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May 21, 2020

Florida's Governor DeSantis brings out his inner Trump

By Andrea Widburg

Florida chose a different lockdown path from the rest of America, protecting old people and letting other Floridians mostly roam free. The media gleefully predicted disaster and have been disappointed that Florida has avoided the disaster and emerged from the pandemic scare with flying colors. On Wednesday, Governor DeSantis let the media know how disgraceful their reporting about Florida has been.

With an approving Vice President Pence standing beside him, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida gave conservatives a thrill when he let the media know how awful their behavior has been regarding Florida’s approach to the coronavirus. It was a performance that would have made President Trump proud, because DeSantis, instead of accepting and defending against the media’s pro-Democrat narrative, attacked the media for having a narrative in the first place:

A National Review interview with DeSantis shows that he wasn’t just lucky when his non-lockdown policy paid off. What happened most states was a mindless panic. Then, as more data emerged, Democrat governors ignored new data and continued the lockdowns. DeSantis, however, carefully and constantly monitored data to craft his strategy for navigating the pandemic:

An irony of the national coverage of the coronavirus crisis is that at the same time DeSantis was being made into a villain, New York governor Andrew Cuomo was being elevated as a hero, even though the DeSantis approach to nursing homes was obviously superior to that of Cuomo. Florida went out of its way to get COVID-19-positive people out of nursing homes, while New York went out of its way to get them in, a policy now widely acknowledged to have been a debacle.

The media didn’t exactly have their eyes on the ball. “The day that the media had their first big freakout about Florida was March 15th,” DeSantis recalls, “which was, there were people on Clearwater Beach, and it was this big deal. That same day is when we signed the executive order to, one, ban visitation in the nursing homes, and two, ban the reintroduction of a COVID-positive patient back into a nursing home.”

The numbers show how smart DeSantis's choices were:

Of course, at any time, governors in lockdown states could have looked at the data about elderly mortality (as Phil Kerpen did in a Twitter thread) and changed course – but they didn’t. Instead, they stayed the stupid course. Ace reminds us what happened in those places that bowed before the media narrative:

Let me again point out the irony -- or perhaps the calculated outcome -- that the only places in the US where the infection rates and death rates came close to matching the models' predictions is in those Democrat states whose Democrat governors engineered a mass slaughter of the elderly by ordering that the infected be mixed in with the uninfected by compromised.

It would not be unreasonable to file manslaughter charges against all the Democrat politicians and bureaucrats who ignored the data and turned nursing homes into death chambers. Governor DeSantis, meanwhile, should get a medal, both for his policy choices and for his beatdown of the media.

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