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New Day

Storm Battering Northeast; Measles Outbreak; Patriots Beat Seahawks

Aired February 02, 2015 - 06:30   ET

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

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: A storm is upon us and it is bad. Sixty-five million people in 18 states under a winter storm warning. Thousands of flights already cancelled. Public schools shut down in over a dozen cities from Chicago to Boston.

That is the situation. Let's get the latest. We have meteorologist Chad Myers.

What are we seeing? When does it end?

CHAD MYERS, AMS METEOROLOGIST: It's getting colder here in New York. It warmed up to 33. Now it's down to 32 and it's raining. Get into Connecticut, it is snowing and it's snowing hard. Massachusetts, same story, snowing hard. Eighteen degrees in Hartford, 24 in Boston. Not going to be changing over to rain there. And there you see the number there, the new number for New York City, 32. Just to the south and to the (INAUDIBLE), it is all rain. But to the south of there, Philadelphia, all rain.

Then you look at this big purple area here. That's all a foot of snow or more from New City to Schenectady, all the way back up, upstate to almost Syracuse, Watertown, and you make the connection all the way to Boston. I don't know what you do with more snow, Boston. I don't know how high you have to pile it, but more is coming. Portland, more for you as well. St. Johns into New Brunswick, also into parts of Nova Scotia, significant snow coming as the next storm, this one, moves across Pennsylvania right now.

See how we're just in this warm front for New York City, just in it. Well, that's going to go away rather quickly today and the cold front's going to come by. This city goes from 32 to 11 in the next 12 hours. And that is going to freeze everything up. This could be a very difficult commute home by tomorrow morning, single digits. Wind chills well below zero in all the cities from Chicago to Boston.

Chris.

CUOMO: All right, Chad, thank you very much. We will check back in with you. I appreciate you being out there for us.

MYERS: You bet.

CUOMO: Mic.

MICHAELA PEREIRA, CNN ANCHOR: All right, Japan is mourning the brutal death of a journalist, Kenji Goto, who was viciously beheaded by ISIS. Goto's wife issued a statement saying she is devastated by proud of her husband. Meanwhile, Japan's prime minister says the terrorists will be held accountable and is defending his policy towards racism - towards terrorism, pardon me. The fate of a second ISIS hostage, a Jordanian military pilot, remains unclear. Jordan continues to try to secure his release but officials still are requiring evidence that he is still alive.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: And after being locked up in an Egyptian prison for more than a year, al Jazeera reporter Peter Greste has been released. Greste and two of his colleagues, who remain in jail, were convicted of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, something they all deny. A presidential reprieve (ph) was granted allowing Greste to continue his punishment period in his native Australia.

CUOMO: In just a few hours, President Obama unveils his 2016 budget. The $4 trillion plan, that's what it spends out, including a plan to boost middle class incomes, to bring more in, raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans. Also in the budget crosshairs, closing tax loopholes for large companies that make huge profits overseas. The president's plan calls for hundreds of billions of dollars in tax savings. That will go toward infrastructure projects.

PEREIRA: An epic battle didn't just play out on the field at Super Bowl XLIX. Another one happened on "The Tonight Show" between host Jimmy Fallon and comedians Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart. Ferrell kicked off the hilarity with his take on Beyonce's "Drunk In Love."

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BEYONCE (singing) (voice-over): Flashing lights, flashing lights, you got me faded, faded, faded, baby, I want you, na, na. Can't keep your eyes off my fatty daddy.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

PEREIRA: Well, so it goes on from there. Jimmy Fallon ups the ante with surprise guests Drew Barrymore. The duo lip-syncs to "Dirty Dancing's" "I've Had the Time of My Life," complete with their own version of the infamous lift from the movie. And then Kevin Hart even made Ferrell fake cry during his version of John Legend's "All of Me." Oh, my goodness.

CUOMO: Ferrell's face.

PEREIRA: That was epic. I'm going to sit back and watch that later today. I'll be quite happy to see the whole thing.

CAMEROTA: Oh, that is great. If only it weren't 13 minutes, we could play the whole thing.

PEREIRA: I know.

CAMEROTA: It takes a bit of a chunk out of the show.

CUOMO: Causing -

PEREIRA: Because we have other things to talk about today.

