Ron DeSantis, Angel of Death, Says Biden Should Follow His Lead on COVID - Vanity Fair

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The Florida governor, whose state’s COVID-19 deaths have hit record highs thanks to his policies, chided the president for failing to end the pandemic.

By Bess Levin

August 26, 2021

As you’ve probably heard by now, one of the places you should avoid visiting if you want to avoid contracting COVID, being hospitalized with the disease, and potentially dying a miserable death, is Florida. That, of course, is thanks to Governor Ron DeSantis, who’s done everything in his power to let the disease ravage the state, from banning mask mandates and vaccine passports to threatening to withhold pay from school districts who decide to protect small children. Never the model of pandemic responsiveness, Florida is now recording, per The New York Times, an average of 23,314 new cases a day over the weekend—a 30% increase from its peak in January—while hospitalizations have nearly tripled in the last month, causing the mayor of Orlando to request that residents conserve water in order to curb the strain on the city’s supply of liquid oxygen, which is needed to treat COVID-19 patients. As for deaths, 227 are being reported daily, which The New York Times notes is “by far the most in the United States right now.”

Given those grim stats, you might think that DeSantis would pause, reflect, and consider that he’s not actually doing a great job here. But you would think wrong! Instead, the Republican governor believes that not only is he doing a bang-up job, but that Joe Biden should take a page from his pandemic playbook. Yes, really!

Appearing on Fox News on Wednesday night, DeSantis spoke with Jesse Watters and actually used the word “success” in reference to how Florida is handling the virus, claimed Biden should be following his lead, threatened to fight the president should he try to impose some kind of federal mandate aimed at keeping Americans alive, and, wait for it, criticized Biden for not ending the pandemic that DeSantis is personally making worse.

“We’re absolutely going to stand in Biden’s way if he’s trying to bring his destructive policies to Florida, if he’s trying to have the federal government take away parents’ rights in terms of their schoolchildren…he said he was going to end COVID, he hasn’t done that,” DeSantis told Watters with a straight face. “We are the first state to start the treatment centers for monoclonal antibodies, having great success with that, that should have been a bigger plan, a bigger part of this whole response throughout the country from the beginning. But at the end of the day, I think he’s trying to find a way to distract from the failures of his presidency. So he thinks that he can attack Florida, sometimes he attacks Texas because we’re Republican states, but I can tell you that dog’s not going to hunt down here. Florida parents want to be able to make decisions for their kids. Biden is obsessed with forcing kindergartners to have to wear masks for eight hours a day even if that’s not what the parent wants them to do. And he has all these other problems that he’s not tending to. So we’re ready and we’ll be willing to respond in kind.“

As the Washington Post’s Philip Bump writes re: DeSantis‘s touting of monoclonal antibodies:

It’s very useful to note that this specific assertion about responding to the pandemic with miraculous treatments was exactly what President Trump tried to do shortly before the 2020 election. Similarly struggling with selling his product, Trump declared that an antibody treatment he’d received for his own infection was a “cure” that would soon be rolled out free across the country. Like DeSantis, he was trying to downplay the spread of the virus by suggesting there was a way to make it unimportant, that the pandemic could be beaten on the back end instead of the front end. This is a very useful bit of spin for a politician opposed to advocating wearing masks or social distancing: a pound of cure is politically worth a ton of prevention.

But Trump also never made antibody treatments a “bigger part of this whole response,” in part because he soon became focused on denying the reality of his reelection loss instead of the pandemic. That itself is of course another example of a politician trying to reframe a loss as a victory.

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