No Thanks, Ron. I Have My Own Mind.

Ron DeSantis, sensing an opportunity to score points with the Trump/Sanders wing of the Republican Party, has decided to sic his state on "Big Pharma" over the Covid vaccines. Never mind the fact that the vaccines have saved about three times the number of American lives that Covid took or the fact -- available to anyone with an ounce of curiosity -- that hundreds of millions of doses have been administered with astoundingly few deaths or severe complications for something we're supposed to be spooked about.

The Washington Post reports in part:

In parts of his petition dealing with safety problems, DeSantis is playing into a common misconception: That anecdotes count as data. If you followed hundreds of millions of people for a period of time, some would die or suffer complications unexpectedly, by chance -- and so when you give hundreds of millions of people a vaccine, the same thing will happen for reasons that have nothing to do with the vaccine. (That was brought home by the sudden death of sports journalist Grant Wahl , 49, during the World Cup -- attributed to an aneurism by an autopsy but used by vaccine skeptics to drum up fear.)

A while back, Harry Binswanger did a fantastic job of explaining what is wrong with vaccine skepticism along similar lines in a post titled "Vaccine Skepticism Is Arbitrary" at Value for Value. I recommend reading it on the matter of safety.

That said, I was pleasantly surprised to see the left-wing outlet admit why DeSantis will score points with a certain segment of his party's electorate and (finally in a major paper) explain why the objection that the vaccine doesn't prevent people from catching Covid is bollocks:

The answer to Covid hysteria is not to pander to vaccine paranoia. (Image by Edvard Munch, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.)

[T]here's a false narrative from the left as well, which was parroted in a Politico piece about the DeSantis grand jury stunt: "Most of the medical community, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the FDA and Johns Hopkins, have emphasized that the Covid vaccine is safe [true --ed] and effective in preventing the virus [false --ed] and protecting against serious symptoms [true --ed]."

Science no longer backs the notion that the vaccine prevents the virus from infecting people. "The benefit of the vaccine in the omicron era isn't protection against infection the way it was earlier. It's protection against what matters most: severe disease, hospitalization and death," said Johns Hopkins University senior scholar and physician Amesh Adalja. [bold added]

It's a shame that it took the opportunity to shoot down a viable Republican presidential contender for the Post to admit as much that the vaccine was oversold. I, who have found left-wing and right-wing narratives equally ridiculous for quite some time, have known this for quite a while.

It is a shame that Ron DeSantis is evidently not confident enough in his professed conviction that freedom is what America needs to campaign on exactly that. Instead, he is pandering to paranoia and tribalism, while alienating that small, but silent and likely decisive minority of Americans who think for themselves.

If this move is any indication, Ron DeSantis is far from being a man who can lead the GOP away from mindless Trumpism, and towards a resolute defense of actual American values. He would appear instead to have decided merely to be a less-obviously-crazy version of Trump.

I hope time proves me wrong: Another Trump is not good enough, to say the least.

-- CAV

P.S. This also is right out of the left's playbook in the sense that DeSantis is no different from any other pro-regulation/pro-government mandate Democrat in putting the question of vaccine safety and efficacy into the hands of a government agency.

What happened to the idea of Americans evaluating data and risk for themselves when deciding whether to take a vaccine? Competing watchdog organizations and consumer groups would be far better for such a purpose, and would be free of the taint of a political agenda one way or the other. Instead, DeSantis wants to swap our existing, unwanted, and counterproductive "outboard brain" for another.