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HHS Secretary RFK Jr. Calls Measles Outbreak "Not Usual"; Protesters Flood Republican Town Halls Over Job Cuts; Actor Gene Hackman Found Dead Alongside Wife In New Mexico Home; Supreme court Signals It Will Make It Easier For Americans To File "Reverse" Discrimination Lawsuits. Aired 6:30-7a ET
Aired February 27, 2025 - 06:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
KAREN FINNEY, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: -- come down any time soon, despite some of the efforts that they're going to take.
[06:30:04]
MIKE DUBKE, FORMER COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR, TRUMP ADMINISTRATION: It does differ around the country. So I -- my son in Little Rock, Arkansas, was having a conversation.
(CROSSTALK)
DUBKE: Well, there you go -- $3 a dozen at Trader Joe's, Alexandria, Virginia, Whole Foods, over $6 a dozen. So, I mean, people are feeling the pain differently. The only thought that keeps going through my humpty dumpty is a billionaire, right?
JESSICA DEAN, CNN ANCHOR: Just -- just keeps --
FINNEY: Yeah. Yeah.
DUBKE: I mean, I mean, he's got it all inside. As long as he can keep it, to.
DEAN: Keep it together. Keep it together.
FINNEY: Yeah. Okay. I'm trying to --
DUBKE: I was trying to set Isaac up, but that one, I just -- I couldn't do.
FINNEY: He's just fried. He just can't. He's scrambled. He can't come up with --
EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE, CNN SENIOR REPORTER: I'm short on puns.
I do think that, you know, politically. And you showed that video of Trump on the campaign trail. It -- there has been a lot of talk, oh, well, people voted for was Elon Musk running the government, people voted for was all this.
What people voted for a lot was doing something about prices.
DEAN: Bringing down the cost of living.
DOVERE: And that video --
DEAN: Yeah.
DOVERE: -- is something. And it wasn't the only time that he did that on the campaign trail. It -- it is something that may come back to haunt him. And we'll see and we'll see how much people register it. They did blame prices on Joe Biden, whether or not that was his fault. They may blame this on Donald Trump, whether or not that's his fault.
DEAN: We're going to see.
The Democrats trying to find their footing in the era of Trump and Musk. Coming up, I'm going to speak with Congressman Brad Schneider of Illinois about where his party goes from here.
Plus, the first death related to the measles outbreak in west Texas. Should you be worried? Were going to talk to Dr. Deborah Birx about that.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[06:36:04]
DEAN: A family in west Texas is mourning the loss of a young child to the largest measles outbreak in 30 years. Health officials in the state saying there are now at least 124 measles cases across nine counties. Eighteen people have been hospitalized during this outbreak, all of them unvaccinated.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was asked about this during the cabinet meeting on Wednesday.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR., SECRETARY OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES: Incidentally, there have been four measles outbreaks this year in this country. Last year, there were 16. So it's not unusual. There are measles outbreaks every year.
We're watching it, and there are about 20 people hospitalized, mainly for quarantine.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
DEAN: Kennedy saying the outbreak, quote, not unusual there. He also claims the hospitalizations were for quarantine purposes. That is something that has been disputed, though, by local hospital officials.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DR. LARA JOHNSON, CHIEF MEDICAL OFFICER, COVENANT HEALTH LUBBOCK SERVICE AREA: We don't hospitalized patients for -- for quarantine purposes. Quarantine is not something that would happen in a health care facility. We admit patients who need acute supportive treatment in our hospital.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
DEAN: Joining us now to talk more about this, Dr. Deborah Birx, former COVID-19 response coordinator under the Trump administration.
Good morning to you, Dr. Birx. Thanks for being here with us.
DR. DEBORAH BIRX, FORMER WHITE HOUSE CORONAVIRUS TASK FORCE RESPONSE COORDINATOR: Good morning.
DEAN: I want to start first with the health secretary calling this growing outbreak in Texas, quote, not unusual. Would you say that's an accurate characterization of what we're seeing unfold there in Texas?
BIRX: Well, you know, over the last two years, '24 and '25, we've had a lot of measles outbreak. And I think it's really a reflective of we have both red states and blue states that are under 90 percent of the children vaccinated. And I think we have red states and blue states that are above 95 percent. So we need to learn from the states that are keeping the higher levels of vaccination and really improve the vaccination rates, particularly in rural communities.
