By Carlos Esteban*
Republican Governor Ron DeSantis has announced that he will permanently ban covid mandates on schools and businesses in Florida.
These new measures protect Florida residents from the overbearing rules and regulations imposed nationwide during the pandemic.
One of the key bills focuses on preserving individual liberty and consolidates the safeguards that were in place in the rogue state these past few years.
In particular, the legislation permanently bans vaccine mandates, ensuring that residents can make their health care decisions.
DeSantis noted that Florida schools cannot require covid vaccinations, nor can the workplace require vaccine passports.
“We have to make all of this permanent,” DeSantis announced. “All the safeguards we’ve implemented over the last two years.”
DeSantis also addressed the problem of misleading data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
He cited mandatory facemasks in schools as an example of misguided policies that became universally accepted.
By enacting these new laws, Florida seeks to avoid making the same mistakes and instead prioritize evidence-based decision-making based on local data.
The new laws also prohibit discrimination based on a subject’s vaccination status, i.e., to avoid cases such as the deplorably frequent cases elsewhere of people being denied organ transplants due to refusal to vaccinate.
In addition, the bill formalizes the state’s refusal to submit to World Health Organization guidelines.
In the future, any public health recommendations adopted by Florida must be approved by the state’s Department of Health.
“We want to serve as a buffer against erroneous and submissive guidance from the WHO,” DeSantis said.
The governor also announced a bill that gives physicians freedom of expression in their practice and empowers them to make decisions based on scientific evidence rather than being bound by mandates, thus promoting evidence-based medicine and allowing physicians to provide the best possible care for their patients.
“We don’t want to give in to authority or follow the herd. In other words, pretty much the opposite of what states like California have done,” DeSantis said.
Finally, Florida has become the first state in the nation to ban gain-of-function research, the model experiment that, in all likelihood, produced the SARS-CoV2 in Wuhan.
“Why don’t people like Fauci respond when they said they had never engaged in something like this? Now that wasn’t true,” he added.
In addition to repositioning Florida as a land of freedom in the face of Washington’s increasing and stifling interference, DeSantis distances himself from one of the worst legacies of his Republican primary rival, Donald Trump, who continues to defend his performance in the early days of the pandemic and the “millions of lives” that “his” vaccines supposedly would have saved.
Regardless of one’s position on pandemic restrictions and vaccine mandates, the fact remains that a huge proportion of Trumpism is on the opposite side of the issue from its candidate.
*Fifteen years at the leading business newspaper EXPANSIÓN, then part of the Recoletos Group, the last three years as head of Interactive Services on the newspaper’s website. Then at Intereconomía, where he founded the Catholic weekly ALBA, he wrote the opinion in ÉPOCA, where he also covered the International section, for which he was responsible when LA GACETA was born (as a generalist newspaper). For the last few years, he has worked freelance, collaborating with different media.
With information from LGI
News United States, English news United States, Florida, Ron DeSantis, Covid-19