PUNTA GORDA, Florida–Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis met with 11 medical professionals in West Palm Beach on March 7 to evaluate the past two years of lockdowns and mandates and their effect on society, at a live virtual event co-hosted by the state surgeon general Dr. Joseph Ladapo.
The panel made up of medical professionals from private practice to academia from all over the U.S. agreed that the past two years of mandates and lockdowns did little to deter the virus, but created a disconnect between the public and the authorities giving out advice and distributing data. The governor took note.
“This has crystallized a lot of things I think we’ve seen—you have a lack of trust in the medical establishment and in the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) and the politicization of those institutions and that’s not going to bode well,” DeSantis told the panel at the Closing the COVID Curtain event. “For us, as a society going forward there is an aversion to actual data—it conflicts with the narrative, and then a failure to weigh costs and benefits.”
The state’s surgeon general organized the panel to discuss how the pandemic was handled. The event was open to the public.
Ladapo said he doesn’t want people to “forget how we got here” and the choices that were made by government and authoritative medical agencies, who “have to be held accountable.”
“They (government) are the ones that have led us to this point,” Ladapo told the panel and 100 other virtual panelists looking on. “They want us to forget how we got here. They want us to forget that the choices that they made for everyone were the wrong choices, that basically led to no appreciable benefit. We cannot let them forget, because it can happen again.”
The surgeon general, a former UCLA researcher, said the pandemic was the “issue of my lifetime.”
“In terms of this incredible challenge, or sort of battle between individual rights and individual choice,” said Ladapo, “the truth is on one side and overarching powers—overarching government abuse of powers, abuse of data dishonesty and frankly a lot of unethical behavior—on the other side.”
Dr. Robert Malone, a molecular biologist who worked for more than 20 years at the Department of Defense in the areas of biodefense and vaccine development, describes himself as a “bioethicist.” He told the panel he was surprised to learn that the CDC had been withholding “large amounts of data” and had been doing it throughout the entire pandemic.
“The CDC is acting as a political arm,” he told the panelists. “When we were being trained ... we believed as physicians that the CDC was a neutral arbiter of truth.”
Malone said his belief in the CDC has diminished because the current administration has “weaponized public health for political purposes.”
“We have seen policy completely upended and, explicitly, the CDC is acting as a political arm,” he said. “We have the clear evidence that the government has invested over a billion dollars in basically marketing vaccines to citizens across the United States.”
DeSantis asked Malone why there was hostility toward the early treatments like monoclonal antibodies and generic drugs.
“You never heard Fauci talking about that at all,” the governor said. “We started doing it in Florida, and we were criticized for it. There was hostility even discussing the idea of early treatment.”
Malone agreed and said he is also concerned about physicians’ ability to prescribe early treatments for the virus. He pointed out that then President Trump had specifically requested and required that hydroxychloroquine be made available on an outpatient basis, but was overruled by the head of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
“There was an intentional effort to circumvent the will of the president of the United States,” Malone said. “Janet Woodcock, who later became the acting director of the FDA, made it so that physicians would not have access and not have authorization to hydroxychloroquine.”
He said “a lot goes on behind closed doors” and that he believed it was “clearly an intention on the part of key decision-makers within the hierarchy of government” to prevent doctors from being able to administer “repurposed drugs.”
Virtual participant, Dr. Harvey Risch, said Americans see public health bureaucracies as a “threat to their individual rights.”
“We have kind of the reckoning of some of the failed policies,” he said. “There’s going to be a lot that needs to be done to try to regain any bit of trust.”
He continued to say there is no “compelling government interest to maintain a heavy-handed emergency order that limits people’s fundamental rights.”
“The fact that it’s doing that, and continuing that, is an abuse of our constitutional rights—our inherent rights,” he said.
Dr. Joseph Fraiman, an emergency room physician from Louisiana and Cornell University graduate said initially he was “all for more aggressive COVID policies” because in his area he was “seeing so much death.”
“But I was wrong,” he said. “It took me about a year into the pandemic before it became really clear that it wasn’t obvious at all that any policy was strongly effective at reducing COVID infections or death.”
“But if the policies didn’t make a big difference and they only cause harm, then you have to start rethinking what we’re doing,” he continued. “As a society, we have to decide if we want to continue a public policy that’s obviously producing large harm and offering only minimal benefit at best—that’s currently unmeasurable.”
Ladapo concluded the meeting by addressing the “failed policies” that have been implemented, frightening citizens and doctors alike.
“We need to shift our policy approach,” he said. “Rather than ‘we think this might work,’ to ’the data is saying something different,' let’s shift our policy approach. There would be a lot more trust in our government bodies right now if that were the case.”
