The Ricochet Podcast - Conversations with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis

Episode Date: September 20, 2021

Jay interviewed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on July 26, 2021. They spoke about the decision to lockdown in March 2020, the science on kids and COVID, the harms from lockdown, the ethics of panicking the population, the reform of public health, and censorship of public speech by big tech companies. To learn more about the harms of lockdowns, visit collateralglobal.org. Source

Feel the surge. The air is electric. Anticipation is everywhere. Following last year's incredible success, Coopera's On The Pulse DJ competition returns. Coopera invites Ireland's rising electronic music artists to create a 30-minute mix that takes us beyond the ordinary. For a chance to perform at Beyond The Pale 2025 and €2,500 to elevate your artist's journey, submit your mix online before April 6th. Search Cooper on the Pulse for more. T's and C's apply. Governor, thank you for having me here. I appreciate the opportunity to talk with you. In the past, you've been asking the questions, so I'm really pleased that I get to ask a few questions to you this time. I want to talk about, I want to go chronological a little

bit from the start of the epidemic and then talk about now and going forward. So like I want, maybe I could ask you just first, take yourself back to March, February, March 2020. And I'm really curious to know what kind of advice you were getting from your public health people, from the White House, from other places that informed your decision making in the early days of the epidemic. Well, I think it's interesting looking back because I remember, for example, in early March being at Port Everglades at the cruise ship terminals with Vice President Pence, with the CDC director. And Dr. Fauci wasn't there, but his basic advice was, hey, keep living your life.

If you're elderly, you may want to take some precautions. And so I think it was everyone was obviously taking it seriously. But all through February and the beginning of March, there was never any inclination that they would shut the world down. I mean, that was not the way it was. We obviously wanted to get more ability to test people. We were trying to figure out who it most impacted. It seemed to be pretty clear by the time we got into March that this was something that was more afflicting elderly people rather than young kids, which was obviously with the kids.

The fact that they seemed to handle it well was positive. So we were kind of doing that. But a lot of us, the governors, we really were looking to the White House Task Force for guidance. Of course, we all have our own health departments here, but really CDC and that task force was kind of the main things that we were looking at. And then, of course, you had in kind of that third week of March, you had a huge change in kind of how they approached it. And that was pretty sudden, to be honest with you. And there were things that were happening in our country that led up to that. Like the sports league stopped. People really started to take it, I think, in a different direction.

But I would say from February into March, a lot of it was relatively calm, taking it seriously. But certainly, no indication. If you'd asked me on February 17th, a month from now, would the country shut down? I would say, why? That was not even on the radar at that time. Yeah. I mean, as a public health person, and I was looking at what was happening, obviously, in China, and it looked like something what was happening, obviously, in China, and it looked like something that we should absolutely be concerned about. And so I personally was stunned to see the reversal that happened in that third week of March, because it didn't meet my understanding of what the pre-pandemic plans were,

where what you do is you care for the vulnerable. You figure out who's vulnerable, put resources to that, but you don't disrupt society and you don't create a panic. I mean, is that the sense that, let's see if that's the sense I got from the early days in March, when that famous press conference with President Trump happened, with Birx and Fauci, I think, were there. I think Fauci in that conference. My sense was that there was a switch toward a panic messaging. So in your view, that wasn't like a – I mean, that was a surprise to you, it sounds like.

Yeah, I think it was. Part of it was driven by some of the academic models that were being produced. I know Fauci and Birx, they really took that Neil Ferguson model from Imperial College London very seriously. I think it spooked them to think. And Ferguson said there'd be 2.2 million deaths, not including nursing home residents, which we know is a huge percentage of what ultimately has happened with COVID. And so they took that and I think really started a change from, hey, here's some public health messaging,

here's what we're doing to try to help testing and some of these other things, to all of a sudden, you just need to shut everything down. And I think that those models really had a lot. I was looking at the data at the time out of Italy and out of South Korea, and it was a huge skew for elderly people. And so my view was, OK, I think telling an elderly person, be wary of crowds or be careful at some of the interactions, given that this thing is starting to hit us, that to me would seem very reasonable. But to impose that on younger people and people just working, the data didn't support that. And so their kind of hysteria at this point, there was not really

data to support it. But at the same time, when you're governor, you're looking, they're like, OK, well, they must know something. There must be some reason that's causing them to do it. I think part of it is they thought that the mortality rate was a lot higher than it turned out to be. I mean, I know you at Stanford, you guys did really the first seroprevalence study. And so prior to that Stanford study coming out, I think most of us thought we're documenting the actual infections. There's not a rash of infections that aren't being documented because obviously people would be getting ill all over the place and we wouldn't miss that. And I think that they certainly were not governing themselves consistent with what those studies were started to show in April, where it was like, okay, for

