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Today: Biden Unveils New Guidance on Wearing Maska Outdoors; Family of Black Man Shot by Police: Video Shows 'Execution'; Liz Cheney, Mulling 2024 Run, Says Cruz & Hawley are Disqualified; Newsom Critics Get Enough Signatures for Recall Election. Aired 6-6:30a ET

Aired April 27, 2021 - 06:00   ET

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

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN ANCHOR: I'm Brianna Keilar alongside John Berman on this NEW DAY. Do Americans still need to wear their masks outside? The highly-anticipated guidance is coming soon.

[05:59:41]

Plus, a city on edge. The family of a black man killed by police say they were only allowed to see 20 seconds of the body cam video, and they're calling what they saw an execution.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: News just in that President Biden will be making a major move on the minimum wage today. And Liz Cheney says Republicans like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley can't run for president in 2024 as she considers a run of her own.

KEILAR: Good morning to viewers here in the United States and around the world. It is Tuesday, April 27. And in just a few hours, President Biden is expected to announce new CDC guidelines for fully-vaccinated Americans, including whether vaccinated people need to wear masks when they're outdoors.

Dr. Anthony Fauci offered a preview of the new guidance on Sunday.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ALLERGY AND INFECTIOUS DISEASES: I think it's pretty common sense now that outdoor risk is really, really quite low, particularly -- I mean, if you are a vaccinated person, wearing -- wearing a mask outdoors. I mean, obviously, the risk is minuscule.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: As of this morning, nearly 29 percent of Americans are fully vaccinated. More than 42 percent have received at least one shot.

Joining me now is MIT professor of chemical engineering and mathematics, Martin Bazant.

Professor, thank you so much for being with us. We do not yet know what President Biden will announce today, but in your mind, what need would there be for vaccinated Americans to wear masks outside? Do you think it would be safe to lift the requirement that people wear masks outside when vaccinated?

MARTIN BAZANT, MIT PROFESSOR OF CHEMICAL ENGINEERING AND MATHEMATICS: Well, as Dr. Fauci just said, seems like a very reasonable decision at this point.

BERMAN: What about unvaccinated people?

BAZANT: So, for unvaccinated people, we have to keep in mind the different modes of transmission. So, their -- the COVID-19 is transmitted through virus, as contained in droplets that are formed by your breathing, by respiration; and there are two different types of transmission.

The first would be short-range transmission through what we call respiratory jets. So these are the puffs that come out when you're breathing or which go a bit farther when you cough. And those are protected against -- and we protect against that form of transmission by social distancing as a very effective means.

On the other hand, there's also airborne transmission through smaller aerosol particles, which are suspended in the air, can travel much larger distances. In an indoor setting, those aerosol particles are particularly dangerous and can, over time, lead to increased risk.

When you're outdoors, that airborne risk is much less, but you still have the short-range risk from those respiratory jets. So if we were to be outside without masks, then some social distancing would still be effective to keep in mind.

BERMAN: Something to consider if people are packed into things like stadiums and whatnot side by side with unmasked, unvaccinated people.

Let's move indoors now. Because you've released a paper -- and I think this is really interesting -- where you talk about social distancing indoors. And you just touched on a little bit, because of the airborne nature of coronavirus, the aerosols, as it were.

You say the six feet social distancing that we've come to rely on more or less meaningless, that when it comes to aerosols, not enough. Explain.

BAZANT: So let me clarify. I don't -- I do not say that the distancing is meaningless. In fact, that has been a common misinterpretation of our work in some -- of our work recently.

So, what we say more specifically is that, again, there are these two types of transmission. For short-range transmission, through these puffs and respiratory jets, it is important to maintain distance. And that distance, you know, should be at least around one meter, which is recommended by the World Health Organization, or even six feet provides an additional means of protection, especially when people are not wearing masks.

You can think of smoking, such as when you see the plume of smoke coming from a smoker's mouth, if you are directly in that plume, you are at an elevated risk. On the other hand, as we also understand from the analogy with

smoking, there's the risk of secondhand smoke, which is when that -- when the particles from that -- that breathing -- imagine like the secondhand smoke particles -- go into the air and are carried around the room by the ambient air currents.

And in those flows, the particles are significantly diluted, but they spread across the room, and they provide a risk to anyone at any distance, certainly can be far beyond six feet.

And then, other factors come into play such as the time. So if you're exposed to secondhand smoke only briefly, that may be perfectly fine. But if you are exposed for many hours or longer, then that risk builds up.

BERMAN: Thank you for the clarification. I didn't mean to suggest that six feet or social distancing wasn't important in terms of droplets or not. Just in aerosolization that it might not be enough to protect you, because of what you say as the secondhand smoke aspect of it.

