DeSantis doubles down after roundtable video pulled

After YouTube took down a video last week of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ coronavirus roundtable because of misinformation about mask-wearing, DeSantis doubled down Monday and invited those same panelists back to the state Capitol for more discussion.

The move plays into DeSantis’ recent push to punish “big tech” for censorship of conservatives, as well as continuing to cement DeSantis’ status as the top Republican advocate against anti-COVID-19 measures and a potential GOP nominee for president in 2024.

The most controversial panelist at both meetings was Scott Atlas, a former President Trump adviser and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, who was condemned by the Stanford Faculty Senate last year for “promot[ing] a view of COVID-19 that contradicts medical science.”

On Monday, DeSantis, who would only refer to YouTube alongside its parent company, Google, called the company “cheerleaders for censorship” and its pulling of the video “Orwellian … big tech, corporate media collusion.”

DeSantis’ roundtables have featured proponents of “immunity through infection,” the idea that lifting all coronavirus restrictions and letting the virus run through the lowerrisk under-60 population is the best way for people to become immune.

The theory has been roundly condemned by most health experts, including an open letter to the medical journal The Lancet signed by more than 80 researchers that called the theory “a dangerous fallacy unsupported by scientific evidence.”

Neither the March 18 panel nor Monday’s featured any expert critical of the other panelists’ theories, despite DeSantis calling for “a freer exchange of ideas.”

YouTube pulled a video of the March roundtable posted by the American Institute for Economic Research, a libertarian think tank, for three instances of what it determined was misinformation about the efficacy of mask-wearing by children and adults. The video remains available on the state-run Florida Channel.

Another two panelists, Jay Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at Stanford University, and Martin Kulldorff, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, were two of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which openly called for herd immunity through natural infection. The third author, Sunetra Gupta, was a panelist in March but did not participate in Monday’s panel.

Kuldorff and Atlas argued in March that children should not wear masks. The panelists argued Monday that while the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends mask-wearing by children age 2 and up, the World Health Organization recommends only children age 12 and up wear masks.

But their original comments did not specify ages, with Kuldorff stating, “children should not wear face masks, no.” Bhattacharya was more sweeping in his anti-mask statements, saying in March that “a lot of the experts would say that wearing masks for the general public is not evidence-based.”

In a statement Friday, YouTube said the video of the panel “includes content that contradicts the consensus of local and global health authorities regarding the efficacy of masks to reduce the transmission of COVID-19.”

A spokesperson for YouTube was not available for comment about the latest panel on Monday.

The panelists also referred to “large amounts of deaths in the United States and across the world,” referring not to the 560,000 deaths in the U.S. and more than 34,000 in Florida from coronavirus but instead the mental effects of lockdowns.

Panelists mostly ignored the deaths and continued aftereffects from coronavirus in both older and younger populations to focus on what they called the “catastrophic consequences” of lockdowns and other restrictions.

But health experts in Central Florida, responding to last month’s panel, had pointed to the continued mask mandates and restrictions in major cities and counties in Florida to argue the state couldn’t be considered the successful “experiment” of open business policies that the panel claimed.

Suicide rates also fell nationally by more than 5% in 2020, according to a study in the medical journal JAMA, which contradicts the claims of a deadly impact on mental health from lockdowns.

DeSantis was asked, based on his comments on mental health, if he would ensure that funding for mental health would not be cut in this year’s state budget. DeSantis said, “my budget supports mental health, we think it’s very important, and we’ll fight for that. And we think that we’ll be able to achieve that.”

Aubrey Jewett, a professor of political science at the University of Central Florida, said DeSantis’ national political profile has been boosted among Republicans by his becoming the standard-bearer for anti-COVID restrictions. But whether the issue will still be front and center during the Republican presidential primaries in 2024 is very unclear.

“It’s hard to tell what issues will be most important in voters’ minds when we get down the road more than two years,” Jewett said. “But in the present, it certainly continues to raise Gov. DeSantis’s profile nationally. … He’s certainly one of the most well-known Republican governors in the country right now. And a lot of Republicans seem to like what he’s saying and what he’s doing.”