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Fauci: Unvaccinated People Were 99 Percent Of Recent COVID Deaths; "Nightmare Scenario" Details Trump WH Dysfunction During COVID. Aired 12:30-1p ET

Aired July 05, 2021 - 12:30   ET

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

[12:30:00]

JOHN KING, CNN HOST: The committee will want to talk to Mr. Trump.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. JIM CLYBURN (D-SC), MAJORITY WHIP: They should go wherever the facts need, they may be able to get what they want and need without him testifying. I would not want to see a former president testifying in such a situation as this way. Well, if that's what it takes, in order to get to the bottom of this, because this is more than any one person.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Given what we know, from the Mueller investigation experience from various other congressional oversight experience in the four years of the Trump presidency, even if that Select Committee said Mr. President, Mr. Former President, we'd like to hear from you. Is there any expectation in this town? The answer would be sure.

ARLETTE SAENZ, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: I think it's President Trump will avoid sitting down having to testify before any type of committee at all costs. He does not really want to be there reliving these moments of the insurrection. But Democrats have really also made clear that they want answers and they want people to be held accountable.

And I think also one thing to think about, when you think about the former president, and this current White House, what you see them doing is really keep their -- keeping their head down and doing the work. When Biden was asked the other day about this case, it was almost like he was saying Allen Weisselberg, who? So they're really are trying to keep off of this message and just focus on their work at hand.

KING: Let Biden White House's let other people deal with Trump. We'll see how long they can sustain that.

Up next for us, the summer race to vaccinate and an eye opening number, just eye popping number, about recent COVID deaths. (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:36:11]

KING: President Biden is celebrating what we all saw with our own eyes this past weekend. The giant progress against COVID-19 in recent months allows for July 4th and other summer traditions to go almost back to normal.

But the administration did fall a little short of its Independence Day goal of getting 70 percent of American adults partially vaccinated. And a recent increase in the coronavirus case count is directly linked to places where the vaccination rate, excuse me, is lagging. Let's walk through the latest numbers.

If you look at the overall case count, you see the line down here, when you remember back in the horrific winter, you think, wow, this is enormous progress. However, on June 21st, the average is 11,351 new infections. Look where we are now, 13,000.

That may not seem like a giant number when you're looking up here at 250,000 and above. But cases are up more than 15 percent, 15 percent in the last two weeks, a lower baseline but cases right now heading in the wrong direction.

In part that's because of vaccination. If you look at this national map, you want your state to be darker. Look at Maine, 62 percent, Vermont 66 percent of the people fully vaccinated. Look down here, Georgia 37, Alabama 33, Mississippi 30. These light -- some of them half, half of what the other states are across the country. Another way to look at it is the President wanted 70 percent of American adults partially vaccinated by yesterday, the Fourth of July.

Well, 20 states plus the District of Columbia met that goal, some of them exceeding it quite significantly. That means obviously 30 States did not meet this goal. At this point, let's bring into the conversation to share his expertise and his -- expertise, excuse me, Dr. Saju Mathew, a primary care physician and public health specialist. Doctor, you look at this the states that met the President's goal, but I want to come back to the States, Georgia 37 percent, Alabama 33, Mississippi 30, Louisiana 35, I could go on.

You have these states in the 30s. And you have states in the high 60s. What is the issue in those states? Is it just political persuasion? Is it people who don't believe in vaccines? How do you break through?

DR. SAJU MATHEW, PUBLIC HEALTH SPECIALIST: You know, John, I've thought about that for such a long time. And I think what we need to stop doing first is really polarizing an already polarized America. And what I mean by that is, yes, there's no doubt that the southern states are lagging behind. I live in Georgia. We'll well below 40 percent. You just mentioned 37 percent.

But ultimately, what the bottom line is, is there's a lot of misinformation out there, John, you know, it doesn't matter whether you are American or French. I was in Paris last week, a lot of the young people are concerned about the same things that the young people in the U.S. are concerned about. You know, I have so far fought COVID. I've been through the pandemic for a year. Nothing has happened to me. I don't know anybody who has had COVID, why should I get the vaccine?

