Gov. Tate Reeves makes national headlines for downplaying MS COVID death toll on CNN
Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves is making national and international headlines after an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday morning.
The state’s first-in-the-nation COVID mortality rate was highlighted, and Reeves downplayed the death toll, calling it only a “lagging indicator” of the virus’ impact across the state.
“Tate Reeves and the high cost of covid incompetence,” declared a Washington Post opinion piece on Sunday evening.
“Mississippi governor claims vaccine mandate is ‘attack on hardworking Americans,’” read the British and international news site The Guardian.
Rolling Stone titled their op-ed, “Governor of State Leading Nation in Covid Death Rate Can’t Name a Thing He’d Do Differently.”
Twitter buzzed with the Republican governor’s name, trending across the country and dominating countless national headlines.
“The mistakes of another Republican governor, Tate Reeves of Mississippi, haven’t gotten nearly enough attention. Until, that is, a disastrous appearance Sunday on CNN’s ‘State of the Union,’” wrote James Downie of the Washington Post.
During the TV appearance, veteran CNN reporter Jake Tapper said if Mississippi alone were compared to countries across the globe, the number of people dead of COVID compared to total population is now second only to Peru.
Reeves consistently circled back to talking points about the power of the presidency, and that “hard-working” Americans would take a hit if they turned down mandatory vaccination. Currently, Mississippi’s overall vaccination rate is 42% compared to the national average of 54%.
“Well, again, over 9,000 Mississippians have passed away with COVID and every single one of them breaks my heart,” Reeves said. “It is a very difficult situation that we as Mississippians and we as Americans find ourselves in. But we also have to understand as we look forward: if this president has the ability to mandate vaccines, what powers do we not grant this president? What does he not have the ability to do? And for my friends on the left, I just want to point something out. This should scare you as well.”
Reeves also said Mississippi has seen its case number fall “dramatically in the past two weeks.”
State Epidemiologist Paul Byers last week noted that COVID numbers across the state were trending downward, but Mississippi is still “in the thick” of a delta surge.
“We’re still at very high levels of cases, hospitalizations, deaths, unfortunately. We’ve had almost 20,000 cases that have been reported this month alone, and we’re just still halfway through the month. So we anticipate that those are going to increase at the levels of daily case reports,” Byers said.
Reeves’ appearance with Tapper came after President Joe Biden on Thursday called out Mississippi and Reeves during a press conference as one of many Republican states objecting to his vaccine mandate or weekly testing proposal for companies employing over 100 people.
The president took offense to Reeve’s calling the mandate a “tyrannical-type move.”
“A tyrannical-type move? That’s the worst kind of politics because it’s putting the lives of citizens in their states, especially children, at risk. And I refuse to give in to it,” Biden said at a White House press conference.
Tapper pointed out that Biden has said he’s invoking a workplace safety law called the Occupation Occupational Safety and Health Act to justify the mandate, which says that the government can impose an emergency order if it determines ‘that employees are exposed to grave danger from exposure to substances or agents determined to be toxic or physically harmful or from new hazards.”
“You’re calling the move tyrannical,” Tapper said. “I mean, if there ever were a reason to use this law, wouldn’t it be during a pandemic with almost two thousand Americans dying every day?”
This article and live event is supported by the Journalism and Public Information Fund, a fund of the Gulf Coast Community Foundation.
