A Voice of Reason - and Science - on Covid

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed a new Surgeon General this week. Dr. Joseph Ladapo, earned his MD from Harvard, and is a professor at the University of Florida, College of Medicine. In his first speech on Covid, Dr. Ladapo stated - with refreshing clarity:

“We’re done with fear. That’s something that’s been, unfortunately, a centerpiece of health policy in the United States ever since the beginning of the pandemic. It is over here, expiration date, it’s done.”

“The state should be promoting good health. Vaccination isn’t the only path to that. It has been treated almost like a religion, and that’s just senseless. There are a lot of good pathways to health, and vaccination is not the only one. We support measures for good health, vaccination, losing weight, eating more fruits and vegetables.”

“We need to respect human rights. People do have autonomy over their lives. It’s not OK, it’s not virtuous, and it’s not right to just take away those rights from individuals.”

“As a perfect example of how glaringly we’ve ignored what public health really means is how we’ve just brazenly pulled children, who need the structure of school and need the structure of a routine in their lives, out of school. It’s terrible to do it for all kids, but we’ve also done it for kids with disabilities, and people have hardly even batted an eye.”

“Part of why fear is an issue is because of the climate of distrust that has been engendered over the past year and a half, and that was the direct result of scientists – my colleagues, some of them – taking the science and basically misrepresenting it to fit their agendas, their interests, what they wanted to see people do.”

“Natural immunity is one of the most startling aspects of the pandemic… There’s really great protection, terrific protection, durable protection, robust protection, variant protection that confers some resistance to variants… There’s tremendous data that supports the fact that natural immunity protects people from getting very ill and also protects people from being infected again…”

Gov. DeSantis blasted the Biden administration for attempting to seize medicines and limit Florida doctors’ use of monoclonal antibody treatment for Covid patients.

“One of the reasons why monoclonal antibody treatment was not something that was put out there very publicly by the experts and by the powers that be in DC, is because they feared that if you tell people there’s an effective treatment, you tell people COVID’s a treatable illness, they feared some people would say, ‘Well, you know, maybe I won’t get vaccinated, I’ll just get the treatment,’ and so they didn’t want that message out because they feared how people would behave.”

“There’s a time for politics, I get that, but to be so obsessed with trying to take away life-saving treatments," said DeSantis. "Some things should be beyond politics.”