Government
Florida Gov. DeSantis Says Lockdowns Were A “Huge Mistake”
Florida Gov. DeSantis Says Lockdowns Were A "Huge Mistake"
Authored by Ivan Pentchoukov and Jan Jekielek via The Epoch Times,
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis issued a statewide stay-at-home order on April 1 last year locking down the Sunshine…

Authored by Ivan Pentchoukov and Jan Jekielek via The Epoch Times,
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis issued a statewide stay-at-home order on April 1 last year locking down the Sunshine State for 30 days amid a global panic about the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus outbreak. Sitting in his office exactly a year later, he told The Epoch Times that the lockdowns were a “huge mistake,” including in his own state.
“We wanted to mitigate the damage. Now, in hindsight, the 15 days to slow the spread and the 30—it didn’t work,” DeSantis said.
“We shouldn’t have gone down that road.”
Florida’s lockdown order was notably less strict than some of the stay-at-home measures imposed in other states. Recreational activities like walking, biking, golf, and beachgoing were exempted while essential businesses were broadly defined.
“Our economy kept going,” DeSantis said. “It was much different than what you saw in some of those lockdown states.”
The governor nonetheless now regrets issuing the order at all and is convinced that states that have carried on with lockdowns are perpetuating a destructive blunder.
After the 30 days of the initial lockdown in Florida lapsed, DeSantis commenced a phased reopening. He faced fierce criticism at each stage from establishment media and his own constituents beholden to the lockdown narrative.
The governor fully reopened Florida on Sept. 25 last year. When cases began to rise as part of the winter surge he did not reimpose any restrictions. Lockdown proponents forecast doom and gloom. DeSantis stood his ground.
The governor’s persistence wasn’t a leap of faith. Less than two weeks after Florida’s full reopening in late September, scientists from Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford went public with the Great Barrington Declaration, which disavowed lockdowns as a destructive and futile mitigation measure. The declaration, which has since been signed by 13,985 medical and public health scientists, calls on public officials to adopt the focused protection approach—the exact strategy employed by DeSantis.
Despite dire predictions about the pandemic in Florida, DeSantis has been vindicated. On April 1, 2021, Florida ranked 27th among all states in deaths per capita from the CCP virus, commonly known as the coronavirus.
The ranking’s significance is amplified because the Sunshine State’s population is the sixth oldest in the United States by median age. California—the lockdown state often compared to Florida due to its lower per-capita death rate—is the sixth youngest. The risk of dying from the CCP virus is highest for people over 55, with the group accounting for 93 percent of the deaths nationwide.
While Florida is doing either better or relatively the same as the strict lockdown states in terms of CCP virus mortalities, the state’s economy is booming compared to the crippled economies in California and New York. Though less quantifiable, the human suffering from the lockdown-related rise in suicides, mental health issues, postponed medical treatments, and opioid deaths is undeniably immense.
“It’s been a huge, huge mistake in terms of policy,” DeSantis said.
“All I had to do was follow the data and just be willing to go forward into the teeth of the narrative and fight the media,” he added.
“As people were beating up on me, what I said was I’d rather them beat up on me than have someone lose their job. I’d rather have them beat up on me than have kids locked out of school. I’m totally willing to take whatever heat comes our way because we’re doing the right thing.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis gives a thumbs up as he leaves a press conference where he spoke about the cruise industry at Port Miami on April 08, 2021 in Miami, Florida. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
‘Don’t Let Them Roll Over Us’
The Epoch Times spent a day embedded with DeSantis as he crisscrossed the state on April 1, jetting southeast from the seat of state government in Tallahassee to a press conference in Titusville and then back north to the Clay County Fair on the outskirts of Jacksonville.
Across dozens of encounters with Floridians from all walks of life, one trend persisted. People thanked DeSantis for his work and his policies. Business owners praised him for not shutting them down.
Chris Allen, the owner of Java Jitters, opened a coffee shop in Orange Park Mall during the pandemic.
“We could not have done that if it wasn’t for Ron DeSantis,” Allen told The Epoch Times after personally thanking the governor during an encounter at the Clay County Fair.
