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Pfizer to Develop COVID Booster Shot; America's Longest War Coming to End after 20 Years; Surfside Tragedy Among Worst Mass Casualty Events Since 9/11; 2 Americans Among Arrests in Assassination of Haiti President. Aired 6-6:30a ET

Aired July 09, 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. And good morning to viewers here in the United States and around the world. It is Friday, July 9.

[05:59:48]

And we're beginning with a heavy dose of COVID confusion. Pfizer says it's planning to develop a booster shot after signs that immunity from its vaccine weakens over time, but the CDC and the FDA say not so fast. They issued a rare joint statement that says if you're fully vaccinated, you don't currently need a COVID booster shot.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Now, much of the country may be ready to move on from coronavirus, but it remains a real and, in many places, a growing risk. The hyper-transmissible Delta variant is driving cases up in nearly half the country.

The states you see there in red are where cases are rising the fastest. And they're the same states where vaccination rates are the lowest.

CNN's Elizabeth Cohen joins us now.

Elizabeth, give us the information here about the booster shot. What do people need to know about whether they need it or not?

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Right now, I can just tell you that most people who are listening to this do not need a booster shot. That's very clear from a statement that the CDC and the FDA put out.

So let's talk about these boosters for a minute. First of all, so Pfizer says that they're going to apply for authorization from the FDA for a booster shot next month.

And I've got to tell you, I think this surprised pretty much everybody. They said, What? We've been talking about boosters, but a booster next month? It sounds like people need it when, in fact, there's lots of evidence that they don't.

The booster, by the way, would just be a third shot of what's already out there. So let's take a look. Pfizer said -- didn't offer any new data. Didn't

say, We did studies that show why we need do this. They just pointed to Israeli data. So let's take a look at that Israeli data.

That data says that the shot is only 64 percent -- or the two shots are only 64 percent effective at preventing infection but 93 percent effective at preventing hospitalization and severe disease. Ninety- three percent is an amazing number.

Why do you need a booster? As for the 64 percent, the Israeli officials didn't really offer up a whole lot of explanation for how they got to that 64 percent. And experts are saying, We need more, because that 64 percent is very different than what British authorities have had.

So all of that leads to confusion. Let me give you the bottom line.

The FDA and the CDC did something very unusual. They really don't do this very often. They put out a statement that was about as simple as you could get. It said, Americans who have been fully vaccinated do not need a booster shot at this time. Now, I want to give one caveat here, there are millions of people who are immune compromised because they take certain drugs, maybe they've had an organ transplant, for example, they may benefit from a third shot. That is a possibility.

But for the rest of us, the vast majority of us, there is no indication that we need a booster shot. And in fact, criticism that Pfizer kind of really messed up here, because one-third of eligible American adults have chosen not even to get the first two shots. And so it makes you wonder, did they read the room?

Now, they're saying you need a third shot when a third of Americans don't even want to get the first two. It's not exactly inspiring confidence when you say you need a booster, and a third of Americans don't even want the first two.

KEILAR: No. It's a very good point. And what about people who have actually had COVID? What about their immunity, because it seems like there may be some new evidence about how long it lasts?

COHEN: Right. The evidence has sort of gone back and forth a little bit on this. But having COVID certainly gives you a level of immunity. But it's a little bit confusing, because part of it might depend on how severely ill you were.

One thing is clear, is that the vaccines give great immunity. And that's why people who had COVID, it's still recommended that they get vaccinated.

KEILAR: Very interesting. Elizabeth Cohen, thank you so much.

COHEN: Thanks.

KEILAR: President Biden forcefully defending his decision to end the war in Afghanistan, insisting that no amount of sustained American presence there could resolve the country's problems, and that the mission of the war was not to nation build.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Nearly 20 years of experience has shown us that the current security situation only confirms that just one more year fighting in Afghanistan is not a solution but a recipe for being there indefinitely. I will not send another generation of Americans to war in Afghanistan with no reasonable expectation of achieving a different outcome.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: Biden bringing an end to the war after a long 20 years in which more than 2,448 U.S. service members lost their lives and nearly 21,000 were injured. Here's a look at the U.S.'s 20-year-long war in Afghanistan.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

GEORGE W. BUSH, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes against al Qaeda terrorist training camps and military instillations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

AARON BROWN, FORMER CNN ANCHOR: In a speech unimaginable less than a month ago, the president of the United States, George W. Bush, has formally told the country that an attack has been launched on both terrorist camps inside Afghanistan and military instillations in that country, as well.

MATTHEW CHANCE, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: A dramatic turn of events here in the Afghan capital, Kabul. The city behind me was, of course, the stronghold of the Taliban. Now those forces have completely abandoned it, leaving it open for the forces of the opposition, the Northern Alliance, to move in and to take over.

