We have 20 to 30 people probably caring for each patient every day. That is what is going on. Vaccines are on the way but how soon . This morning my interview with dr. Anthony fauci. Plus, transition politics. President elect biden starts forming a cabinet. Its a team that reflects the fact america is back. As President Trump continues to say cite nonexistent fraud. How much is President Trump trying to tie president elect bidens hands in iraq and afghanistan . Ill talk to the joint chair chiefs about why a smooth transition is critical to National Security. Joining me are nbc news kasie hunt, hue huet host on the salem n Radio Network and Michael Dyson of vanderbelt university. Welcome to sunday, its meet the press. Announcer from nbc news washington, the longest television running in history. This is meet the press. Good sunday morning, i hope youre having a safe and enjoyable thanksgiving weekend throughout americas covid crisis there is grim statistics. This morning there have been more than 13. 3 million dalss cad 266,000 deaths in the United States alone with little reason to believe things will improve in the short run, but if there is one statistic that stands out above others, the United States has 4 of the worlds population and somehow has 19 of the worlds covid deaths. This is hardly what people mean by american exceptionalism and no amount of game saying or president ial tweeting that increase testing is somehow to blame can wish away this dubious honor. Tens of millions ignored pleas from Health Experts to avoid travel and instead spend time at home with their immediate families. The result may well be a covid surge beyond the record numbers weve seen. How did we get here . Did we lose faith in our government because our government gave us reason to lose faith in it . It a decades long assault on science and objective facts, particularly by some on the right . Was it a fractured media environment that has people seek alternative facts to fit their personal world view or are we fed up, done with months of zoom meetings and closed stores and kids home from school that weve simply had enough . Enough that millions feel its worth taking a big risk to have a brief sense of normalcy. Whatever the co, tst results are clear, millions are being infected. Hospitals are near their breaking point and Health Care Workers are the ones paying the price. Ive been a nurse for 20 years and never experienced burnout like this. Reporter on the front lines Health Care Workers are exhausted overwhelmed and at times angry at an American Public only half listening. I hope the last moments of your life dont look like this because this is what youll see at the end of your life if we dont start wearing masks. Were under staffed. We have so much on our plates as nurses. Reporter with coronavirus cases over 13 million and continuing to climb, up in 44 states in the past two weeks, roughly 90,000 americans are hospitalized, icus are overwhelmed. Its not entirely clear to us well be able to move personnel from cold spots to hot spots because the hot spots are everywhere. Reporter according to federal data, by the end of the week 22 of hospitals, nearly 1400 expect a staffing shortage. One of the plans in utah is to open up one of our big Event Centers as a hospital. Well, where are the doctors coming from . You cant pick up medical professionals from the Grocery Store when youre in need of staff. Reporter nearly one in four physicians say they know a physician that committed suicide. 58 express feelings of burnout. Health care workers are surrounded by dying patients. We decided to take the oxygen away. That was really hard. That was hard. Reporter Health Care Workers are sacrificing their own lives. Willing to put her life on the line to help others so that they could then help others. It was such a tragedy. Reporter but while travel on thanksgiving was down from previous years, more than 6 Million People flew over the last week. Are you concerned about the coronavirus surge . Im not. I dont anybody thats got it. It doesnt seem like it Getting Better so try to have a little fun. Doctors, nurses, health care front liners are frustrated and angry. People say covid is a hoax and masks dont work, that masks are politicized. Reporter while some elected leaders are showing urgency, others continue to down play the virus. I think oklahoma should be with their loved ones over thanksgiving. Lets be safe about it. Reporter in denver, the mayor Michael Hancock urged residents to stay home. Im asking, urging, pleading with everyone to please stay home. Reporter then flew to mississippi for thanksgiving. He said we should not stay with our family and travel for thanksgiving and goes behind our backs. One of the things that we have been struggling with is what we do with our kids if we cant keep them safe, that includes potentially sending them to live with a relative away from us. So stay home. Please. In the two days since thanksgiving, there have been 346,000 new confirmed covid cases in the United States and 2700 deaths. Of course, we wont know for awhile how bad the surge of cases and deaths due to thanksgiving weekend travel will be. Joining me now is dr. Anthony fauci as the director of the National Institute of allergy and infectious diseases. Dr. Fauci, welcome back to meet the press. This other statistic tells the tale of november. The total number of coronavirus cases in the United States in november surpassed 4 million on saturday. Thats more than double than october. What are we staring at in december considering i guess halloween was part of this early surge in november. What should we