highly disturbing developments in just a moment. first, breaking news as it relates to covid-19. right now trucks are being loaded with the second fda emergency authorized vaccine. this one is made by moderna. it will soon be heading to hospitals across the country. dr. anthony fauci says we should expect shots in arms from this vaccine as early as tomorrow. joining me from ol live branch, mississippi, nbc's shaquille brewster. what's the latest? what are you learning about the timeline? what are we likely to see this morning and as vaccines get to hospitals around the country? >> well, ali, we are just waiting for these vaccines to make their way out of this facility right now. you see some of those live pictures as workers are inside this distribution facility, packing, essentially turning that moderna vaccine, stockpile vaccine into individual shipments that will go out across the country to all 50 states. this is not the only facility. there's also a facility outside of the louisville area. when you combine those that's where you'll have the impact. this will touch more people more quickly. that's because -- you can see it there -- this doesn't require that super cold storage that we saw with the pfizer vaccine. it doesn't require special freezers. it's more of an industry-standard refrigeration temperature. what that means is that you can expect this vaccine to hit pharmacies, drugstores, nursing homes. nursing homes, of course, so impacted by this coronavirus, especially when you look at the death numbers. i just learned in the past couple of minutes that the first truck is expected to leave this facility within the next three hours. they're saying we should expect to see a truck leaving this facility, going to the fedex hub in memphis, about 20 minutes away, in just about three hours, by 10:00 a.m. we can expect to see things start moving fairly quickly, ali. >> all right, yeah. you mentioned those two places. these shipments going to memphis. the other shipments from luissville. louisville is a u.p.s. hub, memphis a fedex hub. they don't need as much refrigeration and cold storage as the pfizer drug does and distributing in smaller bunches, which means rural areas who don't have facilities to store this thing at 70 degrees minus centigrade can get these doses. >> that's right. you see that box on our screen. inside each box is not only temperature control equipment -- think essentially an ice pack, to make sure it stays around negative 4 degree temperature, but inside of each one is also a temperature tracking system so that moderna will be able to track and mckesson will be able to track and make sure that the vaccine stays at the correct temperature as it goes out across the country. we learned from fedex this is a priority overnight shipment. these vaccines are expected to arrive tomorrow. again, to all 50 states. you can expect to see shots in arms monday or tuesday. this process is happening fairly quickly. you're seeing literally the process is going through -- they're taking these boxes. they'll go to a loading dock and start packing them on to the truck. that's exactly what you're looking at right now. it's happening. you can see it happen live in this facility behind me. ali? >> shaq, let me ask you something. you said they don't need to be as cold, about a minus 4. does the equipment in the box take care of that themselves or is that a refrigerated facility we're looking at live pictures of? >> reporter: it's a massive refrigerated facility. the images you're look at right now, this is not the freezer room, there's another camera that shows the freezer room. it's a 15,000-foot room. you see people wearing cold climate weather, that's the room you're look at right now. they're wearing that clothing that allows them to be in that cold climate. that room is refrigerated or frozen at negative 4 degrees. so, that's why you're seeing the careful nature that they're working with. they're working in 45-minute shifts. so they'll work, help pack and turn that stockpile of vaccine into those individual shipments as determined by the cdc, and then they'll take a 15-minute break and you'll see people go in and rotate throughout the day. you just get a sense of the urgency. moderna is promising to deliver 20 million of these vaccine doses to the united states government by the end of the year. that number will go up to 100 million by the end of the first quarter. and by the end -- by the start of the second quarter, or rather the end of the second quarter, the start of the summer, that number will be 200 million doses. we're watching this all play out. this, of course, will be the first day as this moderna vaccine, the second vaccine approved by the fda, will begin making its way across the country. >> so this room on the left side of your screen is a refrigerated -- a freezer room basically. they're dressed warmly. they can only work in there about 45 minutes. once they put it into the boxes, it goes into the other room we're showing you where the freezer packs are inside the boxes and they'll stay that way where they're monitored. this is still a two-dose vaccine. wh we have 330 million people in the united states. this one is for people 18 years of age and older. pfizer is for 16 years and older. it's not recommended for pregnant women who are people who have allergic reactions to vaccines. that's fairly normal. that's a lot of doses but is still keeping with anthony fauci and other people's ideas that if you want a vaccine and you're not in an early phase, it may still be late spring and summer before you get that vaccine. >> reporter: that's exactly right. this vaccine -- you know, the point is once it gets to the states and mckesson in conjunction with operation warp speed, they're making sure that these vaccines get to the right locations. once it gets to the states, then it's in the hands of the governor. we heard last week, for example, a lot of governors complaining