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Ron DeSantis on Florida’s Covid Response

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BY Brownstone InstituteBROWNSTONE INSTITUTE

The crucial turning point in the career of Florida’s Ron DeSantis came with his handling of the coronavirus panic of 2020. Deploying a lighter touch than nearly all states from the beginning, Florida opened up completely, to the screams of horror from major media. He then eschewed mask and vaccine mandates, while keeping schools and beaches open.

His new book The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival explains the backstory to his response and reveals the intense pressures he faced at the time, including the scientific influences that drove his decision-making.

Chapter 10 opens with some quotations from President Eisenhower’s famous warning about the military-industrial complex. “Eisenhower cited the alarming risk that what he termed a “scientific-technological elite”—an elite that is neither interested in nor capable of harmonizing all the competing values and interests that are the hallmark of a free, dynamic society—could commandeer policy and, ultimately, erode our freedoms,” DeSantis writes. “The response to the COVID-19 pandemic vindicated President Eisenhower’s fears, to the detriment of the people of the United States, especially our nation’s children.”

The remainder of the chapter serves as a competent historical survey of the calamity: how it began, how pseudoscience took over, the media complicity, and the strange way common sense and normal liberty were all thrown out the window. As governor, he faced a choice to go along or go his own way. He chose the second path. The narrative in this book is revealing of the stress, the frenzy, and the difficulty of making a hard decision for freedom in the midst of every special interest demanding that you go the other way.

His summary statement of the period:

The elites that drove the response to the COVID-19 pandemic fomented hysteria when they should have promoted calm, produced shoddy modeling and analysis to try to justify destructive policies, asserted certainty when nuance was called for, and allowed political partisanship to trump evidence-based medicine. The cornerstone of the US COVID response—the so-called “15 Days to Slow the Spread” that evolved into boundless Faucist “mitigation”—was ill-conceived, crafted based on inaccurate assumptions, and blind to the harm that heavy-handed public health “interventions” inflict on society.

While doing little, if anything, to slow the course of disease spread, this response in much of our country curtailed freedom, destroyed livelihoods, hurt children, and harmed overall public health. It also exposed the partisanship and rot in public health and the scientific community writ large. In the weeks leading up to President Trump’s announcement of the “15 Days to Slow the Spread” on March 16, 2020, it didn’t seem to me like the US was going to shut down our country. Many of the key players on the then recently formed White House Coronavirus Task Force were urging calm. The pathogen was serious, we were told, but there was no need to panic.

Of course panic was exactly what happened, and this was despite the strange timing of Anthony Fauci’s February 28, 2020, article in the New England Journal of Medicine. He explained that it is most likely that this virus will prove to be about as severe as a bad season of flu. And that article was approved for publication several weeks earlier when he was still counseling calm. By the time it came out, he had already shifted to promoting panicked lockdowns.

The shift in tone was informed in part by epidemiological modeling from Imperial College London. “Drs. Fauci and Birx spearheaded the drive for coercive mitigation policies based largely on epidemiological modeling, not empirical data,” writes DeSantis. “In publicly characterizing the shutdown as a short-term measure, Fauci and Birx were, in reality, setting the country on a course of shutdown until eradication—a goal that was not possible to achieve, but would go on well into 2021, to the detriment of millions upon millions of Americans.” Indeed, “These flawed models drove some truly disastrous policy decisions.”

DeSantis further quotes from Deborah Birx’s own book in which she says that the 15 days bit was always a ruse.

A few days later, the president held a press conference with Fauci and Birx and other members of the task force to announce that he was extending the federal shutdown guidelines for thirty days. Congress had just passed, and the president had just signed, the CARES Act, a massive $2.2 trillion spending bill that appropriated money that could finance a lengthy shutdown by providing stimulus payments to individuals, increasing unemployment benefits, and forgiving loans for small businesses that closed. These two factors really changed the dynamic across the country. The initial call for fifteen days was viewed as a temporary measure but, based on a flawed hospitalizations model, the country was pushed into a lengthy period of mitigation. When asked when it would be appropriate to relax mitigation measures, Fauci broadly and irresponsibly said, “When it goes down to essentially no new cases, no deaths.” What started as a precautionary fifteen-day period of social distancing had transformed into a de facto shutdown until eradication. The consequences of this transformation proved to be devastating to America.

