U.S. Pays $1 Billion to Secure Doses of Potential AstraZeneca Vaccine; New Analysis Shows Lockdown Delays Cost Tens of Thousands of Lives; CDC Director Raises Possibility of Second Round of Lockdown This Year; Trump Heads to Michigan After Threatening to Withhold State Funding
POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning, everyone. I'm Poppy Harlow.</s>JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR: And I'm Jim Sciutto. As a country, we are not yet over the first wave of the outbreak yet, but the CDC director is already warning, and this is sad, but about a round two, if the country does not do a better job of tracking the coronavirus going forward. That means another lockdown is possible months from now. And, listen, that's daunting. But this is also a disturbing and disappointing. A new model shows that if the U.S. had shut down just weeks earlier, just weeks, the U.S. would have prevented tens of thousands of deaths in this country. Think about that. Just weeks separated this country from life and death for so many Americans.</s>HARLOW: It really did. We learned that as states reopen and another study warns that we could see a surge in cases, especially in southern states, frankly something we're already beginning to see in some this hour and today the president is just hours away from a trip to Michigan, a state facing loud opposition to tight restrictions in place amid the pandemic. Also the state the president threatened to withhold funding from in a clash over mail-in voting, a move to keep people safe. We're at the Ford plant that the president will go to today. Let's begin this hour, though, with our senior medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen for more on the medical headlines. Elizabeth, good to have you. Let's talk about pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca announcing an agreement to make at least 400 million doses of a potential vaccine. Is that right?</s>ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN SENIOR MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: That's right. And AstraZeneca is making the vaccine that's been developed by University of Oxford in England. And so we have various players here. They are one of eight vaccines that are in human clinical trials. Oxford expecting to begin those trials very soon. They told me before July 1st. You know, this is one of several vaccines that have said we are going to make this many, we are going to make that many. And we don't know that all of them are going to work. It's called manufacturing at risk or parallel manufacturing. What it means is that you start making the vaccines before you know if they're actually going to work. If they're actually going to go on the market. That means at the end of the day, we may have spent a lot of money on a vaccine that's going to sit in a warehouse because it doesn't work. But it also means, hopefully, that we've made a lot of the vaccine that will end up working so that when we do realize that it works, we can say, all right, let's get going, we've already made a large batch. And we need a lot of it because we're trying to vaccinate the world.</s>SCIUTTO: Yes, that's significant. Dr. Fauci and others have talked about that. That's the idea that, you know, if you reach that discovery point, then you already have a supply of it ready to go, granted that's a big if. Tell us more about this new modeling that shows that tens of thousands of lives in this country could have been spared if the U.S. followed the example of other countries such as South Korea and lock down earlier.</s>COHEN: Yes, you know, at the time each country was deciding on its own when are we going to shut down. And many other countries shut down before we did. And so what this new analysis from Columbia University shows is that if the U.S. had shut down two weeks earlier than we did, we could have avoided 84 percent of the deaths and 82 percent of the cases. That is an extraordinary number. Now, this is modeling. So we're not exactly sure that that would be the number. But I think it's clear that if we had shut down earlier, more lives would have been saved. I will say, I think if we all think back to that time, shutting down even when we did, seems like sort of a shocking notion to many people. Shutting down two weeks earlier. I don't think anyone in this country or not many people in this country were in that time frame yet. It still felt I think even to some folks at the CDC that this was somehow controllable. It turned out it wasn't.</s>SCIUTTO: Elizabeth Cohen, thanks very much as always. Let's speak now to CNN's Nick Valencia for more on the latest warning from the CDC director Robert Redfield. This of course comes as there is some sniping at him, talk about the future of his job. What are we learning?