And another big concern that a lot of people have, John, whether you're Democrat or Republican is this vaccine was developed in lightning speed, what is going to happen to me the next two or three years if I get this vaccine. So really, the ground game, John, has just begun. We need to go to barbershops. We need to go to primary care physicians like myself, and really dispel those myths.

KING: I thought Dr. Scott Gottlieb yesterday was trying to powerfully dispel one of them, the part about the quickness by saying, develop quickly in the Trump administration. So if you're a conservative out there and the Biden administration not wanting to listen the vaccine was not -- the vaccine work was done during the Biden -- during the Trump administration, excuse me, one of the few things they can brag about when it comes to COVID.

If you look now, Dr. Mathew at the Delta variant, it has taken root everywhere in America, but the red parts, the orange parts of our map with the Delta variant is now 57 percent of the cases here, 52 percent of the cases up here. If you want -- if you're still reluctant to get a vaccine, listen here to Dr. Anthony Fauci. If this does not motivate you to get a shot in the arm, I don't know what will.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, CHIEF MEDICAL ADVISER TO PRESIDENT BIDEN: Well, if you look at the number of deaths, about 99.2 percent of them are unvaccinated, about 0.8 percent are vaccinated. It's really sad and tragic that most all of these are avoidable and preventable.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

[12:40:09]

KING: We know, Doctor, Delta variant is nasty. It is more contagious. There are many who believe it's more deadly, 99.2 percent of the deaths in recent days and weeks among the unvaccinated. Could there be a more powerful motivator?

MATHEW: Not really. I can't think of anything else, over 99 percent of people that are dying. As you and I speak right now are people that have not gotten vaccinated. Listen, ultimately, this is the way to think about it.

Whether you like it or not, you are going to have an encounter with this virus. And you definitely don't want to have a date with a Delta virus. It's 60 percent more contagious than the Alpha strain, which was first identified in the U.K. And the Alpha strain, John, was 50 percent more contagious than the strain that was moving and circulating in the U.S.

So ultimately, what's happening is the virus is looking for a host. So as long as we have unvaccinated people, we're giving a chance for this virus to replicate and develop into more dangerous mutations, the Delta strain that's not the last dangerous mutation that we're going to see. And also something else that I tell all my patients is that listen, the unvaccinated people are also threatening the vaccinated because what's happening is the Delta strain, the vaccines don't work as well. They work they work great, 90 percent which is absolutely superb.

But it drops the efficacy. So if you're elderly and immunocompromised, if you're hanging around a lot of unvaccinated people, there could be breakthrough infections in the vaccinated as well.

KING: Dr. Mathew grateful for your insights. We'll continue the conversation as we go through the important weeks ahead.

Up next for us, nightmare scenario, new book takes a deep dive into President Trump's mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:46:33]

KING: A damning new book details the bungling of the COVID-19 response by the Trump administration. There are new details about the former president's disdain for science and his view of coronavirus as more of a reelection year public relations challenge than a deadly public health emergency. The author's also detail how the response was hampered even more by the dysfunction of the Trump White House and administration staffing.

For example the book says this, many of the senior staff and cabinet members who had joined Trump back in January 2017 had already left. Who was left? A mix of family members, twentysomethings, hangers-on, fourth-stringers, former lobbyists, sycophants, and a scattering of competent, well-meaning aides who mostly kept their heads down.

"Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration's Response to the Pandemic that Changed History" is the book. The author's Damian Paletta and Yasmeen Abutaleb of The Washington Post are here now. Let's start on that part there. One of the things we're watching now into the Biden administration is they very quickly staffed up these key public health jobs and response jobs with accomplished professionals.

You talk in the book about when this hit the United States of the Trump administration was both from a President who doesn't like science, doesn't believe in science, brushed it aside, and then a personnel standpoint, just not prepared.

