Return to Transcripts main page

CNN NEWSROOM

Stocks Poised to Rebound; Cruise Ship Isolation; Developing an Ebola Vaccine; Whistleblower Nurse Slams Dallas Hospital; World Series Set Between Royals and Giants

Aired October 17, 2014 - 09:30   ET

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


(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ANA CABRERA, CNN ANCHOR: And that's just moments ago, opening bell there on Wall Street. Let's get a check on where we expect the markets to head today. Alison Kosik is live from the New York Stock Exchange.

It's been kind of a bumpy week, Alison. How are we going to end?

ALISON KOSIK, CNN BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: Whoo, everybody's happy it's Friday. And after being beat up for several days, I'm talking about stocks. Bargain hunters are back. The Dow soaring 138 points just a few minutes into the trading day, but volatility -- don't get too comfortable -- volatility may still be the name of the game became the problems that caused that sell-off initially, those problems still exist.

But if you're looking for a little perspective about what happened in the past couple of days, you look at the S&P 500. Did you know it's up 175 percent since it hit rock bottom in 2009? That means that if you stayed in the market, you'd probably be doing all right today.

Ana.

CABRERA: Good to hear it. Alison Kosik, thanks so much for checking in with us. Good to see you on this Friday.

And while you have been sleeping, new developments in the nation's fight against Ebola. Nina Pham, one of the two nurses infected with Ebola at a Dallas hospital, is now in Maryland. This is her arriving last night. She was whisked to the National Institutes of Health where, of course, they have experts now who work in their biocontainment unit to help her with more specialized care.

There are concerns, however, that the second sick nurse, Amber Vinson, could have developed symptoms earlier than initially thought. So this means she could have exposed hundreds of people aboard her first flight to Ohio or those who even boarded later flights on that same airplane.

Just a few hours ago, Carnival Cruise Lines also confirmed that a passenger on one of their ships is under watch and is now in isolation. Apparently she's a health worker who may have handled some lab specimens from Thomas Eric Duncan, the first Ebola victim to die here on U.S. soil. Now, Carnival says its passenger shows no signs, however, of infection.

Let's bring in Rene Marsh, CNN's aviation and government regulation correspondent, to talk more about this. Rene's joining us from Washington.

Let's begin, Rene, with the cruise ship information. This seems like a nightmare scenario for people, especially when you look at those close quarters on the ship and we've seen other viruses spread very quickly on cruises. How concerning is this?

RENE MARSH, CNN AVIATION AND GOVT. REGULATION CORRESPONDENT: Absolutely. It certainly doesn't soothe the panic that many people have over this deadly disease. What we know is this, Ana. A lab worker from Texas Presbyterian Hospital, on vacation. Well, that person is now under quarantine on a Carnival Cruise ship in Belize.

Now, she did not have direct contact with Thomas Duncan, the Ebola patient, but she did test his Ebola samples. Now, we should mention that she boarded the cruise ship October 12th. That was before being notified of updated monitoring requirements. We are hearing from the cruise line -- this is what they tell us in a statement. They're saying that, quote, "at no point in time has the individual exhibited any symptoms or signs of infection and it has been 19 days since she was in the lab with the testing samples." They go on to say, "she is deemed by the CDC to be very low risk."

We know a doctor on board the ship checked her out. We should also mention the U.S. tried to arrange an evacuation, but the government of Belize says they would not allow the use of their airport.

In the meantime, Carnival is taking some steps. They have put some restrictions in place for future passengers. And that includes, if you were either in Liberia, Sierra Leone or Guinea in the last 21 days, you will not be able to board. Also you may have to answer some health questions and undergo medical screening.

Ana.

CABRERA: OK, hopefully that's reassuring for folks who are getting ready to take cruises. Rene Marsh, thank you.

And my next guest not only helped identify antibodies currently used to treat Ebola patients, but he is also working to develop a vaccine. Dr. Alan Schmaljohn is a professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

Professor Schmajohn, thank you so much for being here.

PROFESSOR ALAN SCHMALJOHN, WORKING TO DEVELOP VACCINE FOR EBOLA: You're welcome.

CABRERA: If you can just put it in layman's terms, I'm sure it's tough to do that, how would this Ebola vaccine work?

SCHMALJOHN: Well, an Ebola vaccine would be tested in successive steps, beginning with small tests for safety. As soon as there is no problem with safety, we would move toward vaccinating people at risk, especially health care workers, and then out into the community, to contacts of individuals and probably not even to the wider community. It probably would not be used nationwide either in Africa or in the U.S.

CABRERA: I'm really curious to hear a little bit more about your research and the science specifically. How did you come up with this vaccine idea?

