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Lapado with America's Frontline Doctors at a D.C. press conference to sing the imaginary praises of hydrochlorixiquine to treat COVID. Screenshot

First Do No Harm: Yada Yada So Umm Yada Science Yada Like Yada Yada Data Yada

God knows we've been served lots of lunacy with our pandemic: COVID and the tools to fight it are "genocide," wokeness, communism, fascism, social control, internment camps, a Chinese plot to kill deplorables. But Ron DeathSantis - credit where it's due - has topped it all by choosing as his top health official an anti-vax quack who at hearings just declined five surreal times to answer an elemental question: Are vaccines safe and effective? After Joseph Ladapo dodged, dithered, deflected, Dems - somehow resisting the urge to slap him up side of the head - walked out. GOP pols approved him.

To date, God knows, we've been served bountiful lunacy with our pandemic. Even as right-wing, anti-science COVID cranks suffer and die in numbers up to six times that of lucid people who just go out and get a magical free shot, they continue to spew loopy claptrap about the virus and the science used to fight it. They appear at rallies to frenziedly shriek the vaccine is just like Nazi medical experiments: "None of us can run, none of us can hide! This is a genocide!", though we'd argue it's more a Jim-Jones sort of situation. They threaten the inimitable, life-saving Dr. Anthony Fauci, exhorting mobs of idiots to yell, "Lock Him Up!" They claim a deplorable-killing plot and menace doctors and nurses who are "part of the murder machine of any hospital" with "bullets inside" them: "This is war, and it's gonna get bloody." They rave about a fictional "Great Reset" and COVID "internment camps": "This is all about total and complete control." Often, they do their ranting on complicit right-wing media, especially to Tucker Carlson, who has relentlessly spouted and abetted this bilge: COVID is China trying to control us with wokeness, old people should die for the econony, Fauci is proposing "national suicide," masks are for "second-rate slaves," COVID is BLM - "Minneapolis was our Wuhan" - only the "delicate, timid and effeminate" listen to public health experts and besides you "can't just let epidemiologists run a country." Last weekend, they "marched for death"in D.C., where Robert Kennedy Jr. (WTF happened to him?) argued Anne Frank had more freedom under the Nazis - until they killed her - than we do under vaccine mandates and all those satellites (don't ask). He later apologized when it proved a war crime too far even for his sister - "sickening" - and wife: "reprehensible." Jeff Tiedrich added a "fun historical fact: When my uncle spent three years in a Warsaw basement hiding from the Nazis, it wasn't because they wanted to vaccinate him."

Still, for all the it's-a-flat-earth-and-they're-pushing-us-off-but-just-to-show-them-we'll-die-anyway madness, Florida's Gov. Ron DeathSantis tops it by choosing as surgeon general for his COVID-ravaged state an anti-vax, hydroxychloroquine-touting, barely intelligible, evidently dishonest hack who's enabling Ron's current fight for antibody drugs that don't work and was last seen at a rally of quack doctors who claim the government's run by lizard people and demon sperm threaten us all. Despite his Harvard degree and ubiquitous white coat, Dr. Joseph Ladapo - "DeSantis' new henchman" - has compared the benefits of vaccines to "losing weight (and) eating more fruits and vegetables," refused to honor the mask request of a state senator undergoing cancer treatment, put a health official on leave for questioning the lack of vaccines among his own staff, stripped schools of the power to quarantine COVID-exposed students, and questioned vaccine mandates by babbling, "I mean, you hear these stories, people telling you what's been happening in their lives - nurses, pregnant women who are being forced to sort of put something in their bodies that we don't know all there is to know about yet...People need to continue and stick with their intuition and their sensibilities." One editorial: "The fear is real." Critics say he also falsely claimed to have treated COVID patients, he got fast-tracked for a tenured U. of Florida job by a DeSantis mega-donor, his work as a "fat doctor" renders him "beyond unqualified," and he's using his position as "a pulpit to spew misinformation" for which he should lose his license. On Wednesday, at a ludicrous Senate health committee hearing on his nomination, Dems grilled Ladapo as he dodged, hedged, dithered - "Oh, now I have better clearity on your question" - claimed "there's no yes and no in science," and declinedfive times to answer the elemental question, "Are COVID vaccines safe and effective?" Exasperated Dems walked out, somehow resisting the urge to slap him up side of the head, and majority Republicans advanced his nomination. Oh Floriduh. And America.