YASMEEN ABUTALEB, CO-AUTHOR, "NIGHTMARE SCENARIO": Yes, I mean, if you look at who was left, his first Health and Human Services Secretary had left about a year into the administration. He was also on his second CDC director, his second FDA director, those were people who were, you know, fairly qualified for their jobs, maybe not the strongest leaders for this moment where that you really needed someone to stand up to the president and tell him what the science said and speak up and defensive it. And then if you looked at the White House aides, I mean, he was on his fifth Chief of Staff who had never even been given the permanent Chief of Staff title and a number of other aides who just really didn't have the qualifications and definitely weren't prepared for a crisis of this magnitude.

KING: And one of the things that sad, frankly, when you read it is that so you're in the reelection year. And the President, of course, is concerned about his reelection. Everybody can understand that. But some of the well-meaning aides he talked about keep coming to the President saying, we need to explain this to the American people. We need to tell them this is serious. We need to tell them to get ready. Instead, we got a lot of this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: And we think it's going to have a very good ending for us. It looks like by April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away. I hope that's true. When you have 15 people and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that's a pretty good job we've done. It will go away, just stay calm, it will go away.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Reckless, my word, not yours, for many of the things the President said to the point where what is so damning is about this public relations strategy versus public health strategy is I want to read a little bit from the book.

Trump didn't want any anyone suffering from COVID-19 to enter the United States. He didn't care if they were Americans. He wanted them kept off U.S. soil. And he had dramatic ideas about how to achieve it. Don't we have an island that we own? The room was silent. Where was Trump going with this? He continued. What about Guantanamo? Everyone froze.

We keep terrorists at get MO (ph) not Americans or anybody with a potentially deadly disease.

DAMIAN PALETTA, CO-AUTHOR, "NIGHTMARE SCENARIO": Yes, I mean, this was really chilling for Yasmeen and I to report out. He was obsessed with not so much whether Americans were sick, but whether the number on television screens that recorded how many people were sick would go up, right? So if it was at 14, he wanted to keep it at 14.

He didn't care if the actual number was 5,000. So when he knew there are people who were sick on a cruise ship and he knew that others knew that, he did not want them setting foot in the United States and he wanted to put them in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

[12:50:03]

And he brought this up twice to age until they eventually got together and said we can never let this happen. It would be a public relations catastrophe. But at the same time, there were thousands of flights arriving each day with tens of thousands of people from all over the world. Many of them were sick. And there was very little done until it was too late to try to stop that and sort that out.

KING: Coarseness is something you see a lot in how Trump treats other people. Just a fact, including on the -- in this context about his National Security Adviser John Bolton, Trump had tried to joke about the virus for months, sometimes even mocking people who had become ill. It was part of his false bravado. John Bolton, he had said, hopefully COVID takes out John. That's demented.

ABUTALEB: Yes, I mean, like Damian said, I think we found a number of surprising things in the reporting about the way the President talked about this disease, the way he talked about what the country should be doing about it, it was always in relation to him and what it meant for him.

And I think this joke about John Bolton, when Damian and I first learned about the Guantanamo Bay proposal, you know, it made us realize that we couldn't rule out anything, if we heard a tip, even if it sounded a little bit too crazy to be true that we should run down everything we heard. And I think this fell into that vein.

And it's I think, it just shows you how he was thinking about the virus and how he was thinking about the country's response. It was all in relation to him and what it meant for him and less so about what you do to protect the other Americans.

KING: And a moment many people inside the Trump White House, I remember this in real time thought this might change is when the President himself got COVID. A lot of people thought he's going to understand, what a kick this is, how hard it is, how difficult it is. And he's going to remember, most people out there watching don't get access to the special health care he gets and maybe.

You talk about this here, the doctors hoped that Trump would at least emerge from Walter Reed a different president. It would surely be the inflection point, they all thought. There's nothing like a near-death experience to serve as a wake-up call. It was at the end of the day, a national security failure. The president had not been protected. If this fiasco wasn't the turning point, what would be?

