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Ernest Moniz is Interviewed about the Texas Power Outage; Jobless Claims for Last Week; Storms Cause Vaccine Delays. Aired 8:30- 9a ET

Aired February 18, 2021 - 08:30   ET

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

[08:30:00]

ERNEST MONIZ, FORMER ENERGY SECRETARY: Lots of recommendations made for weatherization, resiliency of the grid, just not followed adequately. We hope it will be different this time.

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR: We hope. I mean, interesting, to the exception of El Paso. El Paso did make those changes. People in El Paso, their lights are on. Their heating is on today.

I want to ask you about how state officials, current and former in Texas --

MONIZ: And, Jim --

SCIUTTO: Sorry, go ahead.

MONIZ: No, please, go ahead.

SCIUTTO: I was just going to say, I wanted to get your reaction to how state officials are practicing a bit of deflection here in terms of who's responsible.

Have a listen to, first of all, to Governor Abbott, how he's excused this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GOV. GREG ABBOTT (R-TX): Every source of power the state of Texas has access to has been compromised because of the over cold temperature or because of equipment failures.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SCIUTTO: I should note, actually, at another moment Governor Abbott said, hey, listen, this is all about windmills, which has become a talking point, and that's factually incorrect, whereas Rick Perry, the former governor, he just said -- he just said out loud that Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business. In effect, admitting, you know, admitting the problem here.

Tell me about how state leadership has handled this in your view. MONIZ: Well, first of all, as you've implied, these statements really

are deflections from the reality that, as I said earlier, they have not responded well enough by any means to the lessons of preparing for these extremes. So, in Texas, where they are kind of a grid island in the United States, they have designed their system on the one hand much more for hot summers and not for cold winters. And that's being seen right now.

But in addition, they made choices within their state. For example, to not have what's called a capacity market. That is, to insist that there be significant margins of reserve capacity, they are very thin on that, and they were way below the demand that has arisen.

There are also other parts of the country, for example, I'm here in New England where the -- there are incentives from the grid operator for the utilities to have backup fuel, oil-based fuel, in case there isn't enough gas. Similarly, if you look at other parts of the country, you know, the upper Midwest and Canada, they have a lot of wind mills, and those have not frozen up because they are prepared for the cold weather.

So Texas has to just, first of all, anyone who engages in climate denial is just incurring risk in the system and they just have to face up to the job that they have to weatherize, they have to prepare for major polar vortex cold spells, just as they prepare for droughts and extreme heat in the summer.

SCIUTTO: I mean we should stop calling them generational events, right, because they're happening every season now in various places across the country.

MONIZ: Yes.

SCIUTTO: What does this tell us about the state of our infrastructure? Because folks have been talking for years about how the grid needs upgrading, right? And we, as a country, haven't invested the money. What do we need to do?

MONIZ: The -- first of all, let me say, this issue of the event of the century becoming the event of the decade, on the pathway to event of the year is something we need to face up to in terms of adaptation. That's quite clear.

I might add, in a very different context, of course, we're seeing the same thing with the other tragedy of our day, the COVID pandemic, where we're talking about it as the event of the century, you know, going back to the Spanish Flu of 100 years ago.

But the reality is, this is the third coronavirus event of this century, of just 20 years. So -- and there's a whole raft of places where we just have to face the new realities and prepare for them.

Now, in terms of the grid, as you said earlier, we had a major set of recommendations going back to the Obama administration for grid hardening, for grid development, for introducing much more information technology, for resilience of the grid. Some steps have been taken. But, frankly, we are, I would say, the order of $100 billion short in terms of really modernizing the grid across this country, providing new opportunities, in fact, for the energy transition that we are going through.

[08:35:00]

So I'm very much hopeful that I believe the inevitable infrastructure package that we will see with bipartisan support this year, that it has to have a major energy infrastructure piece. And in the energy infrastructure, what we sometimes call the uber infrastructure is the electricity system because every other infrastructure depends upon electricity.

SCIUTTO: Yes. Yes.

MONIZ: That includes, by the way, right now in Texas, one of the components of the reduced natural gas availability is that you need electricity to run pumps and the like. So -- so that does make --

SCIUTTO: Yes. It's connected. And, by the way, technology runs on electricity, too.

Ernest --

MONIZ: Yes. It's the uber infrastructure.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

MONIZ: Our financial systems run on it, et cetera. I think the dependence of our society on electricity has only gotten greater and will continue to get greater, which is why we need to laser focus on getting this infrastructure modernized.

SCIUTTO: Yes. Yes.

We'll see. We'll see if that moves the debate on an infrastructure plan.

