Ron DeSantis has dropped out of the race for president, and the chances of an inquiry into the USA's Covid response have dropped along with him, writes Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.
Ron DeSantis drops out of presidential race and backs Trump | BBC News | Bernd Debusmann Jr & Kayla Epstein:
January 21, 2024 - "Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has dropped out of the 2024 presidential race and endorsed Donald Trump. He quit ahead of the Republican primary election in New Hampshire, where he was polling in the single digits..... In a nearly five-minute long video on X, formerly Twitter, released on Sunday afternoon, Mr DeSantis said his campaign had 'left it all out on the field'. 'If there was anything I could do to produce a favourable outcome - more campaign stops, more interviews - I would do it," he added....
"The Florida governor said he was endorsing Mr Trump, who is the clear frontrunner after winning the first contest in Iowa with 51% of the vote. Mr DeSantis said it had become clear that a majority of Republican voters 'want to give Donald Trump another chance'. He acknowledged 'disagreements' with the former president, but said Mr Trump was 'superior' to Mr Biden, who is almost certain to be the Democratic nominee in November's general election. 'I signed a pledge to support the Republican nominee, and I will honour that pledge,'" Mr DeSantis said.... DeSantis also took a swipe at [Nikki] Haley, calling her a member of 'the old Republican guard of yesteryear - a repackaged form of warmed-over corporatism'.
Read more: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68051757
Why did Ron DeSantis quit US presidential race? | BBC News | January 22, 2024:
Ron DeSantis was the last hope of a Covid reckoning | Unherd | Jay Bhattacharya:
January 22, 2024 - "I first spoke with Ron DeSantis, who yesterday dropped out of the US presidential race, when he cold-called me on a Sunday afternoon in September 2020.... We spoke for over two hours: on Covid-19 risk factors, on immunity, on the harms of lockdowns, and on the safety of opening schools.... The next day, the Governor invited me to a policy roundtable where he led a public discussion on Covid policy between me and fellow academics: the Nobel Prize-winning Stanford scientist Michael Levitt and the Harvard epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff. DeSantis then announced that he was lifting all remaining lockdown policies in Florida and would not institute them again....
"In autumn 2020, as California Governor Gavin Newsom kept pupils out of school, DeSantis ordered an in-person option for every child in Florida. Following the lack of high-quality randomised evidence suggesting community masking can effectively prevent Covid, DeSantis prohibited mask mandates in the state. In late 2020, when vaccines first became available, following evidence that older people were more than a thousand times more likely than teenagers to die from Covid infection and that the vaccine could reduce that risk, the Governor prioritised older people for vaccination ... at a time when public health authorities waffled on the topic.... In 2021, following evidence that vaccination did not prevent Covid transmission and so did not provide a public benefit to others besides the recipient, DeSantis rejected the coercive idea of vaccine mandates and passports. At a time when hospitals were preventing families from visiting with dying relatives, he enacted a humanitarian law guaranteeing visitation rights.
"What was the result of these policies? Since the beginning of the pandemic, Florida has had lower all-cause excess deaths, after adjusting for its older population, than California. DeSantis’s state protected human life better than locked-down California did, and it had better economic outcomes, including far lower unemployment and better educational outcomes for its school kids.
"One reason for the Republican reluctance to revisit the Covid era might be that many voters feel conflicted over their early support for lockdowns. They are thus loath to give DeSantis sufficient credit for his pandemic accomplishments. In this reading Trump, savvy operator that he is, has not proposed any honest evaluation of his Covid policies to avoid picking a scab that might make him — and much of the Republican electorate — look bad....
"There are two distinct and contradictory visions of the future now that DeSantis is gone from the presidential race. According to the pessimistic one, the lesson of DeSantis losing the Republican primary race is that Americans will never have an honest inquiry over the Covid policy fiasco. The more optimistic reading is that there may be one, but only if we can muster the grace to have it focus on providing lessons for future policy and not on political point-scoring. I’ll keep working towards the latter vision. But if it is the former, then lockdowns are a permanent fixture in the public health toolbox, and the population should plan accordingly for them to inevitably return."
Read more: https://unherd.com/thepost/ron-desantis-was-the-last-hope-of-a-covid-reckoning/
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