Trump In Daily Briefing Says, Hard Decisions Will Have To Be Made; Trump Falsely Accuses Media Is Spreading False Rumors; U.S. Tops 1,000 Deaths For Second Day In A Row
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: This will be probably the toughest week between this week and next week, then there'll be a lot of death, unfortunately, but a lot less death than if this wasn't done, but there will be death.</s>ANA CABRERA, CNN HOST: What is your reaction to that grim expectation?</s>DR. CARLOS DEL RIO, INFECTIOUS DISEASE EXPERT: It is indeed a grim expectation, Ana, we are bracing to go to sort of the peak of the number of cases, the exponential growth peak and although cases are beginning to slow because of social distancing, we're still going to see an increase in the number of deaths. And quite frankly, many people are going to die over the next several weeks, as a consequence of the coronavirus, and it's going to be very sad. It is going to be tragic. But again, whatever we do to stop transmission now will lead to less deaths later. And I want to emphasize that without the measures taken today, instead of 100,000 or maybe 200,000 Americans die as a consequence of the coronavirus, we would have 1.8 to 2.2 million people dying. So again, I wish nobody would die as a consequence of this. But the reality is this is a very serious epidemic and we need to take it seriously.</s>CABRERA: I mean, we're looking at over 8,000 deaths right now in the U.S. It's hard to fathom that number going up to 100,000 or even beyond, as you've just discussed. Dr. Rimoin, eight states still don't have the stay at home orders. Dr. Fauci is saying social distancing is the most important tool we have and the places where people are doing it seems to be helping. And yet, the President is still unwilling to issue a national stay-at- home order or even, you know, ask the governors of all 50 states to do so in their states, do you think he should?</s>DR. ANNE RIMOIN, DEPARTMENT OF EPIDEMIOLOGY, UCLA: Absolutely. This is a huge problem. We live in a country with open borders where people can move freely, so we are only as safe as the state that has the least rigorous policies in place. This is not the first time that this analogy has been made. But it's just like being on an airplane that has a smoking section. Everyone is affected by people who are not smoking -- or who are smoking, all the non-smokers are. So this is a perfect -- this is a perfect analogy here. We must have national strategy if all states are not doing the absolute best for social distancing, and to be clear, social distancing is a blunt instrument to be able to stop the spread of virus and this is what we need right now because we don't have the therapeutics, we don't have the vaccine, and we don't even have the testing in place to be able to understand where we are in this epidemic curve. So social distancing, and all of the other basic public health measures like hand washing, and now adding on wearing a cloth mask for those people who are not healthcare workers. Everyone doing their part is so critical. Debbie Birx said it very well during this press conference that everybody has to do their part. It's really true and that means from the state level, from the Federal level and from the individual level.</s>CABRERA: And, Dana, I know you were listening very closely to this press conference, did we just witness what is maybe the inherent battle happening within President Trump on one hand, he wants to, you know, go with what Dr. Fauci is saying, on the other hand, he wants to side with the economy, he just doesn't know what to do.</s>DANA BASH, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: It's so well said. That's what I was thinking and that's what I wrote down, my sort of big picture takeaway here. Really mixed messaging, sometimes from the President himself, if you kind of look at the span of that almost two hour press conference, him talking about the need to stay put where we are on social distancing, warning about the death numbers rising and all of the kind of realities. But at the same time saying we have to reopen things. You know, it was incredibly apparent that he is conflicted, but much more apparent that it is the medical professionals, Dr. Fauci, in particular, who every time he stood at the podium said what he has been saying every time he has a microphone on, which is we have to maintain this situation of stay-at-home, isolation, whatever you want to call it, because it is the only thing that is working. And the fact that the President was leaning so far in talking about the need for sporting events to start again, you know, he didn't give a date. He didn't say tomorrow, but the fact that he keeps talking about that. It's understandable he wants to give people hope. But really, if people are watching and thinking, what is my takeaway? What is my message from the President and his team? They're going to be really confused because of what we heard and one other thing and maybe this is a question, I know this is a question for the medical professionals on this panel. The fact that the President of the United States who is not a physician kept saying over and over again, more even then he has in the past that people who are on ventilators who are very sick with COVID-19 should start taking chloroquine, this drug that he has been talking about so incessantly was remarkable.