Is Desantis positioning himself as anti-vax leader?

Will Republicans once again nominate Donald Trump for president? Or will they turn to Ron Desantis? I have no idea.

What I do know is that anyone imagining the Florida governor as a more sensible, saner figure than Trump is delusional. Desantis hasn’t gone down all the same rabbit holes as Trump, but he has gone down some of his own, and his descent is just as deep.

Above all, Desantis is increasingly making himself the face of vaccine conspiracy theories, which have turned a medical miracle into a source of bitter partisan division.

Let’s back up and talk about the story of COVID19 vaccines so far.

In spring 2020, the U.S. government initiated Operation Warp Speed, a public-private partnership intended to develop effective vaccines against the coronavirus as quickly as possible. The effort succeeded: By December 2020, far sooner than almost anyone had imagined, vaccinations were underway.

Have the vaccines worked? And how. There are multiple ways to evaluate their lifesaving effect, but I’m especially taken with a simple approach promoted by analyst Charles Gaba, who looks at the correlation across U.S. counties between vaccination rates and COVID death rates. Between May 2021, when two-dose vaccinations first became widespread, and September, the least-vaccinated 10% of counties suffered a death rate over three times as high as the most-vaccinated.

Now, you may have heard that at this point, deaths among vaccinated Americans are exceeding those among the unvaccinated, which is true.

But that’s partly because most deaths are among the elderly, who are overwhelmingly vaccinated; very few Americans have received no shots; and not enough vaccinated people are getting booster shots.

But why are some U.S. counties so much less vaccinated than others? The answer, as Gaba shows, is partisanship: There’s a startlingly close relationship between the share of a county’s voters who supported Trump in 2020 and the percentage of that county’s residents who haven’t received their shots — and the percentage who died from COVID.

Yet why should vaccination be a partisan issue?

Right-wing opposition to lockdowns and social distancing in the early days of the pandemic made some sense, since these public health measures involved requiring that people make some sacrifices to protect others. (Some might say such trade-offs are what civilization is about, but whatever.)

But getting vaccinated is mainly about protecting yourself. Why wouldn’t you want to do that?

The immediate answer is the widespread belief on the right that the vaccines have terrible side effects. If it were true, shouldn’t there be a lot of evidence for such claims, given that more than 13 billion doses have been administered worldwide?

Ah, but the usual suspects claim that sinister elites are suppressing the evidence. Which brings us back to Desantis, who is forming a state committee to counter federal health policy recommendations — and asking for a grand jury investigation into unspecified “crimes and misdemeanors” related to coronavirus vaccines.

OK, I doubt anyone believes Desantis knows or cares about the scientific evidence here. What he’s doing instead is catering to a Republican base that equates listening to experts with “wokeness.”

Now, will Desantis’ try to position himself as the leader of the anti-vax movement as an effort to endear him to the GOP base? Again, I don’t know. Even if it does, I suspect it would hurt him in the general election: Vaccine paranoia and Fauci hatred are still niche positions.

But anyone who imagines replacing Trump with Desantis as GOP leader would signal a party on its way to becoming sane again is in for a rude shock.