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President Biden Gives Press Conference Urging Americans to Get Vaccinated and Boosted against COVID-19 to Help Stop Spread of Omicron Variant; COVID-19 Cases and Hospitalizations Rising in Texas and United Kingdom. Aired 8-8:30a ET

Aired December 22, 2021 - 08:00   ET

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

[08:00:00]

OLIVER DARCY, CNN SENIOR MEDIA REPORTER: Strong word from the president there yesterday. But as you might predict, they're having no effect among those who have been promoting vaccine misinformation. For instance, Tucker Carlson last night, first few moments of his program he was trafficking in a bunch of anti-vaccine rhetoric. John?

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Interesting that Donald Trump, though, talking again about the efficacy of the boosters and the vaccines and how people should take them. Oliver Darcy, thank you very much.

DARCY: Thank you.

BERMAN: And NEW DAY continues right now.

Good morning to our viewers here in the United States and all around the world. It is Wednesday, December 22nd. I'm John Berman. Brianna is off. Erica Hill with me. Great to have you here all week.

ERICA HILL, CNN ANCHOR: Nice to be with you, my friend.

BERMAN: President Biden says if you are vaccinated and boosted, go ahead, spend the holidays with family and friends. The president says the rapidly spreading Omicron variant is cause for concern, but not panic, and the country is much better prepared now to tackle a COVID resurgence than in the early pre-vaccine days. For the millions who remain unvaccinated, there was this stark warning.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOE BIDEN, (D) PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Almost everyone who has died from COVID-19 in the past many months has been unvaccinated. I honest to God believe it's your patriotic duty. The choice can be the difference between life or death. Please get vaccinated.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HILL: The Biden administration's response to skyrocketing Omicron cases now includes expanding test sites across the country, distributing 500 million free at-home tests to those who request them, deploying 1,000 military service members to help overburdened hospitals, and also adding new vaccination sites.

CNN's senior medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen joining us now. Elizabeth, good morning. A lot of focus on these efforts and what they'll do.

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN SENIOR MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: That's right, Erica. And the reason why is we're seeing numbers going in the wrong direction. Hospitalizations up four percent from the week before. And we're expecting those to go up because as we see cases go up, we're going to see hospitalizations go up, or at least that's been the trend.

So let's take a look at some numbers. So cases, if we look past week over previous week, up 23 percent, deaths up 11 percent. And this number really hurts, vaccine doses administered, down 19 percent. And so what you have here, if you look at the map of the United States, almost half of the country is in the red. Red is bad. Red means that cases are going up. Yellow means stable, and green means going down. So as I said, numbers going in the wrong direction. Erica?

HILL: Elizabeth, the CDC also just released a new report on life expectancy in the U.S. And it's frankly depressing.

COHEN: It is really a punch to the gut. It shows -- we talk about COVID every day. But it shows the actual result over a year, what happened. It just reversed course. Our country is really -- was before COVID, was doing pretty well, was doing quite well at taking care of people, at lowering mortality rates. Now look what happened because of COVID. So the life expectancy in 2020 was 77 years. That's down 1.8 years from 2019. That is the largest annual drop since World War II. The three leading causes of death in this order, heart disease, cancer, and COVID-19.

And when we look at COVID-19, it was responsible for 10 percent of all deaths in 2020. And unfortunately, it hit certain communities more than others. The death rate increase, it was 1.7 times higher for black males than for the population in general, and 2.5 times higher for Latino males than for the population in general. Erica?

HILL: Sobering, that's for sure. Elizabeth, appreciate it, thank you.

BERMAN: I want to bring in Dr. Richina Bicette-McCain. She's an emergency medical physician and the medical director at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. Thank you so much for being with us. We talked to your colleague, Peter Hotez, all the time, and he was saying that it looks like Houston is going to be the tip of the Omicron spear in Texas. What are you seeing in Texas right now in terms of cases in Omicron?

