June 13, 2021 - Epoch Times
04:44
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| DeSantis boasting last month about what great shape Florida was in. | |
| A ticking time bomb for viral spread. | |
| People are going to die because of decisions that were made by Ron DeSantis. | |
| We're already seeing states like Louisiana and Florida start to have surges. | |
| That decision was reckless. | |
| It is a big gamble. | |
| Governor, what has gone wrong with the rollout of the vaccine? | |
| Obviously, Florida has faced media barrages nonstop. | |
| I watched it unfold every day in the newscasts. | |
| But only now did I begin to appreciate what he has had to face on a daily basis. | |
| What does that mean? | |
| I think because Florida did it more rationally, we struck a much better balance, we did better on health outcomes. | |
| In most of these lockdown states. | |
| I won't call him a data wonk, but decisions that he made are not just impulsive. | |
| He knows what he wants to do. | |
| He wants to do the right things. | |
| So what is the truth? | |
| DeSantis seems to receive a large amount of support from diverse communities, but he's also been much criticized. | |
| Behind all the punditry, what's the real story? | |
| We begin tonight with the growing concern as the toll from that deadly coronavirus now grows. | |
| 2020. | |
| I could never have imagined how this year would unfold. | |
| In its early months, the Chinese regime imposed draconian lockdowns in Wuhan and across China. | |
| The city of Wuhan, where the outbreak began, all trains and planes out of that city halted. | |
| Then governments worldwide followed suit. | |
| As of today, all but a handful of states have issued stay-at-home orders in an effort to keep people safe. | |
| After a month of strict lockdowns, in many places there was still no end in sight. | |
| But in Florida, something quite different was underway. | |
| Governor Ron DeSantis announced Florida is ready to take the first step. | |
| First step, phase one, into reopening on May 4. | |
| We will never do any of these lockdowns again. | |
| So what made DeSantis reverse course just one month after instituting a lockdown? | |
| What was going through his mind when he made this decision? | |
| To understand the full story of Florida's unique response to COVID, I sat down with the governor at his office in Tallahassee. | |
| The lockdowns were really a departure from what the typical scientific recommendations had been for pandemics. | |
| It was a panic-driven approach. | |
| If what DeSantis was saying was true, what fueled the panic? | |
| It was appropriate, given that we didn't know, shut things down for what was originally a 15-day period. | |
| And there were reasons why the shutdown would have been useful. | |
| Dr. | |
| Scott Atlas is a health public policy expert and one of DeSantis' key COVID advisors. | |
| The initial inclination to let's prevent hospitals from being overcrowded. | |
| I think everyone bought into it for two reasons. | |
| Number one, fear. | |
| Fear is very powerful and they bought into it because it was temporary. | |
| For 15 days, most people thought that would be a very small price to pay to get things sort of under control and have some handle on how to proceed. | |
| Italy is locking down more regions as hospitals struggle to contain the spread of the coronavirus. | |
| Well, what happened was there was a gradual but very dramatic change in the goal. | |
| We really have a choice to make right now as a nation. | |
| Do we want to go the way of Italy and see our numbers increase rapidly? | |
| Or do we want to go the way of South Korea and China who aggressively leaned in the mitigation measures? | |
| It shifted from stopping hospitals from being overcrowded into, we better stop all cases. | |
| I would like to see a dramatic diminution of the personal interaction that we see in restaurants and in bars. | |
| Whatever it takes to do that, that's what I'd like to see. | |
| I am a health policy expert. | |
| I've been doing this for 17 years. | |
| You don't just look at the disease, you have to look at the consequence of what you do to mitigate or help reduce the impact of the disease. | |
| Dr. | |
| Scott Atlas is not the only one who questioned the lockdown approach. | |
| The idea that the lockdown could stop the disease from spreading altogether in a place where it was already relatively widespread, that is the central most pernicious thing that came out of the Chinese experience with this. | |
| Huge numbers of Western governments copied that. |
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