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At an August 4 press conference, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis accused Biden of having a “wide open southern border” that led to the virus being imported through the United States.
“No elected official is doing more to allow the transmission of COVID in America than Joe Biden with his open border policies,” DeSantis said in a fundraising letter the same day.
Other Republicans, like Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, have also blamed migration as “part of the problem” contributing to the rise in coronaviruses and Texas Senator Ted Cruz criticized Biden, linking migration to the border to the pandemic.
Facts first: Public health experts dispute the idea that migrants entering the southern border are largely responsible for the explosion of Covid cases across much of the country. Instead, experts say the more transmissible Delta variant and relatively low vaccination rates are the main causes of this latest wave. It’s also worth noting that some of the Republicans blaming the wave of migrants have banned mask warrants and opposed policies requiring vaccines.
Spread of Covid
“To my knowledge, there is no evidence that migrants are to blame for the peak in Florida or other southern states,” Aubree Gordon, associate professor of epidemiology at the University of the Michigan. “We have significant increases in drivetrain in many states probably due to the Delta variant.”
Regarding the outbreak, current US Surgeon General Dr Vivek Murthy echoed concerns about the Delta variant, stating in late July that “The thing that makes this possible is the fact that we are dealing with the most transmissible version of Covid-19 which we have seen to date. ”
And according to Dr Anthony Fauci, longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the current situation is also due in part to the country’s vaccination rate.
“If we had an overwhelming proportion of people vaccinated, we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” Fauci told PBS on July 27.
Many companies and organizations have started to impose vaccines on their employees and, in some cases, their customers as well. Some governors have followed suit, requiring vaccines or weekly tests for state government employees.
But DeSantis and a handful of other Republican governors, including Greg Abbott of Texas, refused to do so. Some have even gone so far as to ban warrants for vaccines or other measures that could help stop the spread, such as masks.
Ron Waldman, professor of global health at George Washington University, told CNN: “It is clear that states that do not aggressively implement public health interventions suffer more than those that have adopted policies that do not aggressively implement public health interventions. encourage and sometimes apply these interventions, especially with regard to immunization. We see it clearly in the case, hospitalization and death rates. ”
“It should be obvious that the greatest risk of acquiring COVID comes from neighbors, not from ‘aliens’ crossing the ‘wide open’ southern border,” said Waldman, noting that Florida does not touch the southern border but that it shares a border with Alabama, one of the least vaccinated states in the country.
Southern border
As migrants continue to arrive at the US-Mexico border in record numbers, it is wrong to claim that the border is “open” as DeSantis did last week. The Biden administration still employs a Trump-era policy that allows many migrants to be quickly deported from the United States.
The CDC announced on August 2 that it would extend the controversial health order – called Title 42 – invoked by the previous administration at the start of the pandemic, in March 2020.
Of the migrants encountered at the southern border by US Customs and Border Protection from January to June, 64% were deported from the United States under the health ordinance.
CBP told CNN migrants in detention must wear masks provided by the agency and that if “anyone shows signs of illness in CBP custody, they are referred to local health systems for testing. , appropriate diagnosis and treatment ”.
CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez contributed to this report.
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