During an interview aired on Tuesday’s broadcast of NewsNation’s “Cuomo,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) defended California’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic compared to Florida and also praised the “magnificent job in the beginning” of the pandemic of former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D).

Newsom stated that there are things he would have done differently about how he handled the pandemic.

He then told host Chris Cuomo that “your brother did a magnificent job in the beginning. None of us knew what we did, no one. We’re all geniuses in hindsight, not just experts, geniuses. I mean, he was trying to find body bags. I was trying to find body bags. I had to bring them from other states, mobile morgues. People forget all that. It’s literally — it’s amnesia what we were up against early. And you had nurses saying wait, wait, we can’t get masks, before you hand them out to everybody else, they were desperate, desperate. So it was understandable, even Fauci in the beginning, there was some ambiguity in that. Now, in hindsight, we could have expressed that more clearly. That’s a perfect example of an area when we look back, now we understand.”

Newsom added, “So, I applauded what your brother did early in this pandemic. And, by the way, the facts bear out the successes. And this, to me, is the most galling part, particularly when you have the Republican Party claiming this mantle of life, you look at the per-capita deaths in these states, including Florida, it’s 28.8% higher per-capita deaths in the State of Florida than in the State of California. We outperformed them in GDP in 2020, we contracted at a lower rate, and we had a higher growth rate in 2021. And in education, in 3 out of 4 categories, they had higher learning loss than states like California. New York fared similarly. So, there’s a lot of revisionist history here on the pages — with all due respect — of The Wall Street Journal and others that are sort of segmenting facts and winning the debate because we’re exhausted about this conversation. But I think we have not done the analysis and we’ve not done justice to a self-reflective critique of our own relationship to this and the actions that we took, and I think that’s important for all of us, the American people.”

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