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Dolphins Quarterback Tua Tagovailoa Placed on NFL Concussion Protocol; Top 10 Climate Stories of 2022. Aired 3:30-4p ET

Aired December 27, 2022 - 15:30   ET

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

[15:30:00]

SARA SIDNER, CNN HOST: For a second time this season, Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa has been placed in the NFL's concussion protocol, the decision came one day after he played an entire game against the Green Bay Packers, head coach Mike McDaniel said he could not pinpoint a specific moment where he may have been injured. Take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MIKE MCDANIEL, HEAD COACH, MIAMI DOLPHINS: I care very deeply about each and every player, I take that serious. So, I just want him to get healthy and have peace of mind in that regard and that's first and foremost. And then, you know, whatever those circumstances are after you deal with after, but it's about the human being and making sure he's squared away.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SIDNER: Back in September, Tua Tagovailoa was diagnosed with a concussion after being sacked. He laid motionless on the field for several minutes before getting loaded on to a stretcher.

[15:35:00]

That concussion came just days after a separate head injury where he was allowed continue playing in the game, the incident led the NFL to update the league's concussion protocol.

Joining me now is Ephraim Salaam, he is a former offensive tackle for many NFL teams. He's been in the game. He knows what it's like. Can you give us a sense of whether the dolphins need to go ahead and let Tua rest, bench him, let him rest for the rest of the season at this point?

EPHRAIM SALAAM, RETIRED NFL PLAYER: Well, now, it's a health issue and this goes back to the Buffalo game where he experienced the first head injury and was allowed to come back out from halftime and continue to play.

And then subsequently, I mean, four days later playing on Thursday night, he had that gruesome head injury and concussion that we all witnessed and it was very shocking. The fact that he came back a couple of weeks later and continued to play, now he has, you know, these compound concussion issues.

There is something there that he definitely needs to take this serious. Because whenever you're dealing with your brain, your head, those types of injuries, everyone is different, people bounce back differently at different times. But this is something that he's been dealing with since that first initial Buffalo game.

And, you know, football comes secondary to life and your standard of living and you know most current players don't realize that. So, you as a team, as doctors you have to protect players from themselves and I'm not seeing a lot of that right now.

SIDNER: You know, there is this huge concern about CTE and what it means after you stop playing, not just to the game itself. We know that Tua Tagovailoa had discussed his symptoms with doctors but we weren't quite sure where he stands on whether he wants -- we're taught to play, right. When you're an athlete you're taught to play through the pain. How much say does the player have in making these kind of decisions?

SALAAM: Well, the player has a lot of say. You know, I've in the history of my 13 year career I played with several injuries that had no business playing with but that's the game. This is a team sport and when you play an intricate part of that team like a quarterback, you know your team is better with you there. It's hard for a player to leave those guys in the locker room hanging. So, sometimes we have to protect us from ourselves and that's what needs to happen here.

If Tua is having these problems over and over again, it would be in my opinion the best interest for him to not play the rest of the season. And I know they're on the cusp of going to the playoffs and things like that, but at a certain point health becomes bigger than the game.

SIDNER: I want to talk about some of the protocols. Because there have been updated helmets that we've seen the NFL mandate for practices, some updated play helmets, you know that's one thing, right. But is that really enough? Because when you look at what can happen to someone who gets CTE and who's been hit over and over and had concussions over and over, their life can be shortened or is really badly impacted.

SALAAM: Yes, and every player is different, like I said earlier. Some players are more susceptible to having concussions and lingering symptoms. It seems like this is going on with Tua, especially since this past game. No one can pinpoint when this happened.

And the fact that after the game the whole next day he goes in and then talks to doctors about some issues that he's having regarding the concussion. That's the alarming part for me because we didn't see anything. I know he got sacked one time or he got brought down to the ground and hit his head. He seemed fine.

But now we don't know. So, now there's a situation here where, you know, Tua may be the type of person that these concussions have a longer, lingering effect that can ultimately affect his standard of living moving forward. SIDNER: OK, there's a fierce argument going on in my family and other

families, because every time you see someone that gets a concussion, someone that has one of these head injury and you know it could affect them for the rest of their life potentially.

Do you think that parents are starting to say, like, I'm not going to let my kid play football anymore? Do you think you'll start to see, unless something is done for the health of the players to try and deal with these concussions. Do you think you'll start to see fewer and fewer people wanting to play youth football, for example.

SALAAM: Well, you know, me personally I don't think tackle football outside of high school is necessary. I don't think there should be Pop Warner tackle football at all, on any level. I don't think it's necessary that children are growing, their brains are developing, their muscles there developing, the kids develop at different stages.

[15:40:02]

So, you got some bigger, stronger, faster kids playing tackle football with kids who may not be up to their level. So, for me personally, I didn't play football until ninth grade it worked out OK for me. And I'm not saying, you know, I may be the outlier but I don't think in today's society that these kids need to be tackling.

Me personally, I have two boys 11 and 8, neither one of them will be playing football just because of, you know, the things that I've had to deal with and endure as a parent. I don't want my children to ever experience the pain that I've gone through, including pain today.

So, it will all depend. Football is such a huge part of America culture. Parents love it, kids love it, players love it. It's changed my entire life. So, I understand the need and the want and the desire to play football. But trying to make the game safer -- which the NFL has done. The NFL has made this game a lot safer including the surfaces they play on, the helmet, the equipment, it's much better than when I played.

