The governor of the US state of Texas, Greg Abbott has defied scientific opinion and abandoned the state wide mask mandate, imposed to stop the spread of covid. This comes at a time when not only is Texas trying to recover from natural disasters, but it is also when Texas is lagging behind other US states with regards to vaccine availability, although vaccination levels are starting to improve.

Texas is embarking on a State-wide experiment in not mandating masks and the people of Texas are the governor’s experimental subjects. Will covid infections reduce despite this decision or will they get worse? Will vaccination levels which are higher in some counties than others and in some age groups than others show that Governor Abbott was right to abandon the mask mandate in order to kick start the Texan economy? Will those who have called masks ‘useless’ be vindicated or will the scientific data, that I’ve been drilling down into recently, that show that masks do prevent the spread of virus laden droplets, be proven correct in what is a very large real world experiment? We really don’t know what will happen at this stage of the game.

There are a great number of variables here that could have an impact on whether Mr Abbott was correct or whether he’s condemned Texans to a massive covid related tragedy. One variable will be whether the quintessential American idea of trusting the citizen to do the right thing for themselves is proven to be correct and non-mandated mask wearing continues. Basically what the Governor has done is leave the matter of masks up to individuals and to individual companies whether to mask up or require masks on their premises. The next variable will be whether enough people get vaccinated in time to make masking less necessary anyway. This is a big question as from what I’ve seen across social media there are a lot of Texans who are suspicious of the covid vaccine and indeed vaccines in general. However, it is to be hoped that these Texan vaccine sceptics are just big mouths with only a small degree of influence.

Currently only 25% of Texans have been vaccinated against covid, which is a very small number, although the State is prioritising those with serious disease and who are of advanced age for the vaccine. This is a sensible decision as these groups are the most vulnerable to covid. The big test as to whether the anti vaccine big mouths have had any malevolent influence over people will be as the vaccine is rolled out to people outside of those priority groups. What I will say is that the Texas Department of Health and Human Services is doing a pretty good job of providing information to the public about covid vaccines, their availability and which counties have had what number of vaccine doses when compared to population levels. This department is also prominently showing information about vaccine safety that should go a long way to countering the anti vaccination fraggles that are both loud and in your face on almost every internet platform.

If Texas can up its vaccination game and get more people vaccinated in a short period of time and this causes less cases of covid and less spread of the disease, then Governor Abbott might be proven correct in abandoning the mask mandate. If however everything goes wrong and the majority can’t or won’t get vaccinated then Governor Abbott’s decision will not only be shown to be wrong but also tragically wrong as it could be the cause of a great leap in infections. Time will tell on what will be the result of the Great Texas Experiment and what will be the result for the lab rats, that is the ordinary Texan citizen in this case, when all the data is finally gathered in. If the Governor has got this right then there is no harm done. If on the other hand he’s got this decision on masks badly wrong, then Texas is going to be judging Governor Abbott’s decision by the size of the pile of dead bodies that may be caused by this decision.