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CDC Vaccine Advisors Considering Adding Warning Label or Restricting Who Can Get J&J Vaccine; CDC Chief: U.S. Seeing "Some Unsettling Gaps" in Vaccinations; Happening Now: CDC Advisors Discuss Path Forward for J&J Vaccine; Biden Allies Push Jobs Message On Second Day of Climate Summit; Harris: Biden and I "Have the Same Values and Operate From the Same Principles". Aired 12-12:30p ET

Aired April 23, 2021 - 12:00   ET

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

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JOHN KING, CNN HOST: Hello to our viewers in the United States and around the world. I'm John King in Washington. Thank you so much for sharing your Friday with us.

President Biden closing day two of his Climate Summit with global jobs pushes, reaching his promise of having fossil fuel emissions in 10 years will require monumental buy in. To get it and perhaps to win over science skeptics President Biden says investments in smart climate policy will bring a green energy jobs dividend.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: Today's final session is not about the threat of climate change poses. It's about the opportunity that addressing climate change provides. It's an opportunity to create millions of good paying jobs around the world. This is a moment for all of us to build better economies for our children, our grandchildren, and all of us to thrive.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: More on that climate challenge ahead. Up first, though, today a critical meeting this hour of vaccine experts to decide if Johnson & Johnson's Coronavirus Vaccine will go back on the American market? A CDC committee meeting today to assess more J&J vaccine data and to review a possible vaccine linked to blood clots.

The J&J pause is now 10 days old. A source telling CNN that permanently shelving this vaccine is off the table. But the CDC Vaccine Advisors are considering appending a warning label to each dose or perhaps restricting who can receive the single shot vaccine. The CDC Director last hour underlines the importance of today's deliberations.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) DR. ROCHELLE WALENSKY, CDC DIRECTOR: I think the FDA and I both feel strongly and the CDC feels strongly that we need to act swiftly after that analysis. But I do think that there are plenty of people who are interested in the J&J vaccine if just for convenience, as well as for a single dose option.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Let's go through the latest numbers and show you just where the Coronavirus fight stands as that committee makes this key decision about the vaccine. If you look at the case map right now it's essentially a holding pattern five states trending in the wrong direction. That's the orange that means more new COVID infections right now, compared to a week ago.

22 states that's the beige holding steady 22 States trending down, so 22 states trending down is good news, but a lot of states almost half essentially holding steady and a few going up. If you look at the case timeline this way we're still averaging the seven day average, almost 62,000 new infections a day.

You see the number from Thursday yesterday. 67,000. So this is still too high. It is down from the horrors of the winter peak, but it is still too high on a state by state day by day basis. Where's the vaccine race right now? Well, 27 percent, more than a quarter of the U.S. population fully vaccinated.

40 percent have had at least one dose among adults 18 and over 52 percent more than half at least one dose and two thirds of those over the age of 65 are now fully vaccinated. So a lot of progress on this front, but still works to be done.

Let's look at this on a map perspective. In this case, if you live here in the United States, you want your state to be dark, the darker the better. New Mexico 34 percent fully vaccinated. Alaska 33 you see some 20s down here in the southeast you see 21 percent in Utah. This is the state by state vaccine roll up.

And if you dig deeper into it, you look at vaccines by maker. The J&J vaccine is on the board today for this CDC review. Is it safe? Should it be put back in distribution? About 8 million Americans have received that, 37 million the Moderna Vaccine 44 million, the Pfizer Vaccine.

Here's what Johnson & Johnson wants the committee to consider maybe some restrictions on how the J&J Vaccine is used, but the maker says look, 60 percent - 66 percent overall, this vaccine has proven to be effective a month later. In South Africa, it was 64 percent.

Eight countries participated in this study Johnson & Johnson's overall message is let's look at the rare blood clot conversation. But overall, this is a very, very safe vaccine. And on that point, let's bring into our conversation Dr. Paul Offit. He's a member of that FDA Advisory Committee and Director of Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Dr. Offit it is great to see you. You're on the FDA side of this looking at vaccines at the CDC committee meeting today. You heard Dr. Walensky, how important is it that this committee make a decision and is it likely in your view, this vaccine will be back on the U.S. market quite soon?

DR. PAUL OFFIT, VACCINE EDUCATION CENTER DIRECTOR, CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL OF PHILADELPHIA: No, I think it'll be back on the market very soon. I think that's going to be their decision. I think what they're going to do is trust the American public to understand the concept of relative risk that you have a vaccine that in almost 7 million people was found to cause a very rare, a serious side effect roughly one per million.

On the other hand, if you take a theoretical million people who are infected with COVID 5000 will die and many more will be left with permanent harm. So I think the American public should understand that there is a risk that it's an exceedingly rare risk, but that this is a common virus and a virus which has done a lot of harm that can be prevented by a vaccine and there are advantages to this vaccine.

