A handsome mea culpa from America’s Governor™.

Exclusive: Florida Gov. DeSantis Says Lockdowns Were a ‘Huge Mistake’
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis issued a statewide stay-at-home order on April 1 last year, locking down the Sunshine State for 30 days amid global panic about the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus outbreak. Sitting in his office exactly one year later, he told The Epoch Times that the lockdowns were a “huge mistake,” including in his own state.

“We wanted to mitigate the damage. Now, in hindsight, the 15 days to slow the spread and the 30—it didn’t work,” DeSantis said. “We shouldn’t have gone down that road.”

Florida’s lockdown order was notably less strict than some of the stay-at-home measures imposed in other states. Recreational activities like walking, biking, playing golf, and beachgoing were allowed, while what constituted an “essential business” was broadly defined.

“Our economy kept going,” DeSantis said. “It was much different than what you saw in some of those lockdown states.”

However, the governor now regrets issuing the order at all and is convinced that states that have carried on with lockdowns are perpetuating a destructive blunder.

It’s a matter of perspective, actually. If you’re one of those too-credulous naifs who still, against all evidence, thinks of this as a well-intentioned if perhaps overly-aggressive response motivated by sincere public-health concerns, then “destructive blunder” might pass muster with you. If, on the other hand, you’re the more skeptical and hard-bitten sort who—after gimlet-eyed observation of over a year’s worth of the clumsy deception, constantly-moving goalposts, and all-thumbs bureaucratic circle-jerkery which are all too typical of a bloated government that recognizes no limit on its power and reach—prefers to trust his own lyin’ eyes instead of passively swallowing whatever bullshit he’s handed, then you know full well what the true goal was here. A disaster it surely was, from any point of view; fair enough, so stipulated. But God forbid you should ever be blind enough to mislabel a high-order psy-op as successful as this one as any kind of “blunder.”

The governor’s persistence wasn’t a leap of faith. Less than two weeks after Florida’s full reopening in late September, scientists from Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford universities went public with the Great Barrington Declaration, which disavowed lockdowns as a destructive and futile mitigation measure. The declaration, which has since been signed by 13,985 medical and public health scientists, calls on public officials to adopt the focused protection approach—the exact strategy employed by DeSantis.

Despite dire predictions about the pandemic in Florida, DeSantis has been vindicated. On April 1, Florida ranked 27th among all states in deaths per capita from the CCP virus, commonly known as COVID-19.

The ranking’s significance is amplified because the Sunshine State’s population is the sixth oldest in the United States by median age. California—the lockdown state often compared to Florida due to its lower per-capita death rate—is the sixth youngest. The risk of dying from the CCP virus is highest for people over 55, with the group accounting for 93 percent of deaths nationwide.

While Florida is either performing better or relatively the same as the strict lockdown states in terms of CCP virus mortalities, the state’s economy is booming compared to the crippled economies in California and New York.

Though less quantifiable, the human suffering from the lockdown-related rise in suicides, mental health issues, postponed medical treatments, and opioid deaths is undeniably immense.

“It’s been a huge, huge mistake in terms of policy,” DeSantis said.

“All I had to do was follow the data and just be willing to go forward into the teeth of the narrative and fight the media.

“As people were beating up on me, what I said was I’d rather them beat up on me than have someone lose their job. I’d rather have them beat up on me than have kids locked out of school. I’m totally willing to take whatever heat comes our way because we’re doing the right thing.”

Kudos to you, Governor. Would that America had many more like you, because she’s in desperate need of them.

Then again update! Meanwhile, back in the states where Ron DeSantis ISN’T Governor.

The mindless mask regime might be here to stay, unless YOU resist it
The masks might be forever. We have to come to terms with the fact that a large chunk of the US population will be wearing masks in public for years, maybe even decades to come.

Even if we unquestionably achieve herd immunity, even if 100 percent of the population is vaccinated, even if COVID cases nationwide drop to zero and even if the coronavirus by some miracle learns to communicate in a human language and tells us, forthrightly, “Well, you beat me,” some Americans, especially those in blue metropolises, will continue to cover their faces — and shame you for not going along.

It’s a massively depressing thought.

For more than a year, public-health authorities have urged us to put up with temporary inconveniences, always with the soothing promise that it will be only a little while longer. But recently, NPR cheerfully reported about the growing number of people who see masks as a source of Permanent and Absolute Safety.

Flu and other respiratory illnesses are down this year owing to our ubiquitous face coverings, our state-run news agency tells us, so maybe we should just keep wearing them. Meanwhile, the rapper Will.i.am and Honeywell have introduced a super-duper smart mask that runs $300. The “Xupermask” allows the wearer to chat on the phone or listen to some dulcet music while signaling her virtue.

None of this should give anyone the slightest bit of confidence that the days of ubiquitous mask wearing will soon be behind us.

Yes, masks reduce the transmission of airborne illnesses. You know what else reduces transmission? Staying in a protective plastic bubble in your living room and never venturing into the dirty, filthy, infectious outdoors. And even if it makes sense to wear a mask in tight indoor quarters, it is utterly unscientific and, yes, moronic to wear them outside, and yet blue-state denizens insist.

Sigh. The mask fanatics — some of whom hold advanced degrees that make them no wiser as human beings — can’t be reasoned with.

Precisely so—and precisely why we shouldn’t trouble ourselves about reasoning with them, and just skip on ahead to the beating them until they quack like a duck phase of the festivities without further ado. The longer we put it off, the tougher it will be to rid ourselves of them.