expect in december, sir . Well, if you look at the slope of that curve that led to the numbers that you just mentioned, chuck, were going to be seeing as we go towards the end now and getting into december, were seeing the surge with an inflection curve like this. The concern we had as we entered into the thanksgiving holiday and as were coming out of the thanksgiving holiday is that the travel and the people congregating at dinners that youd expect we tried to get the word out for people, as difficult as it is, to really not have large gatherings of people, family and friends but try to keep it confined to the immediate household, but, you know, people are not always going to do that so what we expect, unfortunately, as we go for the next couple of weeks into december that we might see a surge super posed upon that surge were already in. When i give that message, i dont want to frighten people except to say it is not too late at all for us to do something about this because as we travel back to be careful when we go back to where we are to just continue to do the things weve been talking about. An important issue, chuck, we know when you mitigate with masks, with distance, with not having crowds in settings, states that have done that, the conflexion of their curve starts to do this. We know we can do something about it, particularly now as we get into the colder season and as we approach the christmas holidays. Look, it took, what was it . About a week before thanksgiving that the cdc came out and advised against travel. Are we going to see more dire warnings given about travel now, essentially now in the next week or two as we prepare for the end of the Year Holidays and new years . Chuck, id have to say, honestly, unless something changes dramatically, which i dont see that happening because the curves when you look at the dynamics of an outbreak that you see usually three, four, fiveweek period of time before curves start really coming down. So i think were going to be faced with another situation were going to have to make decisions as a nation, state, city and family that were in a very difficult time and were going to have to do the kinds of restrictions of things we would like to have done particularly in this Holiday Season because were entering into whats really a precarious situation because were in the middle of a steep slope. What people need to do, we say it over and over again. We know it works but also that there is, as i mentioned to you before, chuck, there is light at the end of the tunnel because well really be seeing vaccines soon. We likely, almost certainly, are going to be vaccinating a portion of the individuals in the First Priority before the end of december and then as we get into january and february and march, more and more. So if we can hang together as a country and do these kinds of things to blunt these surges until we get a substantial proportion of the population vaccinated, we can get through this. There really is light at the end of the tunnel what is your confidence level that various Hospital Systems will hold uprig right now . The warnings are coming from all over the country. I know you guys see these reports on the task force. I saw one earlier this week, Something Like one in five Health Care Systems around the country were on the brink of basically being over capacity. They were already over capacity. Right. The next two weeks could make the worse. Health care workers themselves, there is not enough of them. Are you concerned about failing systems around the country . You know, chuck, i have to say that i am and i am because reality stairs you right in the face. Just last night i got a couple of calls from colleagues and associates who were very much involved in different states throughout the country saying were at that point where we soon if things dont turn around quickly, were going to have a situation with capacity not only of Hospital Capacity but staff. You know, what do you think we should do . Almost pleading for advice about what can we do . We dont want a lockdown completely but we might have to im talking about locally, not nationally. Im talking about individual locations of people starting to see significant stresses on the hospital and Health Care Delivery system. So again, thats such an even more important reason why you have to realize that we do have within our capability to be able to blunt that by doi ing the simple things we talk about short of locking down. So we dont precipitate the necessity of locking down. Is this look, i dont want to belabor a point about the federal response we talked about in the past. How about getting the president to talk about not traveling over the holidays or getting the president to talk about wearing a mask again . Is that possible . You know, i dont know. I mean, it certainly is possible, chuck. But i dont think i have any power in that regard. So what im doing is the best that i can do, you know, and thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak to the nation on a National Program to talk about the importance of those kinds of things that can have an impact. Lets talk about the vaccine. The cdc is going to put out protocols who should get it first. Its clear in the conversation you and i are having, its Health Care Workers probably should be priority number one and priority two here. What does that look like . How realistic is it to get the nations leading front line Health Care Workers vaccinated by the end of january, say . Well, chuck, i think certainly the Health Care Workers will be among those. I dont know exactly what the precise final decision is