A single dose is an advantage and it also is a refrigerator stable product, much more so than the other two vaccines. So there are advantages for certain populations.

KING: And keep that in mind as we walk through part of this challenge, which is the moment. It's not just the specific issue is the J&J vaccine linked to these possible rare blood clots but the moment we are in the fight right now?

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KING: I just want to show where we are in the vaccine pace? Number one, the pace of shots in arms is actually down a little bit. The administration had we had it up over 3 million shots a day, it was 3.2 million shots a day at one point; it has come down a bit to 2.9 million.

Now that is more hesitancy, the White House would say that it is about supply right now. But I also want to show you this map here. If you look at vaccine hesitancy, this is from the Department of Health and Human Services. And you see the darker places.

This is by county, across America. We often look at counties we use this wall to look at counties when it comes to politics. This is about vaccine hesitancy, these darker counties, and you see them up here in the prairie states, down here in the southern states in the southeast part of the country.

These are people who are hesitant. There are vaccines available people are not coming up to use them. Dr. Walensky addressed that just last hour listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. WALENSKY: Looking county by county, there are some unsettling gaps in our coverage. Because this virus is an opportunist, we anticipate that the areas of lightest vaccine coverage now might be where the virus strikes next? And with modest protection of our oldest population, many more deaths could ensue. So while we have many reasons to celebrate, we also have the potential indeed the need to do more to protect people now.

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KLING: So Dr. Offit, if you take this map, which is vaccine hesitancy and take the point you just made about you don't need - you don't have the refrigeration challenge and it's one shot. It's easy to transport. There are a lot of rural areas up here. Is the J&J vaccine, if you can convince people to take it one of the solutions to this problem?

OFFIT: Yes, no, I think so. I think that, you know, by basically putting a scarlet letter on this vaccine by scaring people about this vaccine by not really trust him to understand the concept of relative risk, that we may have done more harm than good and that there will be people now who won't get a vaccine because this is the vaccine they would have gotten.

Then that's not the precautionary principle, which is exercising caution to avoid harm because we would have caused harm. And I think Dr. Walensky is exactly right. There are two things working on the behalf of this virus, one is variants and the other is our own inability to embrace the science here.

And to realize that vaccines are only way out of this pandemic. If we can't get to 80 plus percent of this population immune by either natural infection or immunization, by the end of the summer, then heading into winter, next winter, we're going to have a problem. This is that it's hard to winter virus, you can see that this past winter.

And so if we don't get to that, then we're going to have to face what is the next step, if a critical percentage of the population isn't getting vaccinated, which allows variants to continue to be made? What are we going to do? And I think that's where the fight is going to happen, actually, I think probably by the end of the summer.

KING: By the end of the summer, you note and part of that - part of that is adults who are hesitant in places like this. And then the next challenge is children as well. I just want to show you some of the recent data on cases in children still a very small population, if you will a small proportion of the COVID cases.

But the cases among children have been going up and one of the big questions is and you will face this by the FDA, the CDC will face as well. When are the vaccines deemed to be safe? Are they deemed to be safe for children? Or Dr. Sanjay Gupta has a new interview on this subject I want you to listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. ROBERT FRENCK, LEADING TRIALS OF PFIZER AND MODERNA IN CHILDREN 15 AND YOUNGER: I think that the ACIP the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices, and the FDA likely will be lowering to 12 years of age in the next few weeks. I can't say for sure. I know that Pfizer has submitted it and is being reviewed. The data is looked really good - so I'm quite hopeful that even by May, that we would have a vaccine available for 12 and above.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Dr. Frenck, who you just heard from there's leading studies, leading some of the studies looking at the vaccine among younger children, teenagers in the like. Do you agree is the data you have seen? Does it convince you that aid is safe for teenagers, at least and that that should happen soon?

OFFIT: Right. So Pfizer was originally approved that to 16 years of age, they just did a 2200 child study between 12 and 15 years of age 1100 children got the vaccine 1100 got placebo, all 18 cases of COVID were in the placebo group. So the vaccine was highly effective. The vaccine was well tolerated. It was highly immunogenic.

I know Pfizer is submitted that now to the FDA for approval through EOA, which presumably should happen soon. And my understanding is Moderna is really just weeks behind. So in all likelihood, certainly by the summer, we should have a vaccine, which is available for children down to 12 years of age.

KING: And let me circle back to this J&J decision. I just want to put up their cases, and you made the point that you agree, overall, highly effective vaccine, and it has the benefits of the single shot. If you were on the committee voting today I know you're not. What would you do?

Would it just be a warning or an advisory label on every dose like we see on cigarettes? Or would you agree maybe some restrictions that it shouldn't go to young women, if that's where we've seen these rare blood clots? What would your advice be?

