Biden Calls State Decisions to End Mask Mandates
‘Neanderthal Thinking’
Recent announcements by the governors of Texas and
Mississippi have health officials pleading for Americans to continue social
distancing and mask-wearing.
By Maria Jimenez
Moya, Campbell Robertson, Erin Coulehan and James Dobbins
Published
March 3, 2021
Updated
March 4, 2021, 12:22 a.m. ET
HOUSTON —
President Biden on Wednesday strongly criticized the decisions by the governors
of Texas and Mississippi to lift statewide mask mandates, calling the plans “a
big mistake” that reflected “Neanderthal thinking,” as his administration tries
to manage the pandemic while state leaders set their own plans.
The
president said it was critical for public officials to follow the guidance of
doctors and public health leaders as the coronavirus vaccination campaign gains
momentum.
“The last
thing we need is Neanderthal thinking that in the meantime, everything’s fine,
take off your mask and forget it,” Mr. Biden told reporters at the White House.
“It’s critical, critical, critical, critical that they follow the science.”
“Wear a
mask and stay socially distanced,” he added. “And I know you all know that. I
wish the heck some of our elected officials knew it.”
The sudden
announcement on Tuesday by Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas that he would lift a
statewide mask requirement and allow all businesses to operate at full capacity
was a surprising development in a state where vaccinations considerably trail
the national average, more than 7,000 new cases are being reported a day and,
in recent weeks, ominous variants of the virus have appeared.
The decision
by Mr. Abbott, a Republican, frustrated public health experts and a range of
city officials, coming two weeks after a large winter storm collapsed the
state’s power grid and left millions of Texans without power or water,
potentially fueling the spread of disease.
Still, the
move was welcomed by some Texans, particularly those whose livelihoods and
businesses have suffered over the past year. “I’m proud to be Texan and this is
the first step to bring Texas back,” said Amber Rodriguez, 32, who owns an
air-conditioning company in Houston.
Kendall
Czech, 26, a leasing agent who moved to Dallas last summer from California in
part because of that state’s strict Covid-19 restrictions, agreed. “I think
that the governor just gained some guts.”
But for
many other Texans, the announcement, framed as long-awaited relief after an
exhausting stretch of isolation and hardship, was anything but reassuring for a
state that has recorded more than 44,000 deaths and nearly 2.7 million cases.
If anything, some said, it would only prolong the misery.
Sylvester
Turner, the mayor of Houston, called the announcement a “dangerous” attempt “to
deflect from the statewide failure” in handling the storm. Mayor Ron Nirenberg
of San Antonio called the announcement a “huge mistake.” Dr. Victor Treviño,
the health authority of Laredo, said he feared that the decision would
“eliminate all the gains that we have achieved.”
“We know
from the science that masks work and that social distancing works,” said Dr.
Katelyn Jetelina, an epidemiologist with UTHealth School of Public Health in
Dallas, who believed that the upheaval of the winter storm, the arrival of new
virus strains and the governor’s planned reopening, which goes into effect on
March 10, would further postpone any return to normalcy. “We have a lot of
things going against us right now.”
Since the
start of the pandemic about a year ago, states have not taken a unified
approach to the coronavirus. Even within states, restrictions have varied
widely from one county to the next. At the time of Mr. Abbott’s announcement,
12 other states had no statewide mask mandate — a number that grew to 13 when
the mandate ended in Mississippi on Wednesday night. South Dakota never had
one.
But the
decision to reopen Texas, with its 29 million residents, comes at a delicate
time in the punishing season of the coronavirus, as public health officials
plead with people to not let impatience outrun prudence. With vaccinations
steadily rolling out nationwide and the worst of the pandemic appearing now to
have an end date, the guidance from health experts and federal health officials
has been consistent: Keep your guard up a little while longer.
“Now is not
the time to release all restrictions,” Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said at a White House briefing on
Wednesday.
Federal
officials have urged people to keep wearing masks, and to double them up. Dr.
Anthony S. Fauci, Mr. Biden’s chief medical adviser for Covid-19, suggested
that masks may even be needed for another year. “When it goes way down, and the
overwhelming majority of the people in the population are vaccinated, then I
would feel comfortable in saying, ‘We need to pull back on the masks,’” he said
in a recent interview on CNN.
Neither
measurement has been met in Texas. While the tallying of new virus cases and
deaths was disrupted extensively by the recent storm, thousands of new cases
have been reported every day and the death toll remains high. As of this week,
13 percent of Texans have received at least one vaccine dose, among the lowest
rates in the country. And Houston recently became the first American city to
record five of the Covid-19 variants circulating worldwide.
