Trump: Redfield was "confused" and "made a mistake" on vaccine distribution timeline

Anderson Cooper 360

CNN

News

3.7 • 3.8K Ratings

🗓️ 17 September 2020

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

CDC Director Robert Redfield told a Senate Committee he thinks a Covid-19 vaccine won’t be available to the American public until the late second quarter or third quarter of 2021. When asked about Redfield’s comments, President Trump said he was “confused” and “made a mistake” and then went on to claim a vaccine could be ready by October. The CDC later said Redfield misunderstood the questions during the hearing and his 2021 vaccine comment was when all Americans would be vaccinated. Dr. Eric Topol, Executive Vice President at Scripps Research, tells Anderson Cooper he believes Dr. Redfield was telling the truth and “it’s like a circus act in the midst of an important pandemic.” Plus, Michael Caputo, the top spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, who claimed, without evidence, the CDC has a “resistance unit” to work against the President, announced he’s taking a two-month "medical leave of absence” following his apology for the conspiracy-laden rant. Anthony Scaramucci, former White House Communications Director joins AC360 to react to Caputo’s comments and says when it’s corrupt at the top, it spills over into everybody. Airdate: September 16, 2020 Guests: Dr. Eric Topol Anthony Scaramucci To learn more about how CNN protects listener privacy, visit cnn.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Good evening, the President of the United States now considers it praiseworthy if you
0:04.3	were then 240,000 Americans die of the coronavirus.
0:07.3	And that's just some of what he said at this press conference late today.
0:11.1	His comments come after an in-reaction to testimony from some of his top public health experts
0:16.0	contradicting him on mass squaring and the timing of a vaccine.
0:19.4	It also comes after the highest single day spike in deaths in more than a month, according
0:23.7	to the data gathered by people at Johns Hopkins University.
0:27.1	After 1,293 new reported COVID fatalities yesterday, almost 200,000 killed so far.
0:35.2	Yet late today, though one single person whose words and deeds might have prevented so
0:39.3	many people from dying tried to gaslight us all to seeing the last six months as a great
0:44.0	success.
0:45.0	If you look at what we've done and all of the lives that we've saved and I'm going to
0:51.2	ask that a graph be put up and now it's up.
0:55.6	This was right at the beginning.
0:56.9	This was our prediction that if we do a really good job, we'll be at about 100,000 to 240,000
1:04.4	deaths and we'll below that substantially.
1:07.6	And that's despite the fact that the blue states had had tremendous death rates.
1:12.9	If you take the blue states out at a level that I don't think anybody in the world would
1:18.9	be at, we're really at a very low level.
1:22.5	If you take the blue states out, which I'm interested in about that, that is really
1:26.4	a window into how this president views this country.
1:29.2	There are his states and the blue states.
	...

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