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Doctors Ignoring New CDC Guidelines on Vaccines?; Outrage Grows Over Fatal Shooting in Minnesota. Aired 11:30a-12p ET

Aired January 26, 2026 - 11:30   ET

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

[11:30:00]

WOLF BLITZER, CNN HOST: We're back now with news about those very controversial new federal vaccine guidelines, federal vaccine guidelines.

Many doctors are ignoring the more narrow recommendations from the CDC and favoring the traditional guidelines of the American Academy of Pediatrics. Its updated recommendations came out today.

Let's go to CNN medical correspondent Meg Tirrell.

And, Meg, the academy's newest guidelines aren't much different from last year's, but the point is, more doctors are paying attention to them now. Is that right?

MEG TIRRELL, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: That's right, Wolf.

Usually, the American Academy of Pediatrics, or the AAP's recommendation are very similar, if not almost identical, to the CDC's vaccine recommendations. And, of course, over the last year, with such tumult over vaccine policy coming out of the federal government under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., that has dramatically changed.

So now we're seeing this AAP recommended schedule of routine vaccinations for kids, which recommends a vaccination for up to 18 diseases. Now, this is very similar to what the CDC recommended prior to changes made throughout 2025.

And earlier this month, when they made their biggest change of all, and sort of dramatically in one fell swoop changed the schedule to recommend from about 18 diseases down to about 12 different diseases -- that's the CDC's new schedule, which they did, they said, in order to align the U.S. more with other countries, and, in particular, Denmark, which many health experts have pointed out is quite a different country.

So there are six diseases that the CDC doesn't routinely recommend vaccination against, more if you're a high-risk person or in consultation with a doctor, things like rotavirus, COVID, flu, hepatitis A and B, and meningococcal disease.

Now, we have seen that states have been splitting from the CDC's recommendations increasingly over the last year, 28 states now, according to the health policy research firm KFF, many of those along sort of political lines, Wolf, but not exclusively, four states with Republican governors also splitting from the CDC recommendations -- back to you.

BLITZER: All right, Meg Tirrell, thank you very much for that important update.

Just ahead: Eyewitness videos of the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti don't match the Trump administration's version of events. We analyze the footage frame by frame, so you can see for yourself.

Stand by for that.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[11:36:34]

BLITZER: Let's get back to our top breaking news story this morning, protests erupting overnight after a federal agent shot and killed Alex Pretti Saturday in Minneapolis.

The Trump administration says the responsibility is actually on Pretti for his own death, but multiple videos of the incident reveal new details.

CNN's Sara Sidner has a closer look.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

SARA SIDNER, CNN HOST (voice-over): This is the clearest angle of the shooting as it happened. That is Alex Pretti recording on his cell phone as Border Patrol agents arrive outside the donut shop. He goes into the street waving cars through.

Now, here is how the Department of Homeland Security described how Pretti approached federal agents.

KRISTI NOEM, U.S. HOMELAND SECURITY SECRETARY: An individual approached U.S. Border Patrol officers with a 9-millimeter semiautomatic handgun.

SIDNER: That's not what video shows. It shows federal agents approach Pretti. All he has in his hand is a cell phone, not a gun.

Then you see him moving one protester away from agents while agents shove another to the ground. As he tries to help the protester they shoved, agents deploy pepper spray. Three wrestle him to the ground. More join in.

From another angle, you see one agent punching him in the face with a canister of pepper spray in his hand. Pretti is on the ground under them. Nothing appears in his hands.

You can see an officer in a gray jacket walk into frame. Seconds later, agent shout: "He's got a gun."

One agent removes a gun from Pretti's belt. He steps away from the scene carrying a firearm seen here in his right hand. Turns out, state authorities say, Pretti has a license to legally carry a gun. But you never see him draw it. Instead, an agent draws his gun while standing above Pretti and fires the first shot.

Pretti survives, somehow rising up to his knees. Then, agents fire at least 10 more times. Pretti's body slumps face down in the street, lifeless.

But federal authorities weren't done with their accusations against him.

GREGORY BOVINO, BORDER PATROL COMMANDER: This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.

SIDNER: Pretti's neighbor Chris Gray says that couldn't be farther from the truth.

CHRIS GRAY, ALEX PRETTI'S NEIGHBOR: Everything they say about my neighbors is a lie.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BLITZER: Sara Sidner, who's in Minneapolis for us, thank you so much for that truly excellent reporting.

I want to bring in two experts right now, retired Ferguson, Missouri, Police Chief Jason Armstrong and homeland security analyst Donell Harvin.

Chief Armstrong, let me start with you.

You just saw the frame-by-frame analysis of that Minneapolis shooting. What are your takeaways?

JASON ARMSTRONG, FORMER FERGUSON, MISSOURI, POLICE CHIEF: My takeaways is, when is this country going to say enough is enough? We see this man get gunned down, get shot in the back. It clearly was a situation that was out of control. And, unfortunately, we have too many people in this country playing politics.

I'm still waiting for leaders to show up and take control of this situation, because these things are avoidable. They shouldn't be happening. How many lives have to be lost at the hands of what we're seeing and some of the tactics that are rolling out when there's not a clear plan of how these situations are supposed to be handled by the agents on the ground?