CUOMO: Causing controversy. Did Will Ferrell, you know, did he lip- sync that better than Beyonce could?

PEREIRA: Oh.

CAMEROTA: Mmm.

CUOMO: Yes, that's the thing.

PEREIRA: Controversy or non-troversey. You decide.

CUOMO: He looked good though when he was crying to Kevin Hart.

All right, so, from the funny, to the not funny at all. You know what you're looking at right there? Measles. And it is spreading. Hundreds of people in New York may have been exposed thanks to a college student on a train. Now one scientist is demanding parents who do not vaccinate their kids to be jailed. Is there any basis in science, certainly not in law, for that. We have a debate ahead for you.

CAMEROTA: Plus, he's the man who sealed the Super Bowl victory for the New England Patriots with an incredible catch. We are going to talk live to Malcolm Butler. Stick around.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CAMEROTA: The measles outbreak is spreading. Just this past week, hundreds of people in New York may have been exposed when a college student infected with the disease rode an Amtrak train through the states. This morning, 102 reported cases in 14 state. And this has put new focus on the debate surrounding vaccinations.

So let's have that debate. Let's bring in Alex Berezow, the founding editor of "RealClearScience." He wrote a column for "USA Today" about jailing parents who refuse to vaccinate their children, and Mary Holland, a research scholar at NYU School of Law. She's written a guest blog for Harvard Law against legal action against parents.

Great to have both of you here for this debate this morning.

Alex, I want to start with you, because this controversial op-ed that you wrote for "USA Today" suggesting that parent who don't vaccinate should be jailed. Let me read an excerpt of it. You say, "like drunken drivers, the unvaccinated pose an imminent danger to others. They pose a lethal threat to the most venerable, the immunocompromised, such as HIV or cancer patients, and infants who have yet to receive their vaccines. Anti-vaccine parents are turning their children into little walking time bombs. They ought to be charged for endangering their children and others."

Now, Alex, are you trying to just get a reaction? Are you intentionally being sort of extreme, or do you really think that thousands of parents should go to jail?

ALEX BEREZOW, FOUNDING EDITOR, "REALCLEARSCIENCE": No, I think that we should implement some sort of enforcement through persuasion, through pediatricians that will refuse to accept patients. We should maybe implement fines. And as a last resort, in extreme cases, you know, put someone in jail for 24 hours while they vaccinate their kids. I certainly wouldn't support prison for people, though.

CAMEROTA: So, Mary, as a legal scholar and as the mother of a child with regressive (ph) autism, what do you say to people like Alex, he's not alone, who thinks that parents who choose not to vaccinate should be dealt with in the strongest measures?

MARY HOLLAND, RESEARCH SCHOLAR, NYU SCHOOL OF LAW: I think it's important to remember, Alisyn, that as a legal matter, all vaccines are considered unavoidably unsafe. In other words, all vaccines, like the illnesses that they're intended to prevent, carry inherent risks. People are injured by vaccines. More than 3,800 people have been compensated by the federal government for vaccine injury, including death. So brain damage and death are common side effects of the vaccines, just as they are of the illness.

CAMEROTA: Well, death isn't a common side effect. I mean there have been 57, from what I read in terms of the numbers from the Health and Human Services, there have been 57 deaths in the past something like 25 years. It's not much. But if you're the parent of one of those 57 kids, it's a shocking number.

HOLLAND: It is. And if you look at the deaths from measles, the disease in the United States, according to the CDC, there's been one death in the last 20 years. So, in some respects, the vaccine poses real risks to some people. And I think the best people to make that decision are the parents based on informed consent.

CAMEROTA: Alex, what about that? What about that legal argument that parents need to know that vaccines can be risky? They can result in deaths, as the HHS numbers show, and parent are not told that by their pediatricians.

BEREZOW: Well, the numbers are very, very, very, very small. In 1980, before we started widespread mass vaccination, 2.6 million people globally died from measles. To this day, 400 people throughout the world die every day from measles. Measles kills one in 1,000 children who get it. One in 20 who get it will come down with pneumonia, which is a very, very serious infection, which can be lethal in and of itself. So you have to compare the risk of getting measles to the risk of vaccinating against measles.