</s>BASH: I mean, I was texting with a doctor whom I know who said, no, that is not a good thing because we don't know side effects, people's heart stop. Never mind that it could take away from people who need the drug for lupus and rheumatoid arthritis and things like that. That was stunning to me to hear the President of the United States basically try to write prescriptions.</s>CABRERA: Right and that that stood out to me too, because he said what do you have to lose? Take it. Take it. Let me ask our doctors. You know, first of all, doctors, we know that there are no proven treatments that are you know, effective for sure in treating coronavirus. And here we have heard a lot about hydroxychloroquine. We know there was a small, small study in China that had some encouraging results. But, you know, are there risks to anybody taking this drug, Dr. Del Rio?</s>DEL RIO: -- would be the risk and I think -- I want to emphasize that that's why we do clinical research and that's why there are plenty of clinical trials happening and we need to study this rigorously under clinical research conditions. You don't make recommendations based on anecdotes, you make clinical recommendations based on results of clinical trials. So we -- I'm not going to say that hydroxychloroquine doesn't work, but we need to study it. We don't -- we don't do prescriptions based on anecdotes. That's not a very good way to practice Medicine.</s>CABRERA: Do you know Dr. Del Rio what about this particular type of drug, a drug that treats malaria, could be, you know, promising when it comes to coronavirus?</s>DEL RIO: Well, there's some evidence in vitro that this drug may have some activity not only against this coronavirus, but also against the MERS coronavirus. But there are some clinical trials in SARS, for example in which it showed no efficacy and the data from the trial in France that shows some efficacy. It's a pretty flawed study. There's a lot of problems in it. It's a very small study. So I think that making conclusions based on inadequate data, it's wrong. You wouldn't fly a plane like that. You wouldn't make a decision to go to war based on that. You really need better data to make decisions. And that doesn't mean that we don't have very sick individuals, but they are -- the last time I checked in clinicaltrials.gov, there were 300 clinical trials happening right now. So my recommendation to physicians, my recommendations to families, to patients is if you're sick with coronavirus, look for a clinical trial near you that you can potentially enroll in because the reality is through clinical research, we're going to find the answers and we're going to know what works and what doesn't work.</s>CABRERA: Dr. Rimoin, do you have any concerns about the President giving perhaps false hope when it comes to hydroxychloroquine?</s>RIMOIN: Again, absolutely, we need to make decisions based on scientific evidence. We need evidence-based decisions to make policy and that is why research is so critical at this moment, why we need to be doing everything we can to understand how this virus works, how the treatments that are being put out there work. And any use of -- any indiscriminate use of a drug without evidence has the potential to do quite a bit of harm. We've seen this before. We'll see it in this scenario as well. I think it's very, very important to follow the data and follow the science. That is what needs to happen here that will inform national policy and inform how we move forward to be able to get onto the other side of this epidemic.</s>CABRERA: Meantime, we know doctors, nurses, other healthcare professionals are in the trenches right now and they don't have all the supplies they need. Daniel Dale, I want to play another moment from the press conference. Let's listen.</s>TRUMP: Nobody has ever seen anything like this in terms of ventilators, in terms of protective equipment and uniforms and outfits, but it makes it more difficult for distributors to prioritize the real need and it could intentionally and, you know, they have -- everybody has proper intentions, but they want to make sure they are a hundred percent. And sometimes, when they know they don't need it, they want it anyway. That gives them that extra feeling of satisfaction, but we just can't do that. It's not even possible to think of that and that's why -- and we're back up. Remember, we're back up.</s>CABRERA: Daniel, give us a fact check here.</s>DANIEL DALE, CNN REPORTER: Well, we just don't have evidence that states are requesting far more equipment, ventilators et cetera than they need and Trump didn't name these states. From a fact check perspective, honestly, it's hard to know where to start from this briefing. There's just so much -- Trump repeated his false claim that people are being tested for the coronavirus when they get on and get off planes. That is not happening at all.</s>DALE: When he was challenged on it, he kind of muttered a response. It's just not happening. Again, you covered on hydroxychloroquine, he said that it has passed the safety test, because it has been approved for other uses. As the doctors will tell you, that's just not how it works. The fact that it's been safety approved for use against say malaria does not mean it has been safety approved for use here. And I think it was remarkable from a sort of facts and truth perspective that Trump floated two stories about hydroxychloroquine and then said something like, maybe that's correct, maybe it's false. Check it out. On the other story, he said, I don't know. Check it out. This is not how Presidents usually behave and frankly, shouldn't behave. You know, you should expect that when information is coming from the President, it has been vetted, it has been approved. From this President, that's not the case and I'd highlight one more thing. Trump was challenged about his claim from a previous briefing that some states are just not in jeopardy from the coronavirus. It was pointed out to him that some of the states on his list that don't have stay-at-home orders have more than 1,500 cases. He said, well, they're doing a great job. They have big lands, so he insinuated they are probably okay. Fauci, Birx and other doctors have emphasized that every state is at risk. Every state has more than 150 cases, and no state is immune from this just because it's more rural and more spread out.