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CNN This Morning
Relatives Describe Trauma That Child Hostages Endured; North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D) Joins CNN This Morning; Health Alert: Spike In Respiratory Illness In China. Aired 7:30-8a ET
Aired December 01, 2023 - 07:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[07:30:00]
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YAEL ENGEL LICHI, AUNT OF FREED HOSTAGE OFIR ENGEL: A few hours to wake up and just -- we just didn't speak loudly -- just whispered. And I told him again and again, it's OK -- you can talk normally. You're back home.
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POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: Joining us now is Dr. Ofrit Shapira-Berman. She's an Israeli psychoanalyst who is leading a team of professionals to provide mental health care for freed hostages and survivors, and their families. Doctor, thank you very much for being with us this morning.
OFRIT SHAPIRA-BERMAN, PSYCHOANALYST AND TRAUMA EXPERT (via Webex by Cisco): You're very welcome.
HARLOW: Listening to that mother describing the whispering of a child, we heard something similar from Thomas Hand, Emily Hand's father. Emily is 9 years old. Whispering even when they're home, even when they're held, even when they're loved, and when they know they are safe.
How do you begin to treat this trauma?
SHAPIRA-BERMAN: So, first of all, very, very slowly and very delicately. I mean, everybody has to have patience with these children and with all the other hostages who are going to be back. It will take a long time -- a very long time. And I think the trauma will take days before the family and then the therapists will only begin to hear the stories. I'm not even talking about -- to begin to understand the stories. I think understanding will take much longer and need a lot of patience.
And it's going to be manifested in endless ways from the smallest details of everyday life to things which are more -- bigger and more important.
HARLOW: Yeah. You know, one of the other things I've been struck by in these stories from family members as they welcome their loved ones back is something that the uncle of one of the hostages told our colleague Wolf Blitzer about how his niece talks about what happened to her almost as though it happened out of her own body.
Listen to this.
SHAPIRA-BERMAN: Yeah.
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YAIR ROTEM, UNCLE OF FREED HOSTAGE HILA ROTEM-SHOSHANI: She's a little bit distant now. She is a little bit cold. She talks about things that happened like it's in the third person. Like it happened to someone else. She says she saw horrible things but she says it with a straight face. It's like she's describing a scene from a movie that she watched somewhere.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HARLOW: I'm sure that's not just her. I'm sure that other hostages, --
SHAPIRA-BERMAN: Yeah.
HARLOW: -- especially children, will be experiencing that.
SHAPIRA-BERMAN: Yeah.
HARLOW: Why would that happen? What do you make of that?
SHAPIRA-BERMAN: Well, it's actually a very common feature of trauma and I expect that to be very common not just with the children and not with just the hostages but also with the survivors of the massacre.
It's actually a different mechanism. It's -- the pain is unbearable. To realize what you have seen and to realize what has been done to you and to your family is really unbearable.
So what the mind does -- it disassociates itself. And so, sometimes, you can remember the details but the effect is gone, and sometimes you are very emotional and you cannot remember what happened. So -- because collecting the data with emotions is beyond whatever a person can handle at such an early stage.
And this is actually what therapy is about -- about slowly, at the pace of the person -- of the specific person to just try and collect all the details together. The story -- again, the smallest details. When you saw someone who was bleeding, to have the patient -- again, at his own pace -- say what he felt. What he was thinking about. And what kind of triggers today -- when he's home and safe, what kind of triggers make this reappear and then making him think about it and be terrified again. And it can take years and years.
HARLOW: Doctor Ofrit Shapira-Berman, thank you for being with us and for the work you're doing right now with these families.
SHAPIRA-BERMAN: Thank you. You're very welcome, and thank you.
HARLOW: Of course.
SHAPIRA-BERMAN: Thank you.
PHIL MATTINGLY, CNN ANCHOR: Well, today, North Carolina becomes the 40th state to expand Medicaid coverage as part of the Affordable Care Act. That comes as Donald Trump has unleashed a string of recent attacks threatening to gut Obamacare if he returns to the White House.
We're going to have North Carolina's Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, respond to those attacks.
HARLOW: And in case you missed it, there was a debate last night between Republican presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis and California governor, Gavin Newsom. The attacks and the substance just ahead.
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GOV. RON DESANTIS, (R) PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: You just won't admit it.
GOV. GAVIN NEWSOM (D) CALIFORNIA: -- running for a third --
DESANTIS: You will not admit it.
NEWSOM: -- term.
DESANTIS: Why don't you admit that you're wrong?