A staff member for Gov. Ron DeSantis holds a “DeSantis 2024, Make America Florida” hat at the Clay County fair on April 1, 2021. The staff member said the hat was handed to the governor by a fair attendee. (Ivan Pentchoukov/Epoch Times)
At the time of the interview, Florida’s unemployment rate was 4.7 percent compared to 6.2 percent nationally. Lockdown states like New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and California had some of the highest rates in the country—8.9 percent, 7.8 percent, 7.3 percent, and 8.5 percent respectively.
“I have a tough time paying for a meal in Florida just because I saved a lot of these restaurants from oblivion,” DeSantis said. Hours after this claim, a curly fries stand at the fair declined to charge the governor.
DeSantis said some people get emotional when they meet him. Several of the interactions with the governor at the Clay County Fair resembled that description. An visibly moved elderly veteran urged the governor to not “let them roll over us.”
“If we hadn’t stood up, these people may not have jobs, the businesses may have gone under, the kids wouldn’t be in school, there’d be all these things,” DeSantis said.
“This really, really impacts people in a very personal way. And I don’t think anything prior to COVID that I’ve seen in politics can quite do it on this level. And it’s really unfortunate that there were governors that had power [who did] the opposite. It really shouldn’t depend on the governor.”
Reopening the state wasn’t as easy as lifting his own stay-at-home measures. When DeSantis issued the final reopening order in late September last year, he signed a companion order prohibiting local Florida governments from restricting people from working or operating a business. The order had far-reaching consequences across the state, especially in densely-populated, liberal-leaning locales where the local authorities imposed their own strict measures.
DeSantis adopted a hands-off approach to local regulations at first, thinking that voters would ultimately hold local authorities responsible. It became obvious eventually that some places would remain locked down despite the data showing that doing so would have no positive impact on the spread of the virus.
“They weren’t going to open this stuff up unless I pried it open,” DeSantis said.
“We had the data. We talked to some of the best scientists in the country,” DeSantis said, referring to Martin Kulldorff from Harvard, Jayanta Bhattacharya from Stanford, and Sunetra Gupta from Oxford.
“Every Floridian has a right to work. Every business has a right to operate.”
In areas that were forced to reopen as a result, the economies are now booming with new hotels and restaurants opening, DeSantis said.
DeSantis received a law degree from Harvard and is a textualist when interpreting the Constitution. He believes barring the local authorities from placing restrictions on the people and businesses was squarely within his authority.
“You can’t have 67 different minimum wages, or 67 different regulations on hotels. We are one state economy, and we need to have certain rules of the road,” DeSantis said.
Gov. Ron DeSantis delivers remarks at a press conference in Titusville, Florida, on April 1, 2021. (Screenshot via Epoch Times)
‘They Are Never Going to Admit They Were Wrong’
Standing behind the desk in his office in Tallahassee, DeSantis leafed through a folder of praise he’s received from around the nation and across the globe. Hanging on the walls around the relatively small space was a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights as well as the uniform the governor wore as the captain of the Yale baseball team.
When asked why he chose Lincoln, DeSantis said the president is the best example of a leader who had to make difficult decisions in a time of crisis. When asked why some of the leaders today have continued with lockdowns even with ample evidence of their ineffectiveness, the governor theorized that the people involved have committed too much to the narrative and have made it impossible to change course.
“You have a situation where if you’re in this field, the pandemic, that’s something that you kind of prepare for and you’re ready for. And a lot of these people muffed it,” he said.
“When push came to shove, they advocated policies that have not worked against the virus but have been very, very destructive. They are never going to admit they were wrong about anything, unfortunately.”
Elected leaders aren’t the only ones to blame, according to the governor. The media and big tech companies played a major role in perpetuating fears about the virus while selectively censoring one side of the mitigation debate. DeSantis said the media and tech giants stood to benefit from the lockdown as people stayed home and consumed their products.
“It was all just to generate the most clicks that they could. And so that was always trying to do the stuff that would inspire the most fear,” DeSantis said.
Two weeks after the interview, an undercover video recorded by Project Veritas showed a technical director at CNN talking about the boost the network received due to its pandemic coverage.
