The former medical director of the Bush White House, Dr. Jonathan Reiner, likened Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s announced rollback of all Covid restrictions to his former boss’s infamous “Mission Accomplished” declaration while Americans were still constantly dying.

Appearing on CNN’s Erin Burnett OutFront, Reiner pulled no punches with his scorn for Abbott’s abrupt, swaggering Twitter announcement on Tuesday that he was ending all mask mandates and any other social distancing measures in his state.

I just announced Texas is OPEN 100%.

EVERYTHING.

I also ended the statewide mask mandate.

— Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) March 2, 2021

“This is a gigantic mistake,” Reiner shot back at Abbott’s decision. “In Texas, for instance, they have a test positivity rate of 13.5%. Compare that to the overall rate in the United States of 4.4%. They had 54,000 cases last week. That’s 12% of all the cases in the United States. They also had more than 10% of the deaths in the United States. The state, by the way, has 8% of the population in this country.”

“So they are not doing well,” Reiner added, before blaming Abbott’s premature decision on a cynical ploy to redirect public outrage away from his disastrous handling of the massive Texas blackouts. “This is obviously a political ploy on the part of the governor who is just coming out of a horrible winter storm under intense criticism for the state’s performance in a state where basically millions of people were freezing in the dark. Now, in an attempt to appease the public and do something he thinks they want, he’ll endanger the lives of millions of Texans. This is his ‘Mission Accomplished’ moment and it is not a good one. We’ve seen this movie and doesn’t turn out well.”

Burnett then pointed out that a recent study at Houston’s Methodist Hospital found every major Covid-19 variant was already present in the local population. “Now the places we’re seeing the variants is the very place they’re taking away all the restrictions,” she pointed out.

“Right,” Reiner agreed. “They’re going to drop masks. I work in the District of Columbia where the test positivity rate is now 2.8%. Every single person in the store is wearing a mask. That is why the test positivity rate is 2.8%. What is going happen to the amount of virus in Texas when you take away the mask mandate? It is going to rise. We saw this. We saw this when states opened early in April. That was the summer surge. This is not the time to do this.”

Watch the video above, via CNN.

The post ‘This Is His Mission Accomplished Moment’: Dr. Jonathan Reiner Condemns TX Governor for Prematurely Ending All Covid Restrictions first appeared on Mediaite.

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