[11:40:01]

BLITZER: And, Donell, what so far has stood out most to you in the videos that you have seen of Alex Pretti?

DONELL HARVIN, FORMER D.C. CHIEF OF HOMELAND SECURITY AND INTELLIGENCE: Yes, I mean, every time I watch it, it gets harder to watch, Wolf. This is just a really bad shooting. This is clearly an unarmed person.

These are very poor tactics by law enforcement. There's very little muzzle, what we call muzzle discipline. Multiple officers have their handguns drawn with their fingers on the trigger. It could be accidental discharge. We don't know.

The fact of the matter is, this is a circular conversation, Wolf, because the reason why Alex Pretti got shot was because he was out there recording law enforcement. Why does he have to do that? Because none of these officers, from what I can tell, had body-worn cameras.

And the chief can tell you that is the standard in law enforcement. We wouldn't need to be out there recording these officers and what they're doing if they wore body-worn cameras, because there would be evidence of their actions.

BLITZER: Is that right, Chief?

ARMSTRONG: But what we're seeing right now, I'm not so certain, because, clearly, these individuals, they know these cameras are out there recording them and they're still partaking in this type of behavior. So if they were wearing a body camera, I'm not so confident that their actions would change.

Clearly, this is being allowed. When we see these incidents happen, the administration immediately comes out and condones it and says that it was -- it was right in line with what they were trained to do. So I'm not so certain, if they were wearing body cameras, that we would see different actions from them right now.

BLITZER: But you think they should be wearing bodycams?

ARMSTRONG: Going beyond just wearing body cameras, I think that their actions and tactics need to be changed. This is not what we do in local law enforcement. And this is not the appropriate way to go about addressing these issues.

We see officers day in and day out across this country encounter individuals that are armed. You see them taking guns off the street and things, and everybody's not getting shot in the back and getting shot dead. And this is a clear example of where the tactics that they are deploying, they're not getting positive results.

And I would challenge, what are they after in this case? Because I can't tell, from all of my years of experience and watching these things unfold, of what is going on. So, of course, we would love if they had body cameras and that they were wearing -- and that it would accomplish what they're designed to accomplish, for everything to go in that situation understanding, what is the proper way to handle and address the situation?

But with all of the rhetoric and all of the stuff that we're seeing, I'm not so confident that, if they put body cameras on them, that we would see a change in behavior, because clearly this behavior is being condoned. BLITZER: If they were wearing -- Donell, if they were wearing body

cameras, they wouldn't need to walk around with the phones taking video of what's going on.

HARVIN: Not only the citizens, in the first shooting with Renee Good, that was an ice agent that had a phone in his hand. I mean, that's absurd. Like, who carries around a cell phone doing law enforcement in one hand and then pulls his firearm with another?

At the end of the day, Wolf, this is vertically integrated state- sponsored violence. And the reason why I say that is because the administration controls the entire supply chain, from the propaganda and the messaging that's going out all the way to the crime scene, which they have blocked state and locals from having access to and any evidence.

And so you can't break into that. And if you question it, you're supporting domestic terrorists. I'll tell you that, if this individual, Mr. Pretti, and Renee Good are domestic terrorists, then, as a country, we're cooked, because anybody and everybody can be a domestic terrorist, according to this administration.

BLITZER: Chief Armstrong, if Pretti is lying on the ground and not moving, can you justify at all 10 gunshots into his body?

ARMSTRONG: No.

And the one thing that we have to be careful of -- and we've seen this time and time again -- the number of shots that are fired always comes into question. What I don't know from watching this video is if all 10 rounds came from the same individual and the same weapon or if multiple officers started shooting.

We see the video slowed up where we see what appears to be the initial officer that starts firing into Mr. Pretti's back. But I don't know, as the shots continued, if there was additional shots that were fired from another individual.

And that's one of the challenges that you have when you have a group of officers that all join up. And nobody is taking control of the situation, so you don't know what the next person is doing. And it's real chaotic.

When you hear somebody start yelling "Gun, gun, gun," you see somebody pulling a gun out. And what we don't know from that agent's view is, when he sees that gun being pulled out, can he even tell who was pulling it out? Because what we're able to see from the video is that it was another law enforcement officer that was pulling the gun out and removing it from Mr. Pretti.

The officer that initially started shooting, we don't know if he could tell that or not. And that's part of the challenge when you have these chaotic scenes and you have the officers that are just running up to start grabbing people and then all of the chaos that ensues. That's why it makes it that much more difficult for us to manage and navigate these. [11:45:06]

And as we're seeing now, they're leading to some very, very tragic and unfortunate outcomes.

BLITZER: Let me get Donell to weigh in.

What do you think?

HARVIN: Yes.

And the other thing is that we would never -- and the chief knows this. I did forensics for 10 years. We would never come to conclusions just based on footage like this. You need to properly process a crime scene. You need to do ballistics. We get out there with high-end 3-D imaging and Leica cameras and the medical examiner's report.

