Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Wednesday threatened to sue Austin and Travis County after local officials, citing Covid-19’s continuing threat, said they would continue to require residents to wear masks. even “when away from home”.
Paxton’s threat came on the same day that the state’s mask mandate, which Texas Governor Greg Abbott eliminated last week, officially expired.
“City / county leaders must not think clearly,” said Paxton in a tweet. “Maybe it’s the five-fold masking oxygen deprivation. Whatever the case, they have tried this before. They lost. Travis County and Austin have a few hours to comply with state law or I will sue them. “
Paxton, who as Abbott is a Republican, addressed the threat to Judge Andy Brown of Travis County, Mayor Steve Adler of Austin and Dr. Mark Escott of the Austin-Travis County Health Authority. They received until Wednesday night to obey.
Adler responded to the prosecution threat by saying that he and Brown will continue to comply with security orders. “We will fight the attack by Governor Abbott and Attorney General Paxton against doctors and data for as long as possible,” Adler told the Austin American Statesman in a statement on Wednesday.
“I believe that leaders need to be clear and unambiguous in their communications and messages about masking. The masks work! The governor and the attorney general are simply wrong.”
Escott made it clear on Tuesday that, as a public health expert, he disagreed with Abbott’s decision to suspend the mask’s mandate and said Austin’s restrictions would remain in effect until April 15.
“Wearing a face shield is one of the easiest ways to delay the transmission of disease in our community,” said Escott in a statement released by the city of Austin. “While vaccine administration is underway, we are not yet in a place of collective immunity and people need to wear face covers in public and close to non-family members, so that we can prevent an increase in cases.”
Only 8.5 percent of the Texas population was fully vaccinated on Wednesday, the latest statistics showed.
The Austin city statement also included the following line: “In the city of Austin, an individual must also wear a face shield when they are away from home.”
Austin, which is also the capital of the Lone Star State, is not the only big city in Texas that is resisting Abbott’s executive order.
But Austin’s challenge seems to go further than that of Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, El Paso and San Antonio, all of which have promised to keep the masking mandates in place, but only on city properties or public schools.
The US government also continues to demand that Texans make masks on all federal and court buildings and on public transport.
Abbott’s surprise announcement last week that he was abandoning the mask’s mandate and loosening other restrictions on Covid-19 was severely criticized by doctors, who warned that this could trigger another outbreak of new cases. Political opponents accused the governor of trying to distract voters from the state’s disastrous response to the deadly winter storm that shut off the power grid and left millions of Texans shaking in their homes for days.
President Joe Biden called Abbott’s action, as well as similar action by Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves, examples of “Neanderthal thinking” and a “big mistake”. Biden criticized both leaders for easing restrictions, even after the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned against complacency in the face of emerging variants of the coronavirus.
Abbott insisted that “state mandates are no longer needed”, although he admitted that “Covid has not suddenly disappeared”.
“Now it’s time to open Texas 100 percent,” he said.
According to Abbott’s executive order, private companies can reopen fully, as long as Covid-19’s hospitalization rate remains low.
Abbott’s directive also clearly states that local governments will not be able to fine people who refuse to wear masks in the businesses they still require.
“No jurisdiction can impose a penalty of any kind for not using facial coverage or forcing customers or employees to use facial coverage,” says his request.
But Abbott’s order also allows local authorities to “enforce infringement laws and remove violators at the request of a commercial establishment or other property owner.”
Judge Nelson Wolff of Bexar County in San Antonio said local officials would not hesitate to do so.
“If a company calls and says, ‘This guy is breaking into my property and not following the rules I have, you can go out and remove him’ … the sheriff said he would go out and remove them,” said Wolff.
Masks will also be required for the already small number of participants in the NCAA women’s basketball tournament, which San Antonio is organizing this year.
Meanwhile, the Texas Rangers cited Abbott’s executive order in their announcement on Wednesday that it plans to fill the stands this season at the Globe Life Stadium in Arlington to 100 percent capacity. The Rangers are the first Major League Baseball team to do this.
But the team will still require fans to wear masks, unless they are eating or drinking, and will give “three strokes” before being penalized for non-compliance.
“We are totally confident that we can do this in a responsible and safe manner,” said team and COO president Neil Leibman. “There is a lot of pent-up demand from people who want to go to events in a safe environment.”
Emily Berman, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Houston Law Center, said federal law protects Americans from discrimination based on race, color, sex, disability, religion, family status, nationality and citizenship – but “doesn’t wear a mask. “
Still, Berman told NBC News and other local media outlets, companies can require people to wear masks and customers “do not have a constitutional right to enter a particular store or business location”.
“Companies can have their own policies,” said Berman. “I mean, how many restaurants have you seen that say ‘no shirt, no shoes, no service’?”
Texas continues to report nearly 3,000 new cases of coronavirus a day and worrying numbers have increased by 1.6 percent in the last week, according to data compiled by The Covid Tracking Project, even as more and more Texans are vaccinated.
Public health experts warned of another possible outbreak of new infections by Covid-19 after the winter blast that forced many Texans to leave their homes and go to warm shelters, where there was little or no social distance.
Since the start of the pandemic, Texas – the country’s second most populous state after California, with almost 29 million people – has reported about 2.7 million cases and almost 46,000 deaths from Covid-19, according to the latest NBC News numbers.
Most of these infections and deaths came after Abbott failed to take advice from public health experts and, like Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida, reopened his state after just a short quarantine. Both governors closed bars last June and issued other public health mandates after the pandemic began to spread in their states.
In making Texas the largest state in the country to end the mask’s term, Abbott argued that his state was now “in a completely different position” from last March, when he reluctantly issued his first executive orders aimed at slowing the spread of the coronavirus. .
“We now have vaccines,” said Abbott, adding that Texas is now vaccinating people at the rate of 1 million a week.
Dr. Mark McClellan, a former Abbott adviser who previously served as the United States Food and Drug Administration commissioner under President George W. Bush, disagreed.
“We need to remember that we still face a significant risk of spreading among people who are at risk of complications, so (we) just want to take the foot off the brake carefully,” McClellan told Austin American-Statesman earlier this week.
“There are still many people at risk of serious consequences who are not yet protected by vaccines.”
Texas has received 9.7 million doses so far, according to the latest figures from the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and has administered 7.3 million injections.