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Joe Biden’s coronavirus vaccination mandate for federal workers is a “tyrannical attack on hard-working Americans,” Tate Reeves insisted on Sunday, even as the state he rules teetered below a death rate that if Mississippi was a country it would make the second most affected in the world, after Peru.
Speaking to CNN’s State of the Union, the Republican said, “This is the president’s attack on hard-working Americans and Mississippians that he wants to choose between getting punched in the arm and their ability to feed their families. “
According to Johns Hopkins University, more than 9,200 people have died from Covid-19 in Mississippi, out of a U.S. death toll of more than 672,000.
Vaccination use has increased nationwide as businesses and public authorities impose shots, but resistance remains strong in many Republican states.
Also on CNN Sunday, Anthony Fauci, the White House’s chief medical adviser, was asked if a million people could die in the United States before Covid was contained. He said he “didn’t hope,” but avoiding such a grim total depended on widespread vaccination.
Mississippi has the highest death rate among US states, with 306 deaths per 100,000, or one in 326 people. Only Peru has a higher death rate, at 612 per 100,000 people.
Reeves has defended his state’s immunization record and said he sees cases dwindling.
But Biden singled out Mississippi at the White House Thursday, saying children there “need to be vaccinated against measles, mumps, rubella, chickenpox, hepatitis B, polio, tetanus and more.” [But] I’m proposing a requirement for Covid vaccines and the governor of this state calls it a quote, “tyrannical type movement”? “
Reeves told CNN: “The president… knows he doesn’t have the power to do it in my opinion, but he wants to change the political narrative away from Afghanistan and away from the other issues that are driving his poll numbers. into the ground and focus on anything, especially a political fight, other than these issues. “
Biden’s tenure is legally supported by federal Occupational Safety and Health Act. Either way, Republicans have claimed federal overbreadth or outright tyranny, an ever-powerful theme of the American right.
Reeves said that while “every” death from Covid in Mississippi “breaks my heart … if this president has the ability to mandate vaccines, what powers don’t we give this president, what the heck? he does not have the capacity to do?
“… That should scare Democrats as much as Republicans, because if we give an individual the unilateral power to do whatever they want, be it a hit in the arm or whatever, then this country is in deep trouble,” deep, big problems, and it’s not something I’m willing to support and allow him to do.
Since Mississippi’s way of tackling Covid was clearly “a failure,” host Jake Tapper said, would Reeves try to change anything?
Reeves said, “Yeah, well, obviously in Mississippi our legislature is a part-time legislature. Sometimes I wonder if in America, if our Congress was part-time, we wouldn’t be in a better position.
He also insisted that Covid deaths were a “lagging indicator” of the situation in any state.
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