SEAN HANNITY, FOX NEWS HOST, "THE SEAN HANNITY SHOW": All right, gentlemen.
NEWSOM: One thing, in closing, that we have in common is neither of us will be the nominee for our party in 2024.
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[07:38:54]
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DESANTIS: He thinks Biden and Harris have done a great job. He thinks the economy is working because of their policies, for Americans, and they are not. And so, what California represents is the Biden-Harris agenda on steroids.
NEWSOM: Here is a guy who celebrated Bidenomics just this week -- celebrating $28 million that came into your state because of the CHIPS and Science Act, one of the most significant economic plans --
HANNITY: All right. NEWSOM: -- since FDR. I'm proud of the work Biden and Harris have done.
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MATTINGLY: So it was an unusual debate last night. Florida Republican governor and 2024 presidential candidate Ron DeSantis took on California's Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, who technically isn't running for anything. And the Fox debate, as you just heard, zeroed in on part of whether President Biden should be reelected.
Joining us now, Democratic governor of North Carolina, Roy Cooper. Governor, we appreciate your time this morning.
Gavin Newsom serving as kind of the key surrogate for the administration and the campaign last night. You have also been utilized heavily as a -- as a surrogate. I'm interested -- how did you think the governor -- your fellow Democratic governor did last night in the debate?
[07:40:00]
GOV. ROY COOPER, (D) NORTH CAROLINA (via Skype): Well, Gavin Newsom is a great governor. I appointed a new state auditor yesterday. We're getting ready to launch Medicaid today. I had Sec. Yellen in town. So I didn't get a chance to see it. It is pretty clear that I need to grab some popcorn and watch the replay.
But what I will tell you about Democratic governors -- last year, I was chairman of the Democratic Governors Association and we picked up two -- net, plus two Democratic governors in a year Democrats were supposed to get clobbered. And it's because we had right-wing extremists running against competent people.
And as we begin Medicaid expansion today, ensuring 600,000 more North Carolinians, Ron DeSantis could be doing the same thing in Florida. He could get more than 800,000 people who need health insurance right now without costing any Florida state tax dollars.
You know, these right-wing Republican governors seem to think that the only thing the government is good for is banning books and banning women's reproductive freedom. I'm sure he did a great job -- Gov. Newsom did last night and I look forward to watching it.
MATTINGLY: The -- I want to dig in on what you're talking about -- about Medicaid expansion because it is fascinating. One, this has been a central fight for you since you've taken office to get to this point. But at the same time, it comes when President -- former President Trump has started attacking Obamacare again, apparently upset about a Wall Street Journal editorial.
I'm old enough to remember the 2018 midterms. I know how this polled and how effective this message was for Democrats. So effective that you saw the Biden campaign within, like, 24 hours roll out a brand-new ad.
With the context of your fight on Medicaid expansion, is this a game- changer for the 2024 presidential race?
COOPER: Absolutely, it is.
Donald Trump is really good at reading the room full of conspiracy theorists, but he's not good at reading the room full of Americans who need health care.
Medicaid expansion, the Affordable Care Act has provided health insurance for millions of Americans and we're about to get 600,000 more insured in North Carolina. And here's who we're talking about. Working people who, right now, are making too much to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to qualify for subsidies under the Affordable Care Act, and so they're stuck in that gap.
And we're talking about childcare workers. We're talking about senior -- people who take care of seniors. We're talking about people who work in restaurants.
These are the people that Donald Trump wants to rip away insurance from --
MATTINGLY: Right.
COOPER: -- and that is a message that I think will resound during this next campaign.
And plus, people want to keep their health insurance. We see Republicans, Democrats, Independents for this.
I got a Republican legislature to pass Medicaid expansion and we pulled together non-traditional coalitions.
Tough-on-crime Republican sheriffs coming in and saying --
MATTINGLY: Right.
COOPER: -- 80 percent of the time my deputies spend is on mental health issues and substance abuse disorder. These people need health care and not handcuffs.
Those 10 red states that have right-wing extremists preventing Medicaid expansion -- they need to get it now.
North Carolina has --
MATTINGLY: Right.
COOPER: -- a roadmap. Ron DeSantis should look at it if he really wants to help people in Florida.
MATTINGLY: So my question coming from that is I constantly hear from White House officials -- Biden campaign officials on the policy issues themselves in isolation -- the polls are always in our favor. If you take them one by one, the legislative success of the first two years -- what he's pushing, how he's operated -- people like them. And yet, you know the polls. You see them. Whether you dispute them or not, they are out there. And part of the issue, very clearly, is -- I mean, you look at numbers on age, on stamina -- whether he can really fulfill a second term.
