Chris Cuomo Calls Out Brother Andrew for Claiming Critics Said He Was ‘Too Prepared’ for Coronavirus: ‘Show Me One Piece’ Saying That
CNN’s Chris Cuomo publicly called out big brother Andrew over the latter’s unsubstantiated claim that the press has been critical of the New York governor for being “too prepared” for the coronavirus outbreak.
In yet another of the pair’s part-serious, part-jokey interviews — which have raised legitimate media ethics questions — the CNN host began by asking his elder sibling about what motivated the timing of his state’s response to the pandemic. The New York governor took it as an opportunity to boast.
“You’re not going to be able to find a state in the United States of America that moved faster than New York state,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo claimed, before hitting back at unnamed critics. “We had our first case, 15 days later, I closed the schools. Nobody had called for that. Nineteen days later, I closed down the state. When you close down New York, you close down one of the economic engines on this globe. And no state did that faster than we did it. As a matter of fact, I took a lot of heat for moving as fast as I did. Now they want to say: ‘Oh, governor, maybe you did too many — you were too prepared, maybe you didn’t need to do everything you did. ‘ You know, they’re going to do that game all day long. But look, I react to numbers and data and science. We are looking at projections and models, by experts who who analyze this data. And I follow the data, right? This is not about what I think politically or what I think because I think really I’m a doctor. I just follow the data. And that’s what we did.”
Gov. Cuomo’s self-congratulation comes just two days after a damning analysis from former CDC head Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, who estimated that if New York had implemented a shelter-in-place policy one or two weeks sooner, the state could have lowered its death rate by 50 to 80 percent.
After yet another back-and-forth of bros busting each other’s chops with veiled insults, CNN’s Cuomo zeroed in on his brother’s “too prepared” claim.
“I will buy you lunch for every time that you can show one piece that showed you were ‘too prepared’ for the pandemic, OK?” the CNN host said, clearly not buying into his brother’s my-greatest-weakness-is-I-work-too-hard humblebrag. “Any piece you can show me that says ‘Cuomo, you were too prepared for this pandemic! You did too much, too soon!’ I don’t think you’ll find any pieces saying that.”
“What is the wager?”
“Whatever you want,” little brother Cuomo shot back, rolling his eyes. “That you were ‘too prepared?’ You did too much, too fast?”
“Oh really?”
“Yes,” CNN’s Cuomo confirmed.
“That, compared to the projections, that the actuality never came to the projection…” Gov. Cuomo then said, completely restating his previous claim.
“I’ll give you any context you want,” CNN’s Cuomo responded in the cross-talk, before recognizing that this brother had deflected away from his dubious claim and was back to being serious. “Well, look, that’s a separate question I think you got to prepare more than the actual numbers, I hope you’re right about that.”
Watch the video above, via CNN.
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