At this point in the narrative, the governor backs up in time to discuss what an unprecedented policy response this truly was. It was never recommended, much less deployed in the past. He tells how he revisited pandemic plans from the past and found the 2006 treatise by Donald A. Henderson, which concluded that coercive mitigation strategies would turn “a manageable epidemic” into “catastrophe.”

What is crucial about this section is just how deeply the governor was reading in the real science at the time. He figured out, for example, that it was crucial to discover just how prevalent this virus really was in the population. Here he relied on Jay Bhattacharya’s April 2020 study of seroprevalence in Santa Clara, California.

He further noted Jay’s public stance against lockdowns. Here was when the governor stopped trusting anything coming from Washington and started leaning even on Florida’s county governments to open everything up. The media howled in horror and dubbed him DeathSantis. The same happened on the mask and vaccine mandates, which the governor effectively outlawed in the state, based not only on his desire to protect the people’s freedoms but also the actual science appearing in the journals.

Particularly fascinating here is the author’s discussion of how he came to realize the seasonality of the virus, a point that was nearly completely lost on major media and the CDC. His realization came from the work of Stanford professor Michael Levitt in his empirical discoveries concerning the trajectory of the disease. This confirmed for him that his number one job was to focus on the vulnerable while protecting the freedoms of everyone else.

Here we have a fascinating narrative of a governor who initially was willing to follow federal guidance until he, nearly on his own, came to discover that it was actually full of holes. At this point, he had to go his own way. We can look back and observe that this took him too long and he surely agrees. What’s notable was his willingness to look at data and facts and apply them in light of his responsibilities as governor.

At the very start of the pandemic, I did not appreciate how the so-called public health experts were such a stridently partisan, highly ideological mess. This became clear a couple of months later when the same public health experts who had been sharply critical of Americans for leaving their homes because of COVID-19 suddenly endorsed the mass protests following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis…. For two months, these so-called experts lambasted anyone for making a cost-benefit analysis when it came to COVID-19 mitigation policies. Then, the moment it suited their political interests, they reversed course by endorsing the protests as passing their cost-benefit analysis over COVID-19 lockdowns. That they specifically rejected protesting for other causes they did not support told me all I needed to know about what partisans these people were.

At this point, he was done and even suspended the bit of guidance he had previously implemented from the CDC.

After several weeks of consuming data and measuring it against policies implemented around the country, I decided that I would not blindly follow Fauci and other elite experts. To this end, I revoked my order suspending elective procedures at hospitals. The predicted April surge in coronavirus patients never materialized, leaving Florida with one of the lowest patient censuses on record. I also abandoned the federal government’s framework of essential versus nonessential businesses. Every job and every business are essential for the people who need employment or who own the business. It is wrong to characterize any job or business as nonessential, and this entire framework needs to be discarded in pandemic preparedness literature.

As for the idea of vaccine passports, which were embraced by New York and many local governments, DeSantis is very tough in this book, explaining his decision to make them completely illegal in his state.

My view was simple: no Floridian should have to choose between a job that they need and a shot they don’t want. It was especially galling to me that Biden and his ilk were prepared to see policemen, firefighters, and nurses lose their jobs over the shots. These are people who were working on the front lines throughout the entire pandemic—many of them had already had COVID—and now Biden wanted to cast them aside because they wouldn’t bend the knee.

The entire chapter is worth a read, particularly his discussion of the Great Barrington Declaration and the difficulties he faced at each stage in fighting off both federal bureaucrats and media hounds. It’s truly difficult to appreciate the full extent of the pressures at the time but the author does a great job recreating the setting at the time. These days, more people know that he was right, especially given the excellent health, educational, and economic data in Florida, and how it stands in sharp contrast to lockdowns states.