DR. RICHINA BICETTE-MCCAIN, MEDICAL DIRECTOR, BAYLOR COLLEGE OF MEDICINE: Well, what we're seeing in Texas is mirroring what we're seeing elsewhere in the country. We are seeing a spike in cases. Cases in Texas actually are up over 113 percent over the last two weeks. Currently we're averaging about 7,500 cases per day. In the Texas Medical Center, we're also seeing similar trends. Our ICUs are at 94 percent capacity. We're hospitalizing over 100 people per day compared to just 60 something people per day last week. So numbers are spiking.

BERMAN: Are you able to tell yet what you're seeing in terms of symptoms, what might be this Omicron surge and how they differ from other parts of the pandemic?

[08:05:06]

BICETTE-MCCAIN: I'm not sure that I can tell specifically in my emergency department. I am seeing people with milder symptoms, but a good portion of those who have milder symptoms are also vaccinated. So I don't know if the mild symptoms are because of the Omicron variant itself or because these are people who have already previously been vaccinated.

We are, however, getting reports from researchers in the U.K. that have done studies and said that Omicron is less able to infect lung cells when they study it in a lab compared to prior variants. So it may potentially be less severe than prior strains.

BERMAN: Look, that would be good news. And certainly if people are presenting with milder symptoms, whatever the reason, that is also good news, Doctor.

What about kids? What are you seeing in terms of children?

BICETTE-MCCAIN: Children are not immune from COVID. I've been saying this since the very beginning of the pandemic. If there are high case levels in the community, children are going to be affected. For the 19th week in a row, we have seen over 100,000 pediatric cases. Pediatric cases are actually up 28 percent compared to numbers last week. And children are making up a disproportionate amount of COVID cases in the United States.

BERMAN: The president announced a plan to get 500 million instant tests available to the American people sometime later in January. And also to put up some testing sites in cities around the country. But how are you right now? How are you today in terms of your testing capacity and demand? Is it there?

BICETTE-MCCAIN: John, that's kind of what the issue is. I applaud the president for taking this pandemic seriously and really trying to do what is right in order to combat COVID-19, but we're seeing limitations on testing right now. There have been reports, places like New York, Ohio, Florida, there are long lines, there are people who can't get home tests, major retailers like CVS and Walgreens are actually putting limits on the amount of home tests you can buy. So while it is great that we'll have access to more tests in January, we need that access now.

BERMAN: If I can ask you to predict, and that's awfully hard to do in this pandemic, where are we going to be in three weeks?

BICETTE-MCCAIN: No one can say, but I'm pretty worried that the surge that we're going to see in the coming weeks is going to be worse than the surge we saw last winter. TSA reported last weekend that they screened over 2 million passengers per day for three consecutive days in a row. That level of travel is similar to where it was before the pandemic. So we have people moving around, we have millions of Americans who are eligible for vaccine boosters that have not gotten their boosters, and we have a more transmissible COVID variant. That is a recipe for disaster.

BERMAN: Dr. Richina Bicette-McCain, I appreciate you being with us. Thank you for what you do. Have a wonderful holiday.

BICETTE-MCCAIN: Thank you. You as well.

HILL: Let's take a look at where things are now in the U.K., several weeks typically ahead of what we're seeing in the U.S. In a COVID surge there on Tuesday, the U.K. reported more than 90,000 new coronavirus cases and 172 deaths. The country also reported more than 15,000 additional confirmed cases of the Omicron variant.

Joining us now, infectious disease and global health expert at the University of Oxford, Dr. Peter Drobac. Good to have you with us this morning. I want to pick up, I hope that you could hear Dr. McCain at the end there, she said she's worried that this surge in the U.S. and specifically where she is in Texas could be worse than what we saw last winter. She calls it a recipe for disaster. Based on what you're seeing, do you think that's coming at us?

DR. PETER DROBAC, INFECTIOUS DISEASE AND GLOBAL HEALTH EXPERT, UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD: Yes, I share those concerns. Thank you for having me, by the way.

There is so much uncertainty right now about what's going to happen. This maybe one of the most uncertain moments we've had since the beginning of this pandemic. But there are a lot of reasons to be concerned. We know for sure about this variant is that it is incredibly transmissible. Each infected person infects, on average, five other people, which is much more than with previous variants. We're seeing in the U.K., Omicron cases doubling about every two to two-and-a-half days. So even if it turns out that it causes milder symptoms or this overall the numbers of people that it puts in hospital are lower than with previous variants, we're looking at potential case numbers that could still overwhelm health systems and cause huge disruptions to workplaces and schools.

