Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Thursday criticized President Joe Biden for calling his decisions to lift Covid-19 restrictions and disguise mandates earlier this week as “Neanderthal thinking.” continuous outbreak of the state to undocumented immigrants.
Abbott’s comments come after Tuesday’s widely criticized decision to rescind most of Covid-19’s state restrictions, including a state mask warrant. Texas companies will be able to open “100%” starting March 10, he said. Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves made a similar move at about the same time.
Biden on Wednesday criticized the governors for what he said was a “big mistake” and added that “the last thing we need is Neanderthal thinking.”
Abbott told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that the comment “was not the kind of word a president should use” and blamed the spread of the coronavirus on immigrants crossing the southern border. The Republican governor said the Biden administration “has refused to test them” for the virus.
“The Biden administration has released immigrants to South Texas who have exposed jeans to Covid. Some of these people have been put on buses, taking that Covid to other states in the United States,” Abbott told CNBC. “This is a Neanderthal-type approach to dealing with the Covid situation.”
Although the Republican governor did not provide details, Telemundo reported Tuesday that some immigrants released by the Border Patrol in the city of Brownsville, Texas, tested positive for Covid-19. Since the city began testing on Jan. 25, 108 migrants have tested positive for Covid-19, which is 6.3 percent of all tested, according to the report.
“The Biden administration must stop importing Covid into our country,” Abbott said.
Top U.S. health officials have repeatedly urged states not to lift restrictions on Covid-19, as coronavirus cases and deaths across the country stop and highly transmissible variants threaten to “hijack” the recent decline in the country’s infections.
Still, Abbott defended his decision to lift the state’s mask requirements, alleging that the Texans already know that “the safe rule, among other things, is to wear a mask.”
“Do they really need the state to tell them what they already know about their own personal behavior?” Abbott told CNBC.
The governor added that the state’s coronavirus infections are “at least four months away” and that Texas hospitals are prepared to treat an influx of patients if necessary. Texas reported a daily average of about 7,265 new cases over the past week, a drop compared to the peak of more than 20,400 daily cases the state reported in January, according to a CNBC analysis of data collected by Johns University Hopkins.
However, new infections have begun to creep back across the state, with the daily average of new cases growing nearly 13% compared to a week ago.
Abbott said most of the state’s coronavirus spread over the holidays was driven by indoor meetings, not by restaurants and other businesses. The recently lifted restrictions “are not really that transformative” because the mask state mandate was not enforced and companies already had 75% capacity, he said.
“Maybe for the people of New York it seems like that’s a big difference,” Abbott said.
– CNBC’s Will Feuer contributed to this report.