Throughout the history of public health in the United States, there have been a handful of moments where a broad cross-section of scientists and other leaders spotted something happening and thought “This is new. This is bad. This could change everything.”
It happened in the early 1980s, after researchers noted small outbreaks of rare forms of two illnesses — pneumonia and cancer — among the same population of young gay men in New York and California.
It happened in January 2020, when scientists in the World Health Organization spotted a cluster of pneumonia-like cases among people who lived in, or had recently traveled to, China’s Wuhan province.
We got that feeling once again Tuesday morning, watching Gov. Ron DeSantis happily direct a hand-picked cast of scientists, researchers and others before promising swift, radical action in support of their claims of widespread skulduggery and conspiracy in the global response to COVID.
This is new
We’re not alarmed at the idea of questioning the official response to COVID. Questions, doubt, criticism, even accusations: These are all meant to be part of the process following a global pandemic that has taken more than 6 million lives worldwide and strained public health officials to the breaking point. Critical analysis is how the world health community improves its response over time, how it moves more quickly and surely, how it saves more lives the next time a big threat emerges.
It’s not even that DeSantis was clearly mining anti-COVID paranoia for political gain. Any medical historian can point out numerous examples — going back to the 1918 influenza outbreak and even the medieval massacre caused by bubonic plague — of cynical politicians cruelly exploiting biological tragedy.
It was what DeSantis proposes to do. His announced plan to enshrine his hand-picked group of persecution-complex sufferers as official state advisors — while excluding any recognized experts — is bad enough. But it’s backed by a request for the state Supreme Court (dominated by four DeSantis appointees) to empanel a grand jury to investigate “crimes and wrongs” related to the rollout of the federal vaccination plan.
That’s where the real danger lies. It’s clear, reading through the petition, that many of the acts the governor proposes as crimes to be investigated are actually expected and ordinary steps in any evolving response to an extraordinary public-health threat. The petition, which reads like an overwrought screed from an anti-vax Facebook post, recounts multiple statements from the White House, the CDC, vaccine manufacturers and DeSantis’ personal hate-crush, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci, as if they are categorically and deliberately false. Yet a quick investigation of those statements reveals that many of them are inarguably true.
Just one example: DeSantis accuses Fauci of “issuing a press briefing just last year, only days before Christmas, threatening ‘the unvaccinated’ with ‘a winter of severe illness and death.’” That is, in fact, what Fauci said — and a month later, hospitalizations and deaths from COVID hit an all-time high, with unvaccinated people more than twice as likely to be hospitalized and 10 times more likely to die of COVID.
This is bad
It wouldn’t be the first time DeSantis tried to use the power of his office to tarnish accurate information about COVID. But it would be the first time any governor abused the power of the court system to write deliberate falsehoods against public health leaders into official court records, where they could be picked up and wielded by other anti-vax forces. The snowball effect could have a devastating impact on future pandemic response, triggering paralyzing waves of litigation. It could also trigger more attempts to pervert the grand jury process as a means to smear DeSantis’ enemies.
In a round-table event announcing the new committee and grand-jury request, DeSantis and his kickline of vaccine deniers doubled down on the falsehood, claiming a broad conspiracy to quiet dissenting voices surrounding the handling of COVID-19 and the vaccines developed to fight it. The reality is that scientific and medical journals around the world have published hundreds of articles examining elements of the response to coronavirus. Many of them have been critical. And when those critics made compelling, evidence-based arguments, the national and international scientific establishment listened — and national COVID policy shifted. Meanwhile, the CDC has expanded its efforts to monitor and investigate reports of adverse reactions to vaccines.
This should change everything
DeSantis and his acolytes ignored that, and that makes one thing abundantly clear. This is not an investigation, it’s a drama, and the script is already written, with a plot twist that recasts public-health heroes as villains and depicts DeSantis as a savior, outflanking his former mentor Donald Trump to the right. And it casts anyone who lines up behind him, up to and including the state’s Supreme Court, as supporting players who are eager to burn their own careers and credibility on the altar of his ambition. It’s an obvious second act to his successful campaign performance, rallying more gullible, COVID-weary people to his banner and boosting his bid to take his act to the national stage — with absolutely no regard to the wreckage he creates.
Up until now, DeSantis has gotten nearly everything he demanded ― from lawmakers, from state officials (who either complied with his outrageous demands or quit) and from voters who have stuck with him through outrage after stage-managed outrage.
But this is new ― more audacious than DeSantis has ever been. It’s bad. The implications for public health could resonate nationwide, and DeSantis would keep looking to weaponize tools like grand juries against his enemies. And it should change everything, starting with a firm “no” from the Supreme Court to this reckless, potentially deadly abuse of power.
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The Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Krys Fluker, Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson and Viewpoints Editor Jay Reddick. Contact us at insight@orlandosentinel.com
