Texas Senate committee calls for ban on mask and COVID vaccine mandates

AUSTIN — A Texas Senate committee wants the state to ban mask and COVID-19 vaccine mandates, a sign pandemic policy may become a flashpoint in the upcoming legislative session.

The Republican-led Senate Health and Human Services Committee included the coronavirus recommendations in a newly released 37-page report.

While a majority of committee members endorsed the document, including two doctors who are both Republicans, three senators called the policy ideas shortsighted and refused to sign on.

The division on the committee highlights ongoing tension over public health measures sparked during the pandemic.

While not a piece of legislation, the document signals the priorities of the Senate committee, which vets all bills dealing with health and human services.

It remains to be seen whether the GOP-dominated Legislature will welcome the recommendations, which face pushback from public health experts. State leaders have not named pandemic policy a priority ahead of the session, which begins Jan. 10.

More than 90,000 Texans have died from COVID-19, though fatalities have fallen off sharply since the beginning of the year, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services. After months of unseasonably high flu and RSV case rates, COVID-19 cases are once again climbing as a number of contagious omicron sub variants battle for dominance.

The committee report’s section on the pandemic response casts doubt on COVID-19 vaccine efficacy and concludes that nonpharmaceutical interventions, like social distancing and masking, “have their need, but the pandemic revealed sweeping mandates create unintended consequences like economic hardship, delayed preventative treatments, and at times death.”

The report leans on testimony from prominent COVID-19 vaccine skeptics, including Dallas Dr. Peter McCullough, and says mandated shots may be a factor contributing to the loss of nurses and doctors from the health care industry.

In addition to recommending a prohibition on future mask and COVID-19 vaccine mandates, the report also proposes funding research on adverse outcomes from the COVID-19 jab and forming a special committee on “medical censorship.”

Sen. Lois Kolkhorst, a Brenham Republican who chairs the 9-member committee, did not respond to a request for an interview. The committee’s two physician members, Sens. Donna Campbell, R-New Braunfels, and Dawn Buckingham, R-Lakeway, also did not respond to requests for comment about their support for the report.

Public health officials called the committee’s emphasis misplaced and said lawmakers should instead find ways to promote vaccination against the coronavirus. State data show Texans who’ve forgone the shot are much more likely to contract the coronavirus and die from COVID-19 related illness.

“The committee instead needs to review how 40,000-45,000 Texans died needlessly from Covid because they refused a vaccine,” said Dr. Peter Hotez, an inventor of COVID vaccine technology who serves as dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. “The Committee report in its current form serves only to weaponize health communication and place Texans at greater risk from illness.”

Sens. Borris Miles, D-Houston; Beverly Powell, D-Burleson; and Kel Seliger, R-Amarillo, did not sign their names to the report. Sen. César Blanco, D-El Paso, did, but appended a letter of objections to the document.

All four took issue with the ban on future mask mandates, pointing to research that shows they are effective at preventing disease spread and warning the move would strip officials of a key tool to fight future outbreaks.

“What if it were Ebola, or some really bad kind of smallpox?” said Seliger, who did not run for reelection this year. “It’s a medical decision, not a political decision.”

Miles said that looking only at negative effects of the COVID-19 vaccine would earmark taxpayer dollars for “research with predetermined conclusions” and that vaccine mandates at hospitals help keep patients and staff safe.

“I urge my colleagues to stop pandering to the anti-vaccination conspiracy theories and political platforms that have caused the deaths of many people in our state, this country and the world,” Miles said in a written statement.

The report’s other sections examine ways to address the public health workforce shortage and improve data collection. Recommendations include coming up with ways to get staff to medically underserved areas and bolstering funding for programs that keep Texas medical graduates in-state. Those policies did not seemingly generate disagreement among the committee.

When the Legislature last met in 2021, lawmakers opted to limit the use of government shutdown orders at houses of worship and nursing homes. A high-profile bill that sought to curb the governor’s emergency powers, which were used to impose a statewide mask mandate, failed.

Mask mandates have mostly been lifted across Texas. State leaders continue to fight federal COVID-19 vaccination mandates in court. Cases to fight requirements at Head Start programs and in the military, for example, are ongoing.