about the allegations of the pfizer vaccine, saying they didn't get enough or the amount that was forecasted and projected. the reason you heard those complaints from the governors because it was their responsibility to then get them to the individual sites and locations. chief operating officer of operation warp speed said that problem has been fixed now. it was essentially a communication error. that problem will not exist, according to him, by -- or with this moderna vaccine. to your point, yes, this will be able to go to more places. it will really have that reach across the country. especially when you hear about the rural communities that really have been hard hit, especially with those hospitalization numbers, this will affect those front line workers, people working with coronavirus patients each and every day, they are first in line. when you go beyond that, it goes to the nursing homes. nursing homes, of course, particul particularly vulnerable location, not only because of the age of the residents there, but because of the interaction, the staff coming in to these pretty confined spaces. so, those are the people who are on the front of the line. we'll learn from the cdc the rest of the process as more of these vaccine doses become available in the next couple of weeks and months, but we're under way. the process is under way, and we'll learn fairly quickly what kind of impact this will have. ali? >> three weeks ago i was at the pine ridge reservation in south dakota, very isolated area. that's the kind of place that can benefit from this. >> reporter: exactly. >> because it can go to the local health clinic. this drug can go there. at 1:00 this afternoon, governor gretchen whitmer of michigan will be speaking to my colleague, alex witt. she was one of those governors who was complaining not only did she not get the doses of pfizer vaccine she asked for, she couldn't get health and human service secretary alex azar to straighten out what the problem was. gus perna, operation warp speed, he has acknowledged what the error is and acknowledges everybody should be getting the doses they need. wildly signal us if something is moving. i don't care if other people are bored by this. i am absolutely not. if that truck starts moving out with more vaccine, more life-saving vaccine, i want to see it and hear your voice. shaquille brewster in a place called ol iv branch, mississippi, very, very close to memphis, tennessee. we'll keep one eye on that. we might put that in the bottom corner and keep an eye on it. turning to our other top story, damning report published in the last couple of days for to the depths that one man is willing to go, even by the very low standards of the last four years, the details being reported are shocking. "new york times" citing unnamed sources briefed on that friday white house meeting, first breaking the news that donald trump pitched appointing one of his former lawyers, election conspiracy theorist sydney powell as special counsel to investigate his debunked accusations of election fraud. sit on that one for a second. not only does trump not have the power to appoint special counsels, he appears to not understand the role that a special counsel has. you may recall that sydney powell was actually fired from trump's legal team after she pushed a ridiculous theory that venezuela and hugo chavez rigged american voting machines. hugo chavez has been dead for seven years. wall street journal reporting trump even pushed america's second rank ken cuccinelli to seize voting machines. elections in america are state elections. feds can't take voting machines. that request was rejected. that's not all of it. tod today, i'm live in savannah, georgia, latest stop on our sunday series "velshi across america." i'm here talking to businesses and workers. i'm here for another reason. voters are heading to polls in the upcoming senate runoff races. it will decide the balance of power in congress and, indeed, the future of the united states of america. republican candidates have put themselves squarely in the conspiracy theory-laden corner of outgoing president trump. both republican candidates are now running solely on his false claims of voter fraud and other baseless arguments, which often have more than a tinge of racism attached. asking advisers during the meeting friday night about imposing martial law and deploying the military to, quote, rerun the election. that's according to two people briefed on the meeting who were so alarmed at what transpired, they immediately went to the press. remember this. it reportedly happened a day and a half ago. nbc news has not confirmed the report as of yet. trump got the idea from the recently pardoned, disgraced lieutenant general michael flynn, the man on the right, whom the new york times and wall street journal report was at the white house in that meeting friday. the guy has just been pardoned and was at the meeting in the president. i guess he owes the president something, has to listen to the president's crazy ideas. one night earlier, flynn said this, on thursday, on cable news. >> immediately his order seize every single one of these machines around the country, on his order. he can order the -- within the swing states, if he wanted to, he could take military capabilities and place them in those states and basically rerun an election in each of those states. it's not unprecedented. people out there are talking about martial law like it's something we've never done. martial law has been instituted 64 times. >> that's fine then. martial law. we've done it 64 times. that's how we're going to settle this election. martial law. the military involved in an election. for a guy who doesn't want to leave office. where i come from, they call that a coup. that's what the outgoing president reportedly asked his advisers about doing, instituting martial law in swing states he lost. not across the country, not in states he