I was checking the CDC statistics. They have - they said there is no reliable mortality data on the MMR vaccine because deaths are so infrequent. The most serious side effects from the MMR vaccine are seizures, which happen about one in 3,000 vaccines, and allergic reactions, which happen about one in a million. But the CDC itself said that there were no deaths from the MMR vaccine.

CAMEROTA: Go ahead, Mary. HOLLAND: So I think Alex is not talking about the vaccine injury compensation program, which is a federally funded program to deal with vaccine injuries. The pharmaceutical industry and doctors have almost no liability. And for that reason, we created this. So in that program, there have been 57 allegations of death and over 350 allegations of compensated cases for vaccine injury from MMR.

CAMEROTA: But what about Alex's larger point, Mary?

BEREZOW: Well, right. But it's - but it's -

CAMEROTA: Hold on, Alex, just one -- just one second -- about his larger point, that if you give parent the choice --

HOLLAND: Yes. Right.

CAMEROTA: They're not really the experts. And if parents choose not to vaccinate their children, then there could be an outbreak and there could be more -- the kinds of deaths from measles and other diseases that we saw prior to 1980.

HOLLAND: Yes. Right. Well, I think life carries real risks. And I think the best people to make decisions are parents together with their health care providers. Remember, we have mandates in 50 states for the MMR. It's not like we have vast numbers of people opting out. We have a very small percentage and they have lawful reasons to opt out.

CAMEROTA: Go ahead, Alex.

BEREZOW: Well, I mean, as Ms. Holland well knowns, just because you can get a win in a courtroom doesn't mean that it's scientifically valid. Everyone remembers the movie "Erin Brockovich," in which the hexavalent chromium supposedly caused cancer in this small California community and the company that was supposedly guilty ended up settling out of court for $330 million. Well, a subsequent epidemiological investigation totally debunked the case that Erin -

CAMEROTA: But, hold on. But, Alex, in this - so - but forget Erin Brockovich for a moment. You're saying that there have not been any vaccine injuries from the MMR vaccine?

BEREZOW: Oh, no, no, no, no. No. No, absolutely not. Vaccines are not -- they're -- nothing in life is 100 percent, right?

HOLLAND: Right.

BEREZOW: So you can become injured by a vaccine. But these are rare compared to the injuries that are caused by the diseases that they are vaccinating against.

HOLLAND: Well -

CAMEROTA: Very quickly, Mary.

HOLLAND: That may be, but who's in the best position to decide. That's the question. Should it be jails or should it be parents together with their health care parishioners. I think doctors and parents have to make those calls. They're tough.

CAMEROTA: Mary Holland, Alex Berezow, thanks so much for the debate.

We would love to hear what you think about this. You can find me on Twitter @alisyncamerota, and we'll continue the conversation in our 8:00 hour as well. Thanks so much.

HOLLAND: Thank you.

CAMEROTA: Chris.

CUOMO: All right, Alisyn.

Forget about me. Take a look at who's going to be joining us on this show. You remember this play from last night that will be talked about forever. And you're going to like that if you're that guy, number 21 on the field, number one in Patriot fans' hearts. There he is, Malcolm Butler. He's going to join us on NEW DAY.

Congratulations, champs. It's good to have you on the show.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CUOMO: You know, Alisyn, sometimes in sports people exaggerate.

CAMEROTA: Is that right?

CUOMO: And they'll say, this was the biggest, this was the most. This is not an exaggeration. This play decided the Super Bowl. And that man, number 21, that play has made him a Super Bowl legend. Yes, this guy won the MVP, Brady, and everybody likes him and Richard Sherman's crying in his dread locks this morning, but number 21, Malcolm Butler, he robbed the Seahawks of a touchdown and the Super Bowl as a result. And we have him here on NEW DAY.

There is the champ, Malcolm Butler. Congratulations to you. A quick question, did you get up early this morning or have you not gone to bed?

MALCOLM BUTLER, PATRIOTS CORNERBACK: Umm, kind of both and good morning. First of all, good morning.

CAMEROTA: Good morning.

BUTLER: Kind of both. Good morning. I kind of been asleep, waking up, thinking about it. It been off and on.

CUOMO: Well, look, it's an amazing thing. Help us out here. Put us in your head during that play, what you were telling us, what you were telling yourself and what happened, in your perspective.