HILL: As you lay out all that information, specifically the transmissibility even, it makes me wonder because, as you know, the prime minister in the U.K. says there is just not enough evidence right now to justify tougher COVID measures before Christmas. I know you don't agree with that. What would you like to see happen today even in the U.K., and why do you think it would be effective?

DROBAC: Yes, if there's one thing that we learned throughout this pandemic is that every time we hope for best and underestimate the virus, it comes back to bite us. And I worry that's what's happening here. Again, there is some uncertainty, but if we wait until there is hard evidence of what is going to happen in the face of a virus that's growing exponentially, there just isn't enough time.

[08:10:03] And so what I and others in the scientific community have been advocating for since even before the rise of this variant, but certainly over the past few weeks is that we do everything question we can now to reduce transmission and the numbers of cases so that we can be in a better position for the inevitable rise that we're starting to see.

Some steps we're taking here, there has been a terrific booster campaign, we're vaccinating about 800,000 people per day here in the U.K., getting people their third doses, and that's going to go a long ways. One thing we do know about this variant, by the way, is that two doses are probably not enough to give real protection. It's that third dose that gets your antibody levels and your immunity to a threshold that can overcome Omicron. So that's number one.

What we need to be doing more of is limiting mixing and contact to people. And that means potentially closing hospitality for a temporary period of time while supporting those businesses, and giving clear guidance to people about how to manage the holidays so that there can be limited mixing between households, people can be safe, they can be testing using masks, meeting outdoors where possible. We should have had probably some kind of circuit break over the last couple of weeks. And I worry we're going to be after the holidays.

HILL: Do you think this approach by the prime minister saying there is not enough evidence to do anything before Christmas, I don't know if this is an attempt to preserve the holiday, quote-unquote, but is this going to lead to potentially some sort of a post-Christmas surge?

DROBAC: I think it is likely. We certainly saw a big surge last year, because there is a lot of mixing that happens over the holidays. I think overwhelmingly the scientific consensus here is that more should be done. Politically it is really complicated. Nobody wants to, quote- unquote, cancel Christmas or the holidays, and the prime minister is also facing a revolt from his own party who are strongly against any kind of restrictions. That said, leaders have to make tough decisions and sometimes unpopular decisions in order to protect the population. I think that's what we're facing here.

HILL: What are you doing this holiday? Have you changed your plans at all?

DROBAC: Yes, we were going to travel to the U.S. actually to visit family, or at least considering that. And we've scrapped those travel plans. So we have already returned to working from home for those of us who are able, and we're going to have a fairly quiet family Christmas here. We're trying to do lots of things outside. And unfortunately for us it will mean meeting with lots of our loved ones who are abroad online one more year, unfortunately. And that's tough. That's tough to handle. At the same time, we don't want to take any risks now that are just going to make the winter a longer one for all of us.

HILL: Yes, that's for sure. Dr. Peter Drobac, great to have you with us this morning. Thank you, happy holidays. Long lines for COVID testing in New York and other big cities. So if

you are traveling, can you even get that trip, that test, rather, before your holiday trip? Mayor Bill de Blasio joins us live just ahead.

BERMAN: Plus, jurors in Kim Potter's trial for killing Daunte Wright struggling to reach a consensus. What they are asking the judge.

And president Biden insisting he will cut a deal with Joe Manchin on his agenda, but how realistic is that?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:15:27]

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: President Biden sounding optimistic that he and Senator Joe Manchin will be able to work something out, despite the West Virginia Democrat saying he would not vote for the Build Back Better bill containing much of the president's agenda. Watch this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REPORTER: Did Senator Manchin break his commitment to you?

JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Senator Manchin and I are going to get something done. Thank you.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: Joining us now, CNN contributor and staff writer for "The New Yorker ," Evan Osnos. He's also the author of the biography, "Joe Biden: The Life, the Run, and What Matters Now".