What's your response to that?
COOPER: People have made the mistake of underestimating Joe Biden all his life and he's been able to emerge victorious every single time.
I -- not too long ago, I spent more than an hour one-on-one with President Biden talking about governors implementing the bipartisan infrastructure plan, American Rescue Plan, Inflation Reduction Act, CHIPS and Science Act. He is on top of it. He asked tough questions. He wants to get this done on behalf of the people.
Joe Biden has done a magnificent job as president. He's done more the first two years than most presidents could hope to do in two terms.
And we've got a year until this campaign.
MATTINGLY: Right.
COOPER: We're going to be spreading this message across the country. And when you look at the best of Joe Biden and the worst of Donald Trump, that's going to be an easy choice for a lot of people. We're even going to win North Carolina for Joe Biden.
MATTINGLY: Oh, really? OK. I've heard that from --
COOPER: I will.
MATTINGLY: -- Democratic campaigns quite often.
[07:45:00]
Governor, we appreciate your time. I know it's a very big day in North Carolina for you on the policy front with the Medicaid expansion. Thanks so much.
COOPER: Thanks, Phil.
HARLOW: No skepticism, Mattingly, in that "Oh, really" at all, right?
MATTINGLY: A little bit.
HARLOW: Just a little bit on a Friday.
All right. When antibiotics were not working on her dying husband, one woman took matters into her own hands. And our Dr. Sanjay Gupta shows us how she used a naturally-occurring virus to save her husband's life. That's ahead.
(COMMERCIAL)
HARLOW: Welcome back. Growing concern over a reported spike in pediatric respiratory cases in China, but CDC director Dr. Mandy Cohen assured lawmakers yesterday that a new virus is not causing the surge. Listen to this.
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DR. MANDY COHEN, DIRECTOR, CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION: We do not believe this is a new or novel pathogen. We believe this is all existing, meaning COVID, flu, RSV.
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HARLOW: CNN chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta joins us now. Sanjay, good morning. Always good to have you on.
What could be --
DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT, AUTHOR, "KEEP SHARP", HOST, "CHASING LIFE" PODCAST: Good morning.
HARLOW: -- behind this and how concerned should people be?
GUPTA: Well, I'll preface by saying this. You have to take the information coming out of China with a bit of a grain of salt. I've been reporting on these outbreaks for some 20 years and going back to SARS in 2003 and even this most recent pandemic, you have to sort of try and figure out the story behind some of the headlines here, which I think is what Dr. Cohen is referring to.
[07:50:00]
Is this a virus that is spreading between humans? Yes. Are these viruses that are spreading within a community? Yes. We see the hospitals are becoming overwhelmed in certain places.
But this last point does not appear to be a novel virus. It is really important. I mean, it's the novel viruses that can quickly spiral into these pandemics. So it's the swarm of viruses -- flu, RSV, COVID, as you mentioned.
By the way, we saw similar sort of upticks in the winter of last year here as well. All of a sudden, you sort of see these viruses swarm and a lot of people would get sick quickly.
One thing that appears to be complicating things, especially in China, is also bacterial infections. They seem to be a large part of what's driving this as well. And they have a lot of antibiotic resistance in China. So this is something that we're really keeping an eye on.
If you look at deaths associated with antibiotic resistance around the world --
HARLOW: Um-hum.
GUPTA: -- it's close to five million a year. I mean, people may not realize it's that big. In China alone, 600,000. So this is also I think further complicating things with regard to
this uptick. They're likely to get it under control but they've got to keep an eye on this problem.
MATTINGLY: I'm stunned by those numbers --
HARLOW: Yeah.
MATTINGLY: -- to be honest with you.
GUPTA: Yeah.
MATTINGLY: Is there a way to reduce the antibiotic resistance?
GUPTA: Well, as you might imagine, the biggest thing you've got to do is use fewer antibiotics.
I mean, in China, for example, many antibiotics are sold over-the- counter so that just sort of fuels the problem. There's also a lot of antibiotic use in livestock. So there's all these different places we have to sort of curb the use of antibiotics.
And I will tell you this. It takes a long time to develop new antibiotics. It can take 10 to 15 years, which is why there are people around the world right now who are trying to find alternative sources of antibiotics. They're scouring the bottoms of the ocean with ships and they're looking even within nature to see if something can serve as an antibiotic. And I spent time with some of these folks.
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STEFFANIE STRATHDEE, EPIDEMIOLOGIST: Oh, there's some really good stuff here, though.
