Anderson Cooper Debunks VP Pence’s Claim Rising Covid Cases Are Merely Due to More Testing: ‘He Is Lying and Telling Other Authority Figures to Lie Too’
During a “Keeping ’em Honest” segment on Tuesday, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper offered a lengthy fact-check and debunking of Vice President Mike Pence’s comments downplaying the growing numbers of coronavirus cases in many states claimed they are mostly a function of increased testing.
Pence wrote an op-ed in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal dismissing fears of a “second wave” of the Covid-19 pandemic and trying to blame the media for trying to “scare the American people every step of the way.” This, even as positive cases are increasing in 21 states and remain steady in 11 others. And in several states, California, Texas, Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina, increasingly positive cases have been accompanied by higher positivity rates and hospitalizations.
“In states like Florida and Texas and Arizona, each of those states hit records for new cases today,” Cooper noted. “And it’s not the case in Oklahoma, either. Cases there are doubling every month. The curve, as you see, is not only climbing but climbing more steeply than it was even a couple weeks ago.”
“This is what the president and vice president are being dishonest about,” Cooper added. “Today we heard audio obtained of a conference call this week in which the vice president told state governors to spin the figures.”
In the audio, Pence is heard giving some public relations advice: “As we talk about these things, make sure to continue to explain to your citizens the magnitude of increasing testing in most of the cases where we are seeing some marginal rising number, that’s more a result of the extraordinary work you’re doing expanding testing.”
“In suggesting that testing is the main reason that case numbers are growing, the vice president is simply not telling the truth,” Cooper clarified. “A senior U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official telling CNN the vice president is selectively choosing data to make his point, ‘cherry picking’ it being less than truthful. Put more bluntly in that quiver in [Pence’s] voice that says Mom and apple pie, he is lying and telling authority figures to lie, too, about something that could get people killed.”
“The virus will let us know it in due time. There is no need to come to it because the truth is there,” Cooper pointed out. “Reading from the Oklahoma state health department’s latest report, which predicts and I quote ‘an increase in the number of cases and hospitalizations due to Covid-19.’ In other words, it is not just more testing as the vice president suggested that governors say, if it was just, you know, more people are being tested, then hospitalizations wouldn’t rise, would they? But they are.”
Watch the video above, via CNN.
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