every one infection we're documenting, there's probably 10 other people who have had this, and mostly, fortunately, very mild to even asymptomatic infections. And so they did not view it, though, consistent with that data in the middle of March. I mean, that was, as someone who worked on the CERF health and studies, it shocked me to see the scientific community react, and actually the press react, as if it were something that was from Mars. In fact, in Santa Clara County and L.A LA County, it was 40 or 50 to 1, because we weren't just testing. We just didn't have that many tests going on. But that should

have changed how people thought about the epidemic. So in the early days, the mantra was, let's slow down, stop things so that we don't overwhelm hospital systems. But then it sort of mutated into, well, let's actually get rid of COVID altogether, in effect. I mean, people won't say that out loud, but is that, for you as a governor, obviously you have to make decisions for your state, but the sense I've got from the national policy environment, like CDC and from Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx was that they needed, they didn't just want to slow this, flatten the curve. They wanted to actually stop the spread of the epidemic altogether. Without question. So flatten the curve to preserve hospitals, get PPE, make sure we're

able to care for people. And obviously, if you did have the hospital system totally capsized, that's not just COVID patients, There would be other patients, too. And so that obviously would be a very bad thing. But, you know, New York City, the hospitals were not overwhelmed. There were some that were very stressed, but they were able to do that. In New York, a lot of their mitigations happen after the peak, if you go back and look at the data. And so that was the case. And in Florida, the hospital census was way less than

what all these models were saying it was going to be. They literally, I'd look at it in 24 hours, they would predict like a tenfold increase and it never happened. And so I was confident that we would be able to handle it from a clinical perspective. And so at that point, it's like, okay, we know that, you know, we obviously have got to get society functioning, we've got to get kids in school and all this other stuff. But they absolutely switched from flattening the curve. And I think Fauci even said at one time, zero cases, zero deaths. That's when you can get back to normal. Well, boy, if that's the policy you're taking, how many problems and deaths are you going to cause with those draconian policies?

Let's jump to May 2020. I remember I was reading the news and I saw you give an announcement that you were going to reopen the Florida, essentially lifting the lockdown. The cases had come down. I felt like at the time that maybe the panic had started to subside. And I remember Dr. Fauci criticized your decision in July. Despite the guidelines and the recommendations to open up carefully and prudently, some states skipped over those and just opened up too quickly. Right. Do you think that Florida and Arizona opened up too quickly? You know, I think in some respects, in some cases they did not always. But I think that that certainly is contributing to that.

Certainly Florida, I know, you know, I think jumped over a couple of checkpoints. OK, so what's your perspective on that? What checkpoints is he talking about? Were those checkpoints? They were arbitrary things that they came up with that had no relation to reality. And I think what we now know is this virus has a seasonal pattern. It is not dictated by interventions. And so we ended up going forward. And look, let's just be honest, for the 15 and 30 days to slow the spread,

Florida did not do a Michigan or New York. I mean, we had golf courses open, beaches open, all that. A lot of our entertainment, they closed on their own, Disney and all this stuff. So really what we were looking to do is set up for the school year and then make sure some of the personal services, you know, the barbershops and all those, the restaurants were able to welcome people back in. I mean, those were really the core parts where that was an impact. So we did it. And, you know, May and early June were some of the were some of the lowest COVID we've had the whole time. And then we started to see the Sun Belt, the whole Sun Belt have it. And then that's when people like Fauci, oh, it's because of not reopening all this.

Well, we were open. We were proud of it. That thing came and went. And then guess what happened in the lockdown states when the season changed? They saw big increases. And so I knew at that point that our hospitals would be able to handle what came down the pike. We were proud of what we did with, at that time, we were doing a lot of testing with nursing home residents. We established COVID-only nursing homes so that nursing home residents could be safely transported. Sounds like focus protection to me. It is. It is. And that's where we really focused our efforts on. So we did that. And a lot of what I think people like Fauci attribute to lack of interventions is really just the seasonal pattern that people like him really don't recognize to this day, even though looking at the data is inexorable.

When you have five states in a given region all go up and down within a week of each other using different interventions, you can't say it's the interventions if there are some states that didn't do the interventions. And so that was that. So we were doing it. But I'll tell you, at the time, I don't know. I think the fear was maybe subsiding. But that was one of the things I was concerned about is I wanted people to feel.

I didn't want to spook them. I wanted them to feel good. So we tried to do it in a way where we were shown what we were doing. We were very careful with it just because I think the media had created such a frenzy amongst the population. We just wanted to make sure folks understood, hey, we're trying to get people back on their feet. We need to move forward. We want to power you. It's going to be okay. It's going to be something we're going to have to deal with. But it's not something that we can just keep our society cocooned indefinitely and then just hope somehow magically it disappears

because that's not what happens with these respiratory viruses. Yeah, actually, I think that that's such an important point, right? So when you panic a society, as we've done with this pandemic, it actually has knock-on consequences that are very hard to undo. So let's turn to some of the lockdown harms, because I think it's important both the panic and the lockdown, I think, go together. I think the demand for the lockdowns is driven by the panic. So let's talk about schools first, right? So in July, I remember last year thinking that, you know, look, the evidence is that the kids are safe. The disease, thank God, does not harm children at the same rate that it harms adults, a thousand-fold difference in the mortality rate, the kids are safe.