But this specific community where this started is a rural religious exemption community, and we have those throughout the United States.
DEAN: Yeah.
BIRX: Yeah.
DEAN: And Dr. Birx -- Dr. Birx, we also spoke with Texas health officials about this outbreak. And they underscored how rare this is for them professionally. I just want to listen to what they said about it.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Have you ever seen measles before?
DR. JENNIFER SHUFORD, COMMISSIONER, TEXAS DEPARTMENT OF STATE HEALTH SERVICES: No. And I'm an infectious disease physician. I've never diagnosed a case.
GUPTA: That's incredible.
SHUFORD: It's because, you know, measles was declared eliminated. From the United States back in the year 2000 because of the effectiveness of that vaccine. And it's only now with falling immunization rates, not just here in Texas, but across the country and around the world, that we're starting to see more of these outbreaks.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
DEAN: And, Dr. Birx, I heard you in your last answer really talking about looking to these states where they have a higher vaccination rate. I'm curious how this rise in kind of anti-vaccination sentiment has potentially breathed new life into these diseases, which 25 years ago were considered eliminated.
BIRX: Yes. So if you look at vaccine hesitancy, it was pretty stable for the last decade. But since COVID, vaccine hesitancy has really increased and vaccination rates among childhood -- children -- school age children has really decreased.
So if you go to the CDC website -- and I just want to pick up with what you said about Secretary Kennedy, because I always like to go into the data and try to figure out where that came from. And on the CDC website, it does state both for 2024 and 2025 that the hospitalizations were related to isolation and complications.
So it does talk about isolation as hospitalization. I know in Texas because I just came from Lubbock last week, that these are very sick children that are in the hospital.
But that's why precision is important in data. We need to really get precise data on our CDC public health website so that it really says what -- how many were for isolation and how many were for treatment.
[06:40:02]
DEAN: And you mentioned the CDC website. The CDC has been subject to a lot of these cuts. Hundreds of people have been fired from there, the FDA, the National Institutes of Health.
Are you concerned about that when we're confronting something like this?
BIRX: Well, I think you know that I have been very direct with the CDC about data improvement over more than a decade. And I think there are critical improvements that need to occur there. So the data is real time. Data is daily.
I mean, we live in an information age. We shouldn't be just uploading weekly. And so I'm really hoping that we focus the personnel on the public health of the United States and really improve our data and our data to American people so that we have clarity on what's happening across the United States at the county level, where people live.
DEAN: I also, before I let you go, I do want to ask you about this as well. We've learned a vaccine advisory meeting has been canceled, and we can read just a little bit of the report. It says the meeting of the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, or VRBPAC, is held every month, every March to pick flu strains because it's a six-month production cycle for a vaccine released in September.
Apparently, Dr. Birx, the meeting had been set for March 13th, and we're told by Dr. Paul Offit he's received an email saying it's been canceled.
How critical is that meeting? And does that ring any alarm bells for you? BIRX: Well, deciding on the flu strains are pretty important. And
even when we decide, we don't always get it perfectly. And remember, most of our flu vaccines are grown in eggs, so we just had off the eggs segment. So --
DEAN: Yeah.
BIRX: I know they're working on better flu vaccines that are more durable, that more across strain recognition. These strains are critically important.
Now they can probably -- to be honest -- they can do this by a discussion on Zoom. They can do this by online discussion of how to pick these strains because it's very data driven based on what's happening in the Southern Hemisphere as we speak. So there are alternatives to in-person meetings.
DEAN: They just need to meet in some capacity, it sounds like, is the --
BIRX: Correct.
DEAN: -- is the important part.
I also want to ask you about Amy Gleason. She is who the White House has says is running DOGE, and she actually has a history with you, working on your COVID-19 response team.
Did you know Amy? And can you talk a little bit about her experience?
BIRX: You know, I was fortunate to have -- it was tiny. We had about five people that created all those data streams that we provided to the American people and to governors across the United States, which I think was incredibly important because we were in a very resource limited state in that moment. And when you don't have enough resources to just send them everywhere, you have to be very precise.
And it was Amy and that data team that got up our laboratory reporting, our hospital reporting, so we could really see where this virus was and where it was going, so we could give states what they needed. And I got to work beside her every day for almost a year, and really competent, hardworking, focused woman who understands the value of data.