going to be. Certainly, Health Care Workers will be up there. There may be others. I dont know. As you Advisory Committee, either tuesday or wednesday will come next week and come and meet with the cdc and make those kinds of decisions. If you look at the number of Health Care Workers, obviously, you have to do it in a graded way. We dont have enough vaccine right now in the first, in the last week or two or three of december to be able to get everyone who needs to and thats the reason why what happens is that a certain amount of vaccine get shipped locally to the states and then the final decision of how to do that properly will be left up to the states with strong recommendations from the cdc. So let me get into some specifics as there is people watching here. Hey, ive got a parent or grandparent in a senior facility. Maybe its a nursing home, maybe its a Senior Living care. When will they get it . How early in this process do you expect them to get a vaccine . Again, i dont want to get ahead of the Advisory Committee but i can tell you what likely will happen, certainly not definitive that people in Nursing Homes will likely be very high up there in that facility. If you look at the number of people in whats called official Nursing Homes, theres about 1. 5 Million People. If you look at the people who are the staff that staff those official Nursing Homes, thats about another 1. 5 million. So you probably have around 3 Million People. I think you can get them protected reasonably soon because obviously, they are very vulnerable and go down the list of people who are elderly, with or without underlying conditions and get different priorities after that. Lets talk about kids here. Moderna did not do any Clinical Trials with anybody under the age of 18 and pfizer did some of the Clinical Trials down to age 12. There hasnt been a lot. What is your sense of when should we expect School Aged Kids to be able to get vaccinated . Are we looking at the summer . Will that be a longer period of time here . Well, traditionally, chuck, the answer to the question is months. The reason is traditionally, when you have a situation like a new vaccine, you want to make sure because children, as well as pregnant women are vulnerable. So before you put it into the children, you want to make sure you have a degree of effectiveness and safety that is established in an adult population, particularly an adult normal population. Then there are ways to get children vaccine by, lets say, maybe in january and again, this is my estimate, may not be exactly that that you go ahead and you do whats called a phase one and a phase two trial in children. In other words, you find out is it safe in children, and does it induce the kind of immune response thats comparable to that in adults, an immune response that you know protects adults and then what you can do is you can do a study, whats called a bridging study. You can say okay, now, we have safety in the children. We have comparable immunization, namely the same type of immune response. We can get this expedited approved for the children before going through a 30,000 person trial that may take a longer period of time. Well start the process very likely in january to get it to the children sooner rather than later. If someone had covid19, do they get vaccinated . The answer is very likely yes. When the trials were done, the moderna trials and other trials and we looked at the data, there were people when you looked at the antibody response they gave indication they had been infected and actually recovered quite well, and at the time of the vaccine study, they were actually well and normal as it were and yet, they still got vaccinated. Since we dont know the durability of protection from someone who has already been infected, how long that protection lasts, it would not be surprising that we would be vaccinating people who have recovered from covid19. Given the and youve admittedly said this, our rough rollout of a testing strategy in this country, arguably we still dont have were still dealing with a testing strategy that prioritizes sports leagues over Health Care Workers at times but let me ask you this, why should we feel confident Vaccine Distribution will go smoothly considering frankly how unsmoothly testing went . The reason we should feel more confident about that, chuck, we have a long, long history of the distribution of vaccines. I mean, it not to the extent that you are giving it to 300 Million People but every year the system is set up in a relationship between the cdc and the state and local Health Authorities that they distribute 80 million or more vaccines every year. So this isnt something that theyve done just for the first time. Obviously, youre going to want to scale it up because the numbers will be greater but there are a couple of aspects to getting vaccines into the arm of someone who needs it. One, is to get it transported from the place where its made and stored to the local state and city areas. Thats being handled by general gus perna and the military and transport of that. Once it gets there, its the state and local authorities who are responsible for the distribution. So there are a couple of taspha. The part about 300 million doses getting shipped will be taken care of by people who know how to do that. The part at the end of getting into peoples arms will be more challenging than the regular flu season. I think it would be foolish to deny that. I think it will be able to be done because the local people have done that in the past. Hopefully, they will get the resources to help them to do that. January 20th, President Biden