Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Handpicked experts assure DeSantis his critics are wrong on virus.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis assembled a group of scientists who backed his COVID policies at a Thursday roundtable, where they assured him he was taking the right steps on the disease.
The group included Dr. Scott Atlas, the Stanford radiologist whose skepticism on the value of masks and optimistic forecasts on the pandemic won him a job as COVID adviser to President Trump. His views alarmed mainstream scientists, however, and the Stanford Faculty Senate adopted a resolution to “strongly condemn” him for promoting a view on COVID-19 that “contradicts medical science.”
In response to questions from the governor, the group, which included scientists from Oxford, Stanford and Harvard, denounced lockdowns, said school closures harmed children while doing nothing to impede the pandemic, and said the news media had done a terrible job covering the disease.
The most controversial statements questioned the value of masks, an important point for a governor who had resisted calls for a statewide mask mandate and canceled fines imposed by cities and counties for violations of local mask laws.
“Did we see areas like Los Angeles, with heavy masking, having reduced cases to a trickle?” DeSantis asked the group.
“I think masks in some ways have been harmful because people believe that masks protect them, vulnerable people, and they end up taking more risks than they ought,” said Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at Stanford. “And they feel like they’re protected by something that actually does not protect them. So I think masks have not only not been effective but have been harmful.”
Atlas added that mask mandates have been ineffective.
“There’s no evidence that a mask mandate has worked,” he said. “And in fact there is evidence that people in the United States have been wearing masks for months and the cases exploded, whether it’s in certain states like Hawaii, Minnesota.”
Their statements conflicted with the views of most infectious disease specialists. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control says masks reduce the risk the wearer will either spread or contract the disease, since the virus spreads on tiny droplets emitted when people breath or speak.
“The preponderance of evidence indicates that mask wearing reduces transmissibility per contact by reducing transmission of infected respiratory particles in both laboratory and clinical contexts,” states a widely cited, peer-reviewed study published in January in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Public mask wearing is most effective at reducing spread of the virus when compliance is high.”
The group also included Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University and Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine and a specialist in cancer data science at Harvard University. They are among the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, a statement that calls for society to remain largely open through the pandemic, with special measures taken only to protect the most vulnerable.
DeSantis has been criticized for cherry-picking experts who would back his views and sidelining Florida’s mainstream scientists. Florida Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried, the state’s top-ranking Democrat, denounced the roundtable as an example of DeSantis’ “political approach to the pandemic.”
“Governor DeSantis must stop elevating dangerous disinformation — masks save lives and social distancing is crucial,” she said in a statement. “The only way Dr. Scott Atlas should be involved in our pandemic response is as example of falsehoods which should be ignored by the public. We don’t need a roundtable to know that expanding vaccine access is what must be done to save lives and jobs — the strength of our economy depends on it.”
Florida’s death toll from COVID stood at 33,120 Thursday morning, with the total number of cases nearing 2 million. The state’s daily number of cases, deaths and hospitalizations have all been declining. Meanwhile, the number of people vaccinated against the disease grew to 4.5 million, nearly a fourth of the state’s population. And despite having the second-highest percentage of elderly people in the United States, Florida has a COVID death rate that’s lower than many states.
But other trends are less favorable. The state leads the nation in COVID variants that are more contagious, the test positivity rate has been climbing for the past week, and the state recently experienced a wave of crowds arriving for Spring Break, leading experts to fear another surge in cases.
DeSantis has clashed with the news media throughout the pandemic over his view that journalists have been unfairly critical of Republican governors and his administration’s repeated refusals to release information and records without the threat of legal action. He asked the group to rate the media’s work in the pandemic.
“How would you rate from a scientific perspective how the media has performed during this in terms of are they providing the information with context and perspective?” he asked. “Are they trying to be more fantastical and hysterical in the coverage, particularly in those early days?”
Kulldorff said the news media exaggerated the danger, spreading fear and ignoring scientists who disagreed.
“The media has some kind of a herd thinking that’s taking place,” he said. “Those scientists that go against the media have been assaulted by the media in a variety of ways. Many scientists don’t wish to speak up because they don’t want to go through all that nonsense. So I think the media has not done a good job in terms of understanding the whole pandemic, and I think there may have been a tendency to want to build up a fear for whatever reason.”
A few hours after the roundtable, the governor’s office issued a news release with the headline, “Renowned Doctors and Epidemiologists Praise Florida’s COVID-19 Approach During Public Health Roundtable.”