Covid wars launch DeSantis into GOP ‘top tier’

MIAMI — Ron DeSantis once drew national scorn for his stewardship of Florida’s Covid-19 response — critics took to referring to the governor as “DeathSantis” for his resistance to restrictive measures.

But that very blowback — marked by predictions of doom and widespread criticism for being divorced from science — has made DeSantis ascendant in the GOP. His position is strengthened among the GOP grassroots and elites heading into his 2022 reelection in Florida and accompanied by increasing conservative chatter nationwide about a presidential bid.

By scrapping with reporters and President Joe Biden’s White House — which has singled out Florida and the governor in recent weeks — the wonky but combative governor has elevated his profile at a time when other big-state governors have been laid low.

With a Covid death count cover up consuming New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and a pandemic-related recall effort haunting California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Republicans are embracing DeSantis as a red-state exemplar, pointing to rates of Covid deaths, vaccinations and unemployment in the most-populous blue states.

“Ron DeSantis is having a moment with conservatives,” said Josh Holmes, a top adviser to Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell. “Part of this is liberals tried to cast this in the yin-and-yang comparison with Cuomo ... It’s policy and it’s partly stylistic, the way he handles the news media and his blue-collar appeal.”

behind paywall:

Lockdown lunacy is frying our minds
Only mass psychogenic illness can explain the ongoing obsession with COVID-19 and our medieval responses to it.
by Adam Creighton - The Australian 16 Feb 2021
For three German and Spanish economists, it’s time to ask this question: have we forgotten the rationality that’s meant to define policymaking in advanced liberal democracies? Their new research paper, COVID-19 and the Political Economy of Mass Hysteria, lays out how our biological tendency to overreact coupled with a social and mass media that profit from panic, plus powerful welfare states, make mass psychosis likely, and hard to reverse...
Some seriously weird behaviours have emerged…. Australia and New Zealand have incurred costs equivalent to a world war — and more than any other nation has — fighting a pandemic that has killed not even 1000 people, with a median age in the mid-80s, between them. And this is widely seen as brilliant...
Having insisted early last year that lockdowns were necessary to “flatten the curve”, rolling capital city “snap” lockdowns of millions of people have become the norm, at extraordinary economic, psychological and social cost, without a single person in ICU across either country...

VIDEO: 6m: 16 Feb: Sky News Australia: Alan Jones: Too many incentives for ‘mass overreaction’ on COVID
The coronavirus pandemic has provided countless “incentives for a massive overreaction” from government and general society, according to The Australian’s Economics Editor Adam Creighton.
“Our society’s actually structured from first principle to overreact massively,” Mr Creighton told Sky News.

Mr Creighton said the overreaction not only stems from “our own biology” but also the mass media which benefits from negative stories, social media which spreads content rapidly, and the “political class itself benefits from the overreaction”.
“The standing of politicians increases, the standing of bureaucrats increases,” he said.
“You’ve got all these incentives for a massive overreaction and that’s what I think we have now.”
https://www.skynews.com.au/details/_6232599879001

3 Feb: PubMed: COVID-19 and the Political Economy of Mass Hysteria
Authors: Philipp Bagus, José Antonio Peña-Ramos, Antonio Sánchez-Bayón
Abstract
In this article, we aim to develop a political economy of mass hysteria. Using the background of COVID-19, we study past mass hysteria. Negative information which is spread through mass media repetitively can affect public health negatively in the form of nocebo effects and mass hysteria. We argue that mass and digital media in connection with the state may have had adverse consequences during the COVID-19 crisis. The resulting collective hysteria may have contributed to policy errors by governments not in line with health recommendations...

However, mass hysteria can be exacerbated and self-reinforcing when the negative information comes from an authoritative source, when the media are politicized, and social networks make the negative information omnipresent...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33546144/

The paper about mass hysteria as a tool certainly looks interesting!

To my great surprise, I read an article in Scientific American by a researcher who is a professor in Child Development at Yale who thinks that “masking” is having a disastrous effect on the development of language and communication skills among infants and very small children. They are at a crucial development phase, and depriving them of intelligible speech, lip movement and facial expression as a result of mask wearing by people around them will harm them irreparably.

Maybe little by little the truth is creeping out? I was surprised to see this in usually left wing Scientific American.

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