won, in the states he lost. trump has weighed in on twitter, saying talk of martial law is fake news, except his guy said it thursday night. it's extremely important to remember over these next 31 days, there is still a major danger to democracy in the white house that. danger appears to be siding with russia over the united states once again. remember that michael flynn pled guilty to lying to the fbi about secret backchannel talks he had with the russian ambassador during the trump transition, talks that, in fact, took place right around this time four years ago. flynn also has a long and lucrative history of business dealings with russian entities, including state-run media. he was in the white house friday advising the president one day after publicly promoting soviet-like tactics as a way to remain in power. nbc news also learned on friday the white house was order at the last minute to stand down on issuing a statement formally blaming russia for months long hacking campaign that assaulted american industries and businesses. unknown who gave that order. although it most likely wasn't secretary of state mike pompeo, who on friday said the attack was pretty clearly, quote, russian. the outgoing president weighed in, absolving russia of blame and instead implicated china, saying everything is under control. those were the words he used about the covid-19 pandemic in the spring, that it was under control. the pandemic wasn't under control then and the pandemic is not under control right now. more than 317,000 americans are dead from covid-19. more than 3,000 americans are now dying each day. hospitals and icus across the country are at record capacity and new cases are hovering around a quarter million a day. but as one of the outgoing president's closest advisers tells the washington post, quote, he's done with covid, put it on the timetable. just exceeded the amount of time he gave it. joining me now, pulitzer prize-winning reporter with "the washington post" and co-author of the best seller "a very stable genius: donald j. trump's testing of america," the waning support of the outgoing president's ongoing election fight with his aides. jeremy bash, former chief of staff for the cia, msnbc national security analyst and member of the 2008 obama transition team. thank you for being here. carol, let's start with the idea that even where i am in georgia, there are people who went along with the idea, two senatorial candidates went along with the idea that donald trump had his right to have things play out in court. they did. now things being discussed go beyond what we think of democratic ways to protest an election. state-run elections, the idea of the military somehow having some role in running an election. the idea of a special counsel that the president himself doesn't actually have the power to appoint. all of this now is in a different realm. >> absolutely, ali. you know, this president is so fascinating, because literally everyone around him knows, and he surely knows that he is a soon-to-be ex-president, but he's still extremely frustrated that people are not supporting him on television and saying that he really won, that this election was stolen from him, that he really won this election. and he's angry even at some of his most local aides in the white house. we are hearing from our sources that he's railing at those people that have served him fairly in lock step and some of the other dubious claims he has made. and now he is turning to sydney powell and michael flynn, who have been roundly rejected as, you know, almost authoritarian in their proposal for how we solve an election. you know, this is banana republic kind of conversation. talking about rerunning an election. this is putin-level -- you may remember that his election, when he won it, waus viewed by the state department and department of homeland security as having basically been entirely rigged so that his opponents were either kept off the field or their returns were manipulated. so when michael flynn is whispering in the president's ear, hey, we could redo this election, that really appeals to president trump because it says, hey, it is fake and i really did win, which is his goal, to make clear to people that he really is the winner. >> jeremy, you were at the department of defense and the cia. in a meeting like the one that was held friday night at the white house, you might have been in that kind of meeting. and in this moment, i'm not upset about having a meeting. there should have been a meeting at the white house friday night and one thing on the agenda, a major national security threat under way right now. that's what it should have been about, instead of sydney powell and seizing voting machines. >> it's hard to know which is more disturbing, ali, the nature of the hack, solar winds hack or the fact that the president has said absolutely nothing about t it. first with respect to the hack, ali, latest reporting shows more than 200 organizations, including dozens of federal agencies, have been penetrated by a far-reaching cyber attack authored by the russian internal service, successor to the kgb. it was a kremlin-directed attack at a minimum to is your veil and collect vital, sensitive information about our government and potentially worse. potentially to have those computers controlled so that in the event of a conflict, russia could do grave damage to our national computer infrastructure. we don't know yet. the answer is for the president to say everything is under control is, frankly, a lie. at this hour, the damage assessment has not been completed. i would say it hasn't even begun, because the damage assessment for this far-reaching cyber attack will take weeks if not months. the president, in not saying anything about it -- in fact, i think he went further and said maybe it was china. maybe it wasn't russia. maybe they hacked the voting machines. in other words, misleading the american people