A major decision he took was to appoint the brilliant Joseph Ladapo as his surgeon general. It was not just his scientific excellence that attracted the governor. It was also Ladapo’s willingness and ability to stand up to the intense pressure:

Joe Ladapo is a good example of what it takes to succeed in an administration that bucks elite narratives. Key personnel need to view media smears as a form of positive feedback—the operatives for corporate outlets would not bother attacking someone unless that person is effective and is over the target. Not everyone is cut out to take the arrows, but being able to do so is essential to effectively navigating the political battlefield.

The governor concludes:

We can never let this happen in our country again. Congress must conduct a thorough and unbiased investigation of all aspects of the pandemic—the origins of the virus, the conduct of bureaucrats like Dr. Fauci, the damage done by locking kids out of school, the harm caused by shutting down the economy, the failures of so-called public health experts, the role played by pharmaceutical companies, and the actions of the Chinese Communist Party. For once, Congress must put out the unvarnished truth. President Eisenhower was right about the perils of turning policy over to a scientific-technological elite. As the iron curtain of Faucism descended across our continent, the State of Florida stood resolutely in the way. We helped to preserve freedom and to pull the country back from the abyss. Without Florida’s leadership and courage, I fear that Dr. Fauci and his lockdowners would have won. Our country never would have been the same.

Most political biographies are canned, conventional, and obviously manipulative (example A and B). This one is not. It is honest, frank, exciting, accurate, and an overall excellent read, especially on the topics that truly matter to the future.

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  • Brownstone Institute

    The Brownstone Institute for Social and Economic Research is a nonprofit organization conceived of in May 2021 in support of a society that minimizes the role of violence in public life.

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Brownstone Institute

The White House Makes Good on Its Antitrust Threats

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From the Brownstone Institute

BY Jeffrey A. TuckerJEFFREY A. TUCKER

On May 5, 2021, White House press secretary Jen Psaki issued a mob-like warning to social-media companies and information distributors generally. They need to get with the program and start censoring critics of Covid policy. They need to amplify government propaganda. After all, it would be a shame if something would happen to these companies.

These were her exact words:

The president’s view is that the major platforms have a responsibility related to the health and safety of all Americans to stop amplifying untrustworthy content, disinformation and misinformation, especially related to Covid-19 vaccinations and elections. And we’ve seen that over the past several months. Broadly speaking, I’m not placing any blame on any individual or group. We’ve seen it from a number of sources. He also supports better privacy protections and a robust antitrust programSo, his view is that there’s more that needs to be done to ensure that this type of misinformation, disinformation, damaging, sometimes life threatening information is not going out to the American public.

On the face of it, the antitrust action against Apple is about their secure communications network. The Justice Department wants the company to share their services with other networks. As with so many other antitrust actions in history, this is really about the government’s taking sides in competitive disputes between companies, in this case Samsung and other smartphone providers. They resent the way Apple products all work together. They want that changed.

The very notion that the government is trying to protect consumers in this case is preposterous. Apple is a success not because they are exploitative but because they make products that users like, and they like them so much that they buy ever more. It’s not uncommon that a person gets an iPhone and then a Macbook, an iPad, and then AirPods. All play well together.

The Justice Department calls this anticompetitive even though competing is exactly the source of Apple’s market strength. That has always been true. Yes, there is every reason to be annoyed at the company’s hammer-and-tongs enforcement of its intellectual property. But their IP is not the driving force of the company’s success. Its products and services are.

Beyond that, there is a darker agenda here. It’s about bringing new media into the government propaganda fold, exactly as Psaki threatened. Apple is a main distributor of podcasts in the country and world, just behind Spotify (which is foreign controlled). There are 120 million podcast listeners in the US, far more than pay attention to regime media in total.

