© Joe Raedle/Getty ImagesFlorida Governor Ron DeSantis
For more than a year, DeSantis and the Sunshine State were a favorite bugaboo of the left and prominent members of the mainstream media whenever the topic of coronavirus mitigation came up.
Buck Sexton noted that essentially in the time since then, little has been said by the pundits about DeSantis or Florida.
"Why is it that you are not hearing about the Florida COVID caseload so much anymore? We were here talking to you about it in July because the media was convinced Ron DeSantis... 'doesn't care about old people or children dying of COVID' - [saying] horrible things."
Sexton further remarked that conservatives had latched onto the media's nonstop derision of DeSantis by satirically blaming him for coronavirus spikes in places like Hawaii and the Northeast.
"We knew it was absurd. [T]hey were scoring cheap political points, when we all know there is a seasonality to the virus."In Hawaii, Democratic Gov. David Ige implemented the Safe Travels Program, which required travelers from the mainland to submit negative results from a coronavirus test from approved vendors a short time before traveling to the Aloha State, in addition to a mask mandate. As of mid-June, Ige announced restrictions will gradually be lifted as vaccination rates increase.
As of May, there had been 55 reported arrests of people violating Safe Travels quarantine provisions, according to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.
In New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul recently said the NYS National Guard will replace health care workers who will be fired for violating the state's vaccine mandate, while Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City began enforcing an order mandating people show their vaccine cards in order to enter restaurants, shops or theaters.
Co-host Clay Travis later added that Florida has become
"so threatening to the Blue Checkmark Brigade [on Twitter] and to the Anthony Faucis of the world [and] the Biden administration. [Florida] didn't implement a mask mandate, didn't do COVID passports and the cases still went down.Travis' remarks came after Sexton referenced a 50% decline in COVID cases across the Sunshine State in the past 2 weeks.
"Florida has proven how much the Fauciites are filled with 'Emperors who have No Clothes'."
The hosts noted that Australia is one case where the populace has no "test case" like Florida to point to stop the liberal government there from implementing sweeping socioeconomic controls, including on simple freedom of movement, enforced by police and the military.
But, in the U.S., DeSantis has been essentially ruining Democrats and media rhetoric because his state has fared much better than they expected as they routinely admonished his lack of blanket restrictions.
Sexton pointed to a new video from an activist group called Remove Ron, which interposed the storyline of The Purge over video of people flying in an airplane and entering the ostensibly menacing Florida airspace - dubbing it "Your FlorEver Purge."
He called it "one of the most unintentionally hilarious and powerful-for-the-person-being-attacked political ads" he or Travis had seen.
At the country level, no relationship can be observed between the percentage of the fully vaccinated population against COVID-19 and the incidence of the disease. In contrast, research in 68 countries has even shown "marginal" more new cases of infection in countries with a high proportion of fully vaccinated compared to less vaccinated countries. This is stated in the latest issue of the peer-reviewed scientific journal European Journal of Epidemiology.
According to the authors of the article, Israel, with more than 60 percent vaccination, had the highest number of coronavirus infections per million population among the countries surveyed during the week under review.
In the US, researchers have noticed significant differences in the number of new cases within highly vaccinated districts. However, the number of new cases did not decrease significantly with increasing vaccination coverage. For example, among the five most vaccinated districts, where the proportion of fully vaccinated ranges from 84.3 percent to 99.9 percent, the US Centers for Disease Control and Spread (CDC) has identified four as districts with a high level of infection. Among the 57 districts with a low level of the spread of the disease, more than a quarter of the districts have vaccination rates below 20 percent.
In the light of the research results, the authors called for a reassessment of vaccination as the primary tool in the fight against covid, especially with regard to the spread of the delta variant and the likelihood of further mutations.
According to scientists, in addition to vaccination, attention should also be paid to other pharmacological and non-pharmacological means, such as hygiene support, distance adherence or cheap testing. They noted that, according to the Israeli Ministry of Health, the effectiveness of two doses of vaccine from Pfizer / BioNTech against infection is only 39 percent, compared to the 96 percent announced. Recent data also show that immunity after infection is stronger than after administration of the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine.
Although vaccination protects against the severe or even fatal course of the disease, the CDC reported an increase in hospitalization rates from 0.01 percent to nine percent and an increase in death levels from zero to 15 percent in fully vaccinated patients during the first five months of this year.
In conclusion, the authors of the research appeal to the authorities that in an effort to increase vaccination, stigmatization of the unvaccinated should be avoided, which they say "can do more harm than good". They call for the re-use of the above-mentioned non-pharmacological agents in "balancing life with COVID-19 in the same way that we have been living with different seasonal variants of the 1918 influenza virus for a hundred years."
[Link]