In the race to achieve herd immunity through vaccination before a variant comes along that is immune to the vaccines and makes all of our hard work meaningless, Florida is falling behind.
The lockdowns, the masks, the entire Year of Living Isolatedly. All of it meant nothing if we have to go through it again because not enough of us are protected against getting the virus.
We can’t depend on our governor to lead this state to the promised land. He’s too busy hawking “Don’t Fauci My Florida” beer koozies on his campaign website.
In an appearance Wednesday on the Fox News Channel’s “Fox and Friends,” Sen. Marco Rubio found DeSantis’ mocking of 38,000 dead Floridians “funny.”
We don’t.
But of course, we are not the target audience for this stupidity. We didn’t resort to gunplay when asked to wear a mask in Walmart last year, or equate mask-wearing with child abuse and slavery, or any of the other seemingly interminable headlines that ran in the pages of this newspaper throughout 2020 when our fellow Floridians were asked to slightly inconvenience themselves to protect their neighbors.
Now that we’re slowly but surely moving from masks to shots, DeSantis is equally as indifferent. Last Tuesday, he suggested that the elderly and the sick should certainly get vaccinated in light of the more contagious and deadlier Delta variant.
“The best thing you can do if you haven’t gotten a vaccine, particularly if you’re somebody who’s older, particularly if you have any health problems, is to get a shot,” he said.
Our governor either does not know or does not care that a high percentage overall of vaccinated Floridians is our only way out of this. There’s little point in vaccinating only the elderly while the coronavirus mutates among young adults and then hops over to older people once nature produces a strain that can better-invade vaccinated bodies.
President Joe Biden wanted 70% of America’s adults to get at least one dose of vaccine by July 4.
That did not happen — and Florida, that’s partially our fault.
Incredibly, according to the White House, Florida now represents 20% of all new coronavirus cases despite accounting for only 6.5% of the country’s population. Meanwhile, by Independence Day, 20 other states had reached the Biden administration’s goal. At the top of the list: Vermont, which as of mid-July had delivered at least one shot to 86% of its population age 18 and older.
Of course Vermont is beating us. The state’s entire population (623,989 as of 2019) is about the same as the cities of Miami and Fort Lauderdale combined (634,403, same year).
We are a big state with big needs. Logistically, it’s just going to be harder to stick as many people in Florida as in Vermont, where they can just set up a vaccination site at a local farmer’s market or three and call it done.
However, of those 20 states that succeeded in delivering at least one dose to 70% of their adult populations by the beginning of July, two are California and New York, two of the other most populous states in the country.
So, let’s put this in a way that our governor and his diehard supporters can understand.
Attention, Florida: California and New York are ungovernable, socialist hellholes with taxes so high that they will be completely depopulated within a few decades. And yet … Good Lord, those two states have somehow managed to vaccinate higher percentages of their populations than our beloved Sunshine State!
Perhaps they did it by employing socialist woke mobs of antifa supersoldiers to hold down citizens while Anthony Fauci personally delivered the shot to each of them. Who’s to say?
The point is, there’s no way we can allow California and New York to beat us! Fight those pinkos, Floridians! Get your shots today.
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The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Deputy Editorial Page Editor Dan Sweeney, Steve Bousquet and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.