</s>NICK VALENCIA, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes, really ominous warnings from the director of the CDC who hasn't really been that vocal, Jim and Poppy, over the course of the last several weeks. But all that changed overnight, giving an interview here, asked if we should be prepared for perhaps a second wave of this winter. This is what he told the "Financial Times," saying, quote, "I can't guarantee. That's kind of getting into the opinion mode. We have to be data driven. What I can say is that we are committed to using the time that we have now to get this nation as overprepared as possible." You know, last night, I met with several CDC sources and they've really gone on the offensive of course the last 24 hours acknowledging that they haven't done enough or really a good job at all to control the public health message. Senior official at the CDC telling me that they have been working with state and local agencies all along, inferring that they've really been doing this behind the scenes without fanfare and much announcement by the White House. Several officials that I met with last night saying that the CDC has been challenged. It's very challenging to work with this administration, that they're working within the confines and margins set, the boundaries set by the White House. There was also some criticism lobbed towards Dr. Redfield, and that's not new. You know, we've seen this sort of vocal criticism from people within the CDC, questioning whether or not he's the right man for the job. Now no one questions him whether or not he's personally a likable man, they're just asking if he's the right man for this moment. Now sources I spoke to that are closer to Dr. Redfield pushed back on that -- those allegations, those claims, saying that Dr. Redfield remains approximate to the response. He's been in -- nearly every single task force meeting and then he has a voice at the table. Really, though, it is this back-and-forth that we've seen play out with the White House. The fact is, as Elizabeth Cohen just laid out, President Trump didn't take this virus seriously enough. The CDC tried to emphasize just how critical it was for national response. And right now that back-and- forth is playing out in the public eye -- Jim and Poppy.</s>HARLOW: Certainly is. Nick, thanks for the reporting. Let's talk about all of these developments overnight with Dr. Richard Besser, former acting director of the CDC. OK. So I want to get your take on this modeling and, yes, it's modeling as Elizabeth Cohen laid out, but from Columbia University's team, the fact that having -- if we had social distance and lockdown starting March 1st, 83 percent of the deaths in the U.S. would have been avoided. I get that we can't change things now. But it can inform us for the future. It can inform us if there is a second wave in the fall.</s>DR. RICHARD BESSER, FORMER ACTING DIRECTOR, CDC: Well, you know, I think it can inform us even before that. As we're seeing states getting people back to work, it's critically important that we have data at the community level to be able to identify if there is increased disease transmission. You need to know neighborhood by neighborhood. You need to know among black Americans, Latino Americans, Native Americans. If you start to see an uptick, what this suggests is that you have to act quickly. You have to act quickly and move towards more social distancing. You know, we're seeing some declines across the entire nation, which may suggest there is some seasonality that we're going to get a bit of a reprieve during the warmer times and, yes, we have to be ready for the winter when respiratory viruses tend to be much more active.</s>SCIUTTO: Dr. Besser, there's been some positive news on vaccine trials this week. You had the NIH human trial on Monday, progress there as they then scale up to many more human subjects. And success in animal trial, but also after AstraZeneca news. I'm curious, place this in the context for our viewers how significant are these results and do they move up in your view the likely date that we will have a vaccine that all of us can take.</s>BESSER: You know, I'm very hopeful that we will have a vaccine. But predicting when that will be is really, really challenging. Vaccines usually take years to develop. And I'm not convinced that this one will be developed on a faster timeline. I worry that a lot of the data we're seeing is cherry picked. You know, the data about the Moderna vaccine, it was eight patients out of 45. What about those other 37 that we didn't hear about? The news was good. But does it really mean that we're that much faster? I'm excited to see that there is movement to manufacture, start to manufacture vaccine, even before the trials are done. But you never want to give a vaccine to people that you haven't done all the testing to make sure it's safe.</s>HARLOW: Sure.</s>BESSER: That you haven't done the testing to make sure that it's effective. And those things really take time.</s>HARLOW: Dr. Besser, you brought up seasonality, and the hope that in the warmer months at least this subsides. But I just want to get your take on something else that Dr. Redfield said to the "Financial Times," quote, "We've seen evidence that the concern is that it would go south to the southern hemisphere like the flu and what you're seeing is that's happening in Brazil now. And then when the southern hemisphere is over us, I suspect it will reground itself in the north." I'm just interested in what the numbers out of Brazil are telling you right now. I think they just saw a daily spike of 20,000 new cases in a day.</s>BESSER: Yes, I mean, that's typically what you see with influenza. When it gets quiet here in the northern hemisphere, it's more active in the southern hemisphere, and vice versa. So it's really important that public health pays close attention to what's going on in the southern hemisphere. Many countries, if you think about countries in Africa, don't have the testing capacity to really be able to look and it's one of the reasons why it's so important that wealthy nations like ours invest in testing, invest in public health systems around the globe. It helps ensure the health of people everywhere but it also helps ensure the health of people here.