about the nature of the hack. i think that invites more hacking and emboldens russia. >> yeah. i was a little surprised he stopped short of the 400-pound guy on his bed, which he also invoked last time around. carol loennick, it's one thing that the president has rudy giuliani, michael flynn, sydney powell around him. these folks are of a sort. but the last six weeks he has had mainstream republicans behind him, supporting that texas lawsuit that went to the supreme court. is that falling away? are regular people in the president's orbit, on republican servi service, starting to say, all right, we know this is over and we need to move on? >> ali, what i'm hearing and what our great reporters at "the washington post" are hearing and reporting that republicans you mentioned are afraid of donald trump. they're afraid of the power that his voting bloc represents and how it could hurt them in the re-election and making sure they secure their jobs. so they're not confronting the emperor about his clothes. they are not giving a real, honest feedback loop to the president about the reality. he lost the election. he didn't lose it by a tiny bit. he lost it by a significant amount. and it is not in debate. and rerunning the election or figuring out if hugo chavez's ghost got into some of the machines, they're not confronting him with this information. mostly our political reporters have heard that these people signed on to something they knew was false, they knew was baseless because they did not want to invite his ire and have him come at them. look at what donald trump did to the governor of georgia, who simply was a republican trying to run a fair election. what we expect of every politicicion in the state involved in elections, whether they are republican or democrat, the president personally attacked this man and only because he wanted this election to be fair and without any finger on the scale. >> thank you to both of you this morning for kicking off this discussion. carol leo nnig, author of "a very stable genius:donald j. trump's testing of america" and jeremy bash, foerm cia and security analyst. i am wearing a mask for the whole show today. i'm in the city of savannah that has a mask mandate and this is a river walk. there will be members of the public, people here so i'll be keeping my mask on for the whole show. i want to bring in a professor of microbiology at baylor medicine. you'll remember dr. hotez was with me one week ago today as we watched the unrolling of that pfizer vaccine, putting it on trucks and those trucks going out. dr. hotez, right below you on the screen right now, you're seeing moderna facility in which the vials are being packed in a freezer room, into boxes, then another room, and it goes on to trucks. within the next couple of hours, we'll see trucks rolling out from this plant to memphis, tennessee, a fedex hub. there's some differences about this drug, which makes it almost as important as last week to watch this drug going out. >> yeah, absolutely, ali. and we're going to need, actually, several vaccines in order to vaccinate a significant percentage of the population. so the first one, of course, is the pfizer/biontech vaccine. this is the moderna vaccine. these are both mrna vaccines. in the early part of the new year we'll have the two added vaccines from j & j, astrazeneca. there's a particle vaccine from novavax. we'll have a small fleet of vaccines coming out over the next few months. the moderna vaccine is similar technology to the pfizer vaccine. they're both mrna in the lipid coat. the differences include differences in freezer requirements. the moderna vaccine is a little more forgiving in terms of we can keep it at refrigerated temperatures for a month. that's going to make it possible to put it out into rural areas of the country, because it doesn't require that minus 100-degree fahrenheit freezer temperature that the pfizer vaccine requires, and there are few other differences as well. more or less, same technology, but a little more user friendly in terms of rolling out the moderna vaccine. >> now, a couple of things have come up in the last week since we first started distributing the pfizer vaccine. we talked to a lot of people who just had it, saying the side effects are as you would expect from this sort of vaccine. a couple of concerns have been raised about bell's palsy being caused by this. do you know anything about this? >> yeah, bell's palsy, we also call facial paralysis, appears to reflect some temporary weakness of the facial nerves. we don't exactly understand its etiology, its cause. by definition, bell's palsy, we don't know the cause of it. it has been linked to a previous vaccine, which was an intra-nasal influenza vaccine developed in switzerland years ago. whether or not bell's palsy is due to the pfizer vaccine or moderna vaccine is unknown because it was seen for one of the vaccines in the placebo as well. bell's palsy does occur infrequently to individuals. the link between the vaccine has not been established and even if it does, it's an extremely rare event and usually resolves. this is not a major concern at this point. it's one of the things that we'll continue to watch in our system of surveillance and our post-release monitoring. that's something important. the american people need to know we continue to monitor even after the vaccines are released. >> but if you are someone who is the type, because of your co-morbidities or other conditions, that getting covid could actually be fatal for you, that's worth considering, that even if there -- we don't know that the bell's palsy is linked to this, but it's generally not a fatal condition. for some people, coronavirus is. dr. hotez, thank you. peter h otez, joining me from texas this morning, as he did one week ago. in about two weeks, control of the united states senate will be decided. and it is all hanging on this place right now, on georgia. we'll talk to two