DeSantis hires people for their willingness to pursue lib-owning as relentlessly as he does; one of those hires is Florida's surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, who recommended today that healthy children should not get vaccinated against COVID-19. Just so we're clear on this: As The Washington Post's Philip Bump writes today, Dr. Ladapo "announced not that the state was declining to recommend vaccination but ... that children shouldn’t be vaccinated."
This policy was announced at a panel convened by the governor called “The Curtain Close on COVID Theater.” Bump tells us:
To understand this decision, it’s useful to look not at the rationale offered by Ladapo, which he did not offer, but to consider the comments he made at the outset of the panel discussion....Bump is appropriately unnerved by this.
He ... expressed his appreciation at being able to work with DeSantis on “what is very clearly the issue of my lifetime.”
Not the pandemic, mind you, but “this incredible challenge or battle we have between individual rights and individual choice and truth on one side,” Ladapo said, “and overarching powers, overarching government, abuse of powers, abuse of data, dishonesty and, frankly, a lot of unethical behavior on the other side.”
Like what, you might ask? Well, he offered an example.
“I still remember very clearly when people were telling us that — including a lot of people with a lot of degrees, were telling us that 15 days to slow the — you know, to stop the spread and other really interesting statements,” Ladapo said. “And I remember my wife and I were looking at the newspapers and looking at the editorial section of the New York Times thinking, what in heaven’s name are these people thinking? And sure enough, obviously that’s proven to be true that, that these people had no idea what they were talking about.”
Ladapo, disparaging the efforts of President Donald Trump’s White House to combat the coronavirus in March 2020, accurately quoted the administration’s catchphrase: 15 days to slow the spread. But, of course, closing businesses and limiting interpersonal interactions for two weeks did slow the spread of the virus, as it necessarily must have. It didn’t stop the virus — but no one said it would. The point was to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed and, in the absence of clear information about how it spread, the idea was simply to try to limit person-to-person infection....I appreciate Bump's anger, but he's ignoring one key point that I made here last month: "15 days to slow the spread" was Donald Trump's slogan, and yet the slogan is now wielded by right-wingers as a sneering shibboleth directed at liberals, Democrats, and Dr. Anthony Fauci. We never said that 15 days would turn everything around -- Trump did. Yet Ladapo knows that when he invokes this phrase, every potential DeSantis voter -- in Florida and nationwide -- will think, Those goddamn liberals told us if we shut down for 15 days we'd stop COVID. They were wrong then and they've been wrong ever since.
But Ladapo doesn’t simply think that “experts” were wrong or dumb.... Instead, he appears to think that they are malign.
“I think one thing that’s very important at this point is to not let these people get away with it, is just the best way to put it, because there are — the people that have led us to the point that we are, they want us to forget how we got here and they want us to forget that their choices, that they made for everyone, were the wrong choices that basically led to no appreciable benefit,” he said. “And we cannot let them forget. We have to hold them accountable. We have to let our country, let the world know what the truth is because it’s the right thing to do and because it can happen again if we don’t.”
...He’s demanding “accountability” for experts making recommendations that were later updated or for advocating tools rendered less effective by changes in the virus itself. If not, it will happen again, he says — but what will? Experts will try to navigate available information to keep people alive?
And why the reference to "the editorial section of the New York Times"? Did the Times lead the charge for "15 days to slow the spread"? I can't find any evidence of that. But as every right-wing demagogue knows -- and the good doctor is a demagogue, as is his boss -- if you want to connect with the rage centers in right-wing voters' brains, a highly effective way to do it is to turn their anger on one of the media outlets they hate the most. Among media objects of right-wing hate, only CNN is a rival to The New York Times.
So Ladopa, on behalf of DeSantis, is blaming liberals, and what his intended audience regards as the liberal media, for Trump's program and Trump's slogan. And even many of DeSantis amd Ladopa's critics don't understand the subtext.
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