GUPTA (voice-over): Today, epidemiologist Stephanie Strathdee is taking me on a hunt for what are known as phages. They are naturally occurring viruses but have a special quality. They eat bacteria. In many ways, they are perfect predators.
STRATHDEE: I drop it in and try to collect some water from a deep spot. OK, there's a little bit.
GUPTA (voice-over): And although they can be found almost anywhere when it comes to phages, the dirtier the location the better.
GUPTA (on camera): Any idea, like, how many phages would potentially be in there?
STRATHDEE: Well, one drop of water can have up to a trillion phages in it.
GUPTA (voice-over): Just one of which could be used to treat a bacteria for which we currently have no antibiotics.
STRATHDEE: You can tell it's kind of frothy. GUPTA (on camera): I think anybody who's watching this is going to have a different perspective on looking at what they would typically ignore -- waste that they think has no value.
STRATHDEE: Yeah.
GUPTA (on camera): And instead, the idea that it could be medicine.
STRATHDEE: Very good.
GUPTA (voice-over): Now, you've probably never heard of phages and neither did Stephanie. But eight years ago, they became a deeply personal mission for her.
GUPTA (on camera): What happened? How did you take a major interest in this?
STRATHDEE: Well, it certainly is something I kind of fell into.
GUPTA (voice-over): While on vacation together in Egypt, her husband Tom became very sick.
STRATHDEE: A clinic diagnosed pancreatitis. It was caused by a gallstone that blocked his bile duct and caused a giant abscess to form. But that wasn't the worst of it because that abscess made a nice little apartment for this superbug to move into.
GUPTA (voice-over): Superbugs are strains of bacteria, viruses, fungi that have developed antimicrobial resistance. That means medications designed to treat them no longer work.
This is what Tom's superbug looked like -- Acinetobacter baumannii. It's considered one of the impossible ones.
STRATHDEE: I put the keywords like the name of his superbug and alternative treatments, and up popped a paper that had, buried in it, phage therapy.
GUPTA (voice-over): It was a start but with trillions upon trillions of phages in the world, finding the right phage for a specific infection is the real challenge. Think of it as an endless number of keys for just one lock.
And to make things even more complicated, despite being around for more than 100 years, phage therapy has never been widely used in the West.
STRATHDEE: When they were really embraced by the former Soviet Union that was seen as something that was Soviet science -- Soviet medicine, and what the enemy was using.
Aha, good.
GUPTA (voice-over): Stephanie and Tom, however, did not care about that. He was dying and she, along with her colleagues at the University of California San Diego, were now on a mission to save his life.
GUPTA (on camera): So what are we looking at here?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Where you see that the bacteria are being killed, like here and here, you know that you've got a phage from that wastewater that's killing that bacteria.
[07:55:02]
GUPTA (on camera): So when you see a plaque like that develop that's a very good sign then?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes, it's a very good sign. It gets us excited.
GUPTA (voice-over): Now, there were few labs in the United States that were actually studying phages but scientists at the Navy and Texas A&M University stepped in to help Stephanie scour the world, and it worked. Here's where they found the phages for Tom -- sewage treatment plants, barnyards, all containing naturally occurring phages that could do what no modern medicine could.
STRATHDEE: As soon as they were ready, Dr. Schooley said look, we've got to go because he's really close.
GUPTA (on camera): He's really close to dying, so --
STRATHDEE: Yeah, yeah.
After we injected phages into his bloodstream, even though he was in multistage organ failure, he woke up from his coma, lifted his head off the pillow, and kissed his daughter's hand a couple of days later.
GUPTA (on camera): That gives me goosebumps.
THOMAS PATTERSON, CURED WITH PHAGE THERAPY: Stephanie saved my life, without a doubt. As hard as it is to believe, spending nine months in the hospital, it was worth it.
STRATHDEE: It's your legacy.
PATTERSON: No, it's your legacy.
STRATHDEE: Our legacy.
PATTERSON: There you go.
GUPTA (voice-over): A legacy born of this Mother Earth providing medicines for so much of what ails us if we just take the time to stop, listen, and look.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
GUPTA: Stephanie calls these phages perfect predators. And they're not going to replace antibiotics, guys, but that's an example of alternatives that we're going to need to start looking at given how much resistance to antibiotics is out there. HARLOW: Wow --
MATTINGLY: Dr. Sanjay Gupta, thank you.
HARLOW: -- what a story.
GUPTA: You got it.
MATTINGLY: Well, you're looking right now at smoke rising over northern Gaza after the end of the humanitarian pause for hostage exchanges. We're going to get an update from the IDF ahead.
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