PUBLIC HEALTHAfter COVID, Texas Is Less Prepared for the Next Pandemic
Five years after Texas’ first COVID death, the state spends less on public health, vaccination rates have dropped and a distrust of authority has taken hold.
From the moment Steve Young canceled the Milam County Junior Livestock Association show, his days as county judge were numbered.
Young didn’t realize that at the time, of course. It was March 2020, a new virus was rapidly spreading around the country, and politics was the last thing this retired lawyer-turned-cattle rancher was thinking about. He was just doing what he felt needed to be done to keep the 25,000 residents of this rural county 90 minutes northeast of Austin safe.
But the blowback was intense, he said.
“People thought it was just wrong to cancel it, and this was a hoax and it was nothing worse than the flu,” he said in a recent interview. “This thing was highly politicized.”
Many in Milam County supported Young as he closed businesses, required masks and turned vacant hospital buildings into a vaccine clinic, eventually offering families $250 to get their teens the shot. But those who opposed him were loud and virulent — he received death threats, and more than one person stormed into the office to yell at him.
Young remembers getting a call from another county official who warned him he was likely costing himself a job.
“I said, ‘I understand that, but we need to do this,’” he said. “This is more important than a reelection. And if they don’t like it and they want to run against me, then let them have it. In fact, if the guy wants to start tomorrow, tell him to come on.”
After two years of battling COVID-19 and the community, Young lost his seat to the former county Republican Party chair.
It’s a story that played out across Texas, in small towns, big cities and all the way up to the governor’s mansion, as elected officials and public health workers became the punching bag for an angry, fearful public unused to government restrictions. Some, like Young, were chased out of public service. Others, like Gov. Greg Abbott, walked back their early support for public health mandates.
Texas entered the pandemic at a disadvantage, with an unhealthy and uninsured population, an underfunded public health system and workforce shortages across the health care system. While some hoped the pandemic might force improvements, five years after the first Texan died from COVID, many of these long-standing issues have worsened.