[06:05:06]

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared the end of combat in Afghanistan.

DONALD RUMSFELD, FORMER U.S. SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: We're at a point where we clearly have moved from major combat activity to a period of stability and stabilization and reconstruction.

NIC ROBERTSON, CNN INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMATIC EDITOR: The Taliban have really resurged, or at least insurgents associated with them have resurged over the last year or so, particularly in the south of the country. They've started using suicide bombs, roadside bombs, tactics that haven't been used here before.

BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Pentagon officials telling CNN President Obama has now approved the concept of a significant U.S. troop increase in Afghanistan that will eventually, potentially, double the size of the U.S. force there. WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: The president of the United States making

the dramatic, historic announcement. It's all official now. Bin Laden is dead.

ERIN MCLAUGHLIN, CNN ANCHOR: President Obama announcing the end of America's longest war. The president's latest attempt to end the Afghan war includes keeping 9,800 troops on the ground next year and pulling all but 1,000 out of the country by 2016.

BARACK OBAMA, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I think Americans have learned that it's harder to end wars than it is to begin them.

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT/ANCHOR: A thousand more U.S. troops will be remaining in Afghanistan into next year, 10,800 instead of the originally announced 9,800 to help secure the place in a country that Secretary Hagel said is still a very dangerous place.

ATHENA JONES, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: President Trump laid out a new plan for U.S. efforts in Afghanistan and South Asia.

DONALD TRUMP, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Conditions on the ground, not arbitrary timetables, will guide our strategy from now on.

ROBERTSON: There is a real hope here that this is a pathway for peace. It's not a peace deal in and of itself. It's an agreement solely between the United States and the Taliban; commits the United States to withdrawing all its forces over 14 months.

NICK PATON WALSH, CNN INTERNATIONAL SECURITY EDITOR: The Taliban just this morning reiterated their call for all U.S. troops to be out by May the 1st, 16 days from now. Joe Biden said they'd start withdrawing on that date.

ANNA COREN, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: With the Taliban rapidly gaining ground across Afghanistan, U.S. President Joe Biden defended his decision to end America's longest war, saying it was overdue.

BIDEN: I will not send another generation of Americans to war in Afghanistan with no reasonable expectation of achieving a different outcome.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BERMAN: Twenty years of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan. I want to bring in Jeremy Butler, CEO of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.

That's remarkable to look back on 20 years and look at the twists and turns and how, in some ways, things never changed, even as there were developments here and there.

You heard President Biden yesterday say the decision to withdraw is overdue. I wonder what you think about that?

JEREMY BUTLER, CEO, IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN VETERANS OF AMERICA: I think he's right. You know, the president also made a comment yesterday that I thought was really interesting, was that after the U.S. killed Osama bin Laden in 2011, there was discussions about, hey, maybe we'll be out of Afghanistan completely in another year, and then that got extended and that got extended.

And so I think it really is. We've reached a point where we achieved the missions that the U.S. intended when they went into Afghanistan. But we've stayed there much longer than that.

And so I think it is a challenging decision for the president, in the sense that he knew he would face blowback from this, but it was something that was set in place by President Trump. And he's following through on that, and I think ultimately, it's a good thing.

BERMAN: One of the things he mentioned is that the Afghan troops outnumber the Taliban. So he suggested he doesn't think it's a given that the Taliban will overrun the country. Is that an over-rosy outlook, do you think?

BUTLER: It's a somewhat rosy outlook. I think he's absolutely correct that the Afghan troops and the national police definitely outnumber the Taliban. But you have to look at what's happening in some of the provincial areas where the Taliban are overrunning Afghan national army outposts and things like that.

I think what you've got is you definitely have a large number of Afghan forces, but the question is how well trained are they? How dedicated are they? And frankly, how well reinforced are they?

BERMAN: And if the Taliban does take over, which is a real possibility -- I'm not saying it's a given, but it's a possibility. For the veterans, for the tens and hundreds of thousands who've served there, how will they look at the 20-year conflict? Will you look at it and say, Hey, it was worth it, the Taliban -- even if the Taliban is back there now?

BUTLER: I don't think there's any doubt about that. I think everyone will say that it was worth it. Everyone should be proud of the service that they provided over there. Everyone that was sent over did the mission that we were sent to do.

The question is, did we set the stage to allow the Afghans to govern themselves going forward? And I think that's the real focus now, and I think that's what the president was addressing yesterday.

I think a key thing that we have to be looking at is how well are we going to support their air force moving forward? If they don't have -- if the Afghan government doesn't have a strong air force, they're going to have a really hard time maintaining the gains that have been made up until now.

