U.S. President Joe Biden speaks during a bipartisan meeting on cancer legislation at the White House Oval Office in Washington, March 3, 2021.
Alex Brandon | Pool | Reuters
President Joe Biden on Wednesday criticized states that lifted Covid-19’s restrictions on business and rescinded masquerade mandates for residents, calling the measures “a big mistake.”
Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves, both Republicans, announced on Tuesday that they would allow companies to reopen at 100% capacity and remove mandates from the masks. Biden’s comments were in response to shouted questions from the press specifically about the two states.
“Look, I hope that now everyone has realized that these masks make a difference,” Biden told reporters at the White House. “We are about to fundamentally change the nature of this disease because of the way we can put vaccines in people’s arms … The last thing, the last thing we need is Neanderthal thinking, which,” In the meantime, everything is fine. Take off the mask. Forget it. “It still matters.”
He added that it is “critical, critical, critical” that state officials “follow science” and encourage Americans to continue to wear masks and follow all public health guidelines.
“I know you all know that,” Biden told reporters. “I would like some of our elected officials to wish.”
In response to Biden’s remarks, Reeves tweeted that “Mississippi does not need manipulators. As the numbers drop, they can evaluate their choices and listen to experts. I think we should just trust Americans, not insult them.”
In announcing their decisions, Reeves and Abbott cited the decreasing number of new Covid-19 cases and the increased availability of vaccines as reasons to end the restrictions. But federal officials have warned that the decline in new cases appears to be slowing and that the emergence of new variants of the coronavirus may lead to a resurgence.
Abbott officials did not immediately return CNBC’s request for comment.
Both governors adopted a similar tone when making their announcements on Tuesday, saying that people should still follow public health guidelines, but that state mandates are not appropriate. Despite the reversal of restrictions, some companies in both states said they will still require masking in their stores.
On Monday, before the two governors made their announcements, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned state officials against lifting public health restrictions too quickly.
In the past seven days, the U.S. has reported an average of more than 65,400 new cases daily, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. This is well below the peak of about 250,000 new cases every day that the country reported in early January, but it is still well above the rate of infection that the US saw during the summer when the virus swept the Solar Belt.
“At this level of cases, with the variants spreading, we can completely lose the ground we have conquered with difficulty,” said Walensky on Monday. “With these statistics, I am really concerned that more states are revoking the exact public health measures that we recommend to protect the people of Covid-19.”
“Please listen to me clearly: at this level of cases with propagation of variants, we can completely lose the ground conquered with so much effort,” she said.