BUTLER: You know, the play before that, a play or two before that, I can't remember like that, but, you know, that I tipped the ball up and Kearse (ph) ended up catching it and, you know, I tried my best to - I tried my best on that play and somehow he still ended up grabbing it. And I was out for a play and I went to the sideline. I'm thinking it was over with. So the coach called goal line, three corner. And I said, three corner? You know, they got their best running back in the league. Why would they need three - why would we need three corner? So, I was thinking pass and the formation brought back my memory to practice the way the receiver was aligned and I got beat on that play by Josh Boyce at practice and I remember Bill telling me that you got to make that play. And I knew it was do or die time and I just went with my instinct and made that play.

CUOMO: Wow! And you know, it's even more dramatic, Alisyn, because of what happened before. You reminded me of that. I forgot. There was this amazing catch in the play by this guy Kearse (ph) on the Seahawks. Number 21, Butler, tips the ball. Kearse falls down. It bounces off his chest. He catches it.

CAMEROTA: Yes.

CUOMO: Everybody thought the Patriots were snake bit, that they were going to lose the game just like they did against the Giants when the guy caught the ball against his head.

CAMEROTA: Right.

CUOMO: And then the same player winds up making the play that ends the game.

CAMEROTA: You vindicated yourself, Malcolm. So, how does it feel to wake up this morning and have everybody know your name?

BUTLER: It's a great feeling. But, you know, you got to stay humble at the same time, continue to get better, work hard, thank all my teammates. It wasn't just all me. It's not one against 11. It's 11 on 11. And it's just a great job to the coaches and especially my DV coach and my defensive coordinator, of course Bill for being so hard on me and expecting the best out of me and tonight I guess they what they got - I guess what they got the best out of me and it's just a blessing and a dream come true.

CAMEROTA: That's so great. Hey, Malcolm, I have to thank you. Because of you, I am getting a very fancy steak dinner out of Chris Cuomo and Michaela Pereira, my co-hosts. We had a bet and I was going to have to buy them an expensive steak dinner. And this morning I woke up and I said, oh my gosh, you mean I won. They're buying me the dinner. So, if you want to come with me and have them buy us a steak dinner, the invitation is yours.

CUOMO: Say no.

BUTLER: Thank you. Thank you. That's so nice of you. Thank you. And I guess we can just get back on that another time. (INAUDIBLE).

CUOMO: Yes, that all right.

CAMEROTA: OK.

CUOMO: Hey, also -

BUTLER: I thank you for the offer and everything. It's not a deny, I'm just - I'm just saying.

CAMEROTA: I understand.

CUOMO: No, that's all right, I'll take that as a no. I'm cheap. I love you, champ, but I don't want to have to buy you dinner, especially as a Jet's fan.

Hey, does this mean more to you because of the road that you took to get where you are, hard time earlier in college, coming out of Vicksburg, Mississippi, getting back into the game, going undrafted, having to fight your way up, does it mean even more?

BUTLER: I tell you like this, I could have came from a rich family or had everything in the world. If I still would have made -- if I would have made that play, not traveling the journey that I took, I still would feel the same way today because that was - that just don't happen too often. And it's just a blessing.

CAMEROTA: Congratulations, Malcolm Butler. Thanks so much for being on NEW DAY. And have a great, great day. The country is looking at you this morning.

BUTLER: Thank you. Thank you, umm, thank you for having me.

CAMEROTA: Our pleasure.

Such a sweet guy.

CUOMO: Congratulations to the champ and to the Patriots.

CAMEROTA: We're following a lot of news this morning, so let's get right to it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We're expecting snow, sleet and freezing rain.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The real concern right now is that morning commute.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We're going to make sure the city that's on the move, stays on the move.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well, it's pretty rough.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is pretty bad.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's pretty bad out there tonight.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The Seahawks were in position for the game winning touchdown, but a questionable play call.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I put the blame on me because I'm the one that, you know, gave them the ball. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Patriots win a thriller 28-24.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That is the best Super Bowl me and my friends have ever watched.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We've been on the other end of this twice now. You know, this time we made the play to win.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Measles is the most infectious disease known to man.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It's something to be concerned about and something to be aware of.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This vaccine is highly effective and very safe.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: This is NEW DAY with Chris Cuomo, Alisyn Camerota and Michaela Pereira.