heavyweights from the peach state about how these runoff races are shaping up. more after this. shaping up more after this. to all the businesses that helped us make it through 2020... thank you for going the extra mile... and for the extra pump of caramel. thank you for the good food... and the good karma. thank you for all the deliveries... especially this one. you've reminded us that no matter what, we can always find a way to bounce forward. so thank you, to our customers and to businesses everywhere, from all of us at comcast business. >> we are 16 days away from the georgia runoffs, senator kelly l loeffler and. more than 1.3 million georgians have cast a ballot, 25% increase in the same time in the last n runoff. in fact, almost as many georgians have voted early as they did 16 days out from november's presidential election even as officials reportedly try to hamper the turnout. scaling down early voting sites for fives for the county's more than 537 voters. that's atlanta, by the way. it had 11 early voting sites in november's general election. and the work on the ground is being supplemented by various surrogates who spent time in georgia. president-elect biden and vice president mike pence campaigned for their candidates. don jr. stumped here yesterday for the republican ticket. vice president-elect harris and ivanka trump will make the rounds in the state. president trump is scheduled for a visit monday january 4th, the day right before the election. joining me now is georgia congressman hank johnson. good morning to both of you. let me start with you, mizu. you have remarkable enthusiasm, remarkable turnout for this election. 76,000 more people registered for this election than for the general election. why are we, again, making it harder for people to vote rather than easier? >> because in a marketplace of ideas, fewer and fewer people are buying what the republican party is selling. the only way for them to win and hang on to power, at least in georgia, is for them to cheat. there's no reason. the enthusiasm is high. all indications point to voters going to show back up. under different circumstances, i wouldn't fault them for relying on historic turnout during a runoff to plan early voting locations and to plan drop-box locations and historically, turnout in runoffs has been low. but everything from polling to people requesting ballots, all signs point to this being a high turnout election and they have failed on their duty when they've minimized or cut the number of early voting locations and the number of options that georgians have to vote. it's cheating. >> representative johnson -- sorry. >> no, i'm just saying, it's cheating. >> representative johnson. >> just cheating. plain-old cheating. representative johnson, georgia has elected a number of african-american representatives, like you, to congress, never a senator. raphael warnoff, if elected, would be the first black senator from the state of georgia. >> yeah. they are quite a pair. warnock would be the first african-american elected to the senate from georgia. it's very doable, that this can be done, but it's going to be a nail-biting election. it's going to be a lot of teeth nashing, hand wringing. those numbers are exploding on the democratic side. of course, i'm expecting republicans to get out there and vote despite there being kind of dispirited at this time. but they're going to get out and vote. so, it's up to us to get out our vote. things look real good right now with the early voting tallies. it shows that the enthusiasm is really quite high. and it shows that the activism on the ground is working. republicans have been spending a lot of money on the airwaves, trying to reach the voters that way, but the democrats have been working on the ground to make sure that we are knocking on doors and dropping literature and talking to people and making sure that they get out and vote not just in the atlanta metropolitan area, but throughout the state of georgia. i'm really optimistic about our chances on january 5th. >> we're showing pictures of people who have been lining up to vote in a socially distanced way. below us, below me in the bottom corner of the screen is that plant in olive branch, mississippi, where they're loading the vaccine on to trucks. representative johnson, you got your vaccine. tell us about it. >> i did. i went and got it on friday afternoon, when it first became available to members of congress. i felt a little queaziy about going in front of just regular people, but then i realized that it's up to me to set the example. so, i went ahead and got the vaccination, and i posted on @hankjohnson my experience. it's about three minutes. everybody can see me getting the shot. and i want people to know that this vaccine has been found to be safe. of course, there's some side effects. there's side effects with every vaccine. but we take vaccines for things like a tetanus shot. a tetanus shot say vaccine. mumps, measles, chicken pox, rabies. you know, you take vaccines to ward off the disease. and that's what this vaccine does. and we, black people who have been disproportionately hospitalized, sickened and killed by this disease, need to be the last ones to be reluctant to take this vaccine, because it's actually going to save our lives, save the lives of our family members and friends in our neighborhoods, grandmothers, grandfathers. we need to take this virus. that's what i wanted to show by getting mine first. i'm doing okay, 48 hours afterwards. >> i appreciate you saying that. obviously, those concerns that black people have about medications and vaccines are well rooted in american history, but there are reasons why this vaccine should be taken. >> unfortunately. >> we thank you for setting that example. representative hank johnson is a democr democratic congressman from georgia. and nse ufot is ceo of the new georgia project. thank you both for joining me this morning. >> thank