BERMAN: Now, he made a -- I don't want to say vague promise. He promised that he would take care of the interpreters and the Afghans who worked with U.S. troops and U.S. personnel over the last 20 years. Is that enough? Or what more could he do? BUTLER: I think a lot more needs to be done. I would say for me

personally, if there was a disappointing part of the president's address yesterday, it was that we didn't get more details on that, and that he also said something that I think is going to come to a surprise of a lot of people, which is that he stated that Congress needs to change the law if we're going to do an evacuation of those Afghan interpreters and those that supported the allies.

I think that's going to be a big surprise to Congress. We've been talking about this for a long time, and I don't think that that's been brought up right now.

And we also need to move faster, and we need to get more of them out quickly. And I don't think we saw the sense of urgency from the president that we wanted to see.

BERMAN: Seems to me this is an issue of weeks.

BUTLER: Exactly. Exactly. No, it absolutely is. This is something that we've been pushing on for a long time. And I always make this point. The SIV progress, the process to get visas to those that supported us, this isn't something new. This is something that's been going on almost the entire time we've been in Afghanistan.

And so it's been a flawed process from the beginning, and we're well overdue to move quickly.

BERMAN: Jeremy Butler, always great to speak to you. Thanks so much for coming in this morning.

And really, to look back at the 20 years, it really is remarkable.

BUTLER: It is, absolutely. I joined the Navy in 1999. I thought I was going to do four years and be out. And obviously, 2001 changed that forever. And it is incredible just to see that brief recap of the last 20 years.

BERMAN: All right. I appreciate you being here with us.

BUTLER: Thank you.

BERMAN: So a new twist in the assassination of Haiti's president. Why officials say there are two Americans who were involved in the hit.

KEILAR: Plus, the tragedy in Surfside is now among the worst mass casualty events since 9/11 as crews find more victims each day.

And a new book reveals that Mike Pence lost it at Donald Trump when the former president threw a piece of paper at him. We'll have details on NEW DAY.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:15:53]

KEILAR: This morning the painstaking work of digging through rubble and recovering bodies continues in Surfside. Four more victims were recovered yesterday, bringing the number of confirmed deaths to 64.

But officials advise that this is now a recovery mission. And that means that the 76 people that remain unaccounted for are presumed to have also died in the collapse. And that brings the total death toll now to 140. One of the biggest mass casualty events since 9/11.

CNN correspondent Tom Foreman joins us now.

I know you've been looking at this, so tell us. I think this is what strikes so many people about Surfside, by the way, just how many people died. Tell us how this compares to other events that have also affected us similarly.

TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes. It's a terrible thing, in so many ways, because the truth is they never compare. Right? We've been to these things. They're all uniquely terrible for the people involved. Uniquely terrible for the communities. But in terms of sheer numbers, it is interesting to look at.

In terms of mass casualty events since 9/11, you can start off by talking about the plane crash off Queens in 2001: 265 people killed, including five on the ground, American Airlines right after takeoff went down there.

Then in 2003, you'll remember the concert fire in Rhode Island, the Great White playing on stage, so many trapped there trying to get out of the exits there. A hundred people died there.

Forty-nine killed in The Pulse nightclub shooting down in Florida also, which again, it's just terrible, this litany of horrible things that have happened.

And yet, this is the world that we have lived in for quite a while now. And then 58 killed in the Las Vegas concert shooting, which I know we covered so much of at the time.

KEILAR: And you know, the biggest losses of life since 9/11, one of the things we will look at is that they've been connected to natural disasters.

FOREMAN: Yes. Natural disasters could always -- they always have this way of just being so explosive. Hurricane Katrina, back in my old home of New Orleans, all along the Gulf Coast there. We'll never forget that. More than 1,800 people died in that.

A hundred and fifty-eight were killed in 2011 in a tornado in Missouri. That went through Joplin. That was more than a mile wide at some points.

And that came after a month in which we had, like, 300 people killed in a string of tornadoes around the southeast.

Seventy-two people died on the East Coast in Superstorm Sandy.

Sixty-eight killed in Hurricane Harvey, remember when that hit the Texas coast and then moved across and dumped just biblical amounts of water on Houston, just unbelievable what that storm did.

And then you remember Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. Initial estimates was that the death toll was really fairly small. That was revised after people got in and started looking at this. Almost 3,000 people died in that.

And then the Camp Fire out in California in 2018, 85 killed in the fires there. So, you know, we look at this, Brianna. If you put it all together, again, every one of these, in its own way, is a unique and terrible, terrible thing.

This is the world we live in these days, though. A lot of people in this country between mass casualties caused by humans and those that are natural, really a tremendous number of losses out there. Although, I have to say, this one right now is still somewhere in a gray zone. We don't really know.

