Texas Governor Says State on Brink
of Herd Immunity in False Diagnosis

Capitol Inside
April 11, 2021

Governor Greg Abbott admitted his ignorance on the subject before incorrectly suggesting on Sunday that Texas is nearing a point where the coronavirus is no longer a threat with the vast majority of people here immune from the disease.

“I don’t know what herd immunity is, but when you add that to the people who have immunity, it looks like it could be very close to herd immunity," Abbott said in a Fox News interview that he used to attack Democratic President Joe Biden on guns and the immigration at the border.

The Republican governor served up his latest assessment on the state of COVID-19 in Texas in a conversation with Fox News Sunday anchor Chris Wallace. The news host had given Abbott an opportunity to boast about the state's recent performance in the pandemic with new cases, fatalities and hospitalizations down since the lifting of statewide mask mandate and business restrictions early last month in a move that was sharply assailed by doctors.

But after consistently swinging and missing with predictions on covid during the past year, Abbott decided to go for the fences with the assertion about herd immunity that had experts shaking heads in disbelief from Waco to Wuhan.

"There is no way on God’s green earth that Texas is anywhere even close to herd immunity," University of Minnesota infectious disease specialist Michael Osterholm said of the Abbott diagnosis in a story for the New York Times.

Dr. Anthony Fauci estimates that the United States will achieve herd immunity when 75 percent to 80 percent of the people around the nation have been vaccinated for the virus. Experts have been saying that the share of the population that's received the vaccine must be somewhere in the range of 60 percent to 90 percent before the transmission of covid will stop.

Fauci, however, also says that the country won't be able to reach herd immunity until the children have been vaccinated as well.

Texas isn't close by any reasonable measure - with only 19 percent of the people here having been fully vaccinated with two doses of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines or one injection with the Johnson & Johnson version. Texas ranks 44th in the fully vaccinated category while the state is 40th in terms of the percentage of the population that's had at least one Moderna or Pfizer shot.

But Abbott and other GOP leaders in Texas haven't seen the rollout of the covid vaccine to be a major priority compared to the issues that they're tackling in the Legislature like election protection, abortion and social media censorship. Many Texans have found it difficult to get the vaccine as a result of the Republicans' ambivalence - with some of the residents of the state's largest cities having to drive for hours to get the vaccine after trying for weeks to get one in their hometowns without success.

Abbott's suggestion that the Lone Star State is almost out of the woods in the health crisis is the latest in a series of gubernatorial contagion appraisals that have been wrong.

The governor said last spring that the state had isolated the virus to nursing homes, meat packing plants and correctional facilities. Abbott said at a press conference in Amarillo on May 26 that the area had turned the corner as the state's initial major hot spot as a consequence of emergency testing crews that he'd dispatched there several weeks earlier.

Abbott cited the success that he'd had in the first confrontation with covid when he ruled on June 3 that the state had the virus under control and could advance to a new phase of the reopening that he'd begun a month earlier.

The second surge actually had gotten under way a few days before the governor loosened restrictions - and the new infection count had been spiking for almost two weeks when he assured the public that Texas wouldn't have a problem with hospital space. Emergency rooms had been flooded for several weeks when Abbott imposed a mask decree in early July after vowing not to do so.

Then after closing the bars in Texas for a second time in late June, Abbott gave them the green light to reopen in a new executive order that set the stage for a third wave that broke records here for the next several months before the virus numbers started to decline.

Abbott sought to take credit for the arrival of the vaccine in Texas - contending in December in the pandemic's ninth month that the state had entered the 9th inning of the covid fight. That was four months ago. The death toll has climbed almost 75 percent in Texas in that span of time.

But Abbott's words today on herd immunity arguably represent the worst misread yet in a tumultuous stint as the sole commander of the state response.

According to Harvard Global Health Institute virus researchers, 117 Texas counties were ranked on Sunday night as "very high" in terms of covid vulnerability while 73 more were listed as "high" for risk level.

The NYT showed that seven rural Texas counties ranked among the top 10 on Sunday night in terms of places with the highest rates of recent new cases.