Ernest Moniz, thanks very much.

MONIZ: Thank you.

SCIUTTO: We have a new snapshot of America's unemployment crisis. We're going to bring you those new numbers, next.

Plus, we'll tell you how much of a hit the winter storm crippling Texas might have on the economy.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:40:13]

ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: All right, we do have some breaking news on the unemployment front. First time unemployment claims are much higher than expected as the

jobs crisis in America nears the one-year mark from the pandemic.

CNN's chief business correspondent Christine Romans has the breaking details.

What are you seeing, Christine?

CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN CHIEF BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: Well, you know, we thought that maybe you'd see some reopenings in the northeast and in the southeast and in the southwest and then you would start to see these numbers go down. They're not. There is a fire still burning in the American job market. That's the trend here. Another 861,000 first- time unemployment benefits. And last week was revised higher here.

And then you look at this. When you put the pandemic unemployment filings, these are the special programs that the CARES Act and these special rescues from Congress have enacted, altogether, 1.4 million people for the first time filed for the first time for unemployment benefits last week. And 18.3 million receiving some sort of a government check for jobless benefits. And those begin to run out next month in the middle of March.

So, again, demand for that fiscal fire hose here as American families are enduring this every day. Every one of these numbers is a person who couldn't go to work because of COVID and because of job loss because of COVID. So a real problem there in terms of the trend.

Another problem now kind of marring the economic outlook here and that is the deep freeze in Texas. There is real financial misery for people and businesses inside of Texas. And this is spreading beyond.

Accuweather has the biggest forecast I've seen, $45 billion to $50 billion in physical damages and economic damages. Other estimates are a little bit lower than that. But when you look at Valencia oranges and grapefruit and the southern Texas citrus industry, it's in deep freeze right now. You look at oil and gas production, a real problem there, Jim. And you look at just homeowners and what they're facing in terms of the physical damage to their homes. This is just the beginning -- the beginning of what is a slow motion economic crisis for Texas that ripples out because you've got forecasts because of higher oil prices now, gas prices rising 10 to 20 cents a gallon for the rest of the country over the next coming days. And, of course, you know, for people who are going to have to pay their power bills in Texas, it's going to be a real, real rude awakening there.

SCIUTTO: Yes, you wonder what the political effects will be. Does that lead to perhaps some Republican votes for the stimulus? We'll see. It's coming up.

Christine Romans, thank very much.

ROMANS: You're welcome.

Well, the game of chess is seeing renewed popularity with so many people at home this past year. In today's "The Human Factor," we meet a blind chess champion who hopes to inspire others to focus on what they can do in life.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JESSICA LAUSER, U.S. BLIND CHESS CHAMPION: I am the current U.S. blind chess champion. And I have won three years in a row. And I'm in the top 3 percent of women, top 10 percent of men in the regular adult sighted division.

When I play chess, it's as close as I've ever come to a sense of equality because when you start the game, no matter who you are, no matter what your physical condition is or where you come from, both sides start with the same thing.

My vision loss is the result of being born premature. That I needed high levels of oxygen when I was born. The way it was administered caused the damage to my retinas.

I have no usable (ph) perception out of my right eye. My visual field is very narrow. I think when somebody has a disability, kids, of course, don't understand that, so they can be cruel. I did encounters a lot of teasing. I wound up realizing that if I could beat them in chess, in a way it showed I was smarter than they were, so then there really would be nothing they could say.

The biggest thing I get out of playing chess is it helps me cope with a lot of things I can't change. When people are facing challenges, they, too, should focus on what they do have, what they can do as opposed to what they don't have or what they can't do.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:48:46]

CAMEROTA: The winter storms sweeping across the country are also putting a freeze on some coronavirus vaccines. Nineteen states forced to postpone appointments at mass vaccination sites due to delays in shipments.

Joining us now, CNN chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta.

Sanjay, great to see you.

If you had an appointment for this week, what happens to your appointment?

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, I mean that is a -- that is a problem, you know, for many of those people that are hearing that their appointments have been delayed. And we know from the CDC that while you want to get these vaccines on schedule, either four weeks or three weeks after your first shot, depending on which one you got, you can go up to six weeks, up to 42 days. So that's what some of these people are being told, hopefully getting that vaccine within that six-week window. But it's a challenge. And, you know, while the production of the

vaccine continues, we are also hearing that the shipments to some of these places is, obviously, delayed, not just because of the weather, but then because of the requirements for cold chain storage when the vaccine gets to these places, they can't count on power. That's obviously putting those vaccines at risk. And on the other hand, there are people who have had vaccines and are concerned about losing power, so they're trying to get their vaccines out as quickly as possible, mainly to anybody who can walk to some of these vaccination centers.