SCHMALJOHN: Well, at the moment, there are several vaccines in process. I was present at the beginning when we put a full thrust effort on vaccines for both Ebola viruses and marbird (ph) virus. And we used the newly available technology because the older technologies that we're most familiar with of either live attenuated vaccines, like your measles, mumps, rubella or killed vaccines like the soft polio virus vaccine, are not effective against Ebola. So we have used modern technologies and we established step by step what parts of Ebola are required in the vaccine, and then what might be a safe vector, what might be a safe vector that is potent enough to induce a strong immune response, ask the question of what is that immune response that we want to evoke so that we can better design and step-wise improve the vaccine. So it's a long discovery scientific process. And then there's this big gap from that knowledge to scaling up to a very large scale and making the vaccine in a clean enough form for human use with all the regulatory requirements, and that's where the big time lag is.

CABRERA: OK. So, you know, there just has been so much mystery regarding Ebola and this particular outbreak. What is it about Ebola that makes it so hard to treat or to battle when somebody is infected?

SCHMALJOHN: Well, what makes it hard is simply it's a race between a virus and the immune system of the person or animal that it's infecting. So Ebola is one that has several ways to counteract and defend itself against the immune system. So the vaccine has to be designed to tip the balance in that race between virus and host immune system. It's just hard by happenstance as far as we know in humans and monkeys. Ebola is just very fast and very deadly.

CABRERA: Professor Alan Schmaljohn, we all hope that that vaccine comes very quickly. Thank you for your time and we appreciate the work you're doing.

Still to come, a Dallas nurse says the hospital where two health care workers were infected with Ebola was unprepared and did little to protect those putting their lives on the line.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BRIANA AGUIRRE, TEXAS HEALTH PRESBYTERIAN NURSE: No one ever spoke to me about Ebola. Why would my neck be exposed?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CABRERA: Up next, stunning accusations that have a lot of people asking, why didn't the hospital and the CDC do more to protect these nurses on the front lines? (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CABRERA: This morning, one of the nurses who works at Texas Presbyterian is speaking out. Yes, this is somebody who works at that hospital where two of her colleagues have contracted Ebola. And in an interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper, Briana Aguirre describes just how unprepared this hospital was to deal with the virus when Ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan walked in. Listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ANDERSON COOPER, ANCHOR, CNN'S "AC 360": Was your neck exposed?

BRIANA AGUIRRE, TEXAS HEALTH PRESBYTERIAN NURSE: Absolutely. Yes. There's a --

COOPER: What part of your neck?

AGUIRRE: Well, the zipper ended about here on me and the hood ended about here on me. And, you know, this part right here made a triangle that was open. It was - it was completely open. And the very first time that they were instructing me how to put this on is exactly the point when I said, "why would my neck be exposed?" I just told them, "why would an area so close to my mouth and my nose, why would that be exposed?" And they didn't have an answer.

COOPER: What did they say? Was there any follow-up when you raised objections to what is clearly a ridiculous situation, a dangerous situation?

AGUIRRE: I immediately felt like it was ridiculous and I immediately posed the same question that you're posing to me, you know, asking me right now. I said, why? Why -- what explanation can you give me or anyone about why we would be in the second week of an Ebola crisis in our hospital and we don't even have the same equipment or protection that's given to sanitation workers that have no contact with patients at all? And they said, "we know, we've ordered it."

COOPER: I can't believe their response was "well, we've ordered it." I mean that's - that's inexcusable.

AGUIRRE: Two weeks? I mean I could have - this - and not to be taken lightly, but I'm sure I could have ordered that on Amazon Prime and had it in two days.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CABRERA: Make sure you stay with us because we're going to hear more from that interview next hour, including why Aguirre says if she contracted the virus, she would do anything and everything not to be treated at that Dallas facility where she works.

I want to bring in CNN legal analyst Paul Callan now to discuss Aguirre's interview.

And, first, Paul, let's just start with the fact that HIPAA laws, as we all know, who -- when we go to the doctor, seem to be some of the most stringent and protecting our privacy. Is this nurse violating any of those laws by speaking out about the care that was happening in the hospital?

PAUL CALLAN, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: Well, that's a great question because here we're seeing the law as it tries to balance the privacy rights of a patient, Duncan, who was infected, of course, by the Ebola virus, and the rights of the nurses to make sure that they are protected as they treat people with these diseases. So it's a real balancing test.

But HIPAA basically says that, as a patient, you have privacy rights. And if a hospital institution or the employees disclose illegally, unlawfully, they can be punished by fines; there are even criminal penalties for it.

In watching this interview, I don't see this as a case that would create liability under HIPAA for the nurse. She's obviously not trying to reveal details about Mr. Duncan's health. What she's talking about are problems with respect to the hazmat suit or the containment practices of the Dallas hospital. So I think she's a whistleblower -- and, by the way, that's a whole other set of laws that would protect her as she discloses danger in the workplace.

CABRERA: And that being said, let's talk a little bit about how Ebola is treated, because we now know about a lot of different patients who have ended up in the hospital here in the U.S. after contracting Ebola. We know their names. We know that they -- in some cases what their conditions were. Even in Thomas Duncan's case, we heard from some of the medical personnel about his bodily fluids that were encountered and why that was a big deal because of the personal protective gear that they were wearing.

