SC senator says state’s top lawyer is hurting public health on USC mask mandate letter

A South Carolina lawmaker whose district includes the University of South Carolina said Monday the state’s top lawyer is standing in the way of sound public health policy.

Sen. Dick Harpootlian, D-Richland, blasted S.C. Attorney General Alan Wilson in a two-page letter Tuesday, saying a separate letter from the attorney general that concludes USC’s mask policy violates the legislative intent of a one-year rule in the state budget was unnecessary and harmful to public health.

“I disagree with your so-called legal analysis and I am concerned about your decision to needlessly insert yourself into the business of the university and the deleterious public health consequences that will follow,” Harpootlian said in the letter, written on state Senate stationery.

Wilson’s letter was a response to a planned policy USC Interim President Harris Pastides, a public health expert, announced over the weekend. The proposed policy — USC has since reversed course — originally called for masks to be required inside campus buildings.

Wilson’s office had no immediate response to Harpootlian’s letter on Tuesday evening.

After Wilson, a Republican, published his letter on Twitter Monday night, USC responded Tuesday morning with a revised policy that requires masks only on campus public transit and in health facilities.

While Wilson’s Monday letter to USC cited state policy and gave advice on USC’s proposed rules, the letter was not technically an official legal opinion, an attorney general spokesman said Tuesday. In his tweet, Wilson characterized his letter as “guidance.”

Harpootlian said the fact that Wilson did not name the people who supposedly asked for this opinion raises a red flag; usually an attorney general’s legal opinions are addressed to a specific person or entity that requests an official opinion from the attorney general’s office on a state policy or law.

“Your failure to identify the requestors here is conspicuous and raises questions about the motivations or the persons making those inquires (and) whether they do, in fact, exist,” Harpootlian wrote.

Harpootlian also wrote, “I trust that you have already seen fit to have yourself and your family vaccinated, such that you are not personally concerned that COVID-19 will cause you or your loved one’s serious illness or death. That is not the case with many in our State, whose ignorance about the pandemic, vaccines, and masking has only been fueled by reckless cynics.

“Your so-called legal opinion claiming state law bars the University from enacting a universal mask mandate is ... performative politics, not the serious work of a lawyer representing the interest of our State.”

Pastides, who holds both a master’s degree and a PhD in epidemiology from Yale University, decided to tighten mask mandates over the weekend as COVID-19 cases and coronavirus variants have surged. Local health officials have been particularly concerned about the delta variant, which experts believe is now the dominant COVID-19 strain in South Carolina, The State reported previously.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now believes the delta variant may be as contagious as chicken pox and more dangerous than other strains of coronavirus, according to internal documents obtained by The Washington Post

In late July, as the delta variant continued to spread, the CDC recommended even vaccinated people to use masks at “indoor public settings.”

According to the CDC and federal health officials, nearly all the people getting seriously sick and dying from COVID-19 are the unvaccinated. COVID-19 is spread by tiny aerosol droplets in people’s breath.

Classes begin at USC on Aug. 23, according to USC’s academic calendar.