you. waves of social media disinformation emerge around these run-off races. one example, conspiracy theory that says that the state voting machines have a vote flipping mechanism and somehow is tied to hugo chavez, venezuelan leader who has been dead for seven years. posts with 200 false claims, 60% reached through undetected reaching thousands of users. never mind the internet. a good amount of misinformation is coming from 1600 pennsylvania avenue, right from the outgoing president's mouth. >> we're fighting very hard for this state. when you look at all the corruption and problems having to do with this election, all i can do is campaign and then wait for the numbers. when the numbers come out of ceilings and leather bags, you start to say what's going on? >> joining me now is rashad robinson, president of color of change, working directly with social media companies to how to prevent the spread of misinformation, and our reporter covering the election in georgia. rashad, this is weird. this isn't just twitter or facebook, but information from all corners, conspiracy theorists, elected representative in georgia, avowed conspiracy theorist, qan on believer and then the president going on to say we won gnlgds. he didn't win georgia. >> yeah. part of why this is so all over the place is because of decisions that the social media platforms have consistently made to prioritize growth and profit over safety, integrity and security. in every phase where they do that, they make decisions and rules that allow this content to travel quickly, to not actually disable people's account the way that they should, to not pull town this information quickly and put in systems to actually pull it down quickly. we've had many conversations. we ran campaigns. we pushed. we had a whole boycott this summer of facebook and even while we were having the boycott they were making claims to media how much of this information their artificial intelligence actually catches. and then you realize that's not actually the case. their artificial intelligence is designed, once again, by people inside the companies whose intelligence should be under question, both in terms of this sort of history of disinformation and misinformation when it comes to elections, but also the day-to-day interactions people have with these platforms that allow this information to travel so quickly, to allow it to serve sort of greater profit for the leaders of this platform and in many ways to allow political decisions about not wanting to be in the bad graces of one political party. as a result, not make the hard decisions. all of this is a result of that. for anyone who is watching, this is not a car accident. this is the result of decisions that have been made that now communities like ours, like black communities are having to deal with. >> we are seeing remarkable voter turnout, janell, but it does seem that georgian voters are energized. it doesn't always happen that way. >> true, true. turnout, for the most part, is pretty significant. we are about one week into early voting and thus far turnout is almost at the point where it was about this time in the general election. it's a little below that, but it's about where it was at this point in the general election. there is, without question, i think, a lot of conflicting, often utterly false information floating around. this is an occasion, however, where it seems much of the disinformation, it will be interesting to ultimately know where this information is coming from, because it didn't quite seem to be having the desired effect. i would say that when i speak to people around the state of georgia -- i'm headed to macon today. i'm in atlanta now. it seems to be many republican voters who are most distrustful of the voting system, of the voting -- the election officials in the state, and have real questions and/or doubts about the ability to have a free and fair election. and, therefore, i certainly have spoken with some people who have really questioned whether or not this is something they want to spend their time on, if they want to totally disengage in this process. on the other side of the equation, i've spoken to many democrats, many of them people of color, who have concerns about what local officials in their view are doing to make it difficult to vote. you mentioned the issue of closing early polling sites or limiting number of early polling si sites which can have an impact if you can't wait an hour to vote. >> lots of issues for us to continue to talk about once this matter is settled january 5th. janell ross is our fantastic msnbc reporter here in georgia. rashad, the president of color of change. pfizer vaccine and representative buddy carter join me to discuss the vaccine distribution and what it means for folks in georgia and across the country. back more right after this. nd a the country. back more right after this ♪ it's velveeta versus the other guys. clearly, nothing melts like velveeta. ♪ ♪ ♪ smooth driving pays off. ♪ with allstate, the safer you drive the more you save. ♪ you never been in better hands. allstate. click or call for a quote today. 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(vo) get 0% for 63 months and subaru will donate 250 dollars to charity. iwith vicks sinex saline nasal cmist.tion for drug free relief that works fast. vicks sinex. instantly clear everday congestion. as we prepare for the country's second covid vaccine to ship across the nation, officials say this should help their goal to vaccinate 20 million americans by the end of the year. both vaccines by pfizer and moderna received emergency use authorization. pfizer got it last friday. moderna got its green light two days ago. both vaccines have been shown to be highly effective. pfizer is 95% effective, moderna is 94.1% effective. moderna will ship 5 million doses this week and pfizer will have shipped more than 4 million dose the. more than 1.2 million people have been vaccinated. 