Texas Governor Greg Abbott on Thursday criticized President Joe Biden for calling his decisions to lift Covid-19 restrictions and mask the mandates earlier this week “Neanderthal thinking” and blamed undocumented immigrants for the outbreak in state course.
Abbott’s comments come after his widely criticized decision on Tuesday to rescind most of the state’s Covid-19 restrictions, including a state mask mandate. Texas companies will be allowed to open “100%” starting March 10, he said. Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves made a similar move at about the same time.
Biden criticized the governors on Wednesday for what he considered a “big mistake” and added that “the last thing we need is the thinking of the Neanderthals”.
Abbott told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that the comment “was not the kind of word a president should use” and blamed immigrants crossing the southern border for the spread of the coronavirus. The Republican governor said the Biden government “refused to test them” for the virus.
“The Biden government released immigrants in southern Texas who exposed Texans to Covid. Some of these people were put on buses, taking Covid to other states in the United States,” Abbott told CNBC. “This is the Neanderthal approach to dealing with Covid’s situation.”
Although the Republican governor did not provide details, Telemundo reported on Tuesday that some migrants released by the Border Patrol in the city of Brownsville, Texas, later tested positive for Covid-19. Since the city began testing on January 25, 108 migrants have tested positive for Covid-19, which represents 6.3% of all who have tested, according to the report.
“The Biden government must stop importing Covid into our country,” said Abbott.
Leading US health officials have repeatedly urged states not to lift Covid-19 restrictions as coronavirus cases and deaths across the country stop and highly transmissible variants threaten to “hijack” the country’s recent decline in infections .
However, Abbott defended his decision to suspend the state’s mask requirements, claiming that Texans already know that “the safe standard, among other things, is to wear a mask.”
“Do they really need the state to tell them what they already know about their personal behavior?” Abbott told CNBC.
The governor added that coronavirus infections in the state are “at low levels for four months” and Texas hospitals are ready to treat a flow of patients, if necessary. Texas is reporting a daily average of about 7,265 new cases last week, down from the peak of more than 20,400 daily cases reported by the state in January, according to a CNBC analysis of data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. .
However, new infections started to grow across the state, with the average new daily cases growing by almost 13% compared to a week ago.
Abbott said that most of the spread of coronavirus in the state during the holiday was caused by internal meetings, not by restaurants and other companies. The restrictions recently lifted “are not really that transformative” because the state mask’s mandate has not been fulfilled and companies were already at 75% capacity, he said.
“Maybe for people in New York this seems like a big difference,” said Abbott.
– CNBC’s Will Feuer contributed to this report.