In America today, there is perhaps no argument quite as heated as the one surrounding COVID-19; specifically, what role our governments and workplaces should have in mandating medical decisions surrounding vaccines and masks.
The federal government has been erring on the side of caution, as they often do, promoting vaccine mandates for all national-level governmental employees and any businesses with more than 100 workers.
But several state lawmakers are pushing back, including in Texas, where Governor Greg Abbott has signed an executive order barring any such mandates in the Lone Star State.
The White House was nonplussed and fired back at Abbott this week.
Asked Tuesday about the purported motivation for Abbott’s move, White House press secretary Jen Psaki answered bluntly, with a single word: “Politics.” The two Republican governors have also led the party’s resistance to school-based mask mandates. President Biden had previously criticized that fight as motivated purely by political considerations.
“I think it’s pretty clear when you make a choice that’s against all public health information and data out there,” Psaki went on to say, “that it’s not based on what is in the interest of the people you are governing. It’s perhaps in the interest of your own politics.”
Abbott, like fellow anti-mandate Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, is said to be examining the possibility of a run for the White House in 2024, and Psaki’s uncouth attack may just be the Biden administration’s first attempt to get out ahead of that possibility.