“It’s fear. Fear really drives numbers,” CNN Technical Director Charlie Chester said. “Fear is the thing that keeps you tuned in.”
The fear-mongering worked, DeSantis said, pointing to CDC statistics showing that 4 out of 10 American adults delayed or avoided getting urgent or routine medical treatment in June 2020. The agency’s report said that the pattern may have contributed to the excess deaths reported during that period, due to preventable illnesses and injuries going untreated.
Emergency room doctors had reported that fewer people were coming in with cardiac-related chest pains while more were coming in with late-stage appendicitis, something that is usually caught much earlier. The pandemic has also led to a sharp decrease in cancer screenings and detections.
“When you have people too scared to go to the emergency room when they’re literally having a heart attack, that didn’t happen in a vacuum,” DeSantis said.
“Corporate media played a role in that, by really whipping up people into a frenzy.”
The profit motive wasn’t the only factor potentially driving the media’s slanted coverage, according to the governor. The pandemic hit the United States in an election year, presenting an opportunity to heap the blame on President Donald Trump.
“They viewed it as an opportunity to damage Trump. Obviously, they hated Trump more than anything,” DeSantis said.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in his office in Tallahassee, Florida, on April 1, 2021. (Screenshot via Epoch Times)
‘Council of Censors’
In the April 1 interview, DeSantis criticized big tech companies for censoring critics of lockdowns. Less than a week after the interview, the governor himself became the victim of censorship. YouTube, without warning, scrubbed videos of a roundtable discussion between DeSantis and prominent scientists from Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford who assessed that lockdowns are ineffective.
The American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) was the first to flag the video’s disappearance. The original clip is now hosted on a different platform and appears along with a full transcript on the AIER website.
“Google and YouTube have not been, throughout this pandemic, repositories of truth and scientific inquiry, but instead have acted as enforcers of a narrative, a big tech council of censors in service of the ruling elite” DeSantis said in response to YouTube’s censorship during an April 12 video conference call with three of the scientists from the banned video.
“When they took down the video … they were really continuing what they’ve been doing for the past year: stifle debate, short-circuit scientific inquiry, make sure that the narrative is not questioned. And I think that we’ve seen already that that has had catastrophic consequences for our society.”
The takedown of the video suggests that Big Tech intends to keep exercising the awesome power it directed against Trump in the closing days of the previous administration. Twitter and Facebook banned the president, cutting off a direct line of communication between the commander-in-chief and tens of millions of Americans.
DeSantis thinks that the power monopolies have now is far more extensive than what the United States had witnessed at the turn of the century.
“What we’ve seen with the big tech and the censorship, they are exercising more power than the monopolies at the beginning of the 20th century ever could have exercised,” the governor said. “The type of power that they’re exercising now in some respects is even more profound than the type of power that government typically exercises.”
No End In Sight
Desantis believes the lockdown states may never fully reopen because the leaders there have invested so heavily in the narrative while the voters have grown fearful.
While restrictions are easing across the nation, only six states, including Florida, have fully reopened, according to a tracker maintained by USA Today. Eight states never issued a stay-at-home order.
“I think if your goal is no cases, then there may never be an end to it, because you’re never gonna have zero COVID,” DeSantis said, adding that a more pragmatic goal would be to aim towards a hospitalization rate indicative of a respiratory virus endemic.
“But I don’t know that they’re willing to accept that reality. I think they’re going to try to have no cases at all, which would basically mean there would never be a full end to these policies, which is scary.”
International
Repeated COVID-19 Vaccination Weakens Immune System: Study
Repeated COVID-19 Vaccination Weakens Immune System: Study
Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Repeated COVID-19…

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Repeated COVID-19 vaccination weakens the immune system, potentially making people susceptible to life-threatening conditions such as cancer, according to a new study.
Multiple doses of the Pfizer or Moderna COVID-19 vaccines lead to higher levels of antibodies called IgG4, which can provide a protective effect. But a growing body of evidence indicates that the “abnormally high levels” of the immunoglobulin subclass actually make the immune system more susceptible to the COVID-19 spike protein in the vaccines, researchers said in the paper.