BOOK: Just a yes or no. Do vaccines work in fighting against COVID-19, yes or no?

LADAPO: Senator, I just--I, I, as a scientist, you know, I, I, I, I am compelled to answer the scientific question. And I'd be happy to answer any specific scientific question that you have related to vaccines and COVID-19.

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To date, God knows, we've been served bountiful lunacy with our pandemic. Even as right-wing, anti-science COVID cranks suffer and die in numbers up to six times that of lucid people who just go out and get a magical free shot, they continue to spew loopy claptrap about the virus and the science used to fight it. They appear at rallies to frenziedly shriek the vaccine is just like Nazi medical experiments: "None of us can run, none of us can hide! This is a genocide!", though we'd argue it's more a Jim-Jones sort of situation. They threaten the inimitable, life-saving Dr. Anthony Fauci, exhorting mobs of idiots to yell, "Lock Him Up!" They claim a deplorable-killing plot and menace doctors and nurses who are "part of the murder machine of any hospital" with "bullets inside" them: "This is war, and it's gonna get bloody." They rave about a fictional "Great Reset" and COVID "internment camps": "This is all about total and complete control." Often, they do their ranting on complicit right-wing media, especially to Tucker Carlson, who has relentlessly spouted and abetted this bilge: COVID is China trying to control us with wokeness, old people should die for the econony, Fauci is proposing "national suicide," masks are for "second-rate slaves," COVID is BLM - "Minneapolis was our Wuhan" - only the "delicate, timid and effeminate" listen to public health experts and besides you "can't just let epidemiologists run a country." Last weekend, they "marched for death"in D.C., where Robert Kennedy Jr. (WTF happened to him?) argued Anne Frank had more freedom under the Nazis - until they killed her - than we do under vaccine mandates and all those satellites (don't ask). He later apologized when it proved a war crime too far even for his sister - "sickening" - and wife: "reprehensible." Jeff Tiedrich added a "fun historical fact: When my uncle spent three years in a Warsaw basement hiding from the Nazis, it wasn't because they wanted to vaccinate him."

Still, for all the it's-a-flat-earth-and-they're-pushing-us-off-but-just-to-show-them-we'll-die-anyway madness, Florida's Gov. Ron DeathSantis tops it by choosing as surgeon general for his COVID-ravaged state an anti-vax, hydroxychloroquine-touting, barely intelligible, evidently dishonest hack who's enabling Ron's current fight for antibody drugs that don't work and was last seen at a rally of quack doctors who claim the government's run by lizard people and demon sperm threaten us all. Despite his Harvard degree and ubiquitous white coat, Dr. Joseph Ladapo - "DeSantis' new henchman" - has compared the benefits of vaccines to "losing weight (and) eating more fruits and vegetables," refused to honor the mask request of a state senator undergoing cancer treatment, put a health official on leave for questioning the lack of vaccines among his own staff, stripped schools of the power to quarantine COVID-exposed students, and questioned vaccine mandates by babbling, "I mean, you hear these stories, people telling you what's been happening in their lives - nurses, pregnant women who are being forced to sort of put something in their bodies that we don't know all there is to know about yet...People need to continue and stick with their intuition and their sensibilities." One editorial: "The fear is real." Critics say he also falsely claimed to have treated COVID patients, he got fast-tracked for a tenured U. of Florida job by a DeSantis mega-donor, his work as a "fat doctor" renders him "beyond unqualified," and he's using his position as "a pulpit to spew misinformation" for which he should lose his license. On Wednesday, at a ludicrous Senate health committee hearing on his nomination, Dems grilled Ladapo as he dodged, hedged, dithered - "Oh, now I have better clearity on your question" - claimed "there's no yes and no in science," and declinedfive times to answer the elemental question, "Are COVID vaccines safe and effective?" Exasperated Dems walked out, somehow resisting the urge to slap him up side of the head, and majority Republicans advanced his nomination. Oh Floriduh. And America.

