NV Gov Rebukes Las Vegas Mayor’s Bizarre Argument to Reopen Economy: Won’t Let My State Be Used as ‘Placebo’

Nevada Governor Steve Sisolak struck a completely different tone about the threat from the coronavirus compared to the mayor of his state’s largest city, Carolyn Goodman, who had, just hours earlier, undertaken one of the most bizarre, head-shaking interviews in cable history with CNN’s Anderson Cooper.

Appearing with the same CNN host that interviewed Goodman on Wednesday afternoon — an explosive media moment that made big news in all the wrong ways for Goodman — Sisolak tried to lend an air of calm and reason to his state’s public profile. And he began his interview be pointedly pushing back against the mayor’s push for an immediate reopening of the city’s casinos because, as she claimed: “I think we’ve had viruses for years that have been here.”

“We are clearly not ready to open,” Sisolak said, bluntly. “We have, sadly, since you did that interview, we now have 187 deaths in the state of Nevada, but over 4,100 positive cases. I will not allow the citizens of Nevada, our Nevadans to be used as a control group, placebo, whatever she wants to call that. I will not allow that. I can tell you our largest trade union on the strip, culinary union 226 lost 11 members. They lost 11 members to covid-19 already. I’m going to do everything I can to make sure they don’t lose 11 more.”

Cooper then stripped away Goodman’s absurd claims and flawed logic to put a more reasonable question to the governor. “I’m sure you want to get back to business,” the CNN host noted. “What do you say, though, to those who say, ‘Look, you know, the solution to this is keeping us all locked up in our homes and socially distant. It’s not worth the pain and the cost, economic and personal to people long term?'”

“We need a phased-in approach to getting where we need to get to,” Sisolak said. “We’ve been able to keep our numbers as low as they are right now, the 187, 41,00 because of that. I’ve got an enormous amount of cooperation from the vast majority of our citizens. Now there are clearly some who don’t see things my way and they’ve resisted. But most elected officials, the mayor of Reno, Hillary Schieve, chair of the Clark County Commission, Marilyn Kirkpatrick, did nothing but help me to expand our testing and expand our tracing and to open, open at the proper time. Las Vegas is a great place to be. It’s a fun time, it’s a great place to have a convention. Come for a party, an extended vacation, whatever that may be. And we want to welcome everybody back to Las Vegas. We want to welcome them back to the lights on the strip. But that’s not today and it’s not tomorrow.”

Watch the video above, via CNN.

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