</s>CABRERA: And in fact, there's only one state that hasn't had a death from coronavirus and that is Wyoming and so every single state in the U.S. as you point out has cases, most of them have had fatalities because of coronavirus. Dr. Del Rio, I want to play something else the President said. Let's listen.</s>TRUMP: They want to sit next to each other at restaurants. They don't want to be sitting, you know, six feet away and in some restaurant -- a man called up and he said, he said yes, I'm worried because I have a small restaurant with not too many seats. I think he said 120 and he said if I practice what this is, I'm down to 30 seats. I can't make it. I said don't worry about it. That's for a short period of time. You'll be back to your number of seats. We can't do that. Otherwise, you're making everything -- that means your stadium is half the size of what it was a month ago. No, they're going to be close together, but they're going to be breathing air that's not infected that's not going to kill people.</s>CABRERA: Dr. Del Rio -- medically, scientifically, what do you think the President is basing that on?</s>DEL RIO: Well, I frankly don't know. But I'm going to say that we are all concerned about the economy. It almost seems like this is the kind of economy between the medical adviser and the economist. The reality is as a physician, I am concerned about the economy. As a medical profession. I am concerned about the economy. But I do think that this is taking hard medicine. This is a little bit like, I tell people this is like taking chemotherapy for cancer. Chemotherapy is tough. It's hard, but the only way to get rid of the cancer is by taking that very hard medicine. There's absolutely no way to play it halfway. You have to do the right thing in order to get -- and the sooner you do the hard medicine, the sooner you get over it. So the reality is, like we should have implemented a lot of this measures, you know, not now, but a month ago. But be that as it may, that is now, we have the month of April as a month to really do it right. And if we do it right during the month of April, if we truly implement an actual shutdown and we all stay home, and we all practice social distancing. If we truly have no exceptions, then I will say the problem is that many states have social distancing, but each one has different exceptions. Some has exceptions for religious events, some for this and some for that. The reality is, we are in a national strategy and we need to use that month to do a critical thing, which is to scale up testing, to get to the level of testing we need to be and then we can start thinking about opening the economy by having the data. Because data is going to be critical to open the economy. So the reality is we have this month to do it right. Let's do it right.</s>CABRERA: Dr. Rimoin, as Dr. Del Rio was speaking, I saw the numbers on the right side of the screen, update and now we're at more than 8,200 deaths, nearly 8,300 deaths in the U.S., that's more than 1,000 new deaths just today. And of course, we're seeing the total cases rise exponentially it seems. We again heard a lot about getting back to work about the needs of sports leagues. Did you hear a President today who seems to understand the gravity of this public health crisis?</s>RIMOIN: Well, I think that we're still looking for a very strong national strategy and I'm not hearing it. I would like to hear a national strategy to keep everyone home so that we can, as Dr. Del Rio said, be able to take this strong medicine get through the hardest part and make it to the other side. Blunt instruments are the only thing that will work at this point. We don't have the therapeutics. We don't have the vaccines. We don't have the wide scale testing. We have none of these things. All we can count on is making I'm sure that this virus doesn't have opportunity to spread and the only way we can do that is if we have national guidance that goes to the states and that the states all implement this. And if the state's implement it and every city implements it, and every citizen of this United States does what they are supposed to do by staying home and minimizing opportunity for spread, that is the only way we will stem the tide of the spread of this virus.</s>RIMOIN: I have not seen this kind of national strategy. I'm certain we are all waiting for this, and it is the only thing that's going to work. We should be learning from other experiences. We learned this lesson with Ebola. We've learned this lesson from other disasters, from other pandemics. We have to work together. We have to pull together by staying apart and that is from every level from the highest positions in government down to the individual right now.</s>CABRERA: Dana, how does the President, you know, toe the line between trying to be reassuring and optimistic and sort of a calming presence for Americans versus being dangerous?