Senate Backs New Layer of Government
with Texas Pandemic Response Reserves

Capitol Inside
April 21, 2021

Texas Senate Republicans and Democrats teamed up on Wednesday with a unanimous vote on a bill that would create the state's own version of the federal Centers for Disease Control as the central source for guidance during the next global pandemic.

Senators on both sides of the aisle also voted without dissent to approve legislation that's designed the strengthen the state's reporting system for the coronavirus and highly contagious diseases with new requirements for Texas hospitals to follow with the threat of civil fines for failing to fully comply.

The COVID-19 crisis hasn't been a priority for Republicans who control the statehouse during the 2021 regular session despite a death toll that's approaching the 50,000 mark based on the widely respected virus tracking system at the New York Times. Almost 2.9 million people have tested positive for the virus in Texas since it surfaced here more than 13 months ago. The state recorded 82 more fatalities on Wednesday.

GOP State Senator Brandon Creighton of Conroe guided Senate Bill 1780 through the upper chamber without a whisper of opposition as a measure that would create a Texas Epidemic Public Health Institute at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston. The state medical school developed the model on which the proposal is based.

Creighton - the chairman of the Higher Education Committee in the Capitol's east wing - said the new division at the UTHSC would establish and train a public health reserve network would be on stand by for public health emergencies and prepared to assist in the state response in a myriad of ways, The new system would rely on doctors, community health professionals, state and local public health agencies, academic experts, private health care organizations and others who could be called into duty during a pandemic.

The TEPHI would give Texas its own CDC, Creighton said, as a resource for recommendations on safety protocols for schools and businesses with the prevention of lockdowns as a central objective of the legislation.

The Legislative Budget Board estimates that SB 1780 would cost the state more than $59 mllion during the next two fiscal years and slightly more in future bienniums. The TEPHI that Creighton has conceived would have 100 people employed full time initially.

State Rep. Lois Kolkhorst, a Brenham Republican who chairs the Health & Human Services Committee, gave the Creighton bill a plug amid the assertion that it would give Texas the ability to base a state response on information from its own experts instead of federal bureaucrats. .

Kolkhorst cited Dr. Anthony Fauci as an example - saying that the leading authority on the coronavirus in America had wavered in a recent interview to the point where she didn't know if he could be trusted that much anymore. Neither Kolkhorst or Creighton mentioned how Donald Trump had sought to undermine the federal response at every opportunity until Democratic President Joe Biden ousted him at the polls in November.

Texas had a dismal record during the first nine months of the pandemic before Biden took over and implemented a national response that Trump had refused to undertake. The number of new covid cases, deaths and hospitalizations in Texas here have fallen dramatically since Biden's inauguration in January.

The emergency workforce that Creighton envision would have around 3,500 professionals with expertise in a myriad of pertinent fields prepared for deployment in the event of a disaster on par with the covid contagion. The public health reservists would only be compensated when called into special duty similar to the way reserves in the military are paid when activated for assignments.

The legislation appears to be a proactive attempt to be prepared for future health disasters in a state that was totally blind sided by the coronavirus along with the rest of the nation.

"It's not really about covid," Creighton said. "It's about what's next."

The Senate approved a separate but related measure on Wednesday with a unanimous show of support for a pandemic data reporting plan that GOP State Senator Lois Kolkhorst of Brenham is sponsoring in her role as the Health & Human Services Committee chair.

The Department of State Health Services struggled for months with the system that it hastily put in place for tracking the virus across the state. Kolkhorst said Senate Bill 969 would give private providers and local health authorities specific criteria to report on race, region, age and other key characteristics in the new cases and fatalities that they record.

Doctors and laboratories have been required by state disaster law to report covid cases that have been confirmed with tests and those that are suspected as well. SB 969 would extend the detailed reporting requirements to hospitals, which could be hit with fines up to $1,000 for each violation of the new state mandate.

 

 

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