RNC Speakers Make Unsubstantiated Claims Biden Is A Socialist
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Live from CNN Abu Dhabi, this is CONNECT THE WORLD with Becky Anderson.</s>BECKY ANDERSON, CNN INTERNATIONAL HOST: It is 11:00 am in</s>D.C. 7: 00 in evening here in Abu Dhabi, a big 70 days until America's Presidential Election, just a little over two months. I'm Becky Anderson a very warm welcome to the second part of this show. U.S. Republicans opened night one of their national convention with a stark warning. A future with Joe Biden as President would be dismal and dangerous. Well, somber messages coming after President Donald Trump claimed the Republican Convention would have an upbeat, positive tone. There were a few of those positive moments Monday, shown mostly in prerecorded clips, speakers praising the president's accomplishment in areas like criminal justice reform and experimental drug policies. But on the coronavirus, you could argue they revised history, praising Mr. Trump's response and ignoring his repeated downplaying of the virus and the more than 177,000 Americans who have died. On a prerecorded video also painted Democrats as the culprits in the early response to the virus. Have a listen.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: From the very beginning, Democrats, the media and the World Health Organization got coronavirus wrong. The World Health Organization said authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to- human transmission.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Overall, most people should not be terribly concerned about it.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Everything is fine here.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We do you want to say to people, come to Chinatown, here we are, come join us.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We don't even think it is going to be as fair as it was in other countries.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Go about your lives, go about your business.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: One leader took decisive action to save lives, President Donald Trump.</s>ANDERSON: Well, the pandemic wasn't the only big issue glossed over by Republicans. Racial injustice was brought into focus again this week after police in Wisconsin shot a black man in the back while his three young children sat in their car. You may remember Kamala Harris saying last week there is no vaccine for racism. Well, on Monday several Republicans of color offered the overarching message, the U.S. does not have endemic racism. One of them is Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley who is an Indian American.</s>NIKKI HALEY, FORMER U.S. AMBASSADOR TO THE U.N.: In much of the Democratic Party, it's now fashionable to say that America is racist. That is a lie. America is not a racist country.</s>ANDERSON: Well, throughout the night, speakers made repeated unsubstantiated claims that a Biden Presidency would usher in socialist policies that would fail Americans. Some of the sharpest attacks came from the president's son, Donald Trump Jr., who compared Biden to the Loch Ness Monster.</s>DONALD TRUMP JR., U.S. PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP'S SON: He's pledged to repeal the Trump tax cuts which were the biggest in our country. After eight years of Obama and Biden's slow growth, Trump's policies have been like rocket fuel to the economy and especially to the middle class. Biden has promised to take that money back out of your pocket and keep it in the swamp. That makes sense, though, considering Joe Biden is basically the Loch Ness Monster of the swamp.</s>TRUMP JR.: For the past half century, he's been lurking around in there. He sticks his head up every now and then to run for president, and then he disappears and doesn't do much in between.</s>ANDERSON: I want to bring in White House Correspondent John Harwood. What do you make of what you heard on night one, John?</s>JOHN HARWOOD, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Becky, what the Republicans are trying to do is gin up the base of their party. The president is trailing in the polls but he's trying to maximize turnout among his political base, but also give a reason for Republicans who have drifted away from him to come back. You know, you've had, especially during 2020, during the COVID crisis, as the economy has gotten much worse, as the pandemic has taken a huge toll on American life in multiple ways, more than 177,000 deaths, everybody's lives turned upside down, a lot of people have faulted the president for not doing more. He went into this convention with just a 31 percent approval and an AP poll on handling coronavirus, so he's trying to bring those people back, convince them he hasn't been as bad as he's been portrayed in the media on coronavirus, that he's not a racist as people have asserted during the racial justice protests. And also try to convince Republicans that Democrats are going to be so much worse than whatever they're experiencing right now.</s>ANDERSON: Look, I guess you could say you wouldn't expect anything other than a campaign rally. You could argue that's exactly what we got out of the Democrats last week, and this is, of course, a final leg in the race to the White House beginning of November. Let's listen to a couple other things our viewers perhaps haven't heard, and I thought this was interesting. The evangelist Franklin Graham speaking to our colleague Don Lemon. Have a listen.</s>FRANKLIN GRAHAM, PRESIDENT, CEO BILY GRAHAM EVANGELISTIIC ASSOCIATION: I believe he's President of the United States for a reason. I think God put him there.