If the ambition is to control the public mind, something must be done to get those under control. It’s not enough just to nationalize Facebook and Google. If the purpose is to end free speech as we know it, they have to go after podcasting too, using every tool that is available.

Antitrust is one tool they have. The other is the implicit threat to take away Section 230 that grants legal liability to social networks that immunize them against what would otherwise be a torrent of litigation. These are the two main guns that government can hold to the head of these private communications companies. Apple is the target in order to make the company more compliant.

All of which gets us to the issue of the First Amendment. There are many ways to violate laws on free speech. It’s not just about sending a direct note with a built-in threat. You can use third parties. You can invoke implicit threats. You can depend on the awareness that, after all, you are the government so it is hardly a level playing field. You can embed employees and pay their salaries (as was the case with Twitter). Or, in the case of Psaki above, you can deploy the mob tactic of reminding companies that bad things may or may not happen if they persist in non-compliance.

Over the last 4 to 6 years, governments have used all these methods to violate free speech rights. We are sitting on tens of thousands of pages of proof of this. What seemed like spotty takedowns of true information has been revealed as a vast machinery now called the Censorship Industrial Complex involving dozens of agencies, nearly one hundred universities, and many foundations and nonprofit organizations directly or indirectly funded by government.

You would have to be willfully blind not to see the long-run ambition. The goal is a mass reversion to the past, a world like we had in the 1970s with three networks and limited information sources about anything going on in government. Back then, people did not know what they did not know. That’s how effective the system was. It came about not entirely because of active censorship but because of technological limitations.

The information age is called that because it blew up the old system, offering hope of a new world of universal distribution of ever more information about everything, and promising to empower billions of users themselves to become distributors. That’s how the company YouTube got its name: everyone could be a TV producer.

That dream was hatched in the 1980s, gained great progress in the 1990s and 2000s, and began fundamentally to upend government structures in the 2010s. Following Brexit and the election of Donald Trump in 2016 – two major events that were not supposed to happen – a deep establishment said that’s enough. They scapegoated the new systems of information for disrupting the plans of decades and reversing the planned course of history.

The ambition to control every nook and cranny of the Internet sounds far-flung but what choice do they have? This is why this machinery of censorship has been constructed and why there is such a push to have artificial intelligence take over the job of content curation. In this case, machines alone do the job without human intervention, making litigation nearly impossible.

The Supreme Court has the chance to do something to stop this but it’s not clear that many Justices even understand the scale of the problem or the Constitutional strictures against it. Some seem to think that this is only about the right of government officials to pick up the phone and complain to reporters about their coverage. That is absolutely not the issue: content curation affects hundreds of millions of people, not just those posting but those reading too.

Still, if there is some concern about the supposed rights of government actors, there is a clear solution offered by David Friedman: post all information and exhortations about topics and content in a public forum. If the Biden or Trump administration has a preference for how social media should behave, it is free to file a ticket like everyone else and the recipient can and should make it and the response public.

This is not an unreasonable suggestion, and it should certainly figure into any judgment made by the Supreme Court. The federal government has always put out press releases. That’s a normal part of functioning. Bombarding private companies with secret takedown notices and otherwise deploying a huge plethora of intimidation tactics should not even be permitted.

Is there muscle behind the growing push for censorship? Certainly there is. This reality is underscored by the Justice Department’s antitrust actions against Apple. The mask of such official actions is now removed.

Just as the FDA and CDC became marketing and enforcement arms of Pfizer and Moderna, so too the Justice Department is now revealed as a censor and industrial promoter of Samsung. This is how captured agencies with hegemonic ambitions operate, not in the public interest but in the private interest of some industries over others and always with the goal of reducing the freedom of the people.

