PRO-COVID STATE INDEED

Greetings. I am a voting constituent in rural west Texas. After just now visiting my local clinic to get a COVID test, even though I am, and have been, fully vaccinated, I just thought I’d send a constituent view from outside the bubble. Reading this about Texas in Vanity Fair this morning: “On Thursday, the state released a new guidance that somehow makes [Ron] DeSantis’s effort to block cruise ships from requiring vaccines seem smart: Under recommendations from the Texas Education Agency, schools do not need to conduct contract tracing and do not need to let parents know if a student has tested positive for the virus. If a student does come into contact with an infected person, a parent can still send them to school under the new guidance.” Florida and Texas. Pro-COVID states indeed. How can you possibly think that preventing parents from getting the information they need to protect their children is a winning strategy? Is it your intent to kill off Texans in the attempt to cultivate votes among a certain segment of science-adverse constituents? Or to kill off Texans in an attempt to reach herd immunity? Or to kill off Texans in a misguided effort to thwart efforts of the Biden administration to save our people from a pandemic? Because your selective clarion call of freedom of choice is exposed as hypocrisy as you command people and businesses to not try and protect themselves. I personally think you’re using cynical politics instead of leadership during this time of uncertainty. I expect you know that people in charge who are dedicated to helping their particular part of society from sickness will do the right thing. They will thwart your authoritarian efforts and enact measures to help our state and people move past COVID. So you will be able to show your ‘conservative values’ while others do the heavy lifting. If I were any kind of business I would never relocate to this state. And I would be making plans to move my business if I were already here. What do we have to offer? Hard to vote. Weak power grid. And politicians whose main leadership quality is to tout ‘personal freedom’, aka, do nothing at all, while trying to take away our basic freedom to protect ourselves during a pandemic.