DeSantis’ State of the State speech didn’t add up

Demagogues can demagogue all they want. It won’t change the math.

Ron DeSantis can malign Anthony Fauci, as he did once again in his State of the State address Tuesday, characterizing him as the Benito Mussolini of public health, as he railed against a “biomedical security state,” and a “blind adherence to Faucian declaration.”

DeSantis can couch his laissez-faire response to the pandemic as an “escape hatch for those chafing under authoritarian, arbitrary and seemingly never-ending mandates and restrictions.” But COVID deaths in Florida add up to something considerably less glorious.

The governor, of course, avoided numbers that undermined his self-congratulatory rhetoric. The speech included not a regret, not a prayer, not even a fleeting allusion to the 62,900 (and counting) Floridians who have died from COVID-19 under his do-nothing ethos. (More than the total military fatalities in the Vietnam War.)

DeSantis ignored other damning computations. His State of the State included no words encouraging the 36% of Floridians not yet fully vaccinated to inoculate themselves, as if saying “vaccine” would have been akin to blasphemy. Even Donald Trump, the original Fauci basher, chided “gutless” politicians like DeSantis who refuse to say publicly that they’ve received a booster. (Though surely it would be spousal malpractice for the husband of a cancer patient like first lady Casey DeSantis to eschew the booster.)

DeSantis’s cynical pretense that vaccinations weren’t worth mentioning ignored more dire arithmetic.

“If you look at vaccinated versus unvaccinated, there’s about a 10 times greater chance that you’d be infected if you were unvaccinated, about a 17 times greater chance that you’d be hospitalized, about a 20 times likelihood that you would be dead.”

Those calculations were presented at a congressional hearing Tuesday by the Republican Party’s designated arch-villain, Anthony Fauci. Which explains the governor’s reticence. DeSantis’ campaign raises money by denigrating America’s leading public health expert, peddling merchandise on his website like “Don’t Fauci My Florida” beer cozies and T-shirts.

But his latest anti-Fauci screed seemed particularly egregious on the same day that U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, a notorious disseminator of anti-vaxxer lies, was also attacking Dr. Fauci. Paul, an ophthalmologist whose most notable medical achievement was concocting his own ophthalmology accrediting agency (governed by a board consisting of his wife and father-inlaw), repeatedly attacked Fauci with the kind of nonsense accusations that excite the wildeyed Republican base.

The evil Fauci, who by the age of 33 had developed life-saving therapies for several formerly fatal autoimmune diseases, told the committee that when Paul “gets out and accuses me of things that are completely untrue … all of a sudden that kindles the crazies out there, and I have threats upon my life, harassment of my family and my children.” Fauci held up a print-out of Rand’s own fundraising website, under the head: “Fire Dr. Fauci.”

Same day, same strategy. Rand Paul and Ron DeSantis were hard at it, raising money by exploiting the GOP’s misinformed, misled, undereducated (compared to the party’s previous generation of supporters), anti-science base. “I love the poorly educated,” Donald Trump declared back during the 2016 primaries.

Knowing that their party has flipped from a majority with a college degree to a majority with no more than a high school degree, Ivy League-educated leaders like DeSantis have exploited their voters’ skepticism, dislike, downright hate of educated elites. Medical scientists, climate scientists, social scientists and environmental scientists have become targets of GOP disdain. And it works. According to a 2021 Gallup poll, only 45% of Republicans expressed confidence in science, down from 72% in 1975.

Perhaps, the party’s sad new demographics explain a State of the State address that could attack public health measures without uttering the word “COVID,” denounce critical race theory without mentioning his state’s history of racism, promise to fix Florida’s escalating environmental problems while forgetting that global warming has devastated the state’s ecology. DeSantis bragged about Florida’s booming economy and budget surplus while criticizing “reckless” federal spending, neglecting to acknowledge that that same U.S. government pumped billions of dollars in relief money in Florida to save his economy.

In a speech that denounced “Orwellian doublespeak,” DeSantis bragged about Florida’s resistance to federal meddling, though his administration and a state Legislature under his control have time and again interfered with local governments and school boards, stripping them of their historic prerogatives and threatening local officials who resist Big Brother’s dictates.

The Florida he called an escape hatch from authoritarian mandates and restrictions apparently has a special exception for the governor’s own do-it-or-else mandates and restrictions. His description of Florida as a “vanguard of freedom,” requires an asterisk. *Not exactly.