Applauding the bold move of Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott pushing his state to be the first to reopen amid the global coronavirus pandemic, Texans are "going to lead from the front," according to Dr. Ronny Jackson to Newsmax TV.
"We're about to take the next step now and that's trying to get people back to work, and I'm excited about it," Jackson, the White House's former physician for President Donald Trump, told Friday's "Spicer & Co."
"It's time to get it going, and as Texans we're going to lead from the front. I'm proud of the governor; I'm proud of his leadership. I'm excited about doing that."
Reopening is now without risk, Dr. Jackson add, but Texas is a state of a 29 million people, but has just 17,760 confirmed COVID-19 cases and just 439 deaths, according to Worldometers data culled from Johns Hopkins University and recent media reports.
"Now, we're looking back and we're going to have to accept a little bit of risk in this," Jackson told host Sean Spicer, the former White House press secretary.
Gov. Abbott has paneled by medical and economic experts in activating Phase I of the Reopening American Again guidelines unveiled by the coronavirus task force Thursday.
"At some point you have to step back and you have to say, 'OK, we know what the doctors want to do," Jackson added. "Some doctors if they had it their way they would just eradicate the virus, and we just stay in a posture that we're in now until it's completely eradicated, but that doesn't make any sense.
"We have to look at the cost vs. the benefit, and now that we know some stuff about this virus, we can do the cost vs. benefit and we can realistically say, 'hey, the cost of keeping everything shut down – locked down across the country right now – far outweighs the benefit.
"We have to get these people back to work because the cost-benefit ratio has changed now," he concluded.
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Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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