DeSantis should be held liable for this malfeasance
Will Bunch takes on the latest far-right GOP plot to kill Americans. That’s not really hyperbole. The way they behave about public health is a crime. It’s one thing to tell people to be practical and do what they can to protect themselves and others without requiring lockdowns or mandates. That seems to be the consensus as we go into this new surge. But to say the vaccines are dangerous is just plain evil.
They just don’t give a damn about the vulnerable people in our country. I guess that’s nothing new. But it’s never been more obvious.
The initial, overrepeated mantra of Gov. Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign was that “Florida is the state where ‘woke’ goes to die.” Now, a growing number of scientists and public-health experts are worried that the governor of America’s third-largest state may be adding a second risk of death to that list.
His own citizens.
In what should be seen as an alarming moment in America’s descent into misinformation and political demagoguery, DeSantis’s hand-picked state surgeon general, Joseph Lapado, is telling Florida residents under age 65 to avoid a new anti-COVID booster vaccine. That’s the exact opposite of what the nation’s public-health agencies and most experts are recommending to prevent a fall 2023 resurgence of the pandemic. Our would-be POTUS DeSantis is totally on board with his anti-vax medical adviser, claiming he won’t allow healthy Floridians to be “guinea pigs.”
But history and science suggest that some folks who refuse to become “guinea pigs” could become corpses, or will suffer the debilitating impact of long COVID. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, had two words for the Washington Post about Florida’s anti-vaccine guidance: “It’s dangerous.”
Offit told the newspaper there’s legitimate debate over who should be prioritized for receiving the new booster — reformulated to attack recent, dominant strains of the coronavirus — but that what Lapado and DeSantis are doing is casting deeper and unwarranted doubt on the effacy of COVID-19 vaccines more generally. “They have been given a platform and abused it,” he said.
Indeed, at a moment when objective testing — such as levels of the coronavirus in municipal sewage wastewater — is showing a COVID-19 spike equal to some of the worst peaks in 2020 and 2021, Florida is already at severe risk. In fact, the state with one of the five oldest populations in the United States is currently leading the nation in new COVID-19 hospitalizations, with 11.81 per 100,000 residents, and those numbers have been increasing.
[…]
On one level, the current anti-vax follies in the Sunshine State are a grim warning of how the United States might respond — or not respond — to the next pandemic that arrives on our shores. But the dangerous doctoring of Lapado also points to something even more insidious: the GOP promise, through a formal agenda known as Project 2025, to “demolish the administrative state” by undoing civil service protection, so that career servants and experts could be replaced with true believers in the religion of Trumpism.
That would mean that key federal decisions about your health and welfare would be made by zealots like Lapado, who was hired in 2022 by DeSantis as the state’s top health official even after his colleagues at the University of California-Los Angeles said the surgeon exaggerated his own experiences in treating COVID-19 and that they wouldn’t recommend him for the Florida post because he had “created stress and acrimony” with his anti-vaccine views.
It wasn’t a total surprise, then, that a special task force at the University of Florida, where Lapado was given a tenured faculty post, found that the state’s top doc used flawed science and may have violated the school’s integrity rules when he recommended that men under 40 should not take the then-current iteration of the COVID-19 vaccine. The panel found that his recommendation — claiming an increased risk of heart problems — was based on a small sample studied with shaky methodology.
And yet Lapado was not disciplined. Instead, he has become point man for DeSantis’s 90-degree right-turn on vaccine science, which has coincided with his run for the presidency. The Florida governor’s early support for COVID-19 vaccines was reflected in the state’s early 70% vaccination rate, on par with the rest of the United States. That was before DeSantis stuck his finger in the wind and grasped that public-health measures and the public face of those interventions, Dr. Anthony Fauci, were increasingly seen by core GOP voters as threats to liberty from “a deep state.” Now, only 12% of Floridians received the most recent booster shot, compared to 17% nationwide.
An in-depth analysis by the New York Times earlier this year found that Florida’s drop-off in vaccinations left the state ill-prepared when the Delta variant of COVID-19 hit in late 2021. During those months, the newspaper found, Florida actually had a higher death rate than almost any other state. The 23,000 who died in Florida included 9,000 people under age 65, the group that Lapado now urges not to get a booster; most of those who succumbed, according to the Times, were unvaccinated or had not received the second dose.
How many thousands more of Floridians will die needlessly this fall because of the politically poisonous Big Lie about vaccines from DeSantis and Lapado? In fact, the current anti-vaccine and anti-federal government is so extreme that public health experts are deeply concerned they’ll be a drop in other vaccines like the flu shot or protection against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) headed into the winter virus season. That could be disastrous in a state with so many elderly residents.
These are the stakes, looking ahead to next year’s election. We don’t have to speculate about what Republican government in 2025 and beyond would look like. Just look south to Florida, an authoritarian regime where knowledge and expertise are increasingly despised, cruelty is the point of government, and needless death and despair is on the rise. Meanwhile, pray for the souls of those swayed by the cynical anti-science of DeSantis and Lapado. They are the only real “guinea pigs” here.
If Trump wins, you don’t need to have any doubt that he will never allow himself to be on the wrong side of the anti-health wingnuts again. You don’t even want to think about what might happen.