[ad_1]
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis responded to insults from Dr. Anthony Fauci written during the pandemic, calling them “badges of honor” in an appearance Monday on FOX News.
In his ‘diaries’ from August 2021, Fauci wrote: “Besides being a total jerk, he is causing people to die in his home state.” Four days later: “Governor DeSantis is a complete disgrace.”
“I think those are badges of honor, to have him attacking me,” DeSantis said. “The diaries, I think, really validate what I saw early on. This is a guy who was drinking his own Kool-Aid. He was venerated by the media.”
I think he liked the fact that he had a lot of this informal power when he was issuing these recommendations and telling governors and mayors to do some of the draconian things that were done,” he said. “It had a really negative effect on a lot of societies throughout this country.”
“We don’t want to ‘Fauci’ Florida. A Fauci city or state basically was a dystopia where you had businesses reeling, people’s liberties curtailed and kids left on the sidelines, unable to access education.”
He was also doing it publicly, Bill. I remember early in COVID, I did an order to mandate that schools be open. He was attacking us. He would come down to Florida and do hits on local news saying that we were doing it wrong.
He wanted to impose mandates on people at the local level. I blocked those governments from doing it.
You remember he would attack Florida for having our beaches open, for example, or Memorial Day parties that people were doing. That’s what happens. People enjoy the scenery.
He was very quiet when you had the George Floyd protests—not talking about those people being locked down. He was very mute about it.
To me, it was clear pretty early on, within probably a couple of months, that he was practicing political science rather than evidence-based medicine.
What happened, though—I think RFK was right to call out CNN—the legacy media really imbued him with a certain amount of informal authority. Any edict he would issue was put out on every media channel as equating to science.
Fauci even said at one time, “I am the science.” If you disagree with me, you disagree with science.
Wait a minute. Science tells you that a family is not able to operate their restaurant? Of course it doesn’t.
Science tells you that schools should be indefinitely closed for a virus that had very little impact on young, healthy children? Of course it didn’t say that.
Science told you that mask mandates would stop COVID? Fauci himself, in March 2020, said the masks wouldn’t do it.
So the diaries, I think, really validate what I saw early on. This is a guy who was drinking his own Kool-Aid. He was venerated by the media.
I think he liked the fact that he had a lot of this informal power when he was issuing these recommendations and telling governors and mayors to do some of the draconian things that were done.
It had a really negative effect on a lot of societies throughout this country.
I would say, we don’t want to “Fauci” Florida. A Fauci city or state basically was a dystopia where you had businesses reeling, people’s liberties curtailed and kids left on the sidelines, unable to access education.
BILL HEMMER: I had forgotten about this. I remember it now. He was arguing about a spread. You said it was a cluster, and he wrote in his diary that you were correct about that. He also said you are a Trumper and a real problem: “Screw people dying, save the economy.”
Here was the clip from a podcast in July 2022.
[CLIP]: I wonder if you would recommend locking down schools if you had to do it all over again.
DR. ANTHONY FAUCI [CLIP]: Well, you know, again, first of all, I didn’t recommend locking anything down.
You are asking me questions and talking about the CDC. It is the public-health agency that uses its epidemiologists and science-based approach to make recommendations.
BILL HEMMER: Is that an accurate representation of what happened, in your view?
GOV. RON DESANTIS: Absolutely not. Actually, in his diary, he was taking credit for school closures in places like California and New York.
He was opposed to Florida in 2020. I issued an executive order—which the unions opposed and I got sued over—mandating that all public schools be open.
We told parents, if you want to do virtual, that’s fine. But every kid who wants to be there, and the parents who want them there, has a right to be there. We would show it was safe, and it was. He very much opposed that.
He also wasn’t supportive when we did have Delta. When that came and started going through the Southeast, I set up monoclonal antibody clinics with the drug, and it helped a lot of people.
We set them up all over the state of Florida. You never heard him talking about getting that monoclonal antibody treatment. It was like: Wall yourself off from society and don’t contract it. That’s not realistic.
If you go back to the early days, he was not as apocalyptic in February 2020. In March, he started advocating for draconian measures and said it would be temporary. A few weeks later, he said there would be lockdowns until there were no more cases—an indefinite lockdown. It would have destroyed this country.
I think if Florida had not stepped up when we did, the end would have been much worse than what ended up happening.
[ad_2]
Source link
