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Senators Grill Acting FAA Chief After String Of Runway Close Calls; Families Await Answers After Kidnappers Kill 2 Americans; Ex- CDC Chief Explains Why He Thinks Covid-19 Came From Lab. Aired 2:30-Ep ET
Aired March 08, 2023 - 14:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
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[14:34:23]
VICTOR BLACKWELL, CNN HOST: The FAA's acting chief says the agency is committed to raising the bar on safety across the U.S. and around the world.
Billy Nolen faced lawmakers this morning on Capitol Hill after an alarming string of recent incidents involving commercial airliners.
Just this year, we've seen six reported close calls on airport runways.
BIANNA GOLODRYGA, CNN HOST: And it's not just on the tarmac. This week, as you'll recall, a man was arrested for allegedly right to stab a flight attendant in the cabin.
CNN's Pete Muntean is live in Washington.
So, Pete, what stood out to you from today's, at time, difficult hearing?
PETE MUNTEAN, CNN AVIATION CORRESPONDENT: Both of those things came up today, Victor and Bianna. That unruly passenger incident of just the other day, aboard a flight from L.A. to Boston, the chief of the FAA, acting administer, Billy Nolen, says the FAA still has a zero- tolerance policy against these unruly passenger incidents.
[14:35:13]
The number of those have actually gone down in recent years. It was really more of a 2021 issue. The number went down by half in 2022. We have not seen many this year. Although, there have been two high- profile ones so far this year.
The numbers that are going up are the close calls near runways of major U.S. airports involving commercial airliners. They are known, officially, as runway incursions.
And like you mentioned, there have been six since the start of this year, which is a very high number, considering the severity of these incidents. They are happening nationwide, Boston, JFK, Sarasota, Austin,
Honolulu, Burbank. We are finding out about new ones. We just found out about that one in Sarasota, just on Monday.
So the head of the FAA, Billy Nolen, said this is a huge problem for the FAA, and it's trying to dig in on this. There's a safety summit next week.
But he insists the flying system, right now, is safe. Listen.
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BILLY NOLEN, ACTING FAA ADMINISTRATOR: The FAA absolutely has a grasp on the situation. And it's something that we look at every day.
Throughout the course of every day, I get reports all day long about what's happening, the level of completion. And I can tell you that the system is strong, safe, and resilient.
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MUNTEAN: Ranking member on this House -- the Senate committee, excuse me, Ted Cruz, says he called these incidents troubling.
So this was coming up continually for these lawmakers on Capitol Hill today.
Billy Nolen, the chief of the FAA right now, says that this is still a huge issue.
And if there are dots to connect, the FAA will connect them at that safety summit next week, when it brings together airlines and federal stakeholders to try to figure out exactly what the common thread is here wall of these incidents - Victor, Bianna?
BLACKWELL: Pete Muntean for us. Thank you, Pete.
GOLODRYGA: Well, as a special GOP-led House panel holds its first meeting on the origins of Covid-19, U.S. agencies remain divided on where the virus was actually born. What we're learning, that's next.
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GOLODRYGA: The families of four Americans kidnapped in Mexico want answers regarding what happened in the days of the group initially went missing.
Meantime, Mexican officials completed the autopsies of Zindell Brown and Zindell Woodward. Their bodies are expected to return to the U.S. soon.
The two survivors, Latavia Washington McGee and Eric Williams, continue to receive treatment at a Mexican hospital. BLACKWELL: Mexican authorities found the group inside a wooden shack
in the city of Matamoras yesterday. They say the victims were taken to several locations to create confusion and thwart any rescue efforts.
CNN's Dianne Gallagher is tracking this investigation.
What are you hearing from the families?
DIANNE GALLAGHER, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: You know, Victor, I spoke with the mother of Latavia Washington McGee this morning. She experiencing a mix of intense relief and also immense grief.
Her daughter is the only one of those four lifelong friends who was not shot during this terrifying ordeal.
She was taken to the hospital. Her mother tells me that she's been checked out by doctors. She's been spoken to by law enforcement.
Her friend, Eric Williams, also in the hospital. His wife telling CNN that he was shot three times in the legs.
But Barbara Burgess, the mother of McGee, tells me that it is Shaeed Woodard, who is her nephew - but she raised as a son after his mother died when he was a teenager. Shaeed Woodard died along with Zindell Brown.
She said that all of them had been friends since they were children in Lake City, South Carolina.
She described what her daughter told her when she spoke with her on the phone from the hospital yesterday to CNN's Don Lemon on "CNN THIS MORNING" today, saying her daughter was emotional. She was crying.
And again, she described those moments that they were kidnapped to her mother.
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BARBARA MCLEOD BURGESS: MOTHER OF KIDNAPPING SURVIVOR LATAVIA WASHINGTON MCGEE (voice-over): There were driving through and a van came up and hit them. And that's when they started shooting at the car, shooting inside the van or whatever.
And I guess, she said, the others tried to run and they got shot at the same time.
DON LEMON, CNN HOST: Yes.
BURGESS: And Shaeed and Zindell got shot at the same time. And she watched them die.
Put everyone who had something to do with it, I want them locked up.
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GALLAGHER: Now, her mother tells me that she expects McGee to actually return home here to Myrtle Beach some time as early as today, Victor and Bianna.
As far as those two Americans who were killed, their autopsies were completed this morning.
According to a source within the federal prosecutor's office there in Mexico, told CNN that they do expect the repatriation of their bodies to the United States sometime soon.
