Maybe the substackers who are fixated on “woke” student council edicts can spare a moment to condemn the state of Florida for silencing a public health official for discussing…public health. During a pandemic.
Dr. Raul Pino, director of the Florida Department of Health’s Orange County organization, was placed on administrative leave for sending an email urging the agency’s employees to improve their vaccination rate. Orlando’s ABC affiliate, WFTV:
(Dr. Pino) wrote that he had an analyst run vaccination data for employees, and that out of the 568 active staff at the department, only 77 had received a COVID-19 booster, 219 had two doses of the vaccine and 34 had only one dose.
“I am sorry but in the absence of reasonable and real reasons it is irresponsible not to be vaccinated,” Pino wrote. “We have been at this for two years, we were the first to give vaccines to the masses, we have done more than 300,000 and we are not even at 50%, pathetic.”
“I have a hard time understanding how we can be in public health and not practice it,” he added.
The good doctor is correct; that is a pathetic vaccination rate, especially among a group of public health agency employees. But note that Pino didn’t threaten to place anyone on leave or fire them over it. The state did that, as confirmed by the NYT:
Jeremy T. Redfern, the press secretary for the Department of Health, confirmed in a statement that Dr. Pino was on administrative leave, and that the department was “conducting an inquiry to determine if any laws were broken in this case.”
The decision to get vaccinated “is a personal medical choice that should be made free from coercion and mandates from employers,” Mr. Redfern wrote.
This isn’t a case of people on campus tragically having to “self-censor” to avoid criticism about their weird theories on race or gender or whatever. Dr. Pino, who fled his native Cuba for more freedom in the United States, has been muzzled by Governor Ron DeSantis and his minions. This is the state suspending a doctor’s career because of speech that reflects the medical consensus but is at odds with the governor’s and crackpot surgeon general’s politically motivated, anti-science demagoguery.
I’ll be over here waiting for the anti-woke chicken littles to defend Dr. Pino. I’ll bring a very large cup of coffee and a few crossword puzzles to pass the time.
Open thread.
Baud
As with anti-political correctness before, anti-cancel culture is a drink from which only conservatives get to take a sip.
J.
So less than 50% of the people working in the Department of Public Health actually care about anyone’s health. Wonderful.
Orwell could not have scripted this story better.
I feel for Dr. Pino and doctors throughout Florida who are trying to save lives. But it seems that DeathSantis is determined to kill as many people as possible. Does he not realize that most of the people who have died were his supporters?
topclimber
Why was so rate so low? Medical folks thinking they can’t lose 2-3 days to vaccine reactions, or fatalists or what?
Soprano2
Our city workforce has been stuck on 55.5% fully vaccinated for awhile now. It’s pretty pathetic.
Betty
In homage to Cheryl Rofer, let me say the crazy is growing exponentially in Florida. God bless Dr. Pino for trying to do his job. Let’s hope Florida voters send DeSantis packing. Of course the state legislature is pretty awful too.
narya
Since it’s an open thread, shout out to Water Girl, A Good Woman, Curt, and the others who were facilitating last night’s convo with Adam Schiff!! Great job, and a really fun encounter. I think we should send BJ Calendars to the staff person who facilitated it–we ARE a full-service blog, after all.
Steeplejack (phone)
@topclimber:
Floriduh man syndrome, health care division.
Benw
Go Dr Pino. That’s a nice, professional “fuck you all’ email.
Butter Emails!
@topclimber:
I’d have to dig deeper, but many people working for the department of health wouldn’t be health care professionals.
Ksmiami
Betty- I care about you – move out of there.
jonas
“Don’t Look Up” was supposed to be a parody, not a blueprint.
Chief Oshkosh
About 2,000 US citizens are dying from Covid per day. If that rate maintains to Election Day (it probably won’t), that’s about 540,000 deaths. About 92% of those currently hospitalized with Covid are unvaccinated. So, about 500,000 unvaccinated US citizens will have died by Election Day. I haven’t seen reliable numbers as to what percentage of these people might’ve voted Republican, but it’s probably a majority. So I guess all I can say is: “Faster! Faster!”
Baud
@Chief Oshkosh:
It won’t stay that high unless there’s a new variant.
