clearly. All of our brains age as we age. But it was that accelerated aging they were seeing in that year of 2020 that got the attention of researchers.

CAMEROTA: That's incredible, Sanjay. But what are the consequences of a teenager's brain aging?

GUPTA: There seems to be an association between those sorts of changes in the brain and some symptoms that are referred to as internalizing symptoMs.

Again, some things were going on before the pandemic, but anxiety and depression. But also internalized problems typically mean, you know, things that are -- sadness, low self-esteem, difficulty regulating emotions as opposed to externalizing symptoMs, violence, aggression, rule-breaking behavior.

They didn't see a change in those externalizing symptoms as much as these internalizing symptoms.

Two things to point out. One is we don't know, is this a trajectory now or is this something that comes and will return to a normal state?

I should also point out, in addition to the stress and anxiety of the pandemic and people being more isolated, there was the virus itself. And about 10 percent of the people in the study in 2020 had been infected with COVID.

And we know COVID has an impact on the brain as well. So in some people, at least, it could be a combination of both those things.

BLACKWELL: All right. Dr. Sanjay Gupta, thank you.

CAMEROTA: Thanks, Sanjay. All right, so President Biden is proposing a big shakeup to the

political calendar that threatens Iowa's long reign as the first contest. We have the potential impact, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[14:47:50]

BLACKWELL: President Biden wants to reshape how the Democratic Party chooses its nominee for president.

CAMEROTA: He is asking the Democratic National Committee to make South Carolina the first state to host a primary beginning in 2024. Iowa has been the first in the nation since 1920.

Joining us now is former senior adviser to the Biden 2020 campaign, Alencia Johnson.

OK, Alencia, make the case for us. Why does South Carolina deserve to be first and not Iowa?

ALENCIA JOHNSON, FORMER SENIOR ADVISER TO PRESIDENT BIDEN: It's time for black voters to have a say early in the process. No Democratic president can win without winning a majority of black voters.

And we see what happens in South Carolina every year. Black voters make a choice, but sometimes it isn't reflective of what the Iowa caucuses decide.

In 2020, when I was part of the primary process with Elizabeth Warren's campaign, we saw that voters left without confidence in the first standing.

So if we want to make sure, particularly Democrats want to make sure that the base, black voters have a say early in the process and show that we know who could be the next president of the United States, South Carolina has to go first.

BLACKWELL: Let's look. We have it on the screen now. Let's put it back up so we can talk people through it.

The current order is on the left, Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina. The proposal from the president on the right, South Carolina, Nevada, New Hampshire and Georgia, Michigan.

The states that will be elevated are states divided. So it could seem self-serving if he's expecting a primary in 2024 to change the order.

Can this happen if he is running for re-election?

JOHNSON: I understand that correlation. However, if we think about it, those voters made the case for who they believe that the nominee should be, and it turned out to be President Biden. Not only did he win the nomination. He won the actual general election.

And those states that you listed not only are majority black voters represented in those states, but you also have a lot of Latino voters represented in those states and young voters.

And these are also states that represents rural and suburban voters, college educated and non-college educated voters.

[14:50:01]

The diversity that makes up the Democratic Party is truly reflected in those states. In a state like Michigan, for example, would be reflective of the Midwest, but a lot more diverse than Iowa.

CAMEROTA: Here's an argument I want your thoughts on. Do we want the first primary to be a lose chute straight to the presidency?

Isn't the primary process -- part of it is duking it out among all the candidates to see who is the most fit. So one person wins Iowa. One person wins New Hampshire. One person wins South Carolina. And it's a process.

JOHNSON: I do agree that we need a process. We need a robust process. The Iowa caucus, I'm going to be very honest, in 2020, it was not the most, you know, positive experience for a lot of candidates. And that tends to happen.

And I'm on TV talking about this a lot. But a lot of us come out of the Iowa caucus and have a conversation in media. A lot of pundits and news, anchors, a lot of journalists, we have this conversation about what voters may or may not want.

And so by the time a candidate gets to a primary three or four weeks later down the road, the media has kind of already made the case for who the nominee should be. And that might influence voters.