OFFIT: My advice would be that we need to let people know that this is a rare but real side effect, that it's extremely exceedingly rare and that you have a much, you are certainly at much greater risk of being hurt or killed by this virus and therefore the benefits clearly and definitively outweigh its risk.

[12:10:00]

OFFIT: You know before you get CT scan you know you're about to get - if you're about to get contrast, you are told that you have a one in a million chance of dying from getting that contrast. I think the same thing is true here.

Yes, I think it is difficult for people to understand relative risk. I think when they hear one in a million they think, you know, this can happen to me. But I think you need to put that in context of the choice not to get a vaccine, which may be the choice for some people who don't get the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is a choice to take a different and much more serious risk, which is that of getting and being hurt by this virus.

KING: Dr. Offit as always grateful for your important insights, especially as this key moment. I appreciate it very much, sir.

OFFIT: Thank you.

KING: Up next for us, President Biden framing the climate crisis as a gateway to good jobs. And this reminder, yes, this reminder of how much things have changed. With one year ago today, the former president offered up perhaps the most startling of his many pandemic fantasies.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, 45TH U.S. PRESIDENT: Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it's ultraviolet, or just very powerful light, and I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute, and is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or, or almost a cleaning?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

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KING: The President is making a big climate gamble and to deliver he's borrowing an old political axiom. It's the economy stupid. Day two of the Biden Climate Summit put a big focus on what green investment can do for the global economy?

Key planks of the Biden climate plan include more than 109 million in Department of Energy money for energy jobs, job creating infrastructure projects, rural broad band grants, using pollution mitigation and environmental remediation to create jobs and secure energy, job benefits and training. Biden says also making a promise that he won't leave coal country behind.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BIDEN: This is - this challenge, and these opportunities are going to be met by working people in every nation. And as we transition to a clean energy future, we must ensure that workers who have thrived and yesterday's and today's industries have is brighter tomorrow in the new industries, as well as in the places where they live in the communities they have built.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: CNN's Vanessa Yurkevich joins us now. Vanessa, what kinds of jobs is the president promising to create?

VANESSA YURKEVICH, CNN BUSINESS AND POLITICS CORRESPONDENT: He wants to create millions of these clean energy jobs; it could be anything from an auto worker who wants to make electric vehicles. It could be a line worker that is installing infrastructure for clean energy, or it can be a research position at a university.

But all of these jobs are going to be created at a time when jobs in the fossil fuel industry are on the decline, and presumably will most likely be replaced. So let's talk about what these jobs are paying? President Biden says they're going to be good paying jobs.

So if we look at what a coal miner is making, on average, every year? They are making about $56,000 a year. Now look at the solar panel installer job, this is one of the fastest growing jobs in clean energy. They're making about $10,000, less about $46,000. So that clean energy job is actually paying less.

But here's the key. Let's look at growth. Look at the growth in the coal miner industry, about 2 percent. So that's way slower than average, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and now look at a solar panel job, that's going to be an increase of about 51 percent by 2029. That is much faster than the average rate.

But this is going to be a herculean effort to get these millions of jobs off the ground. It's going to take the federal government, the private sector and state in order to push this forward. Here's this - here are the states that are doing the best with clean energy jobs right now.

So it's the most amounts of clean energy jobs as compared to their state employment a lot of Northeast States that their Vermont is actually leading in this. What's missing is those fossil fuel States where there are a lot of fossil fuel jobs. You have West Virginia, Pennsylvania, not on the map.

But John, it's really important to note that a lot of leaders in the fossil fuel industry realize that these clean energy jobs are the future, they're here to stay. The question is how fast are they going to come? President Biden's messaging and the amount of money that he's trying to put behind getting these jobs, these clean energy jobs online, could actually make these jobs appear for people a lot faster than we think, John?

KING: They have to hope on that at the White House because the politics of this gets dicey when you put that map up, it is the future but sometimes getting to the future can be dicey politics Vanessa Yurkevich grateful of the important context there.

And let's continue the conversation now with our Chief Political Correspondent, Dana bash, Co-Anchor of CNN State of the Union. It's remarkable listening to this conversation Dana and some ways we went through this in the 2008 campaign where John McCain was trying to address climate skeptics in his party saying forget about it, forget about the science, and let's do the jobs.

Let's just focus on the opportunities here. If we don't do it, China's going to do it. I want you to listed here some of this as members of the President's climate team, who you have in a town hall on CNN this evening. One of them Mike Bloomberg is an ally of the president. Listen to their message today about the economy and climate.

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JOHN KERRY, SPECIAL PRESIDENTIAL ENVOY FOR CLIMATE: No one is being asked for a sacrifice. This is an opportunity.