128,000 of those administered in the united states. my next guest not only was involved in both moderna and pfizer vaccine trials, but was the principle investigator for moderna's second and third trials. he also became one of those who was vaccinated himself on wednesday. joining me now is dr. paul bradley, internist and principle investigator at meridian clinical research here in savannah. good to see you. thank you for being with us. >> good morning. >> how are you feeling? >> i feel fantastic. i told everybody i promised in the clinical trial i was going to be the first one in line and i was the first one in line. >> tell me about your work in understanding this. now that the vaccine is out there, we have a million questions. >> we do and we've been trying to answer them all along. everyone thinks we started yesterday but this clinical trial actually started in february, phase one, phase two was april, may. phase three, july. at this point, anyone who is going thinks they're the first one in line. but they're not. pfizer had 45,000 people, moderna had 30,000 people. all these heroes have gone in front. >> you're never really the first one in line for a vaccine. >> no. >> you made a good point. clinical trial has been under way since february. peter hotez makes that point. we have been studying coronavirus for a very, very long time. there's a researcher at penn who has been doing this for 40 years. >> absolutely. i remember going to world vaccine and listen to dr. hotez. no one wanted to listen to him. he was telling everybody, this is coming. this is coming. it's here. we need to address it rapidly, and we are. it's amazing. >> we talk about the hiccups in the distribution of the vaccine, because we should. what's your sense of how it's gone, starting from last week, the rollout of the pfizer vaccine, the distribution, the way that's been done, now today another historic moment. the second vaccine for the world's most serious pandemic. >> absolutely. it's been happening, as the government said, at warp speed. i went personally. it was beautiful. we went in and went out. it's going to be complicated to figure out how to get everybody in, who should be getting it now and who should be getting it later but it's happening. >> the is pfizer vaccine needs the super cold temperature, minus 70 degrees centigrade. this one doesn't. >> right. >> it could get to places the pfizer vaccine couldn't reach. >> it's true. the way the government set this up, they understood it would be a problem way back in july. it's not -- it sounds like we're just starting to think about it, but it's not. the logistics were put in place. the plan was in place and it was happening beautifully. >> what's your sense of how -- people want to know how long it will be till regular folks and start getting these vaccines. we can't narrow it down to exact times. emergency responders, hospital workers and nursing homeworkers, if you want to get back to work and tell your customers, everybody, all our staff has been vaccinated, when do you think it will be before the first time we're going to get shots for regular folks are? >> they tell us spring or summer. i'm really hoping that everyone is underpromising and will be overdelivering. i think at the rate we're going, there's a will the of good suggestion to think that. >> we've been seeing the number of people willing to take the drug, the vaccine, increasing. do you think it will keep on doing that as we keep on televising it and showing people getting injections, doctors like you? >> absolutely. the average flu shot is 50 to 70% effective. when people heard 95% it really got their attention. i had my shot last wednesday. come this wednesday, i will have a 55% already of not catching coronavirus. >> wow. >> and one week after my second shot, one month from the beginning, i'll have a 95% chance of not getting coronavirus. that's tremendous. >> dr. bradley, thank you for joining us today. >> thank you. >> an internist and principle investigator at meridian research here in savannah, georgia. i want to bring in dr. peter hotez, from baylor college of medicine, also co-detector of the texas children's hospital center for vaccine development. dr. hotez, dr. bradley was talking about the fact that you and i have discussed this. you knew this was coming. you were talking about it. back then you couldn't get the interest. in your business, interest translates into money. when i said how did we get this vaccine developed so quickly, you pointed out we decided to put the money into it and that's why it happened so fast. you put the resources of america behind something, it happens. >> that's absolutely right. national institutes of health saw the writing on the wall in 2003 when we had the first major coronavirus pandemic. so the covid-19 is caused by sars2. there was something called sars1 that came out of southern china and did he say mayed the economy of toronto for a while. that's when the nih went to work and said we have to look toront economy. that's when we began supporting vaccine research and we were the beneficiaries of that, to start developing early coronavirus vaccines. then we have a second one in 2012, the middle eastern respiratory syndrome. so this is a new normal, ali, that we're now seeing new major coronavirus pandemics or epidemics every decade or so. so we have to now get ready for covid-26 and covid-32. the nih is on top of it, they're putting out requests to look for universal coronavirus vaccines. we've been thinking about this for influenza for a long time, now we're turning our attention to coronaviruses, thinking how we can anticipate coronaviruses and can we identify universal elements common to all of these viruses. >> so yesterday i called for an investigation into what went wrong at the highest levels here, because when we get covid-26 and covid-32, the one thing we want to be able to do is make sure there are things in place that