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I’m going to contribute to the legal-defense fund of this British anti-lockdown protestor [4].
Covid hysteria further eats away cancerously at Britain’s democratic institutions and ethos [5].
Madeline Grant understandably worries that Brits will be frightened back into lockdown [6].
Who’d a-thunk it?! It appears that China’s draconian lockdowns did not defeat Covid-19 after all [7]. (HT Phil Magness [8])
Dave Seminara writes from the Sunshine (and comparably Liberty) state [9]. Two slices:
According to the New York Times Covid Tracker, Florida now has the second-lowest per capita Covid rate of any state: 12 per 100,000, behind only Hawaii, with nine per 100,000 as of October 18. Florida’s vaccination rate (59 percent fully vaccinated) is now above the national average (57 percent.) I live in Pinellas County (St. Petersburg), which currently has a per capita Covid infection rate that’s lower than every county in Delaware, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and other blue states.
As media elites waxed indignant over Florida’s alleged Covid sins this summer, many couldn’t hide their see-we-told-you-so delight when the Delta plague hit our shores. The Left eviscerated Governor Ron DeSantis for his opposition to mask and vaccine mandates. Joy Behar of ABC’s The View called him a “homicidal sociopath” and a “dangerous criminal.” Jennifer Rubin, the Washington Post’s “conservative” columnist, wrote that DeSantis’s conduct revealed a “breathtaking disdain for the well-being of his state.” Charles Blow of the New York Times wrote: “Yes, Florida, DeSantis is allowing you to choose death so that he can have a greater political life.” Writing for CNN, Columbia University economics professor Jeffrey Sachs declared that “Governors Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas have, through their policies, been effectively leading their citizens toward death.”
MSNBC host Joy Reid called DeSantis “Dr. Death” and “the grim reaper of the South,” who was “rolling out the red carpet for the virus,” and “rooting for the virus.” She asked one guest to explain what she characterized as DeSantis’s strategy of “killing children in (his) own state and letting children die of Covid.” MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski called Florida’s governor “the DeSantis variant” and proclaimed him the new leader of a cult. “Almost all of these hospitalizations (and) deaths (in Florida) would have, and could have, been avoided if misguided Americans had not followed the crazed teachings of a growing death cult,” she said.
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Meantime, the states whose Covid infection rates are now heading in the wrong direction are almost all in cooler-weather states run by Democrats, like Michigan, Minnesota, Colorado, Pennsylvania, and New Mexico. Don’t expect the media to highlight this or question if the leaders of those states made bad policy choices.
The truth always finds a way to slip out, though. Florida’s second-quarter tourism arrivals were up 223 percent year over year, and the number of domestic visitors was up 6 percent over the record figures posted in 2019. (International arrivals were down substantially due to travel restrictions.) I’ve had several visitors from cold-weather states like New York, New Jersey, and Illinois, who expected to be stepping over bodies in the streets in my hometown of St. Petersburg but were pleasantly surprised by how normal life is here. At a time when the Left is having an authoritarian moment—pushing vaccine and mask mandates, demanding crackdowns on conservative speech, intimidating parents who criticize school boards [10], and branding anyone who disagrees with them bigoted or worse—Florida feels like a bastion of liberty.