Epoch Times - DeSantis: Florida vs. Lockdowns | An Epoch Times Documentary | Now Available for FREE on Epoch TV!
Aired: 2021-06-13
Duration: 04:44


=== Florida's Reckless Rollback (03:01) ===

[00:00:04]  DeSantis boasting last month about what great shape Florida was in.
[00:00:09]  A ticking time bomb for viral spread.
[00:00:12]  People are going to die because of decisions that were made by Ron DeSantis.
[00:00:15]  We're already seeing states like Louisiana and Florida start to have surges.
[00:00:19]  That decision was reckless.
[00:00:21]  It is a big gamble.
[00:00:23]  Governor, what has gone wrong with the rollout of the vaccine?
[00:00:26]  Obviously, Florida has faced media barrages nonstop.
[00:00:30]  I watched it unfold every day in the newscasts.
[00:00:33]  But only now did I begin to appreciate what he has had to face on a daily basis.
[00:00:40]  What does that mean?
[00:00:46]  I think because Florida did it more rationally, we struck a much better balance, we did better on health outcomes.
[00:00:53]  In most of these lockdown states.
[00:00:55]  I won't call him a data wonk, but decisions that he made are not just impulsive.
[00:01:00]  He knows what he wants to do.
[00:01:01]  He wants to do the right things.
[00:01:03]  So what is the truth?
[00:01:05]  DeSantis seems to receive a large amount of support from diverse communities, but he's also been much criticized.
[00:01:11]  Behind all the punditry, what's the real story?
[00:01:16]  We begin tonight with the growing concern as the toll from that deadly coronavirus now grows.
[00:01:22]  2020.
[00:01:23]  I could never have imagined how this year would unfold.
[00:01:27]  In its early months, the Chinese regime imposed draconian lockdowns in Wuhan and across China.
[00:01:33]  The city of Wuhan, where the outbreak began, all trains and planes out of that city halted.
[00:01:39]  Then governments worldwide followed suit.
[00:01:42]  As of today, all but a handful of states have issued stay-at-home orders in an effort to keep people safe.
[00:01:47]  After a month of strict lockdowns, in many places there was still no end in sight.
[00:01:51]  But in Florida, something quite different was underway.
[00:01:55]  Governor Ron DeSantis announced Florida is ready to take the first step.
[00:01:59]  First step, phase one, into reopening on May 4.
[00:02:02]  We will never do any of these lockdowns again.
[00:02:08]  So what made DeSantis reverse course just one month after instituting a lockdown?
[00:02:13]  What was going through his mind when he made this decision?
[00:02:17]  To understand the full story of Florida's unique response to COVID, I sat down with the governor at his office in Tallahassee.
[00:02:25]  The lockdowns were really a departure from what the typical scientific recommendations had been for pandemics.
[00:02:32]  It was a panic-driven approach.
[00:02:35]  If what DeSantis was saying was true, what fueled the panic?
[00:02:40]  It was appropriate, given that we didn't know, shut things down for what was originally a 15-day period.
[00:02:47]  And there were reasons why the shutdown would have been useful.

=== Why Lockdowns Failed (01:52) ===

[00:02:52]  Dr.
[00:02:52]  Scott Atlas is a health public policy expert and one of DeSantis' key COVID advisors.
[00:02:58]  The initial inclination to let's prevent hospitals from being overcrowded.
[00:03:03]  I think everyone bought into it for two reasons.
[00:03:05]  Number one, fear.
[00:03:07]  Fear is very powerful and they bought into it because it was temporary.
[00:03:12]  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.
[00:03:25]  Italy is locking down more regions as hospitals struggle to contain the spread of the coronavirus.
[00:03:31]  Well, what happened was there was a gradual but very dramatic change in the goal.
[00:03:38]  We really have a choice to make right now as a nation.
[00:03:40]  Do we want to go the way of Italy and see our numbers increase rapidly?
[00:03:44]  Or do we want to go the way of South Korea and China who aggressively leaned in the mitigation measures?
[00:03:49]  It shifted from stopping hospitals from being overcrowded into, we better stop all cases.
[00:03:57]  I would like to see a dramatic diminution of the personal interaction that we see in restaurants and in bars.
[00:04:04]  Whatever it takes to do that, that's what I'd like to see.
[00:04:09]  I am a health policy expert.
[00:04:11]  I've been doing this for 17 years.
[00:04:14]  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.
[00:04:24]  Dr.
[00:04:25]  Scott Atlas is not the only one who questioned the lockdown approach.
[00:04:28]  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.
[00:04:41]  Huge numbers of Western governments copied that.