[06:05:07]

Then what would protect you more than social distancing from the aerosols, as it were. Is that why masking is all the more important indoors?

BAZANT; Yes. In fact, so what our study provides is a quantitative guideline to protect yourself against indoor airborne transmission. And the guideline also allows you to quantify different protective measures in their effectiveness in reducing that risk.

So, the most effective strategy is, in fact, wearing masks. And that's partly because you have a filtration at the source, which is the infected person, and also at the sink or target, which is the susceptible person in the room. So there's a double effect there.

And also, the mask blocked those respiratory jets so that the momentum of the air that is produced by breathing is significantly reduced, which also helps to protect against short-range transmission. So masks are overall very effective way of reducing risk.

BERMAN: Professor --

BAZANT: And then after masks --

BERMAN: Go ahead.

BAZANT: Oh, sure. So I was going to say after masking, then ventilation becomes very important. So getting fresh air into the room and exchanging the air that's currently there, followed by filtration and other measures.

BERMAN: Professor, we do appreciate you helping us understand the things that are happening right before our very eyes and all around us. Thanks so much for being up with us.

BAZANT: Thank you, John. Nice to be with you.

BERMAN: Brianna.

KEILAR: Overnight, peaceful protesters gathering in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, demanding transparency and accountability in the shooting death of Andrew Brown Jr. at the hands of police. So far officials have provided neither.

Brown's family says they were only shown 20 seconds of video, even though their attorneys say as many as eight body cameras may have captured the fatal shooting. They describe what they did see as an execution.

Natasha Chen is with us now from Elizabeth City. Not sure if this is going to allay concerns or make people think that the officials there are being transparent, Natasha.

NATASHA CHEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Brianna, there is more hurt and more pain as the group that was gathered here outside the building yesterday eagerly anticipating news found out that not only did the family see only 20 seconds of video, but that what they described, as you said, was called an execution by the family's attorneys, that the car was backing out, away from deputies as Mr. Brown was continued to be shot at.

In fact, the local chapter of the NAACP, the chapter president, had to step away from that press conference. He actually walked closer to me during that time, and he had tears down his face. And he told me he just couldn't listen to that anymore.

So very strong response from people who continue to march peacefully through the city.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Say his name.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Andrew Brown.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Andrew Brown.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Andrew Brown.

CHEN: Protesters in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, are demanding transparency, asking authorities to publicly release body camera footage showing the fatal shooting of Andrew Brown Jr. by a sheriff's deputy last week.

KHALIL FEREBEE, ANDREW BROWN JR.'S SON: My dad got executed just by trying to save his own life. You know, he was not in no -- the officers was not in no harm of him at all.

CHEN: The calls are growing after Brown's family and attorneys say they were only shown a 20-second video from one deputy's body camera Monday, including redactions and the blurring of faces.

BEN CRUMP, ATTORNEY FOR ANDREW BROWN JR.'S FAMILY: We do not feel that we got transparency. We only saw a snippet of the video.

CHANTEL CHERRY-LASSITER, ATTORNEY FOR ANDREW BROWN JR.'S FAMILY: There was at no time in the 20 seconds that we saw where he was threatening the officers in any kind of way.

CHEN: According to one of the lawyers, the short clip started as the shooting was already under way.

CHERRY-LASSITER: He had his hands firmly on the steering wheel. They run up to his vehicle shooting. He still stood there, sat there in his vehicle with his hands on the steering wheel while being shot at.

CHEN: A deputy shot and killed Brown last Wednesday, as authorities say they were attempting to serve him with an arrest warrant for the sale of illegal drugs. A neighbor filming this video showed the aftermath of the shooting from a distance.

The sheriff said an investigation is under way, and a motion was filed by the county attorney to release the body camera footage.

SHERIFF TOMMY WOOTEN, PASQUOTANK COUNTY: This tragic incident was quick and over in less than 30 seconds; and body cameras are shaky and sometimes hard to decipher.

CHEN: But for Brown's family, any additional video from the incident is key as they seek answers explaining why he was killed.

FEREBEE: Heartbroken. You know, we got a little bit of evidence, but that wasn't enough for us.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

CHEN: And the county attorney has formally filed a petition in court for a judge to grant the release of the body camera footage, and so has a coalition of news organizations, including CNN. The hearing for that will be on Wednesday, Brianna.

[06:10:07]

KEILAR: All right. Natasha, thank you so much, in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, for us.

Let's talk now with Hans Menos. He is the vice president of law enforcement initiatives at the Center for Policing Equity.

Hans, thank you for being with us this morning as we follow the case of Andrew Brown Jr.'s killing here. His family and their attorneys say that they were shown these 20 seconds of video. Is that enough?

