Ron DeSantis and his Pronouncement

There will be no new mandates in Florida

Ron DeSantis is basically saying if we ignore the pandemic it will just go away. While I believe in personal freedom and I want the pandemic to go away, I disagree with Ron DeSantis. Health professionals should be driving our response to the pandemic. Politicians are getting in the way of a coordinated response. Health has become a partisan topic and health is taking a back seat to economic stability.

Why?

Because politics has become making points and not providing service. Any topic which requires action such as the pandemic, it is more important to disagree than to take action. Democracy is failing us because of information overload.

DeSantis referred to a paper / website https://covidschooldashboard.com/ generated by an economics professor out of Brown University and others. The statistics taken last winter and spring show trends based on masking / social distancing at schools throughout the country. The raw statistics would indicate that masking doesn’t make a difference. Hence DeSantis’ referral.

What DeSantis missed was a disclaimer “However, we would caution against making causal conclusions from the data. The mitigation practices in the data tend to cluster, making it difficult to attribute differences in infection rates to a single school behavior.”

Also if you dig a little deeper and do not include elementary schools, it is clear schools without masking have much higher rates of infection. The authors assumed most cases were contracted outside the school environment. environment. Hence infection rates in the community and behaviors in the community make the school data interesting but not definitive.

So the authors don’t necessarily support Ron DeSantis’ conclusion.

From the beginning messages on the pandemic have been mixed.

Communication from the scientific community has evolved over time. The hope was that vaccinations would reduce the need to mask. Biden announced that vaccinated people no longer required masks. The hope was that it would drive up vaccination rates. It failed.

I previously http://nobodyretires.com/index.php/2021/05/21/iowa-and-south-dakota/ suggested that we should begin referring to the vaccine as the “Trumpcine.” I believe the majority of unvaccinated Americans are Trump supporters. While I don’t believe Trump should take credit for the vaccine, if renaming the vaccine would get people vaccine, I am all for it.

Does science support that in most cases we should be vaccinated. I believe the answer is yes. If vaccination gets us to herd immunity, opening our economy becomes safe.

We must be responsible…

The delta variant is a game changer. It has set us back. Recommendations from the science community have changed to meet the new need. That is what science is all about. Responding to the each change as it comes. Learning from past mistakes.

Each and every individual has the right to wear a mask or not, to get vaccinated or not. As long as they remain in isolation that choice does not impact others. But as soon as they decide to be part of a community, their choice puts others at risk. They are being responsible when it pertains to themselves. It is not responsible to put the health of others at risk. Hence workplace and school rules about masking and vaccinations should not only be legal, but enforceable.

An individual who does not learn from their mistakes is doomed to failure.

Conservative Republicans.

While their rhetoric may seem popular. It is based on what worked in the past. The present is now and we should be looking at the future. Since Ronald Reagan the only administrations that have attempted to balance a budget are democratic. Republicans only emphasize deficits when the Democrats are in the Presidency.

Do I believe everything democrats say? No. But I do believe the democrats are better equipped to make lead us into the future. The republicans are leading us into a world of revolution and autocracy.