BOOK: Just a yes or no. Do vaccines work in fighting against COVID-19, yes or no?

LADAPO: Senator, I just--I, I, as a scientist, you know, I, I, I, I am compelled to answer the scientific question. And I'd be happy to answer any specific scientific question that you have related to vaccines and COVID-19.

To date, God knows, we've been served bountiful lunacy with our pandemic. Even as right-wing, anti-science COVID cranks suffer and die in numbers up to six times that of lucid people who just go out and get a magical free shot, they continue to spew loopy claptrap about the virus and the science used to fight it. They appear at rallies to frenziedly shriek the vaccine is just like Nazi medical experiments: "None of us can run, none of us can hide! This is a genocide!", though we'd argue it's more a Jim-Jones sort of situation. They threaten the inimitable, life-saving Dr. Anthony Fauci, exhorting mobs of idiots to yell, "Lock Him Up!" They claim a deplorable-killing plot and menace doctors and nurses who are "part of the murder machine of any hospital" with "bullets inside" them: "This is war, and it's gonna get bloody." They rave about a fictional "Great Reset" and COVID "internment camps": "This is all about total and complete control." Often, they do their ranting on complicit right-wing media, especially to Tucker Carlson, who has relentlessly spouted and abetted this bilge: COVID is China trying to control us with wokeness, old people should die for the econony, Fauci is proposing "national suicide," masks are for "second-rate slaves," COVID is BLM - "Minneapolis was our Wuhan" - only the "delicate, timid and effeminate" listen to public health experts and besides you "can't just let epidemiologists run a country." Last weekend, they "marched for death"in D.C., where Robert Kennedy Jr. (WTF happened to him?) argued Anne Frank had more freedom under the Nazis - until they killed her - than we do under vaccine mandates and all those satellites (don't ask). He later apologized when it proved a war crime too far even for his sister - "sickening" - and wife: "reprehensible." Jeff Tiedrich added a "fun historical fact: When my uncle spent three years in a Warsaw basement hiding from the Nazis, it wasn't because they wanted to vaccinate him."

Still, for all the it's-a-flat-earth-and-they're-pushing-us-off-but-just-to-show-them-we'll-die-anyway madness, Florida's Gov. Ron DeathSantis tops it by choosing as surgeon general for his COVID-ravaged state an anti-vax, hydroxychloroquine-touting, barely intelligible, evidently dishonest hack who's enabling Ron's current fight for antibody drugs that don't work and was last seen at a rally of quack doctors who claim the government's run by lizard people and demon sperm threaten us all. Despite his Harvard degree and ubiquitous white coat, Dr. Joseph Ladapo - "DeSantis' new henchman" - has compared the benefits of vaccines to "losing weight (and) eating more fruits and vegetables," refused to honor the mask request of a state senator undergoing cancer treatment, put a health official on leave for questioning the lack of vaccines among his own staff, stripped schools of the power to quarantine COVID-exposed students, and questioned vaccine mandates by babbling, "I mean, you hear these stories, people telling you what's been happening in their lives - nurses, pregnant women who are being forced to sort of put something in their bodies that we don't know all there is to know about yet...People need to continue and stick with their intuition and their sensibilities." One editorial: "The fear is real." Critics say he also falsely claimed to have treated COVID patients, he got fast-tracked for a tenured U. of Florida job by a DeSantis mega-donor, his work as a "fat doctor" renders him "beyond unqualified," and he's using his position as "a pulpit to spew misinformation" for which he should lose his license. On Wednesday, at a ludicrous Senate health committee hearing on his nomination, Dems grilled Ladapo as he dodged, hedged, dithered - "Oh, now I have better clearity on your question" - claimed "there's no yes and no in science," and declinedfive times to answer the elemental question, "Are COVID vaccines safe and effective?" Exasperated Dems walked out, somehow resisting the urge to slap him up side of the head, and majority Republicans advanced his nomination. Oh Floriduh. And America.

BOOK: Just a yes or no. Do vaccines work in fighting against COVID-19, yes or no?

LADAPO: Senator, I just--I, I, as a scientist, you know, I, I, I, I am compelled to answer the scientific question. And I'd be happy to answer any specific scientific question that you have related to vaccines and COVID-19.

further
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