So if we shake things up a bit, have more diverse states go earlier, maybe we'll have the voters setting the tone and the narrative instead of people like myself or the journalists, us, making the case of who will be the nominee based on those early predictions from a state who doesn't have much say in a general election.

BLACKWELL: Yes, you're right that Iowa does not represent the diversity of the country, the diversity of the party. The economy of Iowa is different than most of the country, where most of the voters are. But all of that could be said about New Hampshire.

Why is New Hampshire still in the top five if that's the case for Iowa?

JOHNSON: Well, you know, it is enshrined in New Hampshire's state constitution to be the first primary. And, you know, we do need representation in the northeast.

Now there's an argument to push New Hampshire a little bit later, and not necessarily be the first. But understandably so, right? We have two Democratic Senators from New Hampshire.

There's a reflection of, you know, what some voters in the northeast want as a Democratic nominee. And so it is important to have them continue to be in the midst, but it's probably not best to have them at the very beginning.

CAMEROTA: Alencia Johnson, interesting to hear your thoughts. Thank you.

BLACKWELL: So what we're watching on Hawaii's big island is amazing, even beautiful. But it's also raising major concerns. Lava flow from the world's largest active volcano is inching closer to a major highway. We'll take you there, live.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[14:57:29]

BLACKWELL: The Alabama man who fell off a cruise ship into the Gulf of Mexico the day before Thanksgiving is now telling his story.

CAMEROTA: And I have so many questions.

James Grimes said he was naked, treading in high waves and wind for more than 15 hours before he was finally rescued.

CNN's Nick Valencia joins us now.

Nick, how did he fall off the ship?

NICK VALENCIA, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, James Grimes, Alisyn, says this is a Thanksgiving he will never forget. But there's a lot about that night that he says he doesn't remember, including how he got into the ship.

Also, he doesn't remember how many drinks he had that night. Remember, the last time he was seen was 11:00 p.m. the night before when he told his sister he was on his way to the bathroom.

But in his first interview since treading water for more than 15 hours in the Gulf of Mexico, he described his will to live and how exactly he stayed alive.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Was there any point while you were out there that you thought, I don't know how much longer I can keep doing this?

JAMES MICHAEL GRIMES, SURVIVED 15-PLUS HOURS IN OCEAN: When it started getting back towards nighttime again, the water started getting colder, at that time, I thought, you know, how much longer am I going to have to be out here?

I done taken off my socks and everything and was just waving them around my head trying to do something where they could see me.

And when that light finally hit me, somehow I heard it, "We got him." And I seen a guy coming down from the helicopter, and it was coming towards me. And right then, I thought, man, I see the light.

(END VIDEO CLIP) VALENCIA: We have been calling this a miracle on Thanksgiving. But this really has a lot of credit to do with what the Coast Guard did to rescue him.

Listen to the lieutenant from the Coast Guard describe what a mission it was to find Grimes in the water.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

LT. SETH GROSS, U.S. COAST GUARD: Just to give perspective of how broad the search area was going to be, you know, the vessel had tracked about 200 miles into the Gulf of Mexico.

And we kind of determined, you know, an approximate search area. We're looking over 7,000 square nautical miles, which is essentially the size of Massachusetts.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

VALENCIA: The size of Massachusetts, and they spotted him.

Grimes, meanwhile, says that he is willing to take a cruise again just because he wasn't really able to enjoy the vacation that was planned with his family.

He is consumed by gratitude, telling "Good Morning, America," he's grateful to be alive, and believes God was with him.

That video is just incredible. They said he had, you know, just seconds to live. And when rescuers finally got to him, he collapsed in their arms -- Victor and Alisyn?

CAMEROTA: But he's getting back on the horse of a cruise ship?

BLACKWELL: Because he missed the lobster. Like, oh, Saturday was lobster. I never got to really enjoy it.

CAMEROTA: I don't

(CROSSTALK)

[14:59:55]

VALENCIA: Just like Alisyn, I've got a lot of questions. Right?

CAMEROTA: Yes.

VALENCIA: I've got questions about, what happened that night. We still have blank spots that we need to --

(CROSSTALK)

CAMEROTA: Please keep following this. Please.

VALENCIA: I will. Absolutely.

BLACKWELL: Thank you, Nick Valencia.