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Texas experts say Biden-Harris administration will be tasked with depoliticizing COVID response

Austinites gathered outside the Texas Capitol on Nov. 7 to celebrate President-elect Joe Biden's Electoral College victory, as supporters of President Trump protested the results nearby.
In just over two months, President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris will take office, where they will be tasked with responding to the coronavirus pandemic and the economic crisis it has precipitated.
Biden and Harris have made clear that they will take a different approach than President Donald Trump, urging Americans to wear masks and promising to "listen to science" as they form their public health policies.
Once inaugurated on Jan. 20, they will likely oversee the distribution of a COVID vaccine—and attempt to unify a divided country.
A state divided
Don Kettl, a professor of the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, said this will be a challenge.
"Texas has seen some of the sharpest tensions in the country between the state and local governments, especially between the state and its largest cities," he wrote in an email to Austonia.
Earlier in the pandemic, officials in Austin and other large Texas cities implored Gov. Greg Abbott to impose a state-wide mask mandate and grant them the authority to limit gatherings. Ultimately, Abbott allowed local jurisdictions to require businesses to mandate masks on their premises.
With COVID cases and hospitalizations increasing in Austin and across Texas, this dynamic is likely to recur.
"The virus, sadly, is flaring up again, and that is likely to bring all those tensions to the surface," Kettl wrote. "This time, getting people to follow tighter restrictions will be even harder."
The moving average number of new COVID cases reported in Travis County each day has been increasing steadily.(Austin Public Health)
Dr. Diana Fite, president of the Texas Medical Association and an ER physician in Houston, said the current surge appears to be larger than the one that occurred over the summer, which she attributed to school reopenings and the recent elections.
But it also appears to be less deadly.
"There's no question that we aren't seeing quite as serious of cases, which is good news," she said.
This is due to many reasons: more cases are occurring among young people, doctors are more familiar with the disease and how to treat it, and high-risk groups are more likely to reduce their risk of exposure—or have already died of COVID.
Although TMA cannot predict how the incoming administration might change the COVID response in Texas, Fite said she hopes its "decisions are driven by data and science."
Austin-Travis County Interim Health Authority Dr. Mark Escott said that Biden and Harris will have the dual challenges of encouraging Americans to mitigate the spread of COVID while also depoliticizing their message.
"There's going to be work to be done to ensure that folks do not feel that this is a political effort," he said last week. "It is science, and we've got to work hard to convince those who have not been convinced so far that the threat is real, that it is a danger to our community and that we will still have hundreds of thousands of people who may lose their lives because of COVID-19."
Beyond COVID
Division will also likely affect other areas of governance—at both the federal and state levels.
Nationally, Trump's refusal to concede the race has prevented Biden's transition team from having access to key members of the current administration—such as Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases—or to the daily intelligence briefing, Kettl said.
"The first problem can create a lot of speed bumps," he added. "The second can sow the seeds of a genuine foreign policy crisis if the handoff of sensitive issues creates an opportunity for a foreign power."
This tension may also trickle down to the state level.
"After Biden's inauguration, polarization is likely to get even worse," Kettl said, pointing to the upcoming session of the Texas Legislature, where lawmakers will set the state's budget and redraw district boundaries, and the 2022 gubernatorial race.
"The battle lines will be sharp, and the battles will begin almost immediately."
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Popular
(Bob Daemmrich)
Hours following the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark ruling that guaranteed a constitutional right to an abortion, on Friday, about 1,000 people gathered in Republic Square with signs calling for change.
The rally, organized by the group Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights Texas, started at the federal courthouse on Republic Square on Friday at 5 p.m. before the crowd marched to the Texas Capitol. More protests are expected to ensue over the weekend.
People showed up with all types of signs like Mindy Moffa holding up, "Keep your filthy laws off my silky drawers."
Austin joined cities across the country that saw protests for a women's right to an abortion after the ruling.
According to a recent UT poll, 78% of Texas voters support abortion access in most cases.
Sabrina Talghade and Sofia Pellegrini held up signs directed at Texas laws. A Texas trigger law will ban all abortions from the moment of fertilization, starting 30 days after the ruling. When state legislators passed the trigger law last summer, it also passed laws for more protection of firearms, including the right to open carry without a permit.
Lili Enthal of Austin yells as around 1,000 Texans marched to the Texas Capitol.
From the Texas Capitol, Zoe Webb lets her voice be heard against the Supreme Court ruling.
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(Paxton Smith/Instagram)
Paxton Smith’s 2021 valedictory speech at Lake Highlands High School in Dallas wasn’t the same speech she had previously shared with school administrators. She dropped the approved speech and made a case for women’s reproductive rights after lawmakers passed the Texas "Heartbeat Bill.”
Her advocacy made news on NPR, YouTubeTV and in The Guardian. Just over a year later, the “war on (women’s) rights” she forewarned has come to a head as the U.S. Supreme Court voted Friday morning to overturn Roe v. Wade, ending constitutional protection for abortion access.
“It is up to the people to show up and show the courts and the politicians that we won’t sit back and let this happen,” Smith told Austonia Friday morning. “We will show up, we will fight back. Before, we were scared of them, now they should be scared of us.”
Now a University of Texas sophomore and abortion rights activist, 19-year-old Smith said she wanted to give the same speech in the “the most public way possible” to reach “as many people as possible who don't agree that I deserve this right.”
However, she says the response was “actually overwhelmingly positive” and supportive of her cause. According to a recent UT poll, 78% of Texas voters support abortion access in most cases.
The speech opened up further opportunities for activism: she advocated for reproductive rights at the International Forum on Human Rights in Geneva, interviewed with Variety magazine and spoke to tens of thousands at Austin’s Bans Off Our Bodies protest at the Texas Capitol in May.
Smith also serves on the board of directors for the Women’s Reproductive Rights Assistance Project, a national nonprofit organization that helps fund abortions or medication abortion—like Plan C pills—in all 50 states. Most recently, Smith has been attending protests in Washington, D.C. leading up to the ruling.
“This is land of the free. This is where you get to choose how you live your life,” Smith said. “Overturning Roe v. Wade violates everything that we have come to believe about what it means to live in this country. I think a lot of people aren't willing to accept that this is a human right that is most likely just going to be gone for over half of the country within the next couple of weeks.”
Bracing for the next steps, Smith gave some tips for supporters:
- Find a protest to attend.
- “I would say invite somebody to go to those protests with you, invite a couple of friends, invite people into the movement,” Smith said.
- Talk about the issue on social media—use the platform you have.
- “Have these kinds of conversations where people can just talk about their fears and then find ways to go and advocate for yourself,” Smith said.
- Volunteer at a nonprofit near you.
“I feel like a lot of the reason things have gotten as bad as they have within the abortion rights world is that people are not making a scene, not protesting, not putting the effort into ensuring that the government doesn't take away this right,” Smith said. “I want to emphasize that if you're not doing anything, don't expect the best scenario, expect the worst because that's the direction that we're going in.”
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