Miss Bianca
@topclimber: I don’t know. Why were eight out of our 16 local clinic workers able to duck getting vaccinated because of “religious exemptions”? It’s because they are marinating in a toxic broth of denial and white exceptionalism, fueled by the right-wing puke funnel
ETA: At least that’s my best guess. I may have to ask our clinic director at the next Hospital District Board meeting.
Spanky
@Baud: Not “unless”, “until”.
Baud
@Spanky:
There are always variants that don’t go anywhere. There’s no way to predict when new wide spread variants will stop.
laura
Has that Florida governor outlawed handwashing after taking a shit yet because that seems like an awfully personal decision too.
(I presume antivaxxers do not wash their hands after using the toilet.)
SFAW
Every day, I see a new reason why I hate the RWMFs with a passion. Mrs. SFAW used to think I was a little overboard on the RWMF-hatred. Then she started paying more attention to the politics, and joined me in that hatred.
Which is tough for her, because she works in a hospital, and cannot triage-out the unvaccinated. [Sort of a non-sequitur, but … ]
SFAW
@laura:
On the plus side, they’re at least still (most of the time) using a toilet. I’m sure there is a goodly number of RWMFs who would have no second thoughts about taking a dump on some Dem’s property. Or the Dem him/herself.
citizen dave
Yesterday I was doing a thought experiment on which state, left or right, is most likely to leave the Union. When I hit upon Florida, I stopped. You win.
Brachiator
Fuck that public health nonsense. Florida is going to keep people “free” even if it kills them. The people, that is.
DeSantis is clearly running to the right of sanity in pursuit of a possible presidential nod.
Is he popular in the state?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Baud: with the usual caveats about ‘re-tweets are not endorsements’, Eric Topol has always struck me as one of the more cautious public health advocates, and I don’t think he’d amplify this if he didn’t think it had some merit
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
?
Hard to see how any unvaxxed person in the US escapes getting Omicron.
Geminid
There was some discussion here yesterday about how strong a hold Trump still has on the Republican parry. So I was interested to see Marcy Wheeler retweet this:
Wheeler predicted that Republicans are really going to turn on Trump as the January 6 Committee findings become public.
Baud
@SFAW:
I wish the medical community supported prioritization of resources, because I think it would be really popular among the responsible. But without their support, political leaders can’t make it happen.
gvg
Um, the supposed vaccination rate may be higher than he officially knows. I work for a state of Florida university with lats of medical leadership encouraging vaccination but unable to require it AND for a long time unable to even ask if someone is vaccinated, even if we got the shot from the University because of the stupid laws and rules not to mention the punishments from spite of anyone who works for the state who even states clearly get vaccinated.
A while ago they decided they could ask employees to voluntarily submit documentation of vaccination, but the employees don’t have to and it wasn’t allowed to influence anything like say not as many tests. After awhile they couldn’t even require the tests. The University President announced he is retiring and I suspect the madness is why. he sent out a video in which he did state he thought vaccination should be required nationwide but he had NO authority to make it required at his University.
Anyway, I did upload the original vaccination series, but I didn’t bother to tell them I got a booster. We have been told we can’t even ask anyone if they are vaccinated. People volunteer it sometimes. I don’t understand how the lawyers think this is covered by medical privacy but that was a big part of what we were told BEFORE the republicans staked out this antivax position and its only gotten worse.
In sum, you can’t count on the numbers being right in this state.
Yarrow
@Baud: There’s a different version of Omicron – BA.2 – that is increasing in Denmark and a few other places. It seems to be replacing BA.1. There is also evidence from South Africa that people are getting reinfected with Omicron.
leeleeFL
@citizen dave: Not arguing at all, but Texas will be first, then FLORI-DUH! Just my sense of the shithead factor. God help us, I am really afeared for this Country! If I was younger, better educated, and could get my Family on board, I would relocate….. posthaste!
sdhays
@citizen dave: With all the natural disasters that regularly befall Florida, it’s one state in particular which really can’t even fantasize about leaving the union, at least by itself.
California could possibly do it successfully (for some broad definition of “successful”), and Texass might be able to if it wasn’t run by corrupt morons (so that’s a “never”).
