He became a regular on Fox News, second only to Donald Trump as a figure of admiration. He laced his speeches and press conferences with anger when he walked, he thrust out his chest like a soldier on parade. Cancels on them all the time.”ĭeSantis’s approach to the pandemic gave rise to an entire governing strategy, in which he regularly denounced some outrage, invariably perpetrated by the left, and proclaimed that he was the only one brave enough to stop it. “Ron’s weakness as a politician is that he doesn’t give a fuck. “Ron’s strength as a politician is that he doesn’t give a fuck,” a Republican consultant who knows him told me. Those who work closely with him say that he is unique among elected officials in his disregard for public opinion and the press. “We can’t trust the governor with our lives.” A former political adviser with knowledge of the COVID response told me that DeSantis was unfazed: “We were getting crucified, but to him it was just noise.” DeSantis revels in defying what he sees as a corrupt and self-satisfied liberal establishment. “Any public distrust of this administration has been well-earned,” the Miami Herald editorial board wrote.
In his view, the government, apart from protecting the elderly and making treatments available, should do almost nothing.Īs the death toll mounted, he was mocked by critics as “DeathSantis” and denounced by the mainstream press. For DeSantis, who espouses a libertarian vision of small government and personal freedom, the ideas in the Great Barrington Declaration resonated. The science, though, remained unclear-Did the virus linger on surfaces? Did it travel in droplets or in a fog?-and many politicians found that the most appealing solutions were the ones that fit their ideology. “He’d read all the medical literature-all of it, not just the abstracts,” he told me. Talking with him, Bhattacharya was surprised by his command of the research. “I’m lucky to have tenure.”ĭeSantis, young and aggressively confident, was similarly convinced that he could find a better way to handle the virus. “I’ve lost friends,” Bhattacharya told me. With COVID-19 killing hundreds of Americans every day, the signers of the declaration became pariahs in their profession. The only practical approach, they said, would be to protect the most vulnerable-mainly by isolating the elderly-and allow everyone else to go about their lives until vaccines and herd immunity neutralized the disease. He is one of three scientists who drafted the Great Barrington Declaration, which argued that many governments were doing more harm than good by shutting down economies and schools. In the early months of the pandemic, Bhattacharya had established himself as an outlier among public-health experts. It was Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, and he wanted to talk about the coronavirus. One Sunday afternoon in September, 2020, Jay Bhattacharya, an epidemiologist at Stanford University, was at home in Los Altos when he got an unexpected call.
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