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  • Jeffrey A. Tucker

    Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Life After Lockdown, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

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Brownstone Institute

Kid Lab Rats

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From the Brownstone Institute

BY Thomas BuckleyTHOMAS BUCKLEY 

” (since [Covid] is universally mild in children), the risk-to-benefit ratio for the [Covid] mRNA injections in children is infinitely bad,” Baker said. “There is no ethical reason whatsoever to continue clinical trials of these products in children, and all such trials should be stopped.” “

Mommy, can I be a Covid lab rat?”

That is a request most parents will never hear and it is a request that very few parents would ever want to hear.

But, unlike the more typical “Can I have a pony?” request, letting your child be a Covid shot test subject is a request that can actually be granted around the nation.

Right now, for example, Pfizer/BioNTech is running an ongoing clinical trial to test the effectiveness of its shots (the shot is not a vaccine as it does not prevent catching the virus or transmitting the virus as typical vaccines do) on kids.

Pfizer has been running radio and other ads looking for test subjects; this is how they describe the study on their “Enrolling Children 6 to 23 months old for a COVID-19 Vaccine Study” website:

This study will help us learn how well our updated COVID-19 vaccine works in babies and toddlers who have not been previously vaccinated and see if the number of recommended doses can potentially be reduced for children under the age of 5. The study vaccine has been authorized by the United States Food and Drug Administration for children at least 6 months of age. It is designed to protect against the newer COVID-19 variant called XBB.1.5.

The company is also running similar trials for older kids and, of course, adults.

Clinical trials for drugs and procedures involving children are not inherently wrong and they are conducted safely around the world almost daily.

But this Covid trial stands out for a number of reasons.

First, the trial only involves kids who have never had a Covid shot before. The likelihood that a parent who has declined to get the shot for their kids in the first place will say “We chose not to get the shots for our kids, but feel free to experiment on them with the stuff we previously declined” is minimal.

In other words, if a parent didn’t feed their kid aluminum foil-flavored ice cream before it is highly unlikely they would feed their kid an experimental version of aluminum foil-flavored ice cream, even if you paid them (the trial comes with certain compensation enticements – Pfizer did not respond to a request for exactly what they are in this trial, though industry averages would indicate the pay would be between a few hundred to a few thousand dollars).

Second, there is the matter of “informed consent.” A trial subject must give permission freely, be told of any risks, and understand the entire situation. Clearly, nine-month-olds cannot do that.

It is perfectly legal for parents to give their “informed consent,” but here we get into the third problem: the risk/benefit question.

For example, during the pandemic (early 2020 to May 2023) there were 41 Covid deaths in California of kids under five. That number does not differentiate between “died with Covid” or “died from Covid;” that is a debate that continues to rage across the country and shall be put aside for the time being.

Every death of a child is a tragedy and this article is not intended to lessen that fact. However, children in general were not at all likely to get, let alone die from, Covid during the pandemic.

During the pandemic, there were about (rolling average) 2.4 million (about 6% of the total population) under-fives in California and there were about 385,000 cases of Covid reported in that age group.

Currently, about 3.2% of California’s under-fives have had the latest shot. That’s on par with the national average. What is interesting is that of the 70,817 kids who have received the shot in the state, 41,224 live in the Bay Area. In other words, the Bay Area has 20% of the state’s population, but 57% of the state’s “vaccinated” toddlers and babies. But do not ever think that politics has had nothing to do with Covid protocols.

During the pandemic, the overall likelihood of a child dying from/with Covid was about 1 in 60,000; for those over 75 – about 6.5% of the population or 2.7 million – there were about 51,000 with/from Covid deaths, or about 1 in 50.

The risk, clearly, is extremely different depending upon age and general state of health.

With a relative risk of being harmed by Covid, the risks of the Covid shot itself must be considered carefully – note: no kid in the study will get a placebo for comparison purposes.

The Covid shots, in the general population, did have significant side-effects and did cause a number of deaths. While these numbers are not broken out by age, in the same time period there were 640 deaths and 89,000 “adverse effects” experienced (much much more than just a sore arm) by Californians.