</s>ANDERSON: What do you make of that?</s>HARWOOD: Well, look, Becky, evangelical - Christian evangelicals are the strongest single demographic group for the president. It hasn't been a good week for them. Jerry Falwell, the evangelical leader who had been the President of Florida University was caught up in a sex scandal. Nevertheless, the president is trying to rally that constituency. He's even going so far as to claim that the Democrats in their convention last week removed the words "Under God" from their convention proceedings. Now, they weren't uttered in every single setting in the convention, but they were uttered an awful lot. Take a listen to this collection of sound bites.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: One nation, under God.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: One nation.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: One nation.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: One nation.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: One nation under God.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: One nation.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: One nation.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: One nation under God.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: One nation, under God.</s>HARWOOD: Well, what we've seen is that the Republicans led by the president are trying in increasingly blunt ways to persuade those evangelicals that Democrats are absolutely opposed to it, and the president has said that Joe Biden is against God, he would hurt God. The problem for the president, of course, and one of the reasons he's trying to make these arguments is that Joe Biden is doing better among white evangelical Christians than Hillary Clinton was in 2016, and that's one of the reasons why Donald Trump is trailing in the polls.</s>ANDERSON: Fascinating. All right, John, thank you for that. John Harwood is in Washington for you, and we are full speed ahead into round 2 of this Republican Convention. CNN's special coverage gets going at 4:00 am Wednesday morning. If you're here in the UAE for you political night owls, that is 1:00 am in London, 8:00 pm Tuesday in New York. Well, an alarming new development in the spread of coronavirus to European patients, one in Belgium and the other in the Netherlands, have been infected with COVID-19 twice. That's right, they were not protected from re-infection, and there was no lasting immunity, either, for a 33-year-old Hong Kong man who was re-infected with a different strain of the virus. He showed no symptoms the second time. Well, a doctor studying re-infection says this sends a sobering message.</s>DR. IVAN HUNG, HKU DEPT. OF MEDICINE: Well, I think the most important message is that even though you have recovered from a natural infection, it doesn't mean that you're immunized for life from that virus. Also, you can see that this virus is very smart because it keeps on new taking.</s>DR. HUNG: That means that even though you have recovered from a natural infection, you still need a vaccination and you still need to wear a mask and keep your social distancing.</s>ANDERSON: Meanwhile, I want to bring in CNN Senior Medical Correspondent Elizabeth Cohen at this point. What does this tell us about re-infection and our immunity to the virus, Elizabeth?</s>ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN SENIOR MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Becky, this tells us what I think a lot of doctors have long suspected, which is that this is a coronavirus. Common colds are also coronaviruses, and we all know you can get the common cold more than once, so this is not shocking. I think that we also need to put this into some perspective. We know details, for example, about this Hong Kong man. He was infected in March; he was infected then again in August. In August he was just caught because he happened to be going through an airport screening. He did not have any symptoms. So if his case turns out to be sort of the way that things work, that's actually, in many ways, good news. It tells us that when we get this again that we - it is a more mild version of the illness. The objective here is not - I mean, it would be great if we could avoid re-infection, that would be wonderful, but that's not the only objective. The other objective would be, hey, for people to get infected, but not get so sick. So in a way this is good news for the vaccine. Vaccines usually mimic what happens naturally, so if what the vaccine does is make it so you don't get terribly ill, you might get infected but you won't get terribly ill, that would actually be a win.</s>ANDERSON: Yes, fascinating. We've been discussing this past hour about President Trump wanting to fast-track a UK vaccine before the U.S. elections, which are, of course, just a little over two months away. What's the implication of doing that?</s>COHEN: Oh, I can't express enough how terrible that would be. First of all, it would be terrible to put a vaccine out there that hadn't been proven to be safe and effective. You could hurt people. The second thing is, let's say you put out a vaccine that's, that it's safe but it doesn't do anything. That's still very, very harmful, and the reason why is that people are going to lose trust in this process and they're going to lose trust in vaccines. That's already an issue already in the U.S.; CNN polling shows that 40 percent of Americans don't want to get the coronavirus vaccine. Once if you mess up and put one out there that doesn't work or isn't safe, that number is going to get even higher. 