SIDNER: Ephraim, I did not realize that you hadn't started until ninth grade. You're like a golden uniform on a rainbow because you had to have been good. Ephraim Salaam, thank you so much for your insight.

SALAAM: Of course, of course. Thank you.

SIDNER: All right, now to Republican Congressman elect George Santos admitting he lied on his resume after major discrepancies emerged following his victory. Now he and his party are now responding. That's ahead.

[15:45:00]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SIDNER: Flooding, heat, and hurricanes. Just some of the elements mother nature unleashed during 2022. Here's CNN's chief climate correspondent Bill Weir. (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BILL WEIR, CNN CHIEF CLIMATE CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): I'm Bill Weir with the top 10 climate stories of 2022, a year that started with a bang.

BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN ANCHOR AND CORRESPONDENT: A tsunami advisory is now in effect for the entire U.S. West Coast and Alaska.

WEIR (voice-over): A undersea volcano near the island nation of Congo erupted with such force that the ash cloud blew 35 miles into the stratosphere. The boom was heard in Alaska. And tsunami waves took two lives across the Pacific in Peru.

Number nine, some of the world's most important rivers fell to sobering levels, like Italy's Po to Germany's Rhine, to the not so mighty Mississippi, where the Army Corps of Engineers is still dredging as fast as they can to keep billions' worth of goods and grain moving to market.

At number eight, a surprise reversal in coal country gives the U.S. its most ambitious climate laws in history.

JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: With unwavering conviction, commitment and patience, progress does come.

WEIR (voice-over): The Biden promised to make America greener. It was all but throttled by West Virginia's Joe Manchin until four days of secret horse trading with Chuck Schumer put the Inflation Reduction Act on the president's desk.

While environmentalists resent some of the concessions given to Big Oil, analysts say the rich incentives for people and companies to electrify could get the country most of the way toward Biden's carbon- cutting goals.

At number seven, Nicole became the first hurricane to hit the Atlantic Coast in the second week of November.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The intensity of the rain and wind have certainly gone up.

WEIR (voice-over): An unusually late arrival, about a 500 mile wind field, during outrageously high king tides. The combination cost five lives and almost $2 billion in damages.

At number six, the 27th attempt at cooperation on climate action went into overtime as poor nations pleaded with rich ones to finally start picking up the tab for loss and damages.

ANTONIO GUTERRES, UNITED NATIONS SECRETARY-GENERAL: Clearly, this will not be enough.

WEIR (voice-over): In the end, almost 200 nations agreed to set up a fund to help the most vulnerable. But a global pledge to phase out fossil feels was stonewalled by oil-producing nations. At number five, an increasingly unpredictable water cycle brought the kind of floods seen once every thousand years. From Dallas, where they got a summer's worth of rain in a day. To Death Valley, which set a record with two inches of rain in one of the driest spots on Earth. 43 lives were lost in flash floods and mudslides across six Kentucky counties.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Where are all these people going to go? Where are they going to live?

WEIR (voice-over): And the combo of heavy rain and rapid snow melt forced 10,000 to evacuate Yellowstone National Park as walls of water rearranged entire landscapes in hours.

At number four, England, that green and pleasant land turned brown in 2022, as thermometers in the U.K. hit 104 degrees Fahrenheit and put an unprecedented toll on firefighters.

Temperatures hit 106 in Spain as the European heat wave took thousands of lives.

And meanwhile, in China, records were smashed at hundreds of weather stations, the stifling heat lingered for 70 days.

At number three, the western megadrought brought Lake Mead to its lowest levels ever, exposing long-lost drowning victims and possible mob hits and triggering the first-ever cuts for those last in line to use Colorado River water.

WEIR: And the lake used to go -- it used to go half a mile around the corner. And now it starts way back here. I cannot believe this.

WEIR (voice-over): While there is hope for a heavy snow pack this winter, it would take years of steady precipitation to refill Lake Mead and will likely inch closer to a dead pool next summer.

From not enough water in the American West to way too much in Pakistan, at number two, a monsoon on steroids brought rains 500 percent above average in some places. As well as a dozen or more bursting glaciers.

CLARISSA WARD, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: So, you can see, there's just a steady stream of vehicles pouring into this area. These are all people who are desperately trying to escape their villages which are now completely submerged underwater.

WEIR (voice-over): At least 33 million people have been affected, people responsible for less than 1 percent of climate altering pollution.

And at number one, a natural disaster of 2022.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Ian is here, John, we just felt the market increase in wind speeds.

WEIR (voice-over): Hurricane Ian, when it roared from a tropical storm to a category three in a day, Hurricane Ian became the new poster child for so-called rapid intensification. When warm water-fueled storms get so strong so fast, evacuation plans fall apart.

WEIR: This is just unbelievable, the amount of damage in this one neighborhood.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I was very scared and I would never want to go through it again.

WEIR (voice-over): Ian's wind, storm surge and freshwater flooding toll is expected to cause over $50 billion and, so far, it has taken over 100 lives.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

SIDNER: And there's your top ten climate issues of the year. "THE LEAD WITH JAKE TAPPER" starts after this short break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)