The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced they no longer recommend indoor masking for residents of states like Florida. The announcement comes after Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has already been defying the CDC’s recommendations and took it a step further, saying the Florida Department of Health is recommending against COVID shots for children.
Florida is now eight weeks into a death count that has hovered around 500 per week; however, there are multiple testimonies to suggest the CDC’s COVID death count has been inflated since at least last summer, notably in children, as admitted by the CDC itself. In fact, as recently as January, CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walsneky also admitted that as many as 75 percent of vaccinated adults who died “of” COVID had at least four comorbidities.
In Florida, March 11 through March 17 was the smallest one-week increase in cases since the week of Thanksgiving, which defied expert expectations.
In February, DeSantis and Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo announced a new set of COVID guidance for Floridians under the moniker “Buck the CDC.” The Florida officials maintained much of the federal guidance has been “COVID theater” and that masking does not work and people ought to be able to “breathe freely.”
“Over the past two years, the data has shown us what works and what doesn’t work. It is long past time to stop the COVID Theater,” said DeSantis in an early March announcement. “In Florida, we told the truth, we let the data drive our response, and we let Floridians make decisions for themselves and their children. As a result, Florida is in a better spot than states who used fear mongering and mandates.”
The State of Florida has cited a CDC study which found “no significant effect of face masks on transmission of laboratory-confirmed influenza.” Critics pointed out the study dealt with the flu, rather than COVID, but numerous studies have come out throughout the pandemic refuting universal masking effectiveness.
“Conspicuously, there’s no evidence of more outbreaks in schools in those countries relative to schools in the U.S., where the solid majority of kids wore masks for an entire academic year and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future,” said a New York Magazine article in Summer 2021. “These countries, along with the World Health Organization, whose child-masking guidance differs substantially from the CDC’s recommendations, have explicitly recognized that the decision to mask students carries with it potential academic and social harms for children and may lack a clear benefit.”
Around the same time, the CDC’s own data showed that children were much more likely to die from vehicles, drowning, and the flu, compared to COVID.
The CDC's own data show kids are far more likely to die from cancer, drowning, the flu, homicide, suicide, etc. than #COVID19.
Too many politicians/media are spreading fear, panic, and misinformation.
Leave the kids alone. They have the least to fear from the virus. pic.twitter.com/WjyYZC6a9R
— Jon Miltimore (@miltimore79) August 9, 2021
DeSantis and Ladapo have also taken their guidance a step further and recommended against isolation for extended periods of time for children and adults.
– – –
Grant Holcomb is a reporter at The Florida Capital Star and The Star News Network. Follow Grant on Twitter and direct message tips.
Photo “Ron DeSantis” by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0. Background Photo “Centers for Disease Control and Prevention” by Raed Mansour. CC BY 2.0.