And yet I remember texting what you refer to the book as some of those, you know, well intentioned dates at the time, who were hoping the President is going to understand now the severity of this, and yet we got something quite different.

PALETTA: I don't think it's hyperbole to say that that weekend was one of the most consequential in recent American history. I mean, that there was two directions this could have gotten. The President, obviously, you know, thank goodness, he made it through. But he could have come through with a new appreciation for how deadly this was. He did get, as you said, incredible access to treatment that no one else did.

But if he would have come out and said, listen, this is no joke. We're heading into the fall and winter, this is really dangerous. Let's just buckle down as a country. Then there could have been a much different result than when he did. He said, listen, we -- I beat this, no big deal, everyone else can beat it too. Let's live our lives. And then you know, almost 200,000 more people died between then and the inauguration of Joe Biden.

KING: And that was close, you're closing in on the election at that point, there was no question of whether you can even have a debate whether it was safe to have the President at a debate. You report in the book about the Chief of Staff Mark Meadows at the time. People close to Mark Meadows said that he was consumed with fear that Trump might die. I assume you're only consumed with that fear if you've been told by the doctors this is not a mild case of COVID.

ABUTALEB: Right. I mean, what Damian and I learned in reporting and trying to stitch together that weekend is that when Trump was sent to Walter Reed, his doctors at that point were very fearful that he was going to have to be put on a ventilator. He was taking quite a rapid downward turn. He was supposed to do a call that day from the White House in person, it kept getting pushed back and then he couldn't be available for it.

And of course, we remember from that weekend, when Trump's doctor, Sean Conley, came out and said he was starting to look better and gave a kind of upbeat prognosis. And then Mark Meadows came out, you know, on background, but the cameras caught him saying the President wasn't quite out of the woods.

What Damian and I learned was that he was actually very scared at that moment, because it was before the monoclonal antibody, the experimental drug that the President got access to, which one of the people familiar with condition thought help with his rapid turnaround had really kicked in and he was starting to turn the corner.

KING: And one of the things you report in the book too, you can see this play out in real time, Dr. Fauci says A, the President says Z, in trying to do the reporting on this to piece together the history, some people clearly weren't telling you the truth.

PALETTA: Yes. And I think, you know, one of the most -- one of the worst legacies of this whole experience last year was -- is continuing now, because half of Americans believe one thing, maybe you don't need the vaccine and half of Americans believe you do. We're heading into another fall. And you know, there can be tragic consequences again.

KING: Well, that's why history matters. That's why history matters whatever your politics. You can look back and learn as we go forward. So I appreciate you both coming in. I appreciate the great work here in the book.

[12:54:18]

Up next for us, a disturbing display of hate, White Nationalist marched through the streets of Philadelphia on what is supposed to be a unifying national holiday, July 4th.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) KING: Topping our Political Radar today, a sad and quite ugly scene in the City of Brotherly Love. Hundreds of members, you see it there, hundreds of members of the White Nationalist group marching down the streets of downtown Philadelphia over this July 4th weekend. The members of the group called the Patriot Front were heard chanting the election was stolen and reclaim America. Police say one member set off smoke bombs as they tried to get away from bystanders who confronted them.

A vague unsettled Biden foreign policy debate raises more questions about the President's lightning speed withdrawal from Afghanistan. Sources telling CNN the White House, the Pentagon, and the Central Intelligence Agency still actively debating the U.S. drone strike policy, who the CIA and the Pentagon for example can strike and when they need permission from the White House, still under consideration.

The Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, officially passes off his CEO title today. The reins are now in the hands of Andy Jassy, a 24-year veteran of the company. Bezos still the company's largest individual shareholder. And he remains the richest man in the world with a net worth of more than $200 billion.

[13:00:04]

Appreciate your time today on this special holiday edition of Inside politics. Hope you'll come back and join us tomorrow. Boris Sanchez picks up our coverage right now. Have a good day.