They pointed to experiments performed on mice that found multiple boosters on top of the initial COVID-19 vaccination “significantly decreased” protection against both the Delta and Omicron virus variants and testing that found a spike in IgG4 levels after repeat Pfizer vaccination, suggesting immune exhaustion.
Studies have detected higher levels of IgG4 in people who died with COVID-19 when compared to those who recovered and linked the levels with another known determinant of COVID-19-related mortality, the researchers also noted.
A review of the literature also showed that vaccines against HIV, malaria, and pertussis also induce the production of IgG4.
“In sum, COVID-19 epidemiological studies cited in our work plus the failure of HIV, Malaria, and Pertussis vaccines constitute irrefutable evidence demonstrating that an increase in IgG4 levels impairs immune responses,” Alberto Rubio Casillas, a researcher with the biology laboratory at the University of Guadalajara in Mexico and one of the authors of the new paper, told The Epoch Times via email.
The paper was published by the journal Vaccines in May.
Pfizer and Moderna officials didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Both companies utilize messenger RNA (mRNA) technology in their vaccines.
Dr. Robert Malone, who helped invent the technology, said the paper illustrates why he’s been warning about the negative effects of repeated vaccination.
“I warned that more jabs can result in what’s called high zone tolerance, of which the switch to IgG4 is one of the mechanisms. And now we have data that clearly demonstrate that’s occurring in the case of this as well as some other vaccines,” Malone, who wasn’t involved with the study, told The Epoch Times.
“So it’s basically validating that this rush to administer and re-administer without having solid data to back those decisions was highly counterproductive and appears to have resulted in a cohort of people that are actually more susceptible to the disease.”
Possible Problems
The weakened immune systems brought about by repeated vaccination could lead to serious problems, including cancer, the researchers said.
Read more here...
International
Study Falsely Linking Hydroxychloroquine To Increased Deaths Frequently Cited Even After Retraction
Study Falsely Linking Hydroxychloroquine To Increased Deaths Frequently Cited Even After Retraction
Authored by Jessie Zhang via Thje Epoch…

Authored by Jessie Zhang via Thje Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
An Australian and Swedish investigation has found that among the hundreds of COVID-19 research papers that have been withdrawn, a retracted study linking the drug hydroxychloroquine to increased mortality was the most cited paper.
With 1,360 citations at the time of data extraction, researchers in the field were still referring to the paper “Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with or without a macrolide for treatment of COVID-19: a multinational registry analysis” long after it was retracted.
Authors of the analysis involving the University of Wollongong, Linköping University, and Western Sydney Local Health District wrote (pdf) that “most researchers who cite retracted research do not identify that the paper is retracted, even when submitting long after the paper has been withdrawn.”
“This has serious implications for the reliability of published research and the academic literature, which need to be addressed,” they said.
“Retraction is the final safeguard against academic error and misconduct, and thus a cornerstone of the entire process of knowledge generation.”
Scientists Question Findings
Over 100 medical professionals wrote an open letter, raising ten major issues with the paper.
These included the fact that there was “no ethics review” and “unusually small reported variances in baseline variables, interventions and outcomes,” as well as “no mention of the countries or hospitals that contributed to the data source and no acknowledgments to their contributions.”

Other concerns were that the average daily doses of hydroxychloroquine were higher than the FDA-recommended amounts, which would present skewed results.
They also found that the data that was reportedly from Australian patients did not seem to match data from the Australian government.
Eventually, the study led the World Health Organization to temporarily suspend the trial of hydroxychloroquine on COVID-19 patients and to the UK regulatory body, MHRA, requesting the temporary pause of recruitment into all hydroxychloroquine trials in the UK.
France also changed its national recommendation of the drug in COVID-19 treatments and halted all trials.
Currently, a total of 337 research papers on COVID-19 have been retracted, according to Retraction Watch.
Further retractions are expected as the investigation of proceeds.
