Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, along with Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo and non-establishment medical professionals, “closed the curtain on COVID theater” during a roundtable event on Monday.
“Over the past two years, the data has shown us what works and what doesn’t work. It is long past time to stop the COVID Theater,” said the governor. He added, “In Florida, we told the truth, we let the data drive our response, and we let Floridians make decisions for themselves and their children. As a result, Florida is in a better spot than states who used fear mongering and mandates.”
DeSantis noted the timing of the event, saying the country was “nearing the two-year anniversary of 15 days to slow the spread.”
The panelists, which included prominent scientists and physicians — including Doctors Robert Malone, Harvey Risch, Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta, Christopher D’Adamo, and others — discussed such issues as COVID lockdowns and the heavy price that Americans paid for them with their financial and physical well-being, prolonged school closures, COVID-related measures and mandates such as masking and social distancing, and vaccinations. A particular emphasis was made on the impact these policies have had on children.
Ladapo, who was the first to speak at the event, slammed the lockdown policies, and stressed that the decision-makers responsible for their implementation should not be allowed to “get away with this.” People who led America to this point “want us to forget how we got here,” and want Americans to forget that “choices that they made for everyone were the wrong choices,” he said, adding, “It can happen again if we don’t [hold them accountable].”
The participating experts echoed those points.
“The lockdowns were an enormous catastrophic mistake that should never be repeated,” said Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University Medical School. “When we think about lockdowns, we should recoil with horror because the policies we followed have violated not just medical ethics, but also crushed the ability for scientists to discuss openly with each other facts and evidence,” he lamented.
Dr. Christopher D’Adamo, epidemiologist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, stressed the link between the lockdowns and the worsened health of Americans. Lifestyle behaviors such as physical activity, sleep, and diet that normally keep people’s immune system strong have been negatively impacted by the lockdowns, and Florida remained perhaps the only state that was openly talking about it, he said.
Dr. Sunetra Gupta criticized much of the “unnecessary” reaction to the pandemic, stating, “We inverted the precautionary principle, ‘Do not cause harm,’ by doing the one thing we knew that would cause harm.” Now we “watch the devastation,” she added.
The botched pandemic response caused many people not to seek medical treatment for non-COVID conditions and miss their routine checkups, pointed out Dr. Shveta Raju of Gwinnett Clinic.
The other scientists pointed to the senseless rejection of natural immunity to COVID — which is said to be far superior to the immunity induced by the vaccines — and to the wide availability of safe and effective repurposed drugs that help treat COVID.
Much of the discussion was dedicated to the issue of school closures, which, the participants argued, did not prevent COVID transmission but undermined children’s health and development.
“On the physical side we’ve seen, when you’re out of school, you’re not getting recess, you’re not getting physical education, you’re not getting sports, dance, just general movement from class to class.” Lack of physical activity “likely contributed to the increases in BMI and obesity, a doubling of the increased rate of BMI during COVID,” said Dr. D’Adamo. He added that being socially isolated, children got hurt psychologically as well. That resulted in “anxiety, depression [and] stress,” he said.
Perhaps the biggest announcement made during the event was the surgeon general’s recommendation against vaccinating healthy children against COVID.
“The Florida Department of Health is going to be the first state to officially recommend against the use of COVID 19 vaccines for healthy children,” Lapado said.
The surgeon general pointed to the most recent study the New York State Department of Health, which found that “There is limited evidence on the effectiveness of the BNT162b2 (Pfizer-BioNTech) vaccine for children, particularly those 5-11 years and after the Omicron variant’s emergence.” The study showed a dramatic and rather swift drop of the shot’s effectiveness in preventing infections and hospitalizations.
“There is no justification for mandating vaccines for children, full stop,” said Dr. Robert Malone. He quoted the November 2021 Global COVID Summit’s Declaration that urged decision-makers to exclude healthy children from the vaccine mandates. 17,000 physicians from around the world argued that while children are statistically not at risk of severe COVID, they risk severe, adverse events from receiving the scarcely studied vaccine.
Dr. Malone further noted that since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is intentionally withholding a large amount of information crucial for the risk-benefit analysis for different age groups and is behaving like a political actor rather than a “neutral arbiter of truth” on matters concerning public health. In addition to that, the federal government has invested $1 billion in an information campaign promoting the vaccines, said the doctor. In such a situation, it is nearly impossible to make a truly informed decision on getting oneself or one’s children vaccinated, he implied.
Dr. Martin Kulldorff of the Brownstone Institute reiterated Malone’s risk-benefit assessment. “We know that there’s a risk of myocarditis for young boys and young men, but also for girls. There might be other adverse reactions that we don’t know about yet. So for children, the benefits we know are at best, very small,” he said. He added that many children have already recovered from COVID and have natural immunity.
Governor DeSantis banned school COVID vaccine mandates back in November 2021.
The White House reacted by calling Lapado’s recommendation a “conspiracy theory” that is “casting doubt on vaccinations [which] is our best tool against the virus and the best tool to prevent even teenagers from being hospitalized.”
