We still haven't got to a point where we can say whether or not DeSantis made the best decisions. We do know that he made public health decisions based upon political tribalism, popularity contests, and not by listening to the the majority of public health practitioners or available scientific evidence. He also has worked hard during this pandemic to suppress information related to Florida's real death count.
It's kinda like firing a gun into a crowd with your eyes closed. Maybe nobody will die. Maybe you'll even hit the next Hitler and the world will be a better place! Like I said, time will tell whether or not DeSantis got away with it. But it's really hard to make a case that his actions to date haven't been reckless.
What? No, it’s nothing like that. To say his actions are like shooting a gun into a crowd is to ignore, as one side has done, all of the myriad of downsides of locking people away, shutting down the economy, crushing small businesses, damage to children and their education and their mental health, and the mental health of millions of people, and pretending that maximum Covid paranoia was the only just action. You can debate whether you think all of those things were justified in trying to minimize Covid, but you cannot pretend that none of them exist, which is what your analogy has done. The “follow the science” crowd spent too much of 2020-2022 pretending that there was only one kind of science “how to stop Covid” and zero side effects of those policies. Purely by the numbers it appears DeSantis weighed the other side of those policies more heavily and didn’t suffer any more than most other states as a result.
DeSantis is recommending against Covid vaccination for kids. All available medical evidence indicates that vaccination reduces severity of outcomes in people who contract covid.
Recommending against vaccination doesn't involve "locking people away, shutting down the economy, crushing small businesses, damage to children and their education and their mental health, and the mental health of millions of people" . . . so which policy is DeSantis carefully weighing and considering to make that recommendation exactly?
Ahh it’s the old guitarStv goal post shift.
I haven't shifted any goal posts. DeSantis' recommendation against vaccination was where this thread of conversation started (see post #653).
That recommendation came out in the last day or two. On the heels of news that a study found the vaccine isn’t very effective for kids 5-11 anyways.
I feel like you didn't read that study. The vaccine is effective for kids . . . they believe that the dose currently being given out may be slightly too low for children 5-11 to receive full benefit.
Of course, that's also a non-peer approved study.
In what world does that lead to a policy of non-vaccination and make any kind of sense?
Now I’m not going to defend the right’s extreme vaccine hesitancy because I think it’s dumb and ill-founded.
But that isn’t what we were talking about, we were talking about DeSantis’s refusal to shut down his economy, his schools, and make performance theater (mask wearing) mandatory for climbing out of bed every day. So you can answer that if you’d like, or you can visibly try to steer the conversation in a direction that’s more advantageous to your argument but isn’t what we were discussing.
As mentioned, the conversation started by talking about DeSantis' current actions. But sure, if you want to talk about his previous actions . . . he has taken risks with other people's lives for what certainly appeared to me to be political expediency at the time*. All the data isn't in, but it seems that he may have gotten away with it - Florida's response isn't significantly more terrible that the US on the whole (which was pretty bad overall).
His current actions only seem to lend credence to my belief about political expediency though.
*This appears to be separate from the discussion of other factors impacting people, from economic impact / mental health / children's education. These are certainly important points, and there have been many debates and discussions regarding where the best place to draw the line is. Certainly, in North America they were always under consideration . . . if they weren't we would have had real lockdowns (can't leave your home), significant travel restrictions (can't leave the country / state / city), or serious quarantine measures (infected people are isolated and monitored in medical bunkers the way that China is currently doing). Opening schools and getting kids into classrooms was certainly a priority around here, as was expanding health care for mental illness and a whole host of small business loans/grants and special programs.
