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Many states, cities, companies and schools have been scrambling to introduce new mandates since Tuesday, when the federal health authorities in Delta variant hotspots recommended that fully vaccinated people also wear masks again in public indoor spaces and pushed for universal masking in schools.
Not Texas.
In an executive order passed Thursday, Governor Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of the second largest state, banned local governments and state agencies from prescribing vaccines, saying that protection from the virus should be a matter of personal responsibility and should not be enforced by one Government Ordinance.
The order also reiterated its previous policy prohibiting local officials from requesting face masks, despite city guides increasingly being called for more flexibility to reverse the re-spread of Covid.
The daily average of cases in Texas on Friday was 8,820, according to a New York Times database, up 209 percent over the past 14 days. Cities across the state are facing a surge in hospital admissions, a reminder of the alarming spikes that occurred before Covid cases started sniffing down with the arrival of vaccines.
With 56 percent of the state’s population remaining unvaccinated – including nearly five million ineligible children under the age of 12 – health officials have raised concerns about the state’s vulnerability.
Mr. Abbott is hardly the only elected official who has reacted with defiance to the CDC’s new guidelines. On Friday, Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis signed an executive order denying mask mandates in schools and giving parents the final say on whether their children wear masks.
“There will be no lockdowns in Florida,” said Mr. DeSantis, cheering at a restaurant in Cape Coral, Florida. “There will be no school closings. There will be no restrictions and no mandates. “
But Mr. Abbott’s order went further. “No government agency can force a person to receive a Covid-19 vaccine that is administered as part of an emergency permit,” the order says. It also prohibits any public entity or private entity receiving public funding, including grants and loans, from requiring consumers to provide evidence of vaccination prior to entering or receiving any service provided by the entity.
The order encourages public safety measures such as wearing face masks and practicing social distancing, especially in areas with high transmission rates, but adds, “No individual may be required by a jurisdiction to wear face-covering or require the use of face-covering.”
Mr Abbott, who is due to be re-elected next year, is not against vaccines. He was photographed receiving a Covid scan at a hospital in Austin on December 22nd and said he wanted to show his Texans how “safe and easy” it was, according to The Texas Tribune.
And in a statement accompanying his appointment, Mr. Abbott said vaccines “are the most effective defense against the virus” and “remain in abundance”.
However, he stressed that vaccination in the state of Texas “would always be voluntary – never enforced”.
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