Ron DeSantis, Angel of Death, Says Biden Should Follow His Lead on COVID

As you’ve most likely heard by now, one of many locations you must keep away from visiting if you wish to keep away from contracting COVID, being hospitalized with the illness, and doubtlessly dying a depressing dying, is Florida. That, after all, is because of Governor Ron DeSantis, who’s finished every thing in his energy to let the illness ravage the state, from banning masks mandates and vaccine passports to threatening to withhold pay from college districts who decide to protect small children. By no means the mannequin of pandemic responsiveness, Florida is now recording, per The New York Instances, a mean of 23,314 new circumstances a day over the weekend—a 30% enhance from its peak in January—whereas hospitalizations have almost tripled within the final month, inflicting the mayor of Orlando to request that residents preserve water with a purpose to curb the pressure on the town’s provide of liquid oxygen, which is required to deal with COVID-19 sufferers. As for deaths, 227 are being reported day by day, which The New York Times notes is “by far probably the most in the US proper now.”

Given these grim stats, you may assume that DeSantis would pause, replicate, and think about that he’s not really doing an important job right here. However you’ll assume fallacious! As a substitute, the Republican governor believes that not solely is he doing a bang-up job, however that Joe Biden ought to take a web page from his pandemic playbook. Sure, actually!

Showing on Fox Information on Wednesday evening, DeSantis spoke with Jesse Watters and truly used the phrase “success” in reference to how Florida is dealing with the virus, claimed Biden must be following his lead, threatened to struggle the president ought to he attempt to impose some type of federal mandate geared toward retaining Individuals alive, and, look forward to it, criticized Biden for not ending the pandemic that DeSantis is personally making worse.

“We’re completely going to face in Biden’s method if he’s making an attempt to deliver his damaging insurance policies to Florida, if he’s making an attempt to have the federal authorities take away mother and father’ rights by way of their schoolchildren…he stated he was going to finish COVID, he hasn’t finished that,” DeSantis instructed Watters with a straight face. “We’re the primary state to begin the remedy facilities for monoclonal antibodies, having nice success with that, that ought to have been a much bigger plan, a much bigger a part of this complete response all through the nation from the start. However on the finish of the day, I feel he’s looking for a approach to distract from the failures of his presidency. So he thinks that he can assault Florida, generally he assaults Texas as a result of we’re Republican states, however I can inform you that canine’s not going to search out right here. Florida mother and father need to have the ability to make selections for his or her children. Biden is obsessive about forcing kindergartners to need to put on masks for eight hours a day even when that’s not what the mother or father needs them to do. And he has all these different issues that he’s not tending to. So we’re prepared and we’ll be prepared to reply in form.“

Because the Washington Put up’s Philip Bump writes re: DeSantis‘s touting of monoclonal antibodies:

It’s very helpful to notice that this particular assertion about responding to the pandemic with miraculous remedies was precisely what President Trump tried to do shortly earlier than the 2020 election. Equally fighting promoting his product, Trump declared that an antibody remedy he’d obtained for his personal an infection was a “remedy” that might quickly be rolled out free throughout the nation. Like DeSantis, he was making an attempt to downplay the unfold of the virus by suggesting there was a approach to make it unimportant, that the pandemic may very well be overwhelmed on the again finish as a substitute of the entrance finish. This can be a very helpful little bit of spin for a politician against advocating sporting masks or social distancing: a pound of remedy is politically value a ton of prevention.

However Trump additionally by no means made antibody remedies a “larger a part of this complete response,” partially as a result of he quickly grew to become targeted on denying the fact of his reelection loss as a substitute of the pandemic. That itself is after all one other instance of a politician making an attempt to reframe a loss as a victory.