The Moar You Know
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: it has a lot of merit. Problem is, so does the counterargument of “this just never goes away now”, the historic examples most applicable being measles and mumps.
Baud
Aren’t the new Covid treatments supposed to be widely available by the summer?
Baud
@The Moar You Know:
I don’t think anyone thinks this goes away completely. It’s more a question of the impact it has on society and daily life.
sdhays
@Geminid: I have a hard time believing it, but I hope so. I also hope that it really depresses the hard-core Dump lovers so they give up on politics and stay home. That surge in KKK-fascists that Dump created in 2020 worries me.
VOR
@jonas: During TFG’s Reign of Error, I used to say 1984 was a cautionary tale, not a “How To” book.
Betty Cracker
@Brachiator: I saw a recent poll that suggested DeSantis’s numbers are tanking. The results say he’d lose the election if held now against either of the two most likely Dem opponents (Crist and Fried). That said, I think most polls are bullshit, and it’s a pollster I’ve never heard of, so it could be hinky. But the same pollster reported strong numbers for DeSantis previously, so who knows?
Xentik
@Baud: Or to paraphrase a common refrain here: One cannot be cancelled by conservatism, one can only cancel conservatism.
Brachiator
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Stuff like this is useless. I hate crystal ball gazing, especially if it comes from scientists or science adjacent people.
We can wait to see what happens and how it happens. Is he predicting that the virus will magically disappear all at once from everywhere on a certain date?
The Moar You Know
@sdhays: economically, we’d be WAY better off. Californians get about 65 cents worth of federal services for every tax dollar paid, the other 35 cents goes largely to the South (the only exception to that being Texas, which does take in enough to pay for what they consume).
And it is precisely because of that enraging fact that California will never be allowed to leave the Union, as the rest of America would find themselves without operating funds in very short order.
Worth also taking into consideration that from a military standpoint CA is not defensible; our eastern border is over 750 miles long, riddled with roadways and vast expanses of pretty flat desert, at least in the southern part.
Yarrow
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: As noted in the replies to that tweet, that same organization predicted the end of the pandemic in January 2021.
Roger Moore
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Count me as deeply skeptical. The evidence from Omicron is that past infection is much less protective than vaccination. The idea that the virus would stop being a concern after everyone had been infected was always stupid, but the evidence argues even more strongly against it than ever.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@sdhays: I’m honestly not trying to play 17 dimensional chess, just looking for silver linings one these cloudy days: A trumpist vs Establishment intra-party war, along the lines of Kemp vs Perdue, may be our best hope for holding and winning seats.
Though I haven’t heard anything about a primary for Wee Willie’d Marco. He’s been a good little Pekinese.
Roger Moore
@Geminid:
I don’t think it’s the January 6th committee findings that will hurt him. It’s him not dominating the news cycle the way he did before while other Republicans can get attention.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
that’s what you take from this?
Baud
@Yarrow: Obviously, that was wrong, but it could have been based on the reasonable prediction that people would have wanted to get vaccinated.
The current prediction seems to be based on the effects of Omicron. WhoTF knows?
scav
Along with hand washing (isn’t all that time spent washing hands after shitting a TYRANNY’S THEFT OF TIME, TIME that BELONG to the HOLY EMPLOYERS!!!!) only an oppression equal to the Draconian Overreach of forbidding driving after a skinful of LIBERTY Juice!? It’s THEIR body and THEIR car, how dare anyone tut tut over their FREEDOM of combining their Pursuits of Happiness? And etc.
Geminid
@sdhays: It’s just one poll, of only relative value. But I always thought that the most significant information polls give is trend. Trump’s popularity among Republicans seems to be dropping, and it’s hard for me to see how he can reverse that trend.
There are still plenty of Republican politicians flying to Mar-a-Loco to kiss Trump’s scurvy ring, and Trump’s endorsement may still have value in a primary. But these politicians could end up behind the curve in their general elections.
Geminid
@Roger Moore: How about both?
And you are right about Trump’s absence from the news. His absence from the White House is another factor. The office of President tends to magnify it’s holder. Trump’s partisans were admiring a larger than life personage. His detractors saw him as an unbearably powerful foe. Some still do.
