Gov. Ron DeSantis expanded his war against public health by declaring “he will sign an executive order to ‘protect the rights of parents’ and allow them to choose whether their children should wear masks even if their school requires them to do so,” The Hill reported on Friday, July 30, 2021 (story here).
“In Florida, there will be no lockdowns, there will be no school closures, there will be no restrictions and no mandates in the state of Florida,” DeSantis said.
The Republican, a potential 2024 presidential nominee, has consistently defied public health and medical experts’ recommendations and guidance, and it shows in his state’s sickness and death statistics; Florida currently has over 20% of the entire nation’s Covid-19 Delta variant cases.
DeSantis is touchy about those statistics. He even sent a heavily armed police SWAT team to invade the home of a whistleblower who refused to participate in covering them up (see details here).
DeSantis’ deadly policies have earned him the sobriquet “Governor Death” among his many detractors.
School officials aren’t taking it lying down. In Broward County, which includes Fort Lauderdale and parts of Miami, the school board chairperson said, “There is no way in good conscious that I could bring anybody back into a school environment on the bus, the cafeteria, and not have a mask mandate. That is a moral decision.”
He’s wrong, she’s right; more than 4 million kids have been already infected, and doctors are warning of a wave of infections among school children this fall. The medical community foresees “increasing cases among children, including severe ones, … as the delta variant spreads and with no Covid vaccine authorized for children under the age of 12,” NBC News reported earlier this month (story here).
It’s crucial to understand that neither the pandemic, nor the virus causing it, are static. Things are changing fast. “Last year, for example, you would have to give a child a really high infectious dose to make them sick, but with the virus that’s more contagious, even what would be an insignificant exposure could get them sick,” Dr. Carlos Oliveira, a pediatric infectious diseases doctor and assistant professor at Yale School of Medicine told NBC News.
From the beginning of the pandemic, Republicans have been a formidable obstacle to containing it and saving lives. Their fierce opposition, bordering on criminality, to public health measures seems to stem from a mix of anti-science ideology and selfish greed; they’ve prioritized saving business profits over saving human lives. There may be a racist element in this, too; the pandemic has hit hardest in impoverished minority communities.
A great deal has been learned about Covid-19, but at a high cost, with more than 600,000 Americans now dead from the disease. Throughout, rightwing politics and Republican politicians have made things worse. Terms like “stupid,” “ignorant,” and “irresponsible” are inadequate to describe their actions, and it’s time to start calling the consequences of their policies “criminally negligent” and “manslaughter.”
And DeSantis? He deserves to be called “Governor Death.” God help us if he becomes president. One can only hope America’s voters are smarter than that.
Related story: A Baton Rouge children’s hospital is quickly filling up with young Covid-19 patients as the Delta variant spreads through that area (read story here).
Photo: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is risking these Miami kids’ health and lives (story here). If he becomes president, he’ll do it to every child in America.