Will we find out eventually that, no, there was some kind of erosion happening that was completely a natural thing that nobody knew about? Or was it something that was human-based. Or did they all come together in some way? We'll find out eventually and, then, sadly, we'll know where that fits into these lists.

KEILAR: Because the lesson from all of these things is that you want to at least learn from them and prevent them. We talk about the years having passed for the people affected by them. You know, hardly any time has passed. They'll feel this loss throughout their entire life.

FOREMAN: A long, long time.

KEILAR: Tom Foreman, thank you so much.

BERMAN: We want to remember some of those who died in the Surfside collapse.

Bonnie and David Epstein were 56 and 58. They grew up in northeast Philadelphia but spent the past several years between Brooklyn, Miami and New Jersey. Their son Jonathan says that it's been comforting to relive the joy of their lives through the testimony of friends and loved ones.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

[06:20:04]

JONATHAN EPSTEIN, LOST BOTH PARENTS IN SURFSIDE BUILDING COLLAPSE: I'm thinking of what I'm going to say at the funeral now. And I just want to emphasize they were so cool. People -- people would -- you know, when I was younger, people -- my friends would come over, and I just felt like they were coming over to hang out with my parents.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: They were so cool.

Seven-year-old Stella Cattarossi and her mother, Graciela, were in the condo with three other family members when it collapsed. Stella's babysitter said that she was a quiet girl who was very close with her mother.

Stella's father is a Miami firefighter. Her grandparents, Graciela and Gino Cattarossi also died in the collapse.

Michael Altman was a selfless man who had a love for life, racquetball and his family, according to his son Nick (ph), who says his father wasn't just his dad but also his best friend.

Michael Altman came to the United States from Costa Rico when he was 4 years old. The condo had been in the family since it was built in the 1980s.

As Wolf likes to say, may their memories be a blessing.

Texas Republicans mounting a new push to restrict voting rights in the state. Is there anything Democrats can do to stop them?

KEILAR: Plus, two Americans arrested in connection to the assassination of Haiti's president. We are live from Port-au-Prince next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:25:28]

BERMAN: This morning the situation in Haiti growing more chaotic after the assassination of President Jovenel Moise. Police say the two U.S. citizens are among the 17 people arrested so far. The others are Colombian. The search is on for at least eight more suspects.

Authorities are calling the hit the work of professional killers, but so far, they say the motive is a mystery.

CNN's Matt Rivers live for us in Port-au-Prince this morning.

As we said, Matt, a sense of chaos and, really, confusion over what happened and who did this. What's the latest on what you're learning?

MATT RIVERS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: John, there are so many questions. It seems like, as we were watching all this develop yesterday, as we got here late last night, things are changing hour by hour.

The latest information that we have is coming from a press conference that was given by Haitian authorities here in Port-au-Prince on Thursday evening. And we're learning more about the suspects that Haitian authorities believed are involved in all this.

So like you said, there are at least 17 people detained at this point. We say at least, because this number continually has been fluctuating. We know that at least three people have been killed. Three suspects have been killed at this point.

I mean, we know at least another eight people remain at large at this point. All of the people detained, according to the numbers that we have so far, are foreign nationals.

Of the numbers of suspects that have been identified -- and this isn't broken down necessarily just between detained and at large -- the authorities just saying of all the suspects that they have, 26 of those 28 suspects are Colombian nationals.

We actually heard from the Colombian defense ministry on Thursday evening, who told us that some of those Colombians are actually former members of Colombia's military. The other two people that are not Colombians are Haitian-Americans. That is what we know at this point.

However, there is still so much to be learned, because what we haven't heard, John, from the authorities is who is behind all this. What is the motive of this? Why did all of these foreign nationals come here to Haiti and kill this country's president?

That is the answer that we do not have yet.

And furthermore, were they assisted in some way? Was this some sort of inside job? Because the presidential residence here in Port-au-Prince normally has a very robust security presence. And yet, these armed men were able to get inside that residence and kill the president and gravely wound his wife.

And yet as far as we can tell, no presidential security forces were injured in some sort of shootout. So there remains a lot of questions at this point here. We're going to try to get to the bottom of it here, John, here in Port-au-Prince in the next hours, days and maybe weeks.

BERMAN: Matt Rivers, great to have you there. Please, you and your team stay safe.

The FBI infiltrating a, quote, "Bible study group" that was discussing the possibility of a second Civil War. We'll break down how these types of operations work.

KEILAR: Plus, Richard Branson heading to space this weekend, beating Jeff Bezos by nine days. We'll have the latest on Branson's trip coming up.

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