Is Ebola considered a different sort of a virus that it would allow people to disclose a little more information?

CALLAN: Well, yes and no. The HIPAA law says that where there is an infectious or communicable disease, certain public health authorities are allowed to disclose information. So, for instance, if you knew that somebody infected with Ebola was traveling someplace else and infecting other people, a phone call could be made to health authorities, that person could be tracked down.

But you're on to a different issue and that is when public health officials start disclosing how many fluids are leaked and distributed by a particular Ebola patient, you may have a privacy violation there. You could have a HIPAA violation there. And I think people are getting a little bit lax about application of the law in the face of this public health crisis, or at least what's perceived to be by many people.

CABRERA: I want to read you something that one of our friends, Danny Cevallos, wrote. He wrote this recently in a CNN.com op-ed and it has to do with individual rights versus public safety.

So here's what he says. "The game changer here is that, with an epidemic, the potential harm to the masses is tremendous, so large that it justifies virtually any invasion of individual rights. Indeed, when one man threatens mankind itself, individual liberties go out the window, and then that window is hermetically sealed."

Do you agree?

CALLAN: No, I don't agree with that. I agree with it -- that that's a general principle that we -- it sounds like common sense, but that's now what the law says. The law says you still have privacy rights in the United States, and the laws are structured in such a way that if they're carefully applied, privacy can be preserved and the public health can be protected.

That's what I was talking about at the beginning, is we balance these rights. So I disagree with Danny that we're -- I don't think we're going to throw out all those rights as we fight this epidemic. We fought other epidemics: the flu of 1917, communicable diseases, and we've still had privacy rights in the United States.

CABRERA: Indeed, Paul Callan. We'll end it there. Thank you so much.

CALLAN: Thank you.

CABRERA: I also want to point you to CNN.com because Paul recently wrote an op-ed, in fact just yesterday. This is called, "We Need A Surgeon General Right Now", which of course is a topic we're talking about today. That's up on our website right now. Thanks again and we'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CABRERA: Welcome back. Checking top stories now.

Olympic track star Oscar Pistorius will learn his sentence Tuesday for the shooting death of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp. All the arguments are over. A judge now has the weekend to make a decision. Prosecutors are asking for at least ten years in prison. Pistorius's defense team says his disability would make him very vulnerable in prison.

Vice President Joe Biden's son has been discharged from the Navy. That happened back in February after sources say he tested positive for cocaine. But now Hunter Biden has released a statement just this morning saying he is embarrassed by his actions and that he respects the Navy's decision. He doesn't get into any specifics, though, about why he was discharged. The 44-year-old is now a managing partner at an investment firm.

Apple has released a new, a thinner, and a faster version of its iPad. This is the new iPad Air and the iPad Mini. They come with touch I.D. fingerprint sensors, which are supposed to be used online with the Apple Pay system, which launches Monday. Now the company hopes the newer version will help turn around the recent slump we've seen in iPad sales.

In the weather, for the very first time in nearly 30 years, Hawaiians are preparing for the possibility of two tropical storm systems hitting this state in one season. Tropical Storm Ana is on a path headed toward the Hawaiian Islands. I'm feeling kind of proud about that; it's called Ana, named after me. Governor Neil Abercrombie has declared a state of emergency. On a serious note, the residents have packed the grocery stores there ahead of this storm's expected arrival. They're hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst.

Now, the World Series is set. It is going to be the Royals versus the Giants. The Giants won the National League Championship Series last night and they did that in dramatic fashion. Brian McFayden is on the campus of Ole Miss in Oxford, Mississippi. Brian, I know you have a few things to talk about, but let's talk a little baseball first.

BRIAN MCFAYDEN, BLEACHER REPORT: Yes, let's talk some baseball. The Giants may be a team of destiny just like the Royals. They won the World Series in 2010 and then they did it again in 2012 and they are heading back again this year. The Cardinals were six outs away from sending the series back to St. Louis but in the bottom of the eighth, Michael Morris hit a pinch hit solo home run to tie the game at three. Then at the bottom of the ninth, Travis Ishikawa gets a hold of this one. That's a three run walkoff home run to win the series. The Giants are now going to face the Royals on Tuesday.

You know, as Florida State prepares for Notre Dame this weekend, questions continue arise surrounding Jameis Winston autographs. According to ESPN, the owner of the authentication company JSA says no one from Florida State has contacted him about the Winston signatures. Right now, the web site has more than 2,000 Winston items that have been authenticated.

So, guys, I'm hanging out here at Ole Miss. This is pretty amazing. Thee site of the Grove, absolutely unreal. This is probably the best tailgate in all of college football. I'm getting told that moments from now these students and fans are going to be rushing the Grove to secure their spot for tailgating. Unbelievable. I'm going to try to get in there with them. Back to you.

CABRERA: Looks like you're having fun out there. Thanks, Brian.

And the next hour of CNN NEWSROOM begins right after a break quick.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)