HANS MENOS, VICE PRESIDENT OF LAW ENFORCEMENT INITIATIVES, CENTER FOR POLICING EQUITY: Good morning, Brianna. Thanks for having me. And my condolences to the family of Andrew Brown.

No, it's not enough. It's insufficient, and it's insensitive. Imagine it's your family member whose life was taken by the police, and they control the evidence that can provide transparency to help you understand what happened.

And the answer is that you can't see more than 20 seconds of it? And there's a suggestion, a tacit suggestion that the -- you can't be trusted to even know what police officers are on the scene, so we're going to blur their faces out.

Their response also kind of misunderstands why we have body-worn cameras in the first place and betrays why we put them in place. That's for transparency and for accountability, so we don't have to take the word of folks who were present and happen to wear a badge. So we can see, based on the evidence that is present and created by a body-worn camera, what actually happened.

So, this is insufficient. And it's insensitive, and it doesn't respond to what communities want, which is why we have body-worn cameras, and doesn't respond to just basic decency of what families deserve when they lose a loved one.

KEILAR: What concerns does this raise for you about why police might not be more fulsome in what they're putting out there right now even just for the family?

MENOS: Yes. So, you know, overall, there's a bunch of concerns. One is, you know, we can take a step back here and look at what would typically happen when someone is caught on body-worn camera doing something that -- that can lead to them -- to force being used against them.

In other words, when we can blame them for what happened, we tend to see that footage, right? We tend to see people who have knives or who are carrying a gun, even if they had dropped that gun. We make sure the public gets access to that pretty quickly.

And so when we don't see it here, it makes me wonder -- it makes a lot of folks wonder -- what is in this video? And moreover, you know, the overall idea of legitimacy in 2021, police legitimacy in 2021 requires the release of this footage.

And so you start to -- you really start to wonder what is it that the police are thinking that they can get away with by not highlighting what is in this footage?

Ask the people in Chicago after the murder of Laquan McDonald and the year-long release of that video, what that did to the legitimacy of that police force. Do the people in Chicago now believe anything that police officers say, based on the wild discrepancies between what they said initially and what that footage showed? And more importantly, just the time it took to release that video delegitimized that police force to this day. And that was seven years ago.

KEILAR: Hans, very good point that you make there. Hans, thank you so much for being with us.

MENOS: Thank you.

BERMAN: All right. Just in, President Biden making a big announcement when it comes to the minimum wage.

KEILAR: And a FOX host encourages people to confront those who wear masks outdoors. He didn't always feel this way, though.

And a Capitol rioter trying to get out of jail uses a creative defense for what he did in Nancy Pelosi's office.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:17:55]

KEILAR: In a new interview with "The New York Post," the No. 3 Republican in the House, Liz Cheney, says she is not ruling out a potential presidential run in 2024. Congresswoman Cheney also criticizing the presidential ambitions of some of her Republican colleagues, telling "The Post," quote, "I do think that some of our candidates who led the charge, particularly the senators who led the unconstitutional charge not to certify the election, in my view, that's disqualifying."

Joining us now is CNN political commentator Errol Louis. He is the political anchor for Spectrum News.

Errol, good morning to you. How do you think that senators Hawley and Cruz are going to be responding to these remarks? Do you have to be a Trump loyalist to realistically consider a 2024 run coming up here?

ERROL LOUIS, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Good -- good morning. I think put your finger right on it. The price of admissions to the club of who are going to be seriously considered as a Republican nominee in 2024, you've got to be -- you've got to be at least OK with Donald Trump and with his loyal followers. They are the Republican Party at this point.

I think Liz Cheney is kidding herself if she thinks that the -- this has been a limited sort of political fever that represented four years of Trumpism. It's gone much further than that. It has affected the DNA of the party. It may not be the same creature that she imagined it was, certainly not the party of her father. I don't know that there's going to be room for her at the top.

Certainly, the current front-runners are going to continue to build in strength. All of the fundraising, all of the polling suggests that that is the future of the Republican Party, like it or not.

BERMAN: So, Errol, after the Chauvin verdict and certainly this week with what we're seeing with Andrew Brown in North Carolina, there is this renewed call for police reform. Tim Scott working with Democrats, we think, to work on something. But it's not happening quickly. Let's just say that.

And Bakari Sellers, who is representing the family of Andrew Brown in North Carolina, called out Democrats, two Democrats by name for helping. Listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) BAKARI SELLERS, ATTORNEY FOR BROWN FAMILY: I want each and every one

of you all to take out your phones right now. And I want you to Google the number of Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin. I want you to call them and ask them why they're not signed on to the George Floyd Justice and Policing Act.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Amen.

[06:20:10]

SELLERS: I want you to make sure that every United States senator, Democrat and Republican, passes legislation so we don't have to be in positions like this.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: What's the calculation by Manchin and Sinema, whom Bakari called out there?