Government
Biden Signs Debt Ceiling Bill, Ending Monthslong Political Battle
Biden Signs Debt Ceiling Bill, Ending Monthslong Political Battle
Authored by Lawrence Wilson via The Epoch Times,
President Joe Biden signed…

Authored by Lawrence Wilson via The Epoch Times,
President Joe Biden signed the Fiscal Responsibility Act on Saturday, suspending the debt ceiling for 19 months and bringing a monthslong political battle to a close.
The compromise legislation negotiated by Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) passed both houses of Congress with bipartisan support this week, averting a potential default on the nation’s financial obligations.
“Passing this budget agreement was critical. The stakes could not have been higher,” Biden said in a Friday evening address to the nation from the Oval Office.
Congressional leaders in both parties, eager to avoid financial disaster, endorsed the bill.
McCarthy referred to the legislation in historic terms, calling it the biggest spending cut ever enacted by Congress. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said, “We’ve saved the country from the scourge of default,” after the bill passed the Senate on June 1.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) both supported the bill.
Biden vs. McCarthy
The president’s signature ends a monthslong cold war with McCarthy over terms for raising the nation’s $31.4 trillion debt ceiling.
The Financial Responsibility Act suspends the debt ceiling until Jan. 1, 2025, cuts non-defense discretionary spending slightly in 2024, and limits discretionary spending growth to 1 percent in 2025.
The agreement also contains permitting reforms for oil and gas drilling, changes to work requirements for some social welfare programs, and clawbacks of $20 billion in IRS funding and $30 billion in unspent COVID-19 relief funds, among other provisions.
President Joe Biden hosts debt limit talks with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and other congressional leaders in the Oval Office at the White House on May 9, 2023. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
In the absence of congressional action to allow additional borrowing, the United States would have lacked the ready cash to pay all of its bills on June 5, according to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.
Yellen announced in January that the country was in danger of reaching its limit.
McCarthy then said Congress would not increase the limit without an agreement from the White House to cut spending. Biden said he would not negotiate over lifting the limit because that would put the full faith and credit of the United States at risk.
The impasse was broken in late April when the House passed the Limit, Save, Grow Act, authorizing a $1.5 trillion increase in borrowing along with spending cuts and other measures favored by Republicans.
Biden then agreed to negotiate with McCarthy, resulting in the Fiscal Responsibility Act.
Opposition
A vocal minority of lawmakers in both parties opposed the bill.
Some Republicans believed the agreement conceded too much to Democrats. Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) nearly blocked the bill in committee, but it cleared by a single vote.
Some Democrats opposed the agreement because it cuts discretionary spending and changes work requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). They said those provisions would hurt working Americans and those in need.
House Rules Committee member Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) speaks at the Capitol on Jan. 30. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
A group of Senate Republicans led by Lindsey Graham (R-N.C.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) initially opposed the bill due to concerns about the level of defense spending. They were brought on board by assurances from Schumer and McConnell that emergency defense appropriations could be added later if needed.
The bill passed the House by a vote of 314 to 117 on May 31. Forty-six Democrats and 71 Republicans voted no.
The Senate passed the measure 63 to 36 the next day. Four Democrats, one Independent, and 41 Republicans voted no.
Mixed Reactions
Outside the Capitol, some observers applauded the bipartisan effort while others echoed the complaints of congressional dissenters.
“This kind of compromise is exactly how divided government should work,” Kelly Veney Darnell, interim CEO of the Bipartisan Policy Center, said in a June 2 statement.
EJ Antoni, a research fellow at The Heritage Institute, said “conservatives have little to celebrate with this deal, and much about which to complain.” According to Antoni, the bill doesn’t actually cut spending. He called it “left-wing legislation” in a statement published June 1.
Navin Nayak, counselor at the Center for American Progress, endorsed the legislation unenthusiastically, saying it was imperfect but necessary in a May 31 statement. Nayak said the Mountain Valley Pipeline, green-lighted by the bill, puts the safety of thousands at risk and the added work requirements will increase hunger in America.
Congress must now work the provisions of the Fiscal Responsibility Act into a federal budget and the dozen appropriations bills required to fund the government in the coming year.
The 2024 fiscal year begins on Oct. 1.
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