50 percent of Americans won't want to get it, 60 percent of Americans, and then a vaccine won't work at all. Also, as Tony Fauci has pointed out, if you put out a vaccine that doesn't work, you're going to have trouble enrolling people in the next sets of studies. Remember we're not talking about one vaccine; we're talking at least half dozen companies that are trying to get a vaccine on the market. You mess up the first one you're not going to get to the next ones.</s>ANDERSON: Yes. The problem is, I mean, ahead of this pandemic, as I understand it, vaccines can take a decade - decades - to develop. So to your mind, what would be an appropriate amount of time for a vaccine to be in development before we can assume for it to be safe and effective?</s>COHEN: Becky, however long it takes. I don't think it's going to take decades. Nobody thinks it's even going to take years. What you want to look for is when they vaccinate tens of thousands of people or have tens of thousands of people in one of these large phase III trials, how many people got sick who got the vaccine, and how many people get sick who didn't. What you're looking for is valid test results, and that may take weeks from now, that may take - I'm sorry, not weeks from now - that will take months from now at least. You can't rush this process. Science is science, biology is biology. You can't rush the process.</s>ANDERSON: And we could also add politics is politics there. Elizabeth, thank you. Your analysis is extremely useful. Spain taking new measures to contain its own surge in coronavirus cases, earlier the country's Prime Minister said 2,000 military personnel will now be deployed to help with contact tracing in several hot spots. And in Madrid, masks will now be mandatory for children six years and older at school. Since Friday the country has reported more than 19,000 new infections with a total number of cases reaching more than 400,000. That is the highest number now in Europe. Well, despite safety measures, a new survey shows almost half of Spaniards think the worst of the pandemic is still to come. The government is hoping it will get a better snapshot of how the virus is spreading through mass testing?</s>ANDERSON: Atika Shubert has this report.</s>ATIKA SHUBERT, JOURNALIST: Temperature checked. Hands cleaned, mouth swabbed, next? This is the new frontline against COVID-19 in the Spanish Capital. The - neighborhood in Madrid has one of the highest rates of COVID-19 infections anywhere in Spain. It's now part of a campaign to test as many as 6,000 randomly selected people, along with hundreds more volunteers lining up for free PCR tests. Madrid's Deputy Health Secretary says he wants to get an epidemiological snapshot of how the virus is spreading?</s>ANTONIO ZAPATERO, MADRID DEPUTY HEALTH SECRETARY: The main reason for doing this is that these are the ideas in Madrid that had greater incidents of new cases. We have to know that these incidents are getting in ages between 15 and 14 years.</s>SHUBERT: The latest data shows COVID-19 cases in Spain are now much younger, at an average age of 38 with as many as 60 percent of cases exhibiting little or no symptoms. That may be why hospitalizations and deaths are still low despite the rising number of infections. But it's scary enough that Marco Malaga, the father of three teenagers, came on his own to get tested.</s>MARCO MALAGA, VOLUNTEERING FOR COVID-19 TEST: As I decided I voluntarily go - quite afraid that I may get COVID. So I don't know - situation.</s>SHUBERT: Now this testing is moving like clapper fair processing hundreds of people in just a few hours, and when they come out, volunteers will get this. It's a QR code that they're able to scan, and this is where they'll get their results in 48 hours. As we film, lab technicians sweep past with another batch of fresh samples bound for analysis at a diagnostic lab. This is what test results across Spain show so far, an alarming rise in cases similar to the peak of the pandemic.</s>EDOUARD MATHIEU, DATA MANAGER, OUR WORLD IN DATA: This is kind of that U shape, which is quite worrying. In some countries are just like at the beginning of the second part of the U, but for France and Spain that U is almost complete, and that's kind of what worries us, and it's happened extremely quickly.</s>SHUBERT: Nobody wants a return to this. Hospitals so crowded, patients sleep on the floor. A group of Spanish doctors and epidemiologists have urged the government to invest more now into detecting cases, tracing contacts and isolating regional outbreaks before it is too late.</s>MANUEL FRANCO, EPIDEMIOLOGIST: We need to have better data than we had before. We need to have the tracing capacity that we haven't had so far, and we're going to need it for many months, if not years. The sooner we get this in place, the better.</s>SHUBERT: Back at the clinic, Marco Malaga is so happy with his experience, he called his entire family over to get tested so they can visit the grandparents over the weekend.</s>ANA MANUELA MALAGA, VOLUNTEERING FOR COVID-19 TEST: We want to make sure we don't have the virus and then be symptom free.</s>SHUBERT: Echoing the hopes and fears of many here in Spain. Atika Shubert, Madrid.</s>ANDERSON: Well, still ahead on "Connect the World" we're going to hear from the European Parliament Foreign Affairs Committee Chair about the situation in Belarus, and indeed, in Libya, and the wider Mediterranean plus calls for a cease fire. Warning political fractions in Libya reach an agreement, but as ever for this conflict the details are convoluted we'll break that down in the most basic of ways after this.