Brachiator
@sdhays:
We can’t depend on this helping us stay clear of Republican autocracy.
This is one of the reasons why.
Fox News seems intent on keeping the people angry, even though they have seen how this can veer out of anyone’s control.
We just have to keep fighting to defeat these fools.
Betty Cracker
@The Moar You Know: The top 5 moocher states are: New Mexico, West Virginia, Mississippi, Alaska and Montana, so it’s not accurate to say the excess “goes largely to the South.”
Kay
Interesting take on the value of forcing debate:
The 52 Senators were not convinced and the majority still don’t support federal civil rights protections for voting, but at least they were forced to state that because it isn’t, actually, “over”. The country goes on without federal civil rights protections for voting now and no one knows how that will play out.
Yarrow
@Baud: I think it’s hard even for people who are experts in these fields to predict it. Plenty of them have been wrong so far. Global vaccination seems to be what will get us out of the pandemic. Until then the opportunity for new and more vaccine-resistant variants to emerge seems to be the risk. Perhaps Omicron will have conveyed enough immunity to make that less possible but all reports I’m seeing indicate that Omicron immunity doesn’t last very long. So who knows.
lee
As someone who read HermanCainAwards regularly:
Fuck ‘um
At this point they have been given all the information they need. If they ignore it, that is the own damn fault.
Brachiator
@Geminid:
The GOP is keeping Trump’s hopes alive by not clearly denouncing him. And the polls mean nothing, especially this early.
How many Republicans still believe that the 2020 election was rigged?
Still I am happy for any sign that Trump is losing favor.
Yarrow
@Geminid:
He’s starting to do rallies again. I think I saw one recent on wasn’t very well attended? Not sure. They sure aren’t getting wall to wall coverage like they were when he officially ran for President or became President. But getting himself out there in front of his fans could be a way to increase his support. Or not.
sdhays
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I just don’t see anyone in the GQP starting a real war on Dump. They had their chance in 2015/2016, and they wet themselves and hid in a pile of manure at the first mean tweet. Now he’s the leader of the cult, even for people who identify more with the cult than the leader himself.
There will be a debate between “sure, Dump is the second-coming of Jesus Christ, but we don’t need to belabor that fact” faction and the “we must honor him in every word and deed” faction. And I don’t see the first faction having much luck in national elections as long as Dump is alive or “not retired” (if retirement is even possible with someone like Donnie).
Kay
Brachiator
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I think anything framed as a “prediction” should be avoided or presented very carefully.
Hoodie
@Betty Cracker: People may be underestimating how difficult it will be for the GOP to replace Trump, who came along and rescued them when they were faced with a choice among such lowlights as Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush. Trump, like him or not, has a certain charisma, probably born from his tabloid-ready lifestyle in the 70’s and 80’s and the mythology coming out of The Apprentice. As is the case with a lot of charismatic figures, it really appeals to a significant number of people, and totally turns off about an equal number (Obama actually had a similar effect). DeSantis is just a lumpy guy with a nasal voice, flat effect, and a bad attitude. He strikes me as the type of guy who gets less popular the more people are exposed to him, a new version of Scott Walker.
Roger Moore
@Geminid:
And normalize him. The news media has a very strong bias in favor of presenting politics as normal and reasonable, which helped Trump immensely while he was in office. No matter how deranged and obviously criminal he was, they didn’t want to come right out and say he was misbehaving. But they don’t seem to have the same deference for him as ex-president. I think a huge part of this is that he’s trying to stay active in politics and even run again. The media usually offers great deference to former presidents, but that’s because they normally semi-retire as elder statesmen who give advice but try to stay above the fray. Getting back in the trenches makes Trump absolutely fair game.
Another Scott
@Roger Moore: What gets me is that early on some on Twitter were saying that Omicron probably developed in a single person in Africa who was infected with something like Alpha and their body never cleared the virus. So it mutated for months before finally escaping to infect others. And flew around the world in huge wave a few weeks.
There is currently nothing – absolutely nothing – preventing something like that happening again.
The pandemic isn’t over until it is over (nearly) everywhere. We cannot let up in fighting the virus.
Cheers,
Scott.
