Stephen Lynch says Massachusetts reopening ‘a bit premature’ but trusts Charlie Baker
U.S. Rep. Stephen Lynch called Gov. Charlie Baker’s decision to forge ahead with reopening Massachusetts businesses this month against the guidance of the CDC “a bit premature” but said he trusts the Republican governor to slow down “if things get out of hand.”
“He was following — at that moment — the data. Following the science,” Lynch said during a Sunday-morning appearance on Jon Keller’s “Keller at Large” show on WBZ. “It looked very good however we’ve got more recent data that indicates it may have been premature.”
Lynch, a South Boston Democrat, said he felt “pretty confident” the governor would lock things down again “if necessary.”
Baker has been under fire from local health experts for his decision to continue relaxing business restrictions as Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky pleads with states to slow down. The U.S. is seeing more than 65,000 new cases a day on average — up 20% in the past two weeks. Massachusetts cases are up 9% on average from the start of the month.
One day after Walensky voiced a sense of “impending doom” over climbing coronavirus cases nationwide, she toured the Hynes Convention Center mass vaccination site alongside Baker, where the pair urged mask-wearing and social distancing. Walensky, a former Massachusetts General Hospital’s infectious diseases chief, declined to comment on the reopening plans of individual states.
Lynch gave credit to Baker and MBTA General Manager Steve Poftak, who reversed plans for a series of sweeping service cuts across bus, subway, ferry and the commuter rail lines.
Lynch had lambasted the cuts as being “on the wrong page” after the transit agency received more than $2 billion from in federal coronavirus relief money.
Many of the cuts were set to go into effect over the spring and early summer, but the T has now agreed to fully restore service to prepandemic levels “as soon as possible.”
“(That’s) a point where we would actually have the vaccines out there in a big way. We’ve been ramping up the vaccines so we wanted the money and the activity to surge,” Lynch said.
Lynch said businesses will be “fragile” as they resume after more than a year of pandemic-era restrictions on capacity, hours and more. The South Boston Democrat cautioned against loading up on corporate and business taxes to help cover the costs of the recovery.
“They will need extra support, and if we clobber them coming out of the gates, they’ll never survive,” Lynch said, noting there is “substantial support” available through President Biden’s recently passed $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan.
But Lynch said the responsibility is on Congress to “make sure that we really provide relief where it’s most desperately needed.”
“As we’ve seen with the CARES Act, sometimes to the money didn’t get to the people we thought were the most deserving … we can’t allow that to happen,” Lynch said.
from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/39HnaWE
Post a Comment