Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo announced on Monday that the Florida Department of Health will become the first state agency to officially recommend against COVID-19 vaccines for healthy children.
Monday morning, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Ladapo hosted a roundtable discussion in West Palm Beach to discuss the “”the Curtain Close on COVID Theater.”
“Lockdown politicians and the medical establishment have continually ignored data, instead choosing to stoke fear and push for lockdowns and mask mandates in their fruitless attempts to ‘stop the spread,’” the governor’s office stated in a news release ahead of the discussion. “Governor DeSantis will highlight the efforts his administration has taken on behalf of Floridians over the past year.”
Ladapo said the medical establishment figures behind the disastrous mask, lockdown, and mandate policies should not be given a free pass for being wrong about everything.
“One thing that’s very important at this point is to not let these people get away with it,” he said.
The governor and surgeon general were joined by numerous physicians, virologists and epidemiologists to discuss how the regime’s failed COVID policies affected Americans, particularly children.
Doctors who participated in the roundtable included Dr. Robert Malone, an American physician and biochemist; Dr. Harvey Risch, a professor of Epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health and Yale School of Medicine; Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research; Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a biostatistician and epidemiologist at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital; and Dr. Sunetra Gupta, an Indian-born British infectious disease epidemiologist and a professor of theoretical epidemiology at the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford.
Gupta, Kulldorff, and Bhattacharya are the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, a statement published in October of 2020 that advocated an alternative approach to the COVID-19 pandemic which to avoid the societal harm of COVID-19 lockdowns and mandates. Nearly 16,000 medical and public health scientists signed the declaration, and nearly 47,000 medical practitioners signed on.
“Almost from the beginning of the pandemic, we adopted policies that seemed like they were tailor made to harm children,” Bhattacharya said. “Throughout the country, schools closed in the early days, and in many places schools stayed closed.” Bhattacharya said the effect of school closures on children has been catastrophic.
During the discussion, DeSantis asked Malone for his take on why the government was so hostile to early treatment COVID options like repurposed drugs and monoclonal antibodies.
“You never heard Fauci talking about that at all. We started using it [monoclonal antibodies] in Florida and were criticized for it,” the governor noted. “It was almost like—lockdown, mask until there’s a vaccine, and there was a hostility to even discussing the idea of...