reiterated Sunday his regrets that he signed a law banning mask mandates in the state amid an ongoing surge in COVID-19 cases nationwide fueled by the highly transmissible delta variant of the virus.
“Facts change and leaders have to adjust to the new facts that you have and the reality of what you have to deal with,” he said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “Whenever I signed that law, our cases were low, we were hoping that the whole thing was gone, in terms of the virus, but it roared back with the delta variant.”
Hutchinson went on to say he had hoped to amend the law to better protect children in the state who are not yet eligible for a COVID-19 vaccine. “I realized that we needed to have more options for our local school districts to protect those children,” he said. “And so I asked the legislature to redo the law that prohibited those requirements or those options for the school districts to protect the children. And so it was an error to sign that law.”