Roger Moore
@sdhays:
The real fight will come when it’s clear Trump isn’t coming back and everyone wants to stake their claim as his true successor. The only way for them to avoid that is for him to obviously and publicly lose in a way that can’t be written off as the other side cheating, so that everyone wants to run away from him to avoid loser stink. I don’t see that happening, so the successorship fights are coming.
Geminid
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I recall John Cole saying some time after the election that Trump was now a Republican problem. I think that in the short term he was right.
Longer term, trumpism- the appeal of a fascist strong man- is still a danger. And Trump helped open a Pandora’s box of election subversion that will be hard to to undo.
burnspbesq
@VOR:
In contrast, it has always been apparent that a certain segment of right-wing America viewed “The Handmaid’s Tale” as an instruction manual.
Arm The Homeless
Floriduh is a fucking joke.
I called my local rep’s office to ask why their boss was trying to push abortion bans and clearly anti-constitutional speech bills. I advised them if I wanted to live in a regressive redneck shit-hole I would move to Mississippi with it’s lower cost of living; that’s when they hung up on me
Geminid
@Yarrow: Trump pulled in 15,000 people to his Arizona rally. I had two takeaways from the reporting on this event: Trump was repetitive in relitigating the past election, and the attendees were something of a freak show. Trump’s gotta do better if his comeback tour is to regenerate his political career.
Trump plans another rally January 29, outside of Houston. I wonder if Texas politicians will flock to this rally like Arizona politicians did to the one last Saturday. And if Gregg Abbott decides he has a prior commitment, will Trump berate him?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Geminid: I’m too much of a realist to think Beto O’Rourke is anything but a very long shot, but I’d be surprised if Abbott is willing to tempt fate like that.
Geminid
@Betty Cracker: New Mexico used to be the second poorest state in the U.S., ahead of only Mississipi. The Second World War changed that when it brought air force bases and the Manhattan Project. New Mexico now has tourism and recreation, some civilian tech growth, and the Southeastern corner of the state benefits from the Permian Basin oil boom. The federal government is still the state’s biggest economic engine, though.
Outside the growth areas, New Mexico is a very beautul but very poor place. Governor Grisham and the Democratic legislature pushed through a good clean power package in 2019 and that will help some.
Betty Cracker
@Arm The Homeless: LOL! Well done!
@Geminid: I’ve visited NM — it’s pretty, the food is excellent, and the people I met were nice. But it’s not the place for me. The lack of humidity made me molt like an iguana.
LongHairedWeirdo
This is a perfect example of how completely crazy the Republican Party has become. They are convinced that Covid-19 is so low risk that they can use it to score points – removing the state’s executive branch to issue emergency public health orders, SCOTUS decisions that turn churches into petri dishes, etc..
This is so amazingly colossally stupid. There’s no guarantee that Covid-19 won’t evolve into far deadlier form. And, there’s absolutely no reason to suspect the next pandemic will be no more deadly than Covid-19.
Why aren’t we talking about this? I mean, *seriously*? I know political journalists are allergic to any truth that they can’t spin as influencing the horse race, or blaming both sides, but, you know, the first step in learning to tell the truth is to admit you’ve got a problem!
James E Powell
@Geminid:
How much do those number differ from January 2016?
There are people who say they are Republican voters and there are people who show up to vote in Republican primaries & caucuses.
Another Scott
@Roger Moore: +1
There was some story in the news about some unvaccinated guy who got COVID twice and recently died – of Omicron.
We seem to go through these cycles every few months – “Oh things are getting better, it will be all over soon…!” It’s Lucy and the football.
And, while I’m here, the IHME may have good people who know what they’re doing, but (as others have noted) their graphs are garbage. Error bars don’t actually get smaller 6 months out than they are now. Think of hurricane “circle of uncertainty” maps – the circles get bigger as time goes on, not smaller. The IHME graphs showing a peak then a trough with smaller error ranges later on pretend to have more confidence than science allows. I can’t help but think that too many people didn’t understand the real-world ramifications of people seeing those graphs…
Grrr…,
Scott.
Gravenstone
@citizen dave: Maybe Cuba would annex them.
/snerk
Bill Arnold
@Kay:
I hope they hunger at least a bit for more.