MIKE BLOOMBERG, FORMER NEW YORK MAYOR: We can't be climate change without a historic amount of new investment.

JENNIFER GRANHOLM, ENERGY SECRETARY: For too long this climate conversation has been viewed as a zero sum game, one of tradeoffs, the climate or the economy, no longer going big on our ambitions means that we're going to create jobs for millions of people.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: It's a promise of millions of jobs. So one of the issues there the red flag to me was to listen to Secretary Kerry.

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KING: Now, the President's Global Envoy on this issue of saying no one is being asked for sacrifice, it's just not true. Some people are being asked for sacrifice. They're being promised job training. They're being promised to transition. They're being promised, as we heard the president say earlier in the program saying their communities will get some help.

But no one is being asked for sacrifice. I can see Republicans using that very quickly in places like Pennsylvania, and Kentucky, and West Virginia.

DANA BASH, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: You're exactly right. But this is as you just played a very, very definitive strategic move by all of the White House and administration players to try to rebrand the whole conversation of the climate crisis, and to do away with the S word sacrifice, and make it the O word opportunity.

I mean, over and over and over. You're already hearing that, and you're going to continue to hear that because it is - it has been the messaging wars, the branding wars, if you will, that those who want Americans, businesses, governments to take this existential threat of the climate crisis seriously, that they have lost that war, which is why, you know, as much as they in the White House and the administration are talking about policy goals.

They also very much are using these two days as a reboot on how they're going to explain it to the American people? And just, you know, one interesting note, Vanessa was talking about the disparity in pay among those who work in the fossil fuel industry, coal in particular, and those who work in new energy, green energy?

You're going to look, you're going to see a conversation about that tonight with Gina McCarthy, and about what their answer is to how you make up the difference? And it's going to be quite interesting Gina McCarthy being the White House Climate Advisor.

KING: Originally from Dorchester, so I listen to everything she says. The town hall will be fascinating tonight to hear them make their case because they understand the political environment. And I want to read you a little bit from the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board. This one I find interesting. Let me read it first and I'll explain why I find it interesting. His pledge tees up sweeping new government controls over the economy of the kind you might see in one of Mr. Xi's five year plans, meaning the President of China.

Mr. Biden now has a 10 year version of central economic planning. The emissions reductions that foreign leaders pledged on Thursday aren't legally binding. But Mr. Biden intends to use regulation to bind Americans.

One of the reasons the president and the White House team think they can meet their goals is because the markets already out there, GM says it's going to go to all electric cars, even the petroleum companies are investing in wind farms and in solar energy. But the Wall Street Journal trying to do the socialist argument, Biden's like China.

BASH: And that's why the argument that you hear from the administration is, you know, that the government is behind. The government is behind business, because business is where the market is, and the market is new energy. You know, one of the open questions is how are they going to change policy?

And, yes, the president has the pen, he has an executive order possibility, and he's done that. But the question is whether anything is possible legislatively? And the answer we hear and we're going to see and hear from the administration tonight is let's focus on business. Let's focus on local governments and states like Vanessa was talking about.

KING: Let me close with this. We're approaching 100 days in the new administration on State of the Union this Sunday; you have a conversation with the vice president who has interesting portfolio changing somewhat as we go. What were your big takeaways from their conversation?

BASH: You know, the moment, the moment that we had this week with the verdict in Minnesota, but also unfortunately, another very high profile, police shooting. And so I asked her about how her role is different perhaps because of her obvious life experience?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KAMALA HARRIS, U.S. VICE PRESIDENT: You'll recall that when Joe Biden asked me to join him on the ticket, he did so with a sense of intentionality of purpose, knowing that he and I may have very different life experiences, but we also have the same values and operate from the same principles.

But it was something that I know he was very intentional about in terms of asking me to run with him and to serve with him, which is that I will bring a perspective that will contribute to the overall decisions that we make.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BASH: And John, it was really interesting to hear her I think, for the first time, talk more about how she's settling into this historic role that she has, as Vice President of the United States almost 100 days in? And the conversations that she has with the president just like he promised you can hear more about that on Sunday.

KING: Looking forward to it on Sunday and always love an opportunity to see the vice president ceremonial office in what is now the Eisenhower Executive Office Building is one of the treats of the United States government.

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KING: It's a fascinating office. It's great to see that as well. Dana Bash, we look forward to that interview on Sunday and tonight don't miss Dana's Special CNN Town Hall, U.S. Special Presidential Envoy John Kerry, White House climate team members, Gina McCarthy, Michael Reagan and Jennifer Granholm. Dana Bash hosts the Climate Crisis that's tonight, right here at 10 o'clock only on CNN.

Up next, President Biden speaks next week to a joint session of Congress and Senator Tim Scott gets the honor and the challenge of delivering the Republican response.

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