Steely Dan has a line in “My Old School” I think of often when news about Florida goes national. California won’t “slide into the sea” before the state with the prettiest name does. As Jonathan Chait remarks in this handy checklist you can print and stick on your fridge with a magnet next to your kids’ dinosaur drawings, Governor Ron DeSantis has devolved from anti-pro-vaccine to anti-vaccine. Remembering to say “you should get vaccinated” doesn’t count.
Anyway, I called it. The moment the delta wave waned, as all waves do, DeSantis would declare victory. I know Yahoo News is not the most rigorous of news sources, but, here they are, wondering like last spring’s POLITICO story where DeSantis would go to get his apology (to its credit the story is one of the few I’ve read noting how Florida has seen more deaths during the delta wave than at any point in the last sixteen months). You’d think knowing that Florida accounts for 23% of American COVID deaths despite having 6% of the population would slow him down. Even more than the former president whom I once thought DeSantis genuinely admired but, it’s clear now, sacrificed on the altar of his ambitions, the governor let thousands of citizens die for the sake of a monstrous calculation.
But DeSantis and his minions don’t read editorials like my hometown paper’s:
Democrats shouldn’t be the only ones to bring up Ladapo’s past endorsement of hydroxychloroquine for the treatment of COVID-19, which was also peddled by Donald Trump and discredited by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Or Ladapo’s signing of a statement calling for herd immunity during the pandemic. Or his hailing ivermectin, an ant-iparasitic medication, as a COVID-19 treatment. Not only is the medication not approved for such use, it also has led to a spike in calls to poison-control centers in the state. He has proven he’s not worthy of the $512,000 per year he will earn along with a tenured professorship at the University of Florida. But in DeSantis’ Florida, Ladapo fits right in.
Consider the last point: the surgeon general designate will earn tenure at UF for despising research.
Speaking of schooling, good news: Centner Academy, the Miami-Dade private school angling to be an abattoir, has said it will not send vaccinated children home after the state threatened its funding.
Humanizing The Vacuum 