Something is rotten in the state of Florida. With COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations skyrocketing, Gov. DeSantis is still vehemently opposed to masks in schools, threatening to withhold funding from schools if they do not follow his authoritarian mandate. Why?
It might seem that Republicans have turned the corner on COVID-19 and are now at least not opposed to vaccinations. A few GOP lawmakers and Governors have advocated for vaccinations, but unfortunately, the vast majority of the right-wing eco-system is still demonizing vaccines, inventing new CTs every day.
But one thing they have steadfastly been against is masks. We can see the tantrums thrown by republican lawmakers about mask-requirements in Congress and there are all sorts of tortuous arguments about why masks are bad for combating COVID-19, including comparisons with the holocaust.
DeSantis, “a most notable coward, an infinite and endless liar, an hourly promise breaker, the owner of no one good quality,” even issued an Executive Order on Friday which threatens to withhold funding from districts that require masks for school children.
This tweet from DeSantis and the background behind it might shed some light on what’s going on in the dark corners of the Governor’s office in Florida and perhaps other red states.
Jay Bhattacharya (of Stanford U) is one of the key leaders of the movement that argues that the primary way to tackle COVID-19 is to let the population achieve herd immunity via natural infection. He and 2 others authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which argues for protecting those who are at highest risk (how?) and allowing others to live their normal lives, get infected and to develop immunity — an approach that its authors call Focused Protection. They have been peddling this approach since the start of the pandemic and they had a lot of influence in the trump administration. Back in April 2020, they performed some dubious studies which argued that a much larger fraction of people in Santa Clara had been infected than were reported and were therefore immune to further disease.
Earlier last week, DeSantis held a secret meeting (unknown to the press) with Jay Bhattacharya and gallery of like-minded rogues, knaves and scoundrels.
According to miami.cbslocal.com/…, all of the participants argued against masks.
“I don’t think the delta variant changes the calculus or the evidence in any fundamental way, governor,” Bhattacharya said when asked by DeSantis if the highly transmissible variant should change the state’s approach to masks in schools.
Cody Meissner, chief of Tufts University’s Division of Pediatric Infectious Disease, also participated in the event and argued that wearing a mask is “not a very effective way of preventing disease.”
Los Angeles-based clinical psychiatrist Mark McDonald argued during the event that “masking children is child abuse.”
Tis the times' plague, when madmen lead the blind.
The Daily Beast has some more coverage of the meeting -
According to a transcript of the Monday event obtained by The Daily Beast, Mark McDonald slammed mask-mandates in general during the panel discussion, calling his home state of California a “medical apartheid state” because of new indoor mask guidelines to curb the surge of cases.
But when asked for comment on his views, McDonald also veered into downright vaccine skepticism.
“There is no medical rationale for vaccinating children,” he wrote in an email to The Daily Beast in which he also suggested both masks and vaccines “don’t work.”
This is Dr. Mark McDonald, a clinical psychiatrist in L.A., tweeting just yesterday going as far as calling the vaccines unsafe. The gentleman doth protest too much, don’t you think?
There was a similar meeting in March this year, which included more knaves such as Scott Atlas (remember him?). The discussion was so loony and full of misinformation that YouTube banned the video of the meeting. DeSantis’s office has now taken to posting videos on Rumble, where they “Cry 'Havoc!', and let slip the dogs of war.”
Florida Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried has been a vocal critic of DeSantis and a source of truthful information for Floridians -
Meanwhile, this is the state of the State of Florida, in spite of vaccinations and some precautions and restrictions in place.
The Biden Administration, the CDC, Dr. Fauci and many more in the medical community are doing their best to educate the public and prevent another catastrophe that is looming ahead. NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins was on CNN yesterday calmly explaining why masks are important -
Dr. Collins -
“I don’t understand the ban. Certainly this seems like something local officials ought to be able to decide based on their community’s circumstance.
We do know that [children] are capable of getting pretty sick, we’ve lost about 400 children who have died from Covid-19 since this all started, and kids can also get long Covid where they ended up months later with difficulties with brain fog, and fatigue that interferes with their school performance.
So this is not to be just dismissed as a zero risk. Kids also live in homes, are related to people in those homes, who are perhaps immunosuppressed. They could bring home the virus and cause bad outcomes.
Delta is as contagious as we now know it is, and we want to try to put an end to what is a very significant uptick right now. Wearing masks, if you're under 12 and can't be vaccinated, when you're [in] school is a really smart thing to do."
A PSA for Floridians -
Epilogue
It may very well be that the “let-everyone-get-infected” movement is still alive and is driving some of these insane policies being pursued by republicans. After all, masks must get in the way of their goal to get everyone infected as soon as possible.
None of these merchants of death have any awareness of the situation, any diagnosis or any solutions. They are simply against whatever the medical community is for. Which is pretty much in line with the modern GOP — they have no solutions, no principles, they simply stand against science, scientists, health experts, and pretty much the rest of the civilized world. And they are willing to bamboozle their supporters with lies, CTs and cultural wars, while they pick their pockets and watch their loved ones die. They “Dream on, dream on, of bloody deeds and death.”
Let’s do whatever we can to spread the truth, ask our friends and family in Florida and other red states to take precautions, expose the destructive mindset of the modern GOP and make sure we triumph over the dark forces in our midst. As the Bard of Avon said - Let’s love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.