DEAN: All right. Dr. Deborah Birx, thanks for your time this morning. We appreciate it.
BIRX: Thank you.
DEAN: Still ahead on CNN THIS MORNING, the Supreme Court hearing a case of alleged reverse discrimination. How the justices may be leaning after hearing arguments this week.
Plus, Democratic Congressman Brad Schneider joining us to discuss what his party has to do to get back in the game.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JAMES CARVILLE, DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST: I'm telling the Democrats, just sit there and play possum. Let them go. Let them go.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[06:47:51]
DEAN: With Republicans controlling every lever of power in Washington, Democrats still searching for an exit from the political wilderness. But they think scenes like this one are going to help them turn the tables.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CROWD: Where's Rob Wittman? Where's Rob Wittman? Where's Rob Wittman?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
DEAN: Chants from protesters at the office of House Republican Rob Wittman in Virginia last night. He won election in November by 13 points.
Now he wasn't in attendance, but federal workers impacted by the massive layoffs were. And they're speaking out about the chaos unfolding in their workplaces.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
EBONY TURNER, PROBATIONARY WORKER FIRED FROM IRS: These mass terminations, without any assessment of the American people's needs, will end up costing taxpayers more money.
CROWD: Yeah, yeah, waste, waste.
TURNER: Interrupt -- disruption to services. You want to know why no one at the Social Security office? They're firing people.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
DEAN: House Democrats now showing a united front in the face of those sweeping cuts this week, they voted unanimously against a Republican budget resolution, which ultimately passed on a party line vote.
Besides opposing Republican votes, Democrats also looking for a broader strategy.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CARVILLE: I'm telling the Democrats, just sit there and play possum. Let them go. Let them go.
REP. SETH MOULTON (D-MA): I don't agree that we should just step back. I think we've got to show leadership, show a way forward, and show Americans that we're actually willing to change.
SEN. CHRIS MURPHY (D-CT): There has been some theory of the case that we should maybe fight occasionally. We should reserve power. I think Donald Trump floods the zone, and I think we should flood the zone.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
DEAN: Joining us now, Congressman Brad Schneider, the chairman of the New Democrat Coalition.
Congressman, good morning to you. Thanks for being here with us.
REP. BRAD SCHNEIDER (D-IL): Happy to be here.
DEAN: I just want to start first where we -- where we left off there. Jane Car -- James Carville saying just play possum, play dead, rope a dope. What do you think?
SCHNEIDER: Well, I think it's full quote was play possum and jump up like a hyena. Fact of the matter is and is my colleague said we shouldn't be playing possum. We should be playing lion.
And we need to be out there and out front talking about what people care about and what they want is for Congress to work on making life easier, lowering, lowering prices, fighting inflation. We should be making it give people a chance not just to make ends meet, but to get ahead, working on creating safe and healthy communities.
[06:50:05]
And -- and trying to make sure that America continues to be the land of opportunity that the American people deserve.
DEAN: And so, there's a couple things I want. It's like a kind of it would be two pronged, which is, number one, I when we talk to people out, just Americans out there, Democrats, but also others, maybe independents that voted for Donald Trump, but especially the Democrats. They -- they're frustrated. They want to know where are the Democrats right now. Do you understand that frustration?
SCHNEIDER: I appreciate the frustration. I think they're looking in the wrong places because the Democrats are out there. You saw the rally we had on -- on the steps the other day, right before every single Democrat voted against a budget plan that the Republicans are putting forward that will cut $800 billion from Medicaid, cut more than $200 billion from food programs that help feed the hungry. That is going to add $300 billion to our debt and ultimately result in $20 trillion of additional debt over the next ten years, rather than bringing down our debt and addressing our problems, they're expanding on our problems.
DEAN: And -- but respectfully, I'm looking at this video and Democrats are going Trump's all over the internet. They're everywhere. Everyone on TikTok sees them. No one is watching something on the House steps. So what do you do to combat that? SCHNEIDER: We've got to be all over the internet. We've got to be
talking to people, meeting in interviews like this, but talking to podcasters who are talking to the American people, having town halls. You'll notice that the Republicans put out a message this week saying, don't have live town halls because they don't want to face the ire of the voters.
