Mississippi Governor Announces Bold Plan to Do Nothing to Stop COVID

A few months into the pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci suggested that the COVID crisis could cause a similar level of devastation as the 1918 influenza pandemic without sufficient government intervention. “That was the mother of all pandemics and truly historic,” Fauci said in July 2020. “I hope we don’t even approach that with this, but it does have the makings of the possibility of...approaching that in seriousness.” The comparison, which came as the United States was closing in on 150,000 deaths, didn’t seem all that unreasonable, but it sent the Trump White House into a fit. “Not only is that false,” then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows seethed to Fox News. “It is irresponsible to suggest so.”

More than a year later, it turns out Meadows was kind of right. Coronavirus really isn’t like the 1918 flu—it’s actually worse. The U.S. on Monday reached 675,000 COVID deaths, the approximate number of Americans that died during the influenza pandemic of 1918 to 1921. The scale of that loss would be difficult to process under any circumstance. But the continued drumbeat of death is even more maddening, given the availability of free, life-saving vaccines that we did not have in the pandemic a century ago.

That the U.S. has access to vaccines that much of the world does not, and still can’t bring the crisis under control, is owing in large part to the incompetence and recklessness of politicians like Tate Reeves, who won’t stop playing politics with the pandemic, even as the people they were elected to serve die from the virus in stunning numbers. Reeves, the Mississippi governor, is presiding over one of the most devastating outbreaks not just in America, but the world. But in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday, he defended his response, making clear he would not do anything different.

“Governor, if Mississippi were a country, you would have the second worst per capita death toll in the world,” a weary-looking Tapper told Reeves. “And I’m saying: Are you going to do anything to try to change that?”

“The reality is the Delta variant is very transmissible and it is moving around the country,” Reeves replied after some gibberish about deaths being a “lagging indicator.” “If you want to talk about cases right now, talk about Kentucky or West Virginia or what’s happening in North Carolina or moving into southern Virginia.”

“I’m going to ask you about your state,” Tapper returned, scrutinizing Reeves’ political stand against the Biden administration’s more assertive efforts to combat COVID. “He’s trying to save lives,” Tapper said of President Joe Biden. “And I’m saying to you: Your way is not working.”

“I’m saying, are you going to do anything to change that,” Tapper continued, “and I’m not hearing an answer.”

That’s because Reeves, along with other reckless governors like Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott, doesn’t have a good answer—just the same reflexive outrage and hyperbolic nonsense equating vaccine mandates to an “attack” on the American people. “In the midst of a pandemic that has already taken over 660,000 lives, I proposed a requirement for COVID vaccines, and the governor of that state calls it a ‘tyrannical-type move,’” Biden said last week. “This is the worst kind of politics.”

Throughout this pandemic, the right has followed Donald Trump’s lead in downplaying the crisis and greatly exaggerating the infringements on personal liberty posed by public health precautions. Combine that with a threat like coronavirus and its even more infectious Delta variant, and it’s perhaps no surprise that the country will hit a number of pandemic deaths in a year and a half what it took about three years to reach in the influenza crisis. There has been some cause for optimism of late, thanks to Biden’s more aggressive moves and Pfizer’s announcement Monday that its vaccine has proven safe and effective in kids—setting the stage for shots to be rolled out to school-aged children later this fall. But the pandemic isn’t through with us yet. The U.S. will surpass the death toll of the crisis that Fauci described last year as the “mother of all pandemics”—but, he warned Sunday, could avoid even more devastation if it can overcome vaccine holdouts.