The Steep Cost of Ron DeSantis's Vaccine Turnabout - The New York Times - 0 views
-
While Florida was an early leader in the share of over-65 residents who were vaccinated, it had fallen to the middle of the pack by the end of July 2021. When it came to younger residents, Florida lagged behind the national average in every age group.
-
That left the state particularly vulnerable when the Delta variant hit that month. Floridians died at a higher rate, adjusted for age, than residents of almost any other state during the Delta wave, according to the Times analysis. With less than 7 percent of the nation’s population, Florida accounted for 14 percent of deaths between the start of July and the end of October.
-
Of the 23,000 Floridians who died, 9,000 were younger than 65. Despite the governor’s insistence at the time that “our entire vulnerable population has basically been vaccinated,” a vast majority of the 23,000 were either unvaccinated or had not yet completed the two-dose regimen.
- ...34 more annotations...
-
A high vaccination rate was especially important in Florida, which trails only Maine in the share of residents 65 and older. By the end of July, Florida had vaccinated about 60 percent of adults, just shy of the national average
-
Had it reached a vaccination rate of 74 percent — the average for five New England states at the time — it could have prevented more than 16,000 deaths and more than 61,000 hospitalizations that summer, according to a study published in the medical journal The Lancet.
-
in Florida, unlike the nation as a whole — and states like New York and California that Mr. DeSantis likes to single out — most people who died from Covid died after vaccines became available to all adults, not before.
-
Mr. DeSantis and his aides have said that his opposition was to mandates, not to the vaccinations themselves. They say the governor only questioned the efficacy of the shots once it became evident that they did not necessarily prevent infection — which prompted him to criticize experts and the federal government.
-
The governor had early success in following his instincts. In 2020, the state supplied its nearly 4,000 long-term care homes with Covid tests and isolated Covid patients, avoiding New York’s mistake of releasing Covid patients from hospitals to nursing homes where they infected others. Florida’s death rate in the pandemic’s first year, adjusted for age, was lower than all but 10 other states’.
-
Florida was also one of only four states to require schools to hold in-person classes in the fall of 2020, a move that Mr. DeSantis has said defied the nation’s public health experts
-
In fact, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, a federal infectious disease expert on former President Donald J. Trump’s task force, said repeatedly that summer and fall that schools could open safely with the right precautions. Nonetheless, facing strong opposition from teachers’ unions, nearly three-fourths of the nation’s 100 largest school districts offered only remote learning that fall.
-
At the same time, though, the governor was embracing more extreme views, including those of Dr. Scott W. Atla
-
Both he and Dr. Bhattacharya argued that people who were not at risk of severe consequences should not face Covid restrictions. If they were infected, they would develop natural immunity, which would eventually build up in the population and cause the virus to fade away, they said.
-
Many public health experts were alarmed by this strategy, which was articulated in a document known as the Great Barrington Declaration. They said it would be impossible to ring-fence the vulnerable, or even to clearly communicate to the public who they were. Besides older Americans, as many as 41 million younger adults were considered to be at high risk of severe disease if infected because of underlying medical conditions like obesity.
-
Dr. Atlas, however, argued that the virus was not dangerous to an overwhelming majority of Americans. Both he and Dr. Bhattacharya said the Covid death rate for everyone under 70 was very low. Dr. Atlas claimed that children had “virtually zero” risk of death.
-
As of this summer, more than 345,000 Americans under 70 have died of the virus, and more than 3.5 million have been hospitalized
-
The disease has killed nearly 2,300 children and adolescents, and nearly 200,000 have been hospitalized.
-
Mr. DeSantis gave him a platform at a series of public events in Florida at the end of the summer of 2020. He would go on to echo Dr. Atlas’s views, sometimes in modified form, throughout the pandemic.
-
Mr. DeSantis subsequently promoted the shots in 27 counties. Florida offered the vaccine to everyone 65 and older, an eligibility system simpler than an early one recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and adopted by many states, that prioritized essential workers and those over 75.
-
But his enthusiasm for shots waned fast, tracking the growing hostility toward them among the party’s conservative activists. In late February, when Mr. DeSantis hosted a gathering of such activists for the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, he boasted that Florida was an “oasis of freedom” in a nation led by misguided health authorities.
-
By the time all adults became eligible for the vaccines in April of that year, Mr. DeSantis was rarely promoting them.
-
“Some are choosing not to take it, which is fine,” he said in March, at a 100-minute public event on Covid in which he did not once urge people to get vaccinated. In dozens of appearances on Fox News in the first half of 2021, he was carefully neutral about shots, except for those over 65.
-
A few months later, he told Fox News that he had concluded early on that Covid “was something that was risky for elderly people,” but that it posed minimal risks for people “who were in reasonably good health, who were, say, under 50.”
-
In May 2021, Florida closed its 27 state-run testing centers. The next month, on orders from the governor’s office, the Health Department halted daily reports on infections and deaths, switching to weekly reports that drew less attention.
-
Both polls and political events showed that Republicans were not as excited as Democrats about the shots. At an Alabama political rally that August, Mr. Trump recommended the vaccine — and was booed. When a reporter asked Mr. DeSantis later that year if he had gotten a booster shot, he responded that he had gotten “the normal shot.”
-
After the highly contagious Delta variant began spreading in Florida that summer, Mr. DeSantis insisted that his approach had worked. Younger adults were driving the surge but “they’re not getting really sick from it or anything,” he said, adding: “They will develop immunity as a result of those infections.”
-
But they were getting sick. And vaccinations, which Mr. DeSantis suddenly began recommending again in late July, took weeks to confer protection
-
With hospitalizations rising, he began a campaign to offer monoclonal antibody treatments — a triage response to the pandemic’s frightening resurgence.
-
The drug cost vastly more than shots and required more medical staff to administer. Within about six weeks, the state had administered more than 90,000 treatments and probably kept 5,000 people out of the hospital, Dr. Rivkees said.
-
Mr. DeSantis accused the media in early August of “lying” about Covid patients’ flooding hospitals. Two weeks later, Mary C. Mayhew, head of the Florida Hospital Association, said: “There can be no question that many Florida hospitals are stretched to their absolute limits.”
-
“Our patients are younger and sicker,” Mr. Smith wrote. Of 17 patients on ventilators in intensive care on Aug. 13, 2021, more than half were younger than 55. Only one was vaccinated.
-
“People say that the decision about vaccination is a personal one and it doesn’t affect anyone else,” Mr. Smith wrote. “Tell that to the kids who lost their mom.”
-
When shots became available last year for children under 5, Florida did not preorder them because, Mr. DeSantis said, he did not consider them “appropriate.” Florida’s vaccination rates are well below the national average for children under 5. The state also trails in booster shots.
-
After Dr. Ladapo issued misleading claims about the risks of Covid shots for young men, the heads of the C.D.C. and the Food and Drug Administration sent a scathing four-page rebuttal. Such misinformation “puts people at risk of death or serious illness,” they said.
-
While the pandemic waned, leaving more than 80,000 Floridians and 1.13 million Americans dead, the governor continued to push policies that kept him at the vanguard of the anti-vaccine and anti-mandate conversation. A new state law, signed by Mr. DeSantis in May, bans government agencies, businesses and schools from requiring Covid testing, vaccination or mask wearing.
-
“Everything involving Covid — I think there needs to be major, major accountability,” he said in Iowa this month. “Because if there’s not, if you don’t have a reckoning, they are going to do it again.”