WATCH: Maddow goes off on GOP governor for not alerting residents of meat packing plant COVID-19 outbreak
May 27, 202 By Bob Brigham


MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow on Wednesday harshly criticized Iowa’s Republican governor for not alerting residents to an apparent COVID-19 outbreak at a meatpacking plant.

“The highest per-capita infection rate in the state of Iowa right now is in one Buena Vista County, population around 20,000,” Maddow explained. “More than 3% of the entire population of the county is now confirmed to be infected.”

“Now, where are all of these infections coming from?” she asked rhetorically. “You know by now, right, without me even having to say it. You know, and I know, even without having to look it up on a map. And local reporters know exactly what drives those kinds of epidemic spike numbers. Everybody knows what’s going on.”

“But boy does the governor of Iowa, Kim Reynolds, not want to admit what it is,” she said, introducing a clip of the Republican governor.

The Reynolds administration said, in the clip, that they would not identify the source of an outbreak until 10% of the workforce tests positive.

“We’re going to wait to tell you, we’re going to wait to tell the citizens of this county that is now the most infected county in the state and who knows where that is coming from, we will are going to wait until it is really, really, really bad, until we’ve decided to move testing in there, until we’ve decided it is more than 10% of the workplace, we will wait until then before we tell anybody anything about it,” she paraphrased.

“It is an infectious disease,” she reminded.

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