Florida Governor Ron DeSantis went toe-to-toe with NIAID Director Anthony Fauci after Fauci criticized recent comments made by governor – and let’s just say, it didn’t end well for Fauci.
DeSantis exploded on Fauci publicly during a Tuesday press conference.
DeSantis made the remarks when a reporter began to ask, “Governor you recently said that unvaccinated individuals had no impact on numbers and Dr. Fauci was quoted saying that –”
“That’s not what I said. No, no, no, that’s not what I said,” DeSantis fired back. “Not that I ever expect to be quoted properly. What I said was, if you’re going to force vaccine mandates on people, just to understand that what the data is showing us about the vaccine, the data is showing us you’re much less likely to be hospitalized or die if you’re vaccinated. That is true. And I think you see it in the statistics.”
“However, the vaccinations have not created herd immunity,” DeSantis continued.
“So if the idea is that having herd immunity, you force everyone to do this, and that will create a herd immunity, that has not happened. It’s still spreading. People who, I mean, obviously in Florida, we’re going down now which is great, but that’s not what the issue is, is it creating a herd immunity? Fauci also said if 50% were vaccinated, you would not see any surges anymore. Well, that isn’t true. Look at obviously the Sunbelt, look in the Pacific Northwest, look at Hawaii, huge surges that you’ve seen.”
In an interview with NPR’s “Morning Edition” in December 2020, Fauci was asked by NPR’s Rachel Martin how many Americans would need to get vaccinated to impact the number of COVID-19 infections. He replied, “I would say 50% would have to get vaccinated before you start to see an impact.” He added that if “75 to 85%” got vaccinated, we could achieve “that blanket of herd immunity.”
DeSantis continued, “We had hoped you could build herd immunity that way, but that just hasn’t happened. It’s not happening in Israel. It didn’t happen in the UK. It’s not happening in the United States.”
The governor went on to celebrate the job his state has done in treating people sick with COVID-19, “Also, I would say, if you look at what we’ve done, we’re leading the nation and pushing early treatment for people with COVID. And that’s people that are not vaccinated, but it’s also people that are vaccinated who are high risk, who still see some of them ending up in the hospital. So we were able to do that.”
“This has been available since December. We found that most of the people that were going, being admitted to hospitals … almost none of them got the monoclonal treatment, the antibody treatment early on in their illness. If they had done that, a lot of those people would not have died. So we’ve done stuff. We’ve done the one here in Polk County. It’s seen 2,800 patients, it’s administered treatments, and what you’re finding is we’re seeing the hospital census decline rapidly. We’re seeing the emergency room visits for COVID-like illness decline. We’re seeing daily hospital admissions decline.”
Author: Ryan Sagen
These content links are provided by Content.ad. Both Content.ad and the web site upon which the links are displayed may receive compensation when readers click on these links. Some of the content you are redirected to may be sponsored content. View our privacy policy here.
To learn how you can use Content.ad to drive visitors to your content or add this service to your site, please contact us at [email protected].
Family-Friendly Content
Website owners select the type of content that appears in our units. However, if you would like to ensure that Content.ad always displays family-friendly content on this device, regardless of what site you are on, check the option below. Learn More