Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is locked in a battle with the Biden White House, which has decided to throttle and ration the state's supply of a successful monoclonal antibody treatment for infected COVID patients. DeSantis has been aggressively promoting these effective, life-saving treatments in the form of the drug Regeneron throughout Florida's brutal Delta wave (for which he was baselessly attacked, naturally). In addition to pulling back on the Sunshine State's supply for "equity" reasons, Biden continues to attack DeSantis over COVID policy in general. Last Friday featured an American admission of a drone strike massacre in Afghanistan, an unprecedented act of diplomatic fury from our longest-standing ally, and a lopsided FDA panel vote against Biden's 'booster' shot policy. Meanwhile, the White House skipped its press briefing and the president departed Washington early to head to the beach, where he's spent 17 of his roughly 36 weekends in the job. But not before firing off this tweet on Thursday evening:
Republican governors in states like Texas and Florida are doing everything they can to undermine the public health requirements that keep people safe.
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) September 16, 2021
They're playing politics with the lives of their citizens, especially children. I refuse to give in to it.
This is garbage. It is Biden who is "playing politics" here, and quite clumsily at that. Florida and Texas are emerging from their seasonal COVID waves, just as they did last year around this time. Other states in other regions will almost certainly start to get hit in the coming weeks. It's also rather rich for the president to target Texas, a state where his own disastrous border policies have invited massive surges of illegal immigrants, who are not being vaccinated against COVID (or even screened for it, in many cases) upon unlawful entering the country en masse. The White House recently confirmed that various categories of American citizens can be required to get vaccinated, while illegal immigrants are not. Beyond that, Biden's appeal to fear about children is not supported by the data at all. As we've said repeatedly, one of the few silver linings of this awful virus is that it largely does not affect kids in severe ways. The people dying from COVID are disproportionately unvaccinated older adults with co-morbidities; almost none of them are juveniles, thankfully. There's also this response to Biden's demagogic and inaccurate tweet:
So why is transmission higher in Newsom’s California?
— Lyndsey Fifield (@lyndseyfifield) September 17, 2021
Did you have a chance to ask him when you were campaigning for him last week? pic.twitter.com/uwZiJNRNf9
Southern California, where virtually every "public health requirement" under the sun has been imposed, in accordance with Biden's definition of "keeping people safe," was shaded darker red than most of Florida or Texas last week. How can this be? I'd love to hear Biden try to explain it, in his own words. I'd also love to see him debate Gov. DeSantis, whom he trolls and assails on a regular basis. Here's DeSantis discussing his new plan to negotiate directly with a pharmaceutical company for doses of a promising new monoclonal antibody treatment, as an end-run around Biden's decision to curtail the state's Regenron supply. Listen to how granular DeSantis' knowledge is of the clinical trial data, then imagine how Biden would fare in a direct exchange over this issue and other COVID-related policies:
Florida's @GovRonDeSantis confirming this-- saying today he will seek to buy monoclonal therapies directly from GSK, circumventing the HHS process. pic.twitter.com/YX8MKBxAEd
— Forrest Saunders (@FBSaunders) September 16, 2021
DeSantis has done his homework and can clearly explain the basis for his decisions, both in broad strokes and in minute detail. Joe Biden's communication skills, grasp of details, and overall cognitive clarity are...different. Writing at National Review, Charles Cooke notes that the aforementioned broadsides against DeSantis over antibody treatments have been exposed as nonsense, following a familiar pattern in bogus anti-DeSantis narratives:
Two months ago, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida was being roundly castigated for promoting the use of Regeneron’s monoclonal-antibody treatment as part of his state’s efforts to fight COVID-19. Desperate to find something sinister in the push, DeSantis’s critics threw out every charge they could dream up. At first, the line was that Regeneron’s treatment didn’t work. Then, it was that Regeneron’s treatment worked fine, but represented a dangerous distraction from the vaccine. And, finally, it was that Regeneron’s treatment was part of a corrupt plot to enrich DeSantis’s donors. Today, we learn from the Washington Post that, actually, none of that was the problem. Instead, DeSantis’s sin is that he has been relying upon monoclonal-antibody treatment too much, and that this is unfair to other states that now need it. What a difference eight weeks make.