We have none of that. In fact, the administration came out within hours and said, nothing to see here. These ICE agents and CBP agents are heroes. This was a domestic terrorist. Move about your business.

And that's just not how investigations are normally done. And that's why the public lacks confidence in anything that DHS is going to say out of this particular tragic case.

BLITZER: And, Donell, I want to follow up and play for you what a top Border Patrol official, Gregory Bovino, told my colleague Dana Bash yesterday. Listen and watch this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DANA BASH, CNN HOST: I just want to also go back to what I was asking about regard to what Secretary Noem said, that he was brandishing a gun. At any point, do you have any evidence that -- yes, he might -- he had a gun on his person. Was he brandishing it? Was he a threat because he had a gun in his hand that put law enforcement in danger?

BOVINO: Dana, we heard the law enforcement officer say, "Gun, gun, gun." So, at some point, they knew there was a gun. So, again, that is going to be part of that investigation as to what was happening on the ground there.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLITZER: So what do you think, Donell?

Is seeing someone with a gun sufficient for an agent to shoot that person and kill that person? How should agents and officers engage with someone who is armed? In this case, by the way, the state of Minnesota says he legally had that gun around his waist. He was authorized to carry a weapon clandestinely.

HARVIN: Well, the first thing is that this isn't even nuanced. These are two different stories. First, you have Kristi Noem saying he approached agents with a gun. That's not -- false. Mr. Bovino kind of walked that back and said, eventually, at some

point, they discovered a gun. Law enforcement officers in the academy are trained to disarm people, whether they're being violent or peaceful, when they encounter a weapon.

If their training was sufficient, an officer would say "Gun, gun, gun," recognizing that there's a sidearm on this individual. As they're trying to recover the gun, once someone says, hey, I got the gun, there should be some positive affirmation that, hey, gun retrieved, I have got the gun or something.

It doesn't look like from the camera angles in the video we have that that was done. And so some -- these officers, these CBP agents may have been under the impression that this person was still armed. We don't know. We don't know how many guns were fired. We don't know if there was an accidental discharge that led to this kind of sequence of multiple discharges. We just don't know.

And so I think this goes back to the training that everyone's been talking about that's been widely reported, what these Customs and Border Agents and ICE agents are getting. They're just not really trained for urban policing. This is something I was trained in the academy. The chief was trained in this. He trained his staff in this.

They don't have these type of tactics, techniques and procedures in their back pocket to manage these situations.

BLITZER: Yes, good point, indeed.

All right, Donell Harvin and Jason Armstrong, to both of you, thank you very, very much.

And we'll be right back with more news.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[11:52:56]

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: you to every single one of us. Thank you so much for coming out.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLITZER: That was a vigil last night in Minneapolis for Alex Pretti, the man killed by a federal agent Saturday in Minneapolis.

Reporter Jason Rantala from CNN affiliate WCCO has more on the people who gathered to honor him.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JASON RANTALA, WCCO REPORTER (voice-over): This woman from Minneapolis is spending a frigid Sunday evening writing a message for a man she never personally knew. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I'm writing "Hands that healed, a soul that

shined."

RANTALA: A man whose life and death in just a short time has made a worldwide impact.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: What's happening isn't OK. And this is the way I can do that right now and hopefully bring a small moment of joy to people who might be coming back tomorrow that did know him.

RANTALA: She's just one of many leaving her mark, part of a growing memorial outside the VA hospital where Alex Pretti worked.

(SINGING)

RANTALA: Clergy at the Basilica of Saint Mary also honored Alex Sunday.

REV. HARRY TASTO, BASILICA OF SAINT MARY: The archbishop has requested that we remember him and his family tonight in our worship here.

RANTALA: For 10 years, Father Harry Tasto says he worked alongside Alex as a chaplain at the VA hospital.

Father Tasto...

TASTO: And he was known for his kindness and gentleness to the patients.

RANTALA: ... with a message for federal officials.

TASTO: So don't, please, pay any attention to the vilification from our national leaders.

RANTALA: We continued to learn more about Alex Sunday, the University of Minnesota writing on social media, he was a 2011 graduate of the College of Liberal Arts.

Quote: "As a nurse, he worked in a profession rooted in care, compassion and service." Clergy invited those at Sunday's service to take home a candle in honor of Alex.

KATIE BARTLET, ATTENDED CHURCH SERVICE FOR ALEX PRETTI: We're from Maple Grove, and my heart has just been heavy.

RANTALA: Katie Bartlet doesn't go to church at the basilica. She's not even Catholic, but felt the pull to be here.

[11:55:00]

BARTLET: It spoke to me to come and bring a candle for Alex.

RANTALA: Present not only for Alex, but for the immigrants targeted by the deluge of federal enforcement. BARTLET: Immigrant students are the most caring, kind, loving,

hardworking people on the planet. And I just don't understand how anybody could vilify anyone, to be honest.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BLITZER: That was from WCCO reporter Jason Rantala in Minneapolis.

And my deepest, deepest condolences to Alex's family. May he rest in peace. And, as we say, may his memory be a blessing.

And thanks very much for joining us this morning.

"INSIDE POLITICS" with our friend and colleague Dana Bash starts right after a short break.