do not allow our president to mislead us. we cannot overstate how much of the damage was done by a president who said it was going to go away, that we had it under control. assuming we don't have donald trump or anybody like him at the helm when this happens, how do we fight this better next time? attack t taking the politics out of it, what are the things we need to do the next time we see this come around? >> you're right, it wasn't just covid-19, it was the aggressive disinformation campaign released by the white house that triggered this. but you're right, factoring that out, we do learn from this. after sars 2003, we put in what was called the international health regulations to increase communication between nations. in the obama white house, the global health security agenda was launched and creating this system of public health emergencies of international concern. so with each epidemic we do learn lessons. we had in place something called the coalition for epidemic preparedness innovation, cepi, to finance new vaccinations. we put in the covax facility for sharing resources. we have to figure out an international system for vaccination especially for low income nations. >> next time we'll have you talking to us about it. professor peter hotez, co-director of the texas children's hospital for vaccine development. today i'm live from savannah, georgia, a city with a very deep history. tomorrow marks 156 years sills general william tecumseh sherman and 60,000 union soldiers who made their way through georgia on a three-week-long martch tha started in atlanta captured savannah. this beautiful city was a horrible confederate bastion of slavery. five years prior, this city was the scene of one of the largest sales of enslaved persons in american history. 436 men, women, and children were brought to savannah racetrack two miles from here and put in stalls used for horses, where they waited for days, in some cases even weeks. hotels in town filled with potential slave buyers from across the region. the event was known as the weeping time because the skies reportedly rained down. the sale of enslaved people was widely reported in newspapers in the north. the reaction to the story deepened the nation's divide in the time preceding the start of the civil war. today that racetrack is long gone and savannah is a very different place, the population is 64% black and dotting the cities are reminders of its history. there is a marker dedicated to the weeping time auction and inside the beautiful homes around me are clues to the living quarters of slaves. now with just 16 days to go to the runoff election, reverend raphael warnock has the chance to make history by becoming georgia's first black senator and only the 11th black senator in america's history, a feat made more difficult because georgia's voting system was specifically designed to limit its use by black people. racial progress has been slow in georgia, but to black people in this state, indeed across the country, that 156 years ago a black man in savannah had little agency over his own life, and now in just two weeks a black man from savannah may be a united states senator, is yet another chapter in this city's remarkable history. don't go anywhere. we have more "velshi across america" at the top of the hour. you're watching msnbc. c.ast deln the perfect last minute gift from your walmart store. really fast. really perfect. let's end the year nailing it. ♪ let's end the year nailing it. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ don't settle for silver #1 for diabetic dry skin* #1 for psoriasis symptom relief* and #1 for eczema symptom relief* gold bond champion your skin gold bond alice loves the scent of gain so much, she wished there was a way to make it last longer. say hello to your fairy godmother alice. and long-lasting gain scent beads. part of the irresistible scent collection from gain! for members like martin. an air force veteran made of doing what's right, not what's easy. so when a hailstorm hit, usaa reached out before he could even inspect the damage. that's how you do it right. usaa insurance is made just the way martin's family needs it with hassle-free claims, he got paid before his neighbor even got started. because doing right by our members, that's what's right. usaa. what you're made of, we're made for. ♪ usaa but with walmart's low prices, you still know how to do it up. and keep costs down. let's end the year enjoying more. ♪ you are all i need baby baby to get by ♪ good morning. it is sunday, december 20. i'm ali she wivelshi. today is rollout number 2 of the vaccine to battle the deadly coronavirus. 6 million doses of the moderna vaccine are being made right now for distribution across the nation. one of the distribution points is in olive branch, mississippi, near tennessee. you're seeing a live shot that have facility right now. the fact that the vaccine does not require the same ultracold shipping conditions as the previously-authorized pfizer vaccine will allow for greater distribution at previously unaccessible locations. here is general gus perna, chief operating officer of operation warp speed. >> moderna vaccine can be shipped and stored at standard freezing temperatures and is packed at 100 doses each per container. this allows jurisdiction of flexibility to support hard to reach, small, and more rural areas. >> during that saturday press conference, perna also took the blame for the confusion in the delivery of some pfizer vaccines to at least 14 states due to logistical miscalculations which he repeatedly apologized for. as of this morning, the total number of people infected with covid in the united states has climbed to 17,724,962 since the start of the pandemic. nationwide, coronavirus has claimed the lives of 317,027 people. this morning i'm joining you from beautiful savannah, georgia, the latest stop on "velshi across

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