Ron DeSantis and his lethal lies

Governor Ron DeSantis paused his incipient campaign for president long enough this week to kill a few more Floridians.  Yes, the graduate of Yale and Harvard Law School, who knows better, told a press conference that research has shown that the new bivalent COVID booster shot causes more disease than if you didn’t get the booster.  “Like almost every study now has said, with these new boosters, you're more likely to get infected with the bivalent booster.”  He backed up that lie with another whopper, claiming that the United States is “one of only a few countries in the world” that requires citizens to get the shot.  There is no requirement for citizens of the U.S. to get a COVID vaccine of any kind.

Here is where the state of Florida stands today with COVID.  An average of 5,768 cases of COVID a day were reported last week in Florida, a 90 percent increase from the rate two weeks ago.  Deaths from COVID are up 74 percent over the same period.  Nearly seven and a half million Floridians have come down with COVID since early in 2020.  84,176 of them have died from the disease.

But you wouldn’t know that listening to DeSantis.  Yesterday, DeSantis proposed a permanent ban on any kind of COVID mandate in the state.  That’s right:  Schools and businesses will not be able to require masks; businesses will not be able to require employees to be vaccinated against the disease.  In December, DeSantis said he would petition the Florida Supreme Court to call a grand jury to investigate COVID vaccines.  Later in the month, the Supreme Court did just that, ordering the grand jury investigation.  Neither DeSantis nor the Florida Supreme Court bothered to specify why COVID vaccines needed investigating, but he did say this: “In Florida, it is illegal to mislead and misrepresent, especially when you are talking about the efficacy of a drug.”

Looks like his grand jury has its first target, doesn’t it?

Two weeks ago, DeSantis held another press conference to attack statistics for COVID and – surprise – attack the efficacy of vaccines.  “With omicron, you know, the vaccinations are not preventing infection,” DeSantis said.  This statement followed a two-week period over the holidays when Florida reported 536,748 new infections.  The Miami-Dade County hospital system reported the same week that 79 percent of new infections from COVID were people who were unvaccinated. 

Meanwhile, DeSantis ordered the Florida Department of Health to investigate the state’s reporting of COVID deaths, claiming that COVID death statistics were greatly over-counted.  DeSantis’ press secretary, Fred Piccolo, tweeted, “We can tell you definitively that Florida is counting deaths that were not directly caused by COVID-19.”  This was the same Fred Piccolo who had previously tweeted, “We had one COVID death in Florida yesterday. Yes you read that right. One.”  This was the same day that 47 deaths from COVID were reported in Florida.

What is causing this graduate of Yale and Harvard Law to spew such a tsunami of lies about COVID in his state?  Oh, I don’t know…could it be that he is running for president?  The podium DeSantis stood behind at his press conference this week read “Prescribe Freedom” as he told his latest lie, that the bivalent COVID booster makes you “more likely to get infected.”

The freedom he’s talking about is the freedom to get sick and die. How his campaign slogans about freedom add up to winning a race for president is anybody’s guess.  Recent studies have shown that because Republicans are less likely to be vaccinated than Democrats, heavily Republican areas of the country have more than three times the number of deaths in largely Democratic areas.  Maybe DeSantis has a secret plan to vote the cemeteries.  That’s what it will take if he keeps telling lies about COVID vaccines.  Meanwhile Floridians, not to mention people in other states with low-vaccination rates, will keep dying.