A reporter tried to bait Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis on Tuesday with a ‘gotcha’ question about a rise in hospitalizations for children as the state reportedly sees an uptick in coronavirus cases.
During an event at Shark Valley in the Everglades, the reporter asked about seven children at Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital, including two in the intensive-care unit, according to CBS Miami.
Asked whether mandatory masking might have helped, DeSantis turned the tables on the falsely framed question.
“You’re blaming the kids saying they weren’t wearing masks so they’re in the ICU,” he said.
“With all due respect, I find that deplorable to blame a victim who ends up being hospitalized,” he added.
The Biden administration and other authoritarian state leaders have pushed increasingly for civil liberties to be restricted as they continue to hype a new “mutant” strain of COVID-19 and to blame unvaccinated individuals for their suspicions and skepticism in the highly politicized debate.
“This has been a really negative thing throughout this whole thing, with some of these ‘experts,’ some of the media,” DeSantis said.
“Somebody can contract a highly transmissible airborne virus and they’re viewed as having done something wrong,” he added. “That’s just not the way you do it.”
Democrats themselves—including President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris—previously encouraged vaccine hesitancy during the Trump administration, but they quickly tried to shift the narrative after failing to meet a July 4 benchmark to have 70% of individuals vaccinated.
A month later, the 70% threshold has only been met by individuals having received at least a single vaccine shot.
Of the total population—including children—only 49.7% have been vaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
However, Floridians have led the fight against allowing schools to impose mask mandates as children return for the fall, noting that the risk of serious adverse effects is greatly reduced for those under age 65 without underlying health conditions or risk factors.
Some have noted that the adverse impact of the masks—and the psychological harm of government-imposed restrictions—risks doing even greater damage than the virus.
Only 400 of the more than 600,000 US fatalities (0.06%) have been children.
However, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky insisted last month that the risk was too great to justify allowing individuals to retain their God-given freedom of self-determination.
“Children are not supposed to die, so 400 is a huge amount,” Walensky claimed.
Meanwhile, Democrats have continued to turn the issue into a political landmine by attempting to link the uptick to red states while ignoring the impact of an open-borders immigration policy and routinely making exceptions for their own super-spreader events.