The voters are right. They're upset. What Elon Musk, who no one elected, no ones vetted. He and his doge bros are doing are basically taking not a scalpel or even a butcher knife to the government, but they're going in, as he said, with a chainsaw, not giving any thought to what they're doing, not considering the ramifications until after the fact.
If ever there was an example of ready, fire, aim, DOGE is it.
DEAN: And so, OK, so if that's the case and these cuts, as we just saw in that clip we played from Virginia, they're starting to really go through and disseminate through the country. And people are being affected by them. How do you all then take what's happening and convert that into winning back the House in two years?
SCHNEIDER: There's a number of pieces. We've got to keep talking to the voters and making sure they know what's happening, that if you cut aid to or assistance to first responders, when you have a fire at your home, the fire truck is not going to be there because there's no fire truck for that community. If you're cutting programs at national parks and you take your summer vacation, you're going to be waiting three hours to get into the park because the people who check the cars going in aren't going to be there.
So from the mundane to the very serious, these are real problems. We have to talk about that.
But we also have to deliver a message. And this is what the new Dems are doing. So I'm chair of the new Democrat coalition. We're 110 members, the majority of the Democratic Caucus. And we rolled out a vision, a platform built on three pillars, economic growth and opportunity, lowering costs, healthy and safe communities, and a strong national security, national defense, making America what it should be, not destroying it like you're seeing with DOGE and others.
DEAN: And we are starting to see the protests like we saw in that clip. I want to play what Speaker Johnson said about those, and I want to get your reaction.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. MIKE JOHNSON (R-LA), SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: Videos you saw of the town halls were for paid protesters in many of those places. These are Democrats who went to the events early and filled up the seats. If you -- if the videos had panned outside the building --
KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN HOST: You can't argue they were all paid protesters, though, Mr. Speaker.
JOHNSON: Many of them were. I don't know.
COLLINS: One of your -- a Republican acknowledged they were his constituents.
JOHNSON: One Republican acknowledged they were constituents. That's fantastic. Okay. But they had Democrats come and fill the seats early. All right? This is an old playbook.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
DEAN: What do you think of that?
SCHNEIDER: I think they're sticking their head in the sand. If we close our eyes and don't look, it's like little kids game. They close their eyes and maybe it disappears.
Fact of the matter is that the people at home are angry. They see what these cuts are doing to their communities. They see what they're doing to the nation and they're saying, stop. That's not what we voted for.
Yes, the American people want us to lower prices. Yes, the American people want us to make sure government is efficient. But you look at what DOGE is doing. Before I was in Congress, I worked with CEOs and business owners, and we worked together on trying to identify how to make things more efficient, more effective.
But there's some basic questions you ask. First one is, should this be done? If not, stop doing it.
Then you ask if it should be done, are we the best ones to do it? Should the government be doing it? And if not, then you find others who can do it better. But there are things that only the government can do.
You had a segment on earlier talking about this outbreak of measles. That's not just a threat to the families in Texas. My heart breaks for this family who lost their child. But measles is a threat to the whole country. We've seen recently what an epidemic can do when it grows into a pandemic.
And the CDC and government programs that work with the states, that's not anything any company can do. The federal government has to do that. And Elon Musk is going in with a sledgehammer and destroying it.
DEAN: All right. Congressman Brad Schneider, thanks for being here.
SCHNEIDER: Thank you.
DEAN: We appreciate it.
All right.
[06:55:00]
We are 54 minutes past the hour. Here's your "Morning Roundup". The Pentagon is clarifying plans to kick out transgender service
members in a new court filing, Defense Department leaders outlining a new policy which recognizes, quote, only two sexes, male and female. A memo outlining the policy says any service members with gender dysphoria will be removed from the military.
A Maryland judge will decide if Adnan Syed will remain free, despite his conviction for the 1999 murder of a former girlfriend. Prosecutors have dropped their bid to vacate his conviction. He was sentenced to life in prison but released in 2022 due to issues with trial evidence.
And this --
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
PAM BONDI, U.S. ATTORNEY GENERAL: The breaking news right now, you're going to see some Epstein information being released by my office.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
DEAN: Attorney General Pam Bondi promising last night to release information related to Jeffrey Epstein as soon as today. The New York financier was in a New York jail awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges when he died by suicide back in 2019. The files could include flight logs of Epstein's private jet, with names of passengers who flew with him.