“I don’t
know what they’re thinking,” said Ernestine Cain, 52, a home health aide who
was picking up a case of bottled water at a distribution site in San Antonio on
Wednesday morning. “You still need to give it time. You can’t just cut it like
that.”
Clay
Jenkins, the county judge of Dallas County, said the governor “absolutely”
decided to reopen the state to distract residents from the sky-high electricity
bills and credit card balances they faced after the storm.
“This gives
people something to talk about other than the state’s failure to protect the
power grid,” he said.
In a
statement on Tuesday, the governor had defended his decision by saying: “We
must now do more to restore livelihoods and normalcy for Texans by opening
Texas 100 percent. Make no mistake, Covid-19 has not disappeared, but it is
clear from the recoveries, vaccinations, reduced hospitalizations and safe
practices that Texans are using that state mandates are no longer needed.”
But that
sense of optimism was lost on local officials like Ricardo Samaniego, the
county judge of El Paso County, where according to a New York Times database
one in seven residents is known to have had the virus.
“We still
have mortuaries that are saturated,” he said. “We still have bodies that have
been there for two to three months.”
He said the
leaders of the six largest counties in the state agreed that Mr. Abbott’s
decision was premature. But he said he saw no indication that their opinions
were sought, which left him frustrated and dejected.
“We were
doing so well,” he said. “We had worked so hard.”
It remains
to be seen whether Mr. Abbott’s decision will trigger a wave of similar
decisions by other governors eager to lift restrictions. On the same afternoon
as Mr. Abbott’s speech, the governor of Mississippi, Tate Reeves, also a
Republican, announced he was lifting the statewide mask mandate and rescinding
capacity limits on businesses there.
“We
continue to suggest that you do the right thing,” said Mr. Reeves, who, like
Mr. Abbott, urged people to continue to wear masks despite the lifting of the
state order. The precautions remain the same, Mr. Reeves said; the difference
is that “the government is no longer telling you what you can and cannot do.”
In a tweet
on Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Reeves acknowledged Mr. Biden’s “Neanderthal”
comment and pushed back: “Mississippians don’t need handlers. As numbers drop,
they can assess their choices and listen to experts. I guess I just think we
should trust Americans, not insult them.”
Under the
new orders in Texas and Mississippi, private businesses can maintain mask
requirements. Many appeared on Wednesday to do just that, with Target and
Macy’s among the largest to say face coverings would remain mandatory in Texas
stores. Masks will be optional for customers in H-E-B, a popular grocery store
in Texas.
Under
Mississippi’s order, cities and counties can still impose local mask mandates,
while in Texas, a jurisdiction can impose restrictions only if Covid-19
hospitalizations rise above a certain level. And even then, people cannot be
penalized by local governments for not wearing masks.
Dr. Mary
Carol Miller, a physician at Greenwood Leflore Hospital in the Mississippi
Delta, said that even a lightly enforced statewide mask order was helpful,
sending the message that the virus was still circulating and that masks were
the best protection. Without the order, she saw weeks ahead of more sickness,
hospitalizations and deaths in a part of the country where the pandemic has
already been devastating.
“The
light’s there at the very end of the tunnel, and now we’ve made the tunnel
longer,” Dr. Miller said. “It’s foolish. It’s beyond foolish.”
In Texas,
after an onslaught of challenges, from the brutal winter storm to widespread
power failures to water outages across the state, some saw another factor at
work in the reopening debate: politics.
“It’s
pretty obvious to people who pay attention that this is just a move to change
the subject from the infrastructure failures that we just saw,” said Kaitlyn
Urenda-Culpepper, an El Pasoan now living in Dallas, echoing a commonly heard
sentiment across the state.
But Ms.
Urenda-Culpepper, whose mother died from Covid-19 in July, acknowledged that
the governor had the power to make such decisions, as frustrating and enraging
as they might be. And given that, there was no choice but to hope for the best.
“I don’t
want him to be wrong,” she said. “But obviously for the greater good of the
people, I’m like, ‘Man, you better be right and not cost us tens of thousands
more people.’”
Maria
Jimenez Moya reported from Houston, Campbell Robertson from Pittsburgh, Erin
Coulehan from El Paso and James Dobbins from San Antonio. David Montgomery
contributed reporting from Austin, Texas, Marina Trahan Martinez from Dallas
and Ellen Ann Fentress from Jackson, Miss.
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