The governor of Texas, Nebraska, and Mississippi announced that they're ending all COVID-19 restrictions.

Meanwhile, President Biden announced that there'd be enough doses to provide every single adult American their vaccines by May.

And the Senators passed President Joe Biden's $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package, though with serious concessions to right wing Democrats.

The House will vote to pass the bill today. This is America Dissected. I'm your host, Dr. Abdul-Elsehyan.

Remember two weeks ago when we all watched as Texas was devastated by a polar vortex that knocked out its electric grid, froze water pipes across the state and destroyed homes?

It was yet another taste of how climate change is going to fundamentally change lives.

In Texas, with its low-and-star energy grid, it got hit especially hard. It's easy to blame this on the unseasonably cold weather.

But it's more about a long-running pattern of decisions made by elected leaders in Texas, like Governor Greg Abbott, who have prioritized profits over the lives of people.

And last week, Governor Abbott announced another decision that will put the lives of Texans on the line.

Effective next Wednesday, all businesses of any type are allowed to open 100 percent.

Just like Texas's deep freeze as a consequence of terrible decisions, so is so much of what we've suffered through this pandemic.

It's yet another reminder that though we call this the coronavirus pandemic, the main character in this horror show isn't actually the virus.

The main characters are the people making decisions that propel it. We live in a democracy. Never mind what a bunch of white supremacist terrorists think about it.

In a democracy, in theory at least, the people should decide who their leaders are forcing those leaders to abide by their will.

So when politicians like Greg Abbott arbitrarily decide to wag the dog, to draw attention away from the mishandling of one crisis by mishandling another, to end the mask mandate despite case transmission rates that are far higher than they were last summer.

We have to ask ourselves why? Beyond the crisis of COVID-19, we're facing another crisis we tend to forget about because election season is behind us. It's a crisis of democracy itself.

Increasingly, a small but vocal minority gets to decide too much of our public policy. They've captured the Republican Party and Republican politicians.

And though they're no longer dictating federal policy on the pandemic, thanks to President Biden's victory, they still drive policy in a lot of states, putting countless more millions of lives at risk.

So today, we wanted to step back and ask, what does the public really think about COVID-19? What are their hopes, fears and worries?

Ifso has been polling Americans every single week since the pandemic started about just that.

And today, we talked to Chris Jackson, who's leading that polling, about what it tells us about where the public is and where they hope we can go after the break.

So yesterday is Chris Jackson. He's a pollster with Ipsos and they have been monitoring public attitudes to COVID-19 and the response and everything from vaccinations to physical distancing.

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