Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves (R-MS) defended his state’s high COVID-19 death rate during an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union ” with host Jake Tapper, who told him: “You’re not doing anything.”
Reeves — who has failed to require coronavirus safety rules – rambled on about “lagging indicators”:
Jake, as I mentioned earlier, deaths, unfortunately, are a lagging indicator, Our total number of cases went from 100 to 3,600 and over the last two weeks has declined. They’ve been cut in half from 3,600 to 1,800. When you wanted me to come on three or four weeks ago and talk about our number of cases then you want to talk about our hospitalizations, now you want to talk about a lagging indicator, which is sad, and it’s horrible.
Tapper reminded Reeves of his terrible record:
I’m saying to you, your way’s not working and whether you say it’s a lagging indicator, or whatever your argument is. Mississippi now has, if it were its own country, the second-worst per capita death rate in the world, behind only Peru. and I’m saying, are you going to try to do anything to change that and I’m not hearing an answer.
Reeves failed to offer any changes, and defended his record, played what-about-ism with Democratic governors and accused Tapper of making the deaths political:
Well, what I have said to you repeatedly, Jake, is that Mississippi has taken action, Mississippi has seen a significant uptick in the total number of Mississippians that have gotten the vaccine. We’ve seen our case numbers have fallen dramatically in the last two weeks. And so ultimately, as I have said, deaths, unfortunately, is a lagging indicator, we’ve seen cases, again, cut in half in Mississippi. And these other states that you refuse to talk about, perhaps because they have Democratic governors, you don’t want to talk about them. But the reality is, you and the president and so many other people want to make this about politics.
(Source: CNN via YouTube)