[08:50:08]

So it's a bit of a mess right now but the production of the vaccine continues. Hopefully the shipments will start to go out quickly and people can stay within that six-week window.

SCIUTTO: All right, so let's look at the overall course of the pandemic here and just put this up on the screen. This is new, confirmed coronavirus infections. As you know well, Sanjay, it's coming down. It's way down.

We spoke with Dr. Michael Osterholm last hour and he said, hey, you know, sad news is, it's going to pop back up again. These variants are spreading fast. Don't let your guard down. I'm wondering if you -- if you agree with that, even as we see more people vaccinated and that has some effect on the overall rate of infections.

GUPTA: Yes. Well, you know, it's funny. And I talked to Michael Osterholm quite a bit about this. I think that the idea that we're going to have these more transmissible variants is clear. I mean we've been following data out of various states, seeing how large a percentage these variants are becoming in some of these states. And it's increasing, you know, significantly.

I think the big question really is, and we've talked about this almost since the beginning is, which metrics are you going to continue to follow? I think if cases go up, that's obviously a big concern. But we've always said that, you know, a few weeks after that, hospitalizations go up. A few weeks after that, sadly, deaths go up.

What we may -- what we may see is that we're not seeing those increases as much now in hospitalizations and deaths, which I think were the most important measures here. Is the virus going to continue to circulate? Yes. Because people, particularly vulnerable people are becoming increasingly vaccinated, I think it's those second two metrics, hospitalizations and deaths, which hopefully, you know, don't increase as quickly and don't increase as much.

CAMEROTA: But, Sanjay, the good news also is that there are these new studies reported in "The New England Journal of Medicine," which show that the vaccines are working, correct me if I'm wrong, against that new U.K. variant that's spreading quickly.

GUPTA: Yes, this is really interesting science, Alisyn. You know, remember Pfizer and Moderna's vaccine trials were really done before the variants were circulating widely. So we didn't really have any real world evidence of this. So what they've done in these studies is they basically engineered the South African variant, the virus, and they see how does those -- how do those vaccines work against it? And what they found is exactly what you said. There was less antibody effect against the variants, but there was still plenty of neutralizing antibody effect.

There's this big cushion, as Dr. Fauci refers to it, that allows you this buffer. And the good news is that the effect is there. We saw that with the study that came out of "The New England Journal of Medicine" yesterday on the Pfizer vaccine and there was data earlier showing the Moderna vaccine similarly had an effect. So the existing vaccines, Pfizer and Moderna, do seem to have an effect, a significant effect on these variants.

And we know the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which was trialed when these variants were circulating, also has a significant effect, especially in terms of eliminating hospitalizations and deaths. So that's good news. And we've just got to keep an eye on that.

SCIUTTO: Sanjay, folks are familiar with that number on the right side of our screen there, 490,000 Americans have lost their lives. This is having just a debilitating effect on life expectancy in this country. It was really shocking to see how far these numbers came down. We can put them up on the screen. But this is based only on the first six months of 2020, this drop in life expectancy. You know, and, obviously, things got even worse second half of 2020. Tell us the significance of this. It's so sad to see.

GUPTA: You know, I have followed -- even pre-pandemic, been following sort of life expectancy trajectories throughout our country for a long time. Last time we saw significant dips in life expectancy was about 100 years ago. And what was happening 100 years ago? Another pandemic and World War I. And so, you know, it's tough to look at these numbers and understand that we've progressed so much as a society but then this little strand of RNA basically brings our life expectancy down. You saw the numbers, 78.8 was life expectancy going into 2020 and now 77.8.

And as we've seen so many times, the disparities, the impact on black and brown Americans, even more significant. For African-Americans it's down nearly 2.7 years.

We'll see. I mean it's going to get worse, as you point out, because the -- that only goes up to the middle of 2020 and we know the end of 2020 was worse. I think what we really need to understand is, is this a blip in the radar, you know, in terms of life expectancy, or are these going to be some persistent downward trends that last, you know, several years? Don't know that yet. But, yes, I mean, it's amazing the impact this has had overall on life expectancy.

CAMEROTA: Let's just hope that the vaccines can outrun the variants.

[08:55:04]

GUPTA: Yes.

CAMEROTA: Thank you. Thank you very much, Sanjay. Great to talk to you, as always.

GUPTA: You got it. You, too.

CAMEROTA: OK, CNN's coverage of the crisis in Texas continues after this quick break. We have new developments for you.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[09:00:01]