Plus --
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GENE HACKMAN, ACTOR: If you put your effort and concentration into playing to your potential to be the best that you can be, I don't care what the scoreboard says at the end of the game. In my book, we're going to be winners.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
DEAN: Academy Award Winner Gene Hackman is dead. Police responding to a welfare check request at his Santa Fe home Wednesday afternoon where they found the actor, his wife Betsy and a dog, all deceased. Their cause of death has not been confirmed, but the Santa Fe sheriffs office says it is not believed to be foul play. Hackman was 95 years old.
And I am bringing our panel back in here as well, just as we watch Gene Hackman. I know there were so many movies we were talking about at the earlier at the top of the hour.
Myself, I enjoyed "The Firm", but I think a lot of people, the point we were making was that he had a six decade long career in film, which is just something you don't see in the movies much anymore. So if anyone has a favorite film, you're welcome. "Hoosiers" was another favorite.
DUBKE: No, no, "Hoosiers" for me, but the little known fact is when the press left the cabinet room yesterday, President Trump gave that exact same speech to the cabinet.
FINNEY: Did they?
DUBKE: Just go out there and be winners.
DOVERE: Did Elon Musk interrupt him and give himself?
FINNEY: You know, so I was a college athlete and my -- my coach, we were it was ahead of a big race that we had coming up. It was, you know, very important in our season. And she had us all watched "Hoosiers" actually.
DEAN: Oh, really? See? I think that happened --
FINNEY: To be like, to get our confidence up.
DOVERE: So much in "The Royal Tenenbaums". Gene Hackman does with the word anyway.
FINNEY: Yes, he was just -- there was no one like him.
DEAN: He was really -- I know -- he leaves quite a legacy.
All right, moving on. Both the liberal and conservative Supreme Court justices appear to be, as Justice Neil Gorsuch put it, quote, in radical agreement yesterday as they heard arguments about a so-called reverse discrimination case, the court seemed likely to side with an Ohio woman who claims she lost out on a promotion and even got demoted because she was straight.
(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)
JUSTICE SONIA SOTOMAYOR, U.S. SUPREME COURT: Judge Kethledge basically said, you have a situation here where she alleged she was a member of the majority group. She was 20 years her employee. Great reviews. And then all of a sudden, she's not hired and someone is hired who's gay, doesn't have her level of college experience and didn't even want the job. It's something suspicious about that. It certainly can give rise to an inference of discrimination.
(END AUDIO CLIP)
DEAN: Our panel back here. Isaac, interesting to see these Supreme Court justices in such alignment.
DOVERE: Yeah, over anything these days.
DEAN: I know.
DOVERE: Although it's always the case that the Supreme Court, except for the biggest and most controversial cases, tend to be a little bit more aligned. But look, this is playing out in our politics. This is playing out in our culture in all sorts of ways. We will see what it looks like on the other end of it, whenever that is.
But we are in the middle of the -- some level of backlash to what was happening over the last couple of years. And I think that that you see, Sonia Sotomayor, a liberal justice, responding that way is evidence that there are more people who are who have had second thoughts about some of the moves that have been made in government and culture over the last couple of years than maybe others would have suspected.
DEAN: Yeah. And, Mike, look, this is part the DEI is a much broader conversation. It's not necessarily exactly connected, but it is, as you're saying, kind of tangentially connected.
DUBKE: Well, it's all part of the same kind of movement and flow that were seeing with companies pulling back on DEI policies, the government, all of the E.O.s coming out of the White House.
So all of this is happening kind of congruently. It is interesting to see that that the big thing is, I do think the Supreme Court and the judicial branch of our government is going to have a much higher level of import over the next couple of years as we watch all of these things.
FINNEY: The one thing I would say about this case is that --
DEAN: And we got to go soon, just -- yeah?
FINNEY: Yeah, people forget that initially when we talked about affirmative action programs, white women are a protected as -- women are a protected class and have benefited the most from affirmative action programs. And so part of this case sort of challenges that notion, I think to some degree.
DEAN: Thank you to all three of you. It was a great morning with you guys.
And thank you for joining us.
I'm Jessica Dean.
"CNN NEWS CENTRAL" starts right now.
