Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is defending his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Sunshine State.
During an interview this week with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, DeSantis said his state isn’t reliant on what he called “Fauci-ism,” referring to Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser.
“It took me a few weeks, March and into April,” he explained, “to get enough data to say, ‘OK, you know, we’re not doing Fauci-ism. We’re gonna make sure our state’s open. We’re gonna get the kids back into school. And we’ll just focus our protection on elderly people, who are the ones that are at risk for this.’”
While DeSantis has faced a great deal of blowback from the left for not locking down more, the governor said — in retrospect — he thinks he still went too far with some of his state’s restrictions, several of which he claimed “were ineffective.”
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He specifically told Carlson he would likely not have forced restaurants and gyms to shutter. And primarily, DeSantis said, he would not have paused elective procedures at hospitals.
“They said first that there was going to be hospital overflow, and I said, ‘I’m not sure about this,’” DeSantis said. “They said, ‘Oh, we’re running out of [personal protective equipment]. If they have elective procedures, you’re gonna run out of all this stuff.’ … I think every state in the country suspended these elective procedures at hospitals. And we did it for about four weeks, and I’m like, ‘The hospitals are half empty. We gotta get this back.’ So we turned it on.”
DeSantis said his philosophy was that any time he acted on what he described as “an elite recommendation” — meaning a suggestion from the White House or from a medical expert — he “reversed course” if the data didn’t show it was effectively reducing COVID-related hospitalizations or deaths.
The Sun-Sentinel reported last week that hospitals across Florida have registered a 46% drop in admissions for COVID-19 patients ages 70 and over since mid-February.
Early on, DeSantis prioritized elderly people for vaccinations against COVID-19 and, disregarding federal guidelines, made the shots available for all Floridians 65 years and older.
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“We’ve now done close to 3.75 million seniors that have gotten at least one shot, and the overwhelming majority of that are fully vaccinated,” he said Friday. “And I think that’s one of the reasons why you see hospital admissions for seniors are less than what they were three or four months ago. So I do think it’s had a positive effect.”
In September of last year, DeSantis said he will “never” lockdown his state again.
“We will never do any of these lockdowns again,” he said ahead of the 2020 presidential election. “And I hear people say they’ll shut down the country and, honestly, I cringe.”
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