When all the previous lines of attack dried up on this front, the critics moved on to a new one:
Over time, the Regeneron-inspired criticisms of DeSantis have all been rolled into the vague and unfalsifiable allegation that, while the company’s drug may indeed work, DeSantis’s promotion of it has always served a broader political goal — which, apparently, is to “downplay the vaccines.” But this, too, is preposterous. Explaining his approach at a press conference two weeks ago, DeSantis made it abundantly clear that he is not hoping to “lean into monoclonals to the detriment of vaccines” or to “play defense with no offense,” but to adopt an all-of-the-above approach. “If you’re at risk,” the governor said, “the best thing you can do beforehand, obviously, is to get vaccinated. But even if you are, and if you’re not, if you do become COVID-positive, you have an opportunity to get early treatment using these monoclonal antibodies.” “This is not in lieu of [vaccination],” DeSantis concluded. “It’s in addition to.” Back when the state began to promote Regeneron’s therapy, Florida ranked 21st in the nation in “giving people of all ages at least one shot.” Today, it is 17th. From what, exactly, is the governor supposed to be distracting people?
DeSantis has been a consistent and vocal supporter of vaccination, as we've documented previously. And as Cooke points out, during the governor's big Delta push on Regeneron (going on "offense"), Florida's vax numbers (playing "defense") simultaneously increased significantly. I dug deeper into these numbers late last week, and they check out:
On this metric, FL is clustered with IL, VA, OR, DE and CO — all Biden states with Dem governors. It’s 7 percentage points better than the next closest Trump states with GOP governors (TX, NE)…
— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) September 16, 2021
On vaccinations and antibody therapies, it was not an either/or proposition in Florida. It was an all-of-the-above strategy to keep as many people out of hospitals as possible. And while Regeneron treatments soared, new vaccine shots also increased substantially. Observing much of the media commentary on DeSantis, and listening to Democratic smears against him, you'd assume that he must be one of the worst-performing governors in American on this stuff. In reality, he correctly identified a successful treatment for infected Floridians, got savaged for it, and has since been vindicated by events, demand, and the Biden administration's posture. Meanwhile, on vaccines, he has overseen the best effort -- by far -- among all 2020 red states. As I highlight above, Florida is on par with a bevy of Biden-carried states with Democratic governors. You would never, ever know this from the tone of the coverage directed at Florida and the governor himself. On that front, I'll leave you with this utterly and characteristically deranged tirade:
Joy Reid declares Ron DeSantis likes murder: "He may be a sociopath. We don't know what his pathology is, but he's not stupid & I think that he understands that if he is going to inflict death on schoolchildren, he's going to have to make it real hard for their parents to vote." pic.twitter.com/NV1Md5taLM
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) September 15, 2021
A recent Politico story implied that DeSantis' school mask opt-out policy (entirely defensible based on the data and other countries' experiences) has led to an explosion in child deaths, yet did not provide any details about where the recently-deceased kids contracted COVID. The story did mention that many of them had other conditions, but it did not say if the cases were even linked to schools at all, let alone unmasked schools. A number of the deaths occurred in a county where local officials have defied DeSantis on masks. If the governor's policies are said to be responsible for these increased deaths, critics should point to specific receipts. Instead, we get vague innuendo. By the way, the total number of Florida juveniles who've died with COVID throughout the entire pandemic is 17, in a state with approximately four million residents under the age of 18. These facts do not align with The Narrative, so we get tweets like Biden's and rants like Reid's. As I said on Friday, "I realize people are absolutely committed to their Florida Man narrative, but damn. The numbers really expose that narrative as transparently political." Indeed they do.
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