</s>BASH: Look, this -- that's a question you can ask every single time he comes to the podium because he does both. And in many cases, the dangerous part of the comments that he makes are the most vivid and that frankly matters much more when you're talking about the pandemic that we have now. And we talked a lot already about the fact that he is trying to prescribe medicine that he has no right to or experience in doing, never mind a degree or training and doing from the White House podium. But you could also hear him talking about, you know, having covered this President and before, the candidate for a long time, you can kind of get a sense of maybe the conversations he is having behind the scenes or the media he is listening to before he comes out. And today, he was much more focused on the notion of, we can't let the cure be worse than the disease, which we heard a lot about from him about a week ago. It comes straight from, you know, conservative media, from a lot of people on the Republican side in particular, who have been very, very upset with the President, maybe a little bit less so now that that those numbers on the screen are so dire. But the fact that he is repeating that now, when we haven't heard it for a few days, frankly, is alarming. The other thing I just want to point out is that just this whole notion of a national strategy or a national lockdown. Even if the President isn't willing to do that in a formal way by Executive Order or whatever method he has as President of the United States, and I'm talking to White House sources who say that right out he is not, he can use the bully pulpit. He can say, in answer to our colleague, Jeremy Diamond's question about the eight governors who are refusing to tell people to stay at home, you know what governors? You've got to do it. I can't tell you what to do, you know, constitutionally, that's the term he used. But please, be smart. Do it. He didn't even do that today. He said, it's up to them. They're smart people. I'm going to let them do what they want to do. I mean, that is something that is a classic tool of again, the bully pulpit that this President isn't willing to touch. Yes, he is doing a lot. Yes, there is a lot, not key but that the Federal government is doing a lot fueled by the medical professionals like Dr. Fauci, but those little, you know, powers that he has with his rhetoric, he is not even using those.</s>CABRERA: And well, one of the powers that he has used or at least started to use recently is the Defense Production Act. And Daniel, the President talked a lot about this today claiming he has been using it and it works very well he says, where do things stand with the utilization of the DPA and the execution of it?</s>DALE: Well, he is using it in some ways. When he first started claiming that he was using it, he meant that he was using it to cajole or coerce companies into doing what he wanted. He has since claimed to invoke it against various companies, but some of them like GM have said that, even though he claimed to invoke it against us, we haven't received the formal notification, and so can't proceed. And so I found that with all of his rhetoric on this particular subject, the Defense Production Act, it's often been very murky as to what is actually happening. And I just want to highlight one other fact check item from today's briefing, you know, Trump was asked about another important matter that is getting buried understandably by the pandemic, which was his removal of the Intelligence Community Inspector General.</s>DALE: And in justifying that decision, he repeated a bunch of his false claims, I'd even say lies about the Ukraine saga. He said, the Inspector General did a terrible job because he brought to Congress this phony report from this phony whistleblower who was totally inaccurate. As we've repeatedly noted, that whistleblower was highly accurate. Trump then suggested that Adam Schiff, the Democratic House Intelligence Committee leader might have been the informant for the whistleblower. That's nonsensical. That's complete fiction. And so in addition to promoting falsehoods about the pandemic about the coronavirus, he also returned to falsehoods about this whole subject of Ukrainian impeachment.</s>CABRERA: And that's a really good point, and I'm glad you bring it up, because it's so important that we do bring the facts to our viewers. It's hard to do it in real time. Daniel, you are such a treasure to be able to do that for us and with us in real time. Thank you for taking through some of those issues. Dana, did you have one last word you wanted to get in there?</s>BASH: Yes, just real quick. Daniel was rightly talking about the things that the President said about the Ukraine scandal that were inaccurate. But let's just take a step back and talk about how craven it is, the notion of the President of the United States in the middle of this crisis, unprecedented crisis in the wee hours of Friday night, firing an Inspector General who did the right thing, by all accounts, as Daniel was just saying. I mean, that happened. And then, you know, I mean, that's remarkable. That is really remarkable.</s>CABRERA: It is and in any other administration, and in this one, it just seems like commonplace. Danna Bash, Daniel Dale, Dr. Anne Rimoin and Dr. Carlos Del Rio, our thanks to all of you. I really appreciate you being here with us. During this afternoon's briefing in the middle of this global health crisis, President Trump took new aim at the media. We're going to play some of those words and why it could be dangerous. We'll have Brian Stelter with us next.