“EARLY TREATMENT SAVES LIVES”
That theme of the day was announced by a sign when Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis stepped up to the podium outside Ocala Regional Medical Center on Friday morning.
The treatment was monoclonal antibody infusion, which DeSantis has been advocating since then-President Donald Trump credited it with his recovery after catching COVID-19.
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But Trump would not have needed treatment of any kind if he had not been infected. And he might have escaped that if his vanity had not prevented him from wearing a mask.
Trump largely shunned face coverings, as did his minions, trying to pass off their servile selfishness as a matter of personal choice and freedom. They proclaimed that they refused to be ruled by fear when in fact they were simply declining to be inconvenienced for the sake of others. So what if masks protect everyone around you as well as yourself?
The resistance to wearing masks and other simple mitigation measures, along with an effort to minimize the “academics,” contributed to the national COVID death toll, which has passed 800,000. That includes more than 60,000 in Florida, one of them 62-year-old Teresa Twist of Ocala.
She died nine months ago in the very hospital that DeSantis was using on Friday as a backdrop for his media event.
Twist was legally blind and had been forced to leave her high school without a diploma because she had not been able to see the blackboard. She was in her late forties when she resumed her studies with the help of a program for the blind and obtained her GED. She began volunteering at her granddaughter’s elementary school and secured a certificate that enabled her to teach special needs students. She insisted on making her own way to the school, but could not drive a car because of her vision, so she commuted by moped on back roads.
“It was so crazy to us, but she wanted her independence,” her daughter, Chastity Price, told The Daily Beast. ”Once she memorized it, she was good. Don’t get me wrong, she crashed many times.”
In the classroom, she gave her all to all her students. A photo that appeared in a local newspaper showed her on a field trip, helping a child in a wheelchair churn butter.
She had asthma, which she knew put her at high risk when the pandemic hit. She wore an N-95 mask and gloves on the job until the school was shut down. She was anxious to get the jab as soon as DeSantis approved it for teachers and before school reopened.
“She WANTED the vaccine,” he daughter remembered.
But classes resumed before she was able to get vaccinated. The virus was everywhere and she was one of several teachers exposed at the school. She and at least two other teachers fell seriously ill in February and she had been in the hospital for a week when DeSantis finally announced that teachers could now get the shot.
Early treatment with monoclonal antibodies may indeed have benefited Twist. But it was not widely available then, and after two weeks she became so ill that her doctor said her only hope was a double lung transplant. Protocol required her to wait six more weeks before she was eligible. Her family was still pleading for an exception when her doctor informed them that the end had come. The family gathered together and got on FaceTime to give their collective approval for the doctor to pull the plug.
Ron DeSantis stood before the “Early Treatment Saves Lives Sign” where that desperate drama had played out. He began by talking not about lives, but about jobs as a way of making a political point. He was happy to say that Florida was responsible for a quarter of the 210,000 new jobs in the latest monthly report by the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics. The national total was far short of the 600,000 predicted for November.
DeSantis only then went from livelihoods to lives. He noted that in recent months Florida has had one of the lowest per capita COVID infection rates in the nation. He suggested this was largely due to his policies, though he is not doing much in the way of mitigation.
He proved that he did understand some value in prevention when he excitedly announced that Florida would be deploying a newly approved pre-exposure monoclonal antibody treatment that is said to reduce the risk of infection by 77 percent, which is 16 percentage points less effective than the Moderna jab, 11 percentage points less than Pfizer. And it will be reserved for the relatively small number of people who are immunosuppressed and otherwise less likely to benefit from the vaccine.
“You can do this before you’re ever exposed and potentially it will mediate any infection that you get,” he said.
But DeSantis still failed to acknowledge the importance of reducing the spread and keeping others from being exposed simply by accepting a minor annoyance such as a facial covering. He shrugged off a 127 percent rise in new COVID cases in Florida over the last six months to a daily average of 3,207 as “seasonal.”
An equally cheery Florida Surgeon General Joe Ladapo stepped up to speak. He was appointed in September after having repeatedly cast doubt on the vaccine. He famously refused when a state senator—who had just been diagnosed with breast cancer—asked him to wear a mask in her office in October. Ladapo sought to justify his behavior by saying he cannot “communicate effectively” while wearing a face covering.
Ladapo proved that we would be better off if he could not communicate at all as he scoffed at states that seek to fight the virus with mandates for vaccines, masks, and testing.
“It’s the trifecta,” Lapado said. “It’s lunacy.”
This licensed medical doctor proceeded to suggest that it is just fine for some people to opt for waiting to get sick rather than take a safe and effective measure to prevent it.
“Some people are more inclined for treatments instead of vaccinations,” he said.
Ladapo then spoke as glowingly about DeSantis as DeSantis has about Trump.
“In Florida, under the governor’s leadership, we’ve provided all options for people and we’ve provided education and access, right?” he said.
If DeSantis ever succeeds in parlaying his actual lunacy into the presidency, look for Ladapo to become the U.S. surgeon general, or maybe secretary of health, education and welfare.
Wherever DeSantis’ ambitions take him, Twist and the tens of thousands of others who died on his watch will remain dead. No doubt many would have died no matter what he did. But he cannot say that he set politics aside and did all he could to save lives.