GOLODRYGA: Such a tragedy.
Dianne Gallagher, thank you.
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BLACKWELL: A damning new report from the Justice Department. It finds that the Louisville Police Department uses excessive force, routinely discriminates against and targets black people there. We'll speak with a member of a Louisville city council, ahead.
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GOLODRYGA: The House Select Subcommittee investigating the origins of Covid held its first hearing on Capitol Hill today.
Among the witnesses called by Republicans was former CDC director, Dr. Robert Redfield, who has previously stated that he thinks the virus came from an accidental lab leak.
He stands by that belief but says it will be up to the intelligence experts and not scientists to prove it.
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DR. ROBERT REDFIELD, FORMER CDC DIRECTOR: This virus was immediately the most infectious virus -- not the most, I think probably right behind measles - virus that we've ever seen infect man.
So I immediately said, wait a second, this isn't natural. And then you go back and look at the literature and you find, in 2014, this lab actually published a paper that they put the H2 receptor into humanized mice so it could affect human tissue.
And then you learn that the new Covid, which came from bats, now can hardly replicate in bats. So how does that happen?
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I don't think that answer is going to come from the scientific community. I think that answer is going to --
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GOLODRYGA: Dr. Megan Ranney is an emergency physician in the deputy dean of public health at Brown University.
Doctor, always good to see you. So in addition to Dr. Redfield, Republicans had invited Dr. Jamie
Metzl, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, to testify as well.
And here's what he said. He said researchers that "researchers, who sought to publish papers like himself in examining a lab origin, were, quote, "facing ferociously strong headwinds' and a manufactured consensus in the scientific community on the lab leak theory."
He described himself as a lifelong Democrat and said that he had been painted as a conspiracy theorist when he started to investigate even the possibility that Covid originated in a lab.
Was potentially valuable information and time lost during that period in your view?
DR. MEGAN RANNEY, EMERGENCY PHYSICIAN & DEPUTY DEAN OF PUBLIC HEALTH, BROWN UNIVERSITY: I think a lot of potentially valuable information was lost. But not so much because of the suppression of papers, which I can't comment on.
As an editor of a journal, I never saw a paper come across my desk that talked about a lab or land origin of Covid.
Instead where I think information was lost what was lost in those early months, in China, itself as well as in the early months in the United States.
We did not know about the spread of Covid within China until long it had already started to decimate the Wuhan region.
And then, as Covid migrated across the globe, we lost valuable time here in America with lack of testing, lack of data, lack of effective policies to identify who was potentially sick and to try to keep the virus out of large spread. That's where our time was deeply lost.
GOLODRYGA: To that point, the chairman of the subcommittee, Congressman Brad Wester, said this:
He said: "This information must begin where and how this virus came about so that we can attempt to prepare, predict or prevent it from happening again.
Without China's cooperation - and China has not been cooperating since day one. They're even denying Covid originated in their country - do you think we'll get answers?
RANNEY: I don't know that we will ever get answers. And this gets to the core of the issue.
You ask do the American people deserve an investigation into this horrible virus that changed our lives for the worst for far too long, that killed far too many of our friends and relatives, and that hurt our children, our elderly, and those of us of working age, we do deserve an investigation.
But what we deserve even more is better preparedness so that we never get caught in that same situation again.
We should be strengthening international cooperation to monitor for new infectious disease outbreaks.
We should be strengthening international cooperation around how to handle labs, not just labs that do research but also labs that get specimens. We need to have good security protocols around that.
And we should be strengthening international cooperation so that we, as a society, are ready to react if and when there is another pandemic in a way that protects our most vulnerable, that scales up testing and treatment more quickly.
Watching what's going on with the H1N1 bird flu, which has not made large-scale jumps to humans, I'm deeply worried because we're setup to make all those same mistakes again.
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RANNEY: - more energy.
GOLODRYGA: On this lab leak theory, do you think that that investigation in particular was stymied by politics?
RANNEY I think every part of our Covid response was stymied with politics, whether it was the lab leak investigation, availability of personal protective equipment, development and dissemination of tests or uptake of vaccines.
It is difficult at this point to look at a single part of our Covid response that was not marred by early politicization.
GOLODRYGA: Do you support a Republican bill that has been supported by Jim Himes, congressman who's a top Democrat on the House Intel Committee, that would require the Biden administration to declassify any information about potential links between Covid and the Wuhan virology lab?
RANNEY: So I am not a security expert. Based on my knowledge of colleagues who work in the national security sphere, my concern about that bill would be we do not want to release privileged information that helps us better at identifying and preventing future pandemics.
GOLODRYGA: All right, Dr. Megan Ranney, thank you so much.
[14:55:57]
Well, the daughter of the late Australian conservationist and crocodile hunter, Steve Irwin, is sharing a very personal story about her battle with endometriosis.
Bindi Irwin is speaking out about her 10-year struggle with the condition to raise awareness as the world marked International Women's Day. This month is also Endometriosis Awareness Month.
The 24-yeawr-old posted on social media how she endured insurmountable fatigue, pain and nausea before undergoing surgery.
The disease impacts 190 million women worldwide. Symptoms can include pelvic pain, heavy menstrual bleeding and fertility issues. And its most common in women in their 30s and 40s.
Irwin says she's now, thankfully, on the road to recovery.
BLACKWELL: In Ukraine, the city of Bakhmut may be on the verge of falling to Russia. But Kyiv says it's not giving up. Our Wolf Blitzer just sat down with President Zelenskyy. Hear part of that interview ahead.
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