And I was looking at evidence coming out of Iceland and elsewhere that suggests that kids are actually very inefficient spreaders of the disease. And I, my impression was that people would take this evidence and do the obvious thing, which is let's reassure parents that it's safe to send the kids to school. Let's reassure teachers that it's safe to send the kids to school. Let's reassure teachers that it's safe to teach. And yet to my shock, through July, there was this campaign essentially to close the schools down. And yet you resisted that. So tell me a little bit about that decision-making.

What drove that, and what's that meant for the kids in your state? Well, because of all those studies, of all the decisions I've made, that was the one that I had the least worry about in terms of what would I knew what would happen. I knew it was safe because literally in every part of the world where kids were in school, even in intense community outbreak situations like Sweden, you did not have negative outcomes. And in fact, a typical flu season would be worse on a school than what COVID was doing. So that was something that, honestly, I was happy to hear. And we wanted to embrace that.

So it was all political. And it was people, quite frankly, you know, Dr. Fauci, he did not know the latest data. He was touting the South Korea study even after it had been debunked, which tried to say that the kids are efficient spreaders. And so I knew all of the evidence pointed in that direction. A lot of it was more political, media-driven, partisan. What drives some, even politically, what would drive somebody to want to panic parents when it's really not harming children? Whereas keeping kids out of school harms them.

Well look, we're in an election year, there's a lot of partisan agendas at stake. Obviously teachers' unions took the position that the school shouldn't be open. Well, look, we're in an election year. There's a lot of partisan agendas at stake. Obviously, teachers' unions took the position that the school shouldn't be open. They sued you, actually. They sued me in Florida. We beat them in court. I helped with that case, by the way. There you go. I know.

And the expert they had didn't know what he was talking about. If you talk about the New York Times trying to create fear or CNN, part of it is, I think, for their interests in terms of viewership or readership. But part of it is I think a lot of people that are part of those organizations, I think they had no real understanding of the true COVID risks. And you see it in polls now. People with certain persuasions, ideologically, people who concern certain news, they have no concept for the true risk of COVID across age demographics. So I think some of it was political, but I think some of it was there were people out there that thought if you put kids in a classroom, that there was going to be a massive amount of death amongst young people. And there was zero evidence to support that. But I do think people believed it. And now, because that was the theory and the evidence up to that time, you've now had a full year of school in Florida, open, in person, unlike California where I live. What's the experience been for kids and for teachers?

Well, it's been successful, I mean, of course. And there's been no real outbreaks of any significance in terms of it certainly has not driven disease at all. I to these rural school districts trying to say, oh, these yokels in Florida are putting the kids. And they wanted it to fail. But then I said, look, we know it's going to be fine because we know what the science says. So after a month, everyone's going to have to go back to school because we will have been in school. They're going to see it. And to my shock, it was almost as if what we were doing didn't even exist into Chicago or Los Angeles or some of these places that kept the kids locked down and kept them out of school. And so it was, I think, a deliberate attempt to just ignore evidence. And the interesting thing about Florida is the outcomes didn't matter on the mitigation. So we

had some school districts that didn't require masks. Many of our school districts did. Most of our charter and private schools didn't do it. Many of them didn't do the social distancing. They basically let the kids be kids. And there's really no difference in COVID outcomes based on that. And so the obvious, I think, takeaway is kids should be back in school and they should have a normal school year. And how about youth sports? What did you do with that? We made sure we had youth sports going. So this was very early on when a lot of these leagues were concerned about where they could go. So I came out in May of 2020 and I specifically said, no limitations by local government on any of this. This is authorized, and you guys need to provide

this opportunity. And most of them did. I mean, some of them were still concerned, but most of them were able to get the kids back. And then, of course, for the school year, we had a full year of athletics, football basketball, you name it. And there were actually families that would move from some of the lockdown states to Florida just so their kid could go to school in person and play sports. I mean, some of these kids had their senior year of football or baseball taken away from them in Michigan or California. Some of them moved here to be able to go and not miss out on that opportunity. I'll tell you, my wife wanted that, but I just couldn't leave. Okay, so let's change gears in school, because I think it should

be clear that the schools are important. But now I want to talk about the economy, and in particular, I want to talk about unemployment. So in the early days of the epidemic, I remember it was taboo to talk about the economy, right? So the idea was that if you think about the economic effects of the lockdowns, you're essentially being indifferent to the lives of people dying from COVID. And the mantra is like lives versus economy. Of course, lives matter more. And in fact, it was an anathema to even point out there may be economic harm. So first of all, I want to establish that there is some economics.

So tell me about the unemployment, like businesses open in Florida versus what you've seen in the rest of the country. I mean, I can cite you some numbers, but I'd like to see. Well, our unemployment rate has consistently been, I mean, since last summer, has consistently been less than the national