Meet hydroxychloroquine touter, masks skeptic, vaccine-dismissing Dr. Joseph Ladapo, final seen buttering up one in every of Donald Trump’s most well-liked crackpot pandemic cures throughout a interval when Trump was casting about for pandemic options that might contain not doing one rattling factor on his half. Ladapo is a surgeon normal DeSantis can belief to toe the Florida Republican line when making the state’s faculties, authorities businesses, eating places, cruise ships, and alligator feeding ponds into wonderful breeding grounds for brand new COVID-19 variants.
There wasn’t an opportunity in hell DeSantis was going to select anybody who would not nod approvingly at Republican speaking factors. DeSantis exists to serve DeSantis, and whether or not Floridians die whereas DeSantis postures for a Trumpian presidential run is a facet problem at greatest.
As for Lapado, he’s an attention-grabbing alternative. The “America’s Frontline Docs” group who introduced themselves to America in that video—a video Google eliminated for selling pandemic misinformation—is dodgy as hell and never close to the “frontlines” of something. Nonetheless, Tea Social gathering Patriots co-founder Jenny Beth Martin is concerned. The weird boosting of hydroxychloroquine by the group’s numerous members ought to have triggered some type of reckoning when it turned obvious the remedy was snake-oil nonsense. Nonetheless, Lapado and the others look like detached to break finished by these claims.
Early within the pandemic, Lapado had already scrambled to the press with a Wall Road Journal op-ed defending anti-maskers, social distancing refusers, and different public well being menaces with a relentless barrage of speaking factors straight out of Republican mouths. There wasn’t any phrase that Lapado was ready for U.S. deaths to inch in the direction of the 700,000 mark again when he steered that public coverage targets must be centered on “not overwhelming hospitals” slightly than on stopping People from getting sick within the first place.
We are able to take from his backing of the DeSantis method even now that he has completely no problem with the present variety of pandemic deaths—and believes the nation can tolerate significantly extra.
Certainly, Lapado is all-in on the DeSantis method. On the press occasion saying his appointment, Lapado introduced the state will “reject concern as a manner of constructing insurance policies” and declared it was “mindless” to prioritize vaccines over, for instance, “consuming extra vegatables and fruits.”
Yeah. So he is a quack, then. A quacky, quacky quack. A Trump-approved, Republican Social gathering-talking-point-spewing quack wanting to forged apart his once-impressive medical credentials to announce as an alternative that perhaps if you happen to all ate extra apples, then you definately would not want vaccines within the first place. Bought it.
All of this means that the Florida public stays extraordinarily boned. The state’s conspiracy-promoting Republicans haven’t any plan to scale back pandemic deaths and completely little interest in doing so. DeSantis as an alternative appears to be making an attempt to achieve “herd immunity” the arduous manner: by permitting the state’s total inhabitants to be uncovered and getting the mass deaths over with, hopefully earlier than the 2024 presidential marketing campaign begins.
Even setting apart the monstrous nature of that method, it is astonishingly harmful. As we have seen, the COVID-19 virus has proven a bent to mutate into new types. The present pressure of concern, delta, has each probability of once more mutating into one thing extra harmful nonetheless. As in Texas and different Southern states, the selection to make petri dishes out of native populations slightly than responding aggressively to new outbreaks could but produce a harmful variant named after one of many Republican charlatans at the moment cultivating it.
I do not know what to inform you, Florida. A majority of Floridians voted for this, and there is nonetheless been no push amongst Florida voters at hand DeSantis’ behind to him on a platter and cross off pandemic duties to any individual who would not have a toddler’s soccer trophy the place his soul must be. Evidently for the state’s Republican voters, cult adherence is certainly a extra motivating pressure than protecting their very own households alive, a lot much less anyone else’s.