Also during the same time period, all other vaccines combined caused 66 people to die and 14,000 to have a reportable “adverse effect.” (Note – the numbers are taken from the CDC’s “vaccine adverse event reporting system,” a tool it stood by as an early warning device for decades…that is, until the Covid problem numbers got too high.)

That puts the general odds of something bad happening to a person after they get a Covid shot at about 1 in a 1,000 and some studies have shown it to be 1 in 800. In other words, the risk from the shot appears to outweigh the risk of Covid itself by a factor of 60 times.

Citing the uncertainty of benefit, it should also be noted that the European Union has not cleared the shot at all (with minor exceptions) for the under-fives and were hesitant in allowing them for the under 18s.

Clearly, the risk outweighs the reward, as it were, and it is unclear – because Pfizer did not answer any request for information/comment (see questions below) – if parents are given those figures when making the decision to enroll their kid in an experimental drug program.

Adults calculate risk and reward constantly – from “Can I make that light before it turns red?” to “Should I tease that lion?” But a seven-month old is simply not capable of doing so and while certain clinical trials do hold out serious hope and are important for society at large, a trial such as this for such a limited reward – kids very very very rarely get, let alone suffer seriously, from Covid – seems dubious.

In other words, if you wanted to test a new malaria drug you would not do so on Santa’s elves at the North Pole because there are no mosquitoes there to infect anyone.

According to the Belmont Report, which set baseline standards for human-involved clinical trials in the late 1970s (it was a government reaction to the horror of the CDC’s own “Tuskegee Syphilis Study”) one of the three core standards for justifying clinical trial testing is “beneficence.”

In other words, there is an obligation to protect persons from harm by maximizing anticipated benefits and minimizing possible risk and harm.

That risk/benefit calculation obviously changes in regard to other far more common childhood maladies, making participation in those studies potentially far more “beneficent.”

But in the case of Covid, the question is how are maximal, as it were, are the anticipated benefits?

Very very minimal and that is the problem, said Dr. Clayton Baker, former Clinical Associate Professor of Medical Humanities and Bioethics at the University of Rochester.

“Given the real and well-established risks of harm (including myocarditis and death), and given the functionally zero potential for benefit (since [Covid] is universally mild in children), the risk-to-benefit ratio for the [Covid] mRNA injections in children is infinitely bad,” Baker said. “There is no ethical reason whatsoever to continue clinical trials of these products in children, and all such trials should be stopped.”

Come to think of it, maybe just get the kid the pony instead.

Here’s a link to an on-going kids Covid study with a handy map so you can find a location near you (mostly Bay Area): A Study to Learn About Variant-Adapted COVID-19 RNA Vaccine Candidate(s) in Healthy Children

For clinical trials in general, you can look here for one that you might be interested in taking part in:

For clinical trials just about Covid, you can look here

As noted above, here are the questions Pfizer did not reply to:

-Exactly how is informed consent handled? I assume a parent/guardian can provide said consent?

-Do (or have) you run trials with previously vaccinated children?

-What child/youth trials have been run in the past and what have been their results?

-What is the compensation amount?

-Have any previous trials shown conclusively that the vaccine ameliorates Covid severity in children?

-When and in what manner did the FDA approve this trial?

-When do you expect to conclude the trial?

-Is this trial aimed at testing a “booster” shot or to cover a new variant?

-Has any child in any trial conducted had a significant and serious reaction requiring hospitalization and/or led to death?

-It appears one of the points of the study is to figure out how to cut the number of doses as well as check effectiveness. Is that correct?

-How many children – nationwide and in California specifically – have signed up for/been through the trial so far?

-What are the differences between trials involving children and those involving adults?

-Will Pfizer conduct trials each time it comes out with new variant vaccine shot?

Republished from the author’s Substack

Author

  • Thomas Buckley

    Thomas Buckley is the former mayor of Lake Elsinore, Cal. and a former newspaper reporter. He is currently the operator of a small communications and planning consultancy.

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