President Joe Biden’s vow to shut down the virus and not the country has resulted in raging COVID-19 cases, a return of shuttered schools, staffing shortages due to infections and mandates, and has been a complete “failure,” according to Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis.
“His central promise of his campaign — totally up in smoke,” DeSantis told Fox News’ “Life, Liberty & Levin,” noting he is taking the “arrows” that are not getting thrown at Biden.
“And so I think as a result of that, they try to find scapegoats. And I think trying to fight with Florida or Texas is just one of the things they do to divert attention from their failure.”
But relying on masks, vaccines, and mandates amid the contagious omicron variant has exposed their lack of foresight in focusing on treating the inevitability of infection, DeSantis added to host Mark Levin.
“I think that they just have tunnel vision in terms of how they want to handle this: It hasn’t worked, obviously,” DeSantis said. “Remember he demagogued Donald Trump during the campaign, saying Trump was to blame for COVID even though China was to blame for COVID, saying Biden would shut down the virus if he were elected president.
“It was a ridiculous thing to say. It was demagogic. He gets in, and now you see cases and all this like no one ever anticipated was even possible.”
Florida, following the cues of former President Donald Trump, focused on treating the disease, including using monoclonal antibodies, which had Biden’s Health and Human Services suggesting Florida is overusing its share of, a move that was “all political,” according to DeSantis.
“We have actually embraced treatment,” he continued. “Most of these other governors and the people like [Dr. Anthony] Fauci and the federal leadership, they basically say, Get a shot; wear a mask’ and they never talk about treatment. And we’ve really embraced treatment because that’s just the reality of what we’re facing.”
The vaccines have been exposed as incapable of stopping COVID-19, he concluded.
“I wish that the vaccines were sterilizing, but they’re not providing that type of immunity,” he said. “So to just not deal with treatment and to be hostile to people like me who are, it shows so much of this is about a political agenda. It’s about partisanship, and it’s not about the best interests of the American people when you talk about how these folks are acting.”