Meet hydroxychloroquine touter, masks skeptic, vaccine-dismissing Dr. Joseph Ladapo, final seen buttering up one in every of Donald Trump’s most popular 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 basic DeSantis can belief to toe the Florida Republican line when making the state’s faculties, authorities companies, 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 aspect problem at finest.
As for Lapado, he’s an attention-grabbing selection. The “America’s Frontline Medical doctors” group who offered 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 Occasion Patriots co-founder Jenny Beth Martin is concerned. The weird boosting of hydroxychloroquine by the group’s numerous members ought to have brought about some kind of reckoning when it turned obvious the therapy was snake-oil nonsense. Nonetheless, Lapado and the others seem like detached to wreck executed 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 recommended that public coverage targets must be targeted on “not overwhelming hospitals” reasonably than on stopping Individuals from getting sick within the first place.
We are able to take from his backing of the DeSantis strategy 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 strategy. On the press occasion saying his appointment, Lapado introduced the state will “reject worry as a approach 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 Occasion-talking-point-spewing quack desirous to solid apart his once-impressive medical credentials to announce as a substitute that perhaps should you all ate extra apples, you then 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 don’t have any plan to cut back pandemic deaths and completely no real interest in doing so. DeSantis as a substitute appears to be trying to succeed in “herd immunity” the laborious approach: by permitting the state’s whole 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 strategy, it is astonishingly harmful. As we have seen, the COVID-19 virus has proven an inclination to mutate into new varieties. The present pressure of concern, delta, has each likelihood 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 reasonably than responding aggressively to new outbreaks might but produce a harmful variant named after one of many Republican charlatans at present cultivating it.
I do not know what to let you know, 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 move off pandemic obligations to any person who does not have a toddler’s soccer trophy the place his soul must be. Plainly for the state’s Republican voters, cult adherence is certainly a extra motivating drive than retaining their very own households alive, a lot much less anyone else’s.