</s>SCIUTTO: It's early, but 50 states are now reopening to some degree. Others started earlier. There's been some anecdotal evidence of an uptick in cases as a result of that in some states. Have you seen a broad set of data that shows you that outbreaks are increasing or growing as a result of reopening? Or is it too early?</s>BESSER: Yes, I think it's too early. There is a real lag. If you think about what it takes as you reopen, people start to have more contact with each other. If there is increased risk there, and there will be. But if it's significant risk, it can take a week, 10 days, before you're seeing an increase in people getting sick and then within that illness it can take another week for people to get sick enough to go to the hospital. And then unfortunately, you know, it's something like a death indicator, that takes many weeks before you'd see movement there. So it's hard to tell. And I worry that we don't have the testing down to the level of each community, each population so that there could be increases that occur that you miss, in groups of people who are going back to work, in groups of people where their exposure is really increasing.</s>SCIUTTO: Dr. Richard Besser, always good to have you on to cut through the fog of all this. Thanks for joining us this morning.</s>BESSER: Thanks, Jim. Thanks, Poppy.</s>HARLOW: All right. We'll go to the president now. He is heading to Michigan. He's going to tour a Ford plant there, one that has been making ventilators and just started making cars and trucks again.</s>SCIUTTO: Yes. But it comes amid controversy. The president threatened yesterday to withhold federal funding from Michigan in a fight over mail-in ballots, which the fact show GOP and Democratic-led states are increasingly the availability of mail-in ballots. CNN correspondent Omar Jimenez joins us now with details. What is the president threatening here and are state officials there taking that threat seriously?</s>OMAR JIMENEZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Jim and Poppy, that threat to withhold funding is centered on the secretary of state here in Michigan saying that they would be offering absentee ballot applications to all of their voters. And initially President Trump tweeted incorrectly at the time saying that there were absentee ballots being sent out and claiming it was illegal. Again, we know both of those claims were not true. He later characterized it correctly as far as what was being sent out but in that same tweet, threatened to withhold funding from Michigan if they went down this voter fraud path as he described it, which it is worth noting that voter fraud by mail is pretty rare and there are other states like Texas that are offering similar things to all of their voters. And all of that is separate from what we're expecting to see here Ypsilanti at this Ford plant behind me. A big question with the president's visit today is whether he will be wearing a mask, and that's significant specifically because it is Ford's policy here that all of their employees and people that come in and out should be wearing masks. They say they've communicated this to the White House and that the White House will be making their own determination as Ford tells us. And this comes as now the state attorney general says well, if he doesn't wear a mask, that would put into consideration how they treat any future visits of the president to facilities here in the state.</s>DANA NESSEL, MICHIGAN STATE ATTORNEY GENERAL: If he fails to wear a mask, he is going to be asked not to return to any enclosed facilities inside our state. And I know that Ford hasn't asked him to do the same thing. But if he -- if we know he's coming to our state and we know he's not going to follow the law, I think we're going to have to take action against any company or any facility that allows him inside those facilities and puts our workers at risk.</s>JIMENEZ: Now, I've spoken to one source in the facility who says they would prefer the president wear a mask, specifically pointing to the fact that when the CEO came and when union leadership came and others, that they followed safety protocols as laid out by Ford and that they would like to see more of that leadership by example -- Poppy, Jim.</s>HARLOW: I mean, Omar, it would be, I think, seen by many as a slap in a face if he doesn't. Ford made PPE, masks, gowns, ventilators, for the months that it was closed to protect people. I mean, you can't forget that. Thank you very much for that reporting. And again we're going to talk to Michigan's lieutenant governor later this hour about the president's visit and also that threat on funding. Still to come here, another 2.4 million Americans filed for first-time unemployment benefits last week. Will Congress do more to help? Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio who took on the Treasury secretary this week, he will join us.</s>SCIUTTO: Yes, 2.4 million people a week. At any other time, I mean, that would be news all by itself.</s>HARLOW: Yes.</s>SCIUTTO: And as more and more counties in the state prepare to reopen, California has seen now its second highest single-day death toll. What does that mean for reopening?