LOUIS: Well, look, their calculation is that they're -- they're dealing with their own politics. They are what would be called, at this stage, moderate Democrats who have to keep a lot of independents and Republicans, if not with them then at least not fiercely against them if they want to keep their seats. And so they're just kind of playing out their politics.

What our friend Bakari is reminding them, though, is that we talk a lot about the Republican -- the base of the Republican Party. The Democratic Party has a base. It is black voters. And many of them turn into single-issue voters when it comes to these issues of the abuse of police power.

And so to bottle up that legislation to say that it won't even get a vote that they're not going to let it go forward, not acceptable.

And you know, I mean, it's also worth reminding senators Manchin and Sinema that the only reason they're in the majority is that the base turned out over and over and over again in key states like Georgia, and that the group that brought them to the party can also send them back home if they -- if they don't choose wisely when it comes to this issue.

KEILAR: Let's move on to California, where critics of Governor Gavin Newsom now have enough validated signatures to force a recall election of the Democratic governor this year. That contest could land on the ballot as early as this summer. Do you think that Governor Newsom actually will be recalled?

LOUIS: Oh, absolutely not. There -- look, there have been 179 recall efforts in California. It's a quirk of their -- their system out there. There have been 56 attempts to recall the governor. And it has succeeded exactly once, and that was way back in the early 2000s when Gray Davis was extremely unpopular.

KEILAR: I remember that. I lived through that, living in California. LOUIS: He couldn't have made more missteps, poor Gray Davis. But Gavin

Newsom, for all of the stumbles that he's had, is nowhere near that level of unpopularity. And so you can't beat somebody with nobody.

I think of this as sort of a political temper tantrum by the Republicans who, you know, are in third place in California, let's remember. It goes Democrats, then independents or, you know, no party affiliation, and then Republicans. There's no other way that they can even hope to get him out.

So, in some ways it's kind of a long shot, a hail Mary pass. I don't think it will succeed.

BERMAN: A lot of political consultants are going to make a lot of money in that very expensive state. That's for sure.

Parochial interest now here, Errol, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo again deflecting criticism over New York state's nursing home COVID-19 death count. He says it's all political. Listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GOV. ANDREW CUOMO (D-NY): The nursing homes, with what that's going to come down to, in my opinion, is the politics of COVID. In the middle of COVID, the number was shifting dramatically. And the definition of a, quote unquote, "nursing home death" was shifting dramatically. The number and the blame game and the finger pointing, that is just more of the ugly politics of the time.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

Berman: Look, A nursing home death is a nursing home death. Errol, what do you make of sort of the moving response to this controversy?

LOUIS: Yes. That -- that's a miscalculation by the governor. I mean, look, he's in a very tight position. He's got multiple scandals of which this is only one. To dismiss this one, however, as simply politics, as the Trump administration coming after him, it was the same flawed logic that got him into all the trouble in the first place.

They didn't want to acknowledge that they'd made a forgivable mistake in judgment as far as how and where they were going to count some of these fatalities.

Now there were thousands of people who lost loved ones, and they are not going to settle for being lumped in as some kind of political force. These are good, decent people who were fed bad information, frankly, and want to hold somebody accountable. That somebody is the governor.

KEILAR: He says it's about politics. But it's about facts. And both of these things can be true. The governor's political enemies can be taking aim at him over something, but this obviously can be factual as well, Errol. LOUIS: Exactly right. Exactly right. And he's -- and let's keep in

mind that, you know, the allegations of sexual abuse and allegations that he committed wrongdoing with how he published a book and so forth, that's not going away either. That's all lumped in, in the same story. And so to try to tease it out and say, well, I was OK on this one issue, that's not going to solve his problem one bit.

BERMAN: Errol Louis, great to have you on this morning. Thanks so much for joining us, buddy.

LOUIS: Thank you.

KEILAR: Just in a brand-new announce from the Biden administration about the minimum wage. We will be live from the White House next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:29:17]

BERMAN: Just in, CNN has learned that President Biden will sign an executive order today requiring federal contractors to pay employees a $15 minimum wage. Jeremy Diamond, live at the White House with more -- Jeremy.

JEREMY DIAMOND, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, John.

In his first week in office, President Biden directed his team to prepare this very executive order. He said to do it within his first 100 days. And now, as he approaches that 100-day mark of his presidency, President Biden today will sign that executive order, lifting the federal minimum wage for contractors, for federal government contractors, to $15 an hour, up from $10.95.

This will also be adjusted for inflation as time goes on. And he's also going to be eliminating the tipped minimum wage, which is lower for certain federal contractors who also receive tips.

Now, the White House is saying that this is not going.