I should note you profiled Joe Manchin in the spring. You worked in West Virginia. I sort of like how the universe always aligns into areas of your expertise.

Thanks for being with us this morning, Evan.

You know both these guys. What do you hear in their comments now and what does that lead you to believe about whether some kind of a deal is possible?

EVAN OSNOS, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: Yeah, John, you know what's really interesting, you heard Joe Manchin over the last couple of days give us a lot of reasons for why he torpedoed this bill. He's concerned about inflation. He's concerned about debt.

He's talked about what he calls problems at the staff level at the White House. He's sort of irritated by how he was being handled.

One thing he hasn't done is blame this on the president of the United States. That's not an accident. It is important.

These are two people who are trying to preserve a pathway to get back to conversation again. You heard the president yesterday talk about they're going to do something, Joe Manchin when he went on local radio in West Virginia this week, making it clear he has no problem with the president.

So in some ways, the optimistic reading here is that this is a throat clearing part of the process, where they have now more or less put their cards on the table, shown what they're willing to accept and not accept and they can sit down and hash something out.

BERMAN: Manchin says he has to be able to explain this to people in west Virginia, this is one of his common refrains here. I don't -- does he feel any pressure or where is the pressure that he genuinely feels?

BERMAN: Yeah, it is interesting, I think we sometimes make a mistake by assuming that west Virginia is a monolithic pro Trump territory. It is not. No place is monolithic. In West Virginia, there are people today, I've been hearing from them this week, who are concerned about losing this child tax credit. There are about 300,000 kids in West Virginia, who got that child tax credit this month, estimates are that about half of them would slip into poverty in January if the tax credit dries up.

So Joe Manchin is getting some pressure at home to make sure that he's looking out for people who are vulnerable, in need. It is not a simple matter of him leaning to the right. He's also got to be responsive to what people need in their daily lives right now.

BERMAN: And then there is what pressure Joe Biden feels on this. And questions about whether or not he was behaving or trying to govern in a way that he had a mandate that maybe he didn't have. What do you think about that? Did he want to be FDR?

OSNOS: Well, in a way I think he came into this moment, John, he felt this was a grave period in American politics and also a period of opportunity, where you had Democrats in control of the Congress and the White House, getting a lot of pressure from his own party for this to be a transformative moment and as Joe Manchin said, he's governing as if he has not -- Biden specifically, but the leadership is governing as if they have a 55 or 60-seat advantage in the Congress. They don't. This is very tight.

So this is a bit of a humbling moment frankly for both of them. And I think it is a possibility that that may be the kind of breakthrough you can begin to now say, what can we really get done, because politically speaking, the period of talking about it, of hoping for it, of wishing the best that you can get, that's over. They have to get something here, voters are counting on it.

BERMAN: So there was a really interesting back and forth and back again on the issue of vaccines and boosters between the former president, the current president, and the former president. It all started when Donald Trump admitted he was boosted, and talked about the benefit of the vaccines and talked about how much credit he thinks that he should get for helping streamline the vaccine approval process, then president Biden in his remarks yesterday gave credit to the previous administration for developing the vaccines and noted that the former president was boosted and then, if you're following the play by play here, Donald Trump did an interview last night, where he praised Joe Biden's tone and said it was nice to be thanked like that, and hesitated about saying anything negative about Joe Biden on vaccines and vaccinations.

I'm not sure I've seen this before and I'm trying to figure out what it all means.

[08:20:00]

OSNOS: Well, peace is breaking out all over the place, John. I think the truth is that this is a moment in which the former president did come out and say that he had gotten a booster. He received pushback as we know from some of his own supporters who booed him in that moment.

I think this is time, though, where the president of the United States today, Joe Biden, is saying we need to recognize that the previous administration played a role in this, there are a lot of Americans out there who are still in many ways consider themselves part of the Trump movement and they are hesitating and that hesitation to get the vaccine is the single greatest obstacle right now to the United States getting through it.

Joe Biden's political future and the public health of the United States rests on getting more Americans vaccinated and boosted.

So you heard him saying, praising a person with whom he has very little in common, praising him for doing that, and let's hope that message gets through. It is the essential message.

BERMAN: Look, if it saves lives, if it saves one life, then it may be worth whatever political, you know, eating it has to take here.

Evan Osnos, it's great to see you. Everything is in your area of expertise. I always learn something. Have a wonderful holiday.

OSNOS: My pleasure. Great to be with you, John.

BERMAN: Politicians taking aim at state courts for the potentially chilling effect. More on how and why next.

ERICA HILL, CNN ANCHOR: Plus, some new rules at major drugstores, where home COVID tests are flying off the shelves. That's if you can even find one on the shelf.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:25:01]

HILL: A new study by the Brennan Center for Justice says 2021 was a big year for threats to American democracy. The study finds state lawmakers across the country considered more than 150 bills that would either politicize or diminish the independence of state courts, particularly when it comes to the fairness and security of elections.

Joining us now, Michael Waldman. He's president of the Brennan Center. It's good to have you here this morning and disturbing quite honestly.

So, give us an example if you could.

So, these state laws would diminish a court's ability to protect elections. Walk us through how some of that would work.

MICHAEL WALDMAN, PRESIDENT, THE BRENNAN CENTER: Well, you're exactly right. First of all, we all care enormously about the independence of courts. Judges have to be able to follow the law and follow their state constitutions, even if it makes one political party or another mad. And that's certainly true when it comes to elections.

As part of the push for laws to do restrict the vote, or respond to the big lie of the stolen election last year, we're now seeing something new, which is laws targeted at judges around elections. So that in Georgia, for example, when they pass their big law restricting the vote and a number of ways, they made it harder for judges to extend to polling place hours in places where there are long lines, which tends to frequently be in black communities.

In places like Texas, and Kentucky, you see other laws that restrict the ability of judges to enforce the law. You even see proposals in a number of states saying that courts cannot enforce their own state constitution, that only partisan legislators, without any oversight from the courts, can touch elections and election laws. That's a very dangerous recipe going forward.

HILL: Yeah, it certainly is, and that should give, I would hope, everyone pause no matter where your political affiliations lie and yet it seems to be in some areas having the opposite effect, seeing a lot of support. Is this something you see, a trend you see, continuing into 2022?

WALDMAN: Well, as you know, all throughout this year we have seen a wave of new laws in states across the country make it harder for people to vote. And then at the same time for the first time we have seen on top of these voter suppression laws kind of election sabotage laws changing who counts the votes, how it is decided who wins an election, removing the secretary of state of Georgia, for example, from determining the winner of an election. And knocking aside independent judges who have the power to uphold the law is part of that effort.

It is important to remember, of course, we're talking in late December the state legislatures come back into action next month. So there is going to be a second wave of these voting and judicial laws that we have to watch out for.

HILL: There are plenty of Americans who hopefully are disturbed by this, right? They look and say what can I do? Oftentimes the answer is, well, you make your voice heard at the ballot box.

But the reality is, A, those elections are sort of far off depending what we're talking about and, B, if people have perhaps even less access to vote, is there anything practically speaking that concerned citizens can do at this point? WALDMAN: Well, I think people can do two things. One is to say that

there are all kind of laws people like and don't like, but going after judges, and going after the courts, that's un-American. That draws a real -- that crosses a real line.

The other thing is on much of this, though not all of it, there is a chance for federal action to stop so many of the assaults on voting that we see across the country. As states have moved forward with these laws, Congress is considering the freedom to vote act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. These are two key pieces of legislation that have passed the house, that have a majority of support in the Senate, including Senator Manchin, that are being blocked by a Republican filibuster right now.

And Senator Schumer and the Senate leadership said this is the first thing they're going to turn their attention to in the beginning of the year. If Congress does not act, they're giving a green light to states to pass laws restricting the vote.

HILL: You know, to that end, this pivot to focus again on voting rights is a little late. Should there have been more of a continued focus over the last several months? And, if so, do you think it would have, A, changed any minds, on the right side of the chamber, or B, brought up a more substantive or even consistent discussion about the impact of the filibuster on these specific issues?

WALDMAN: Well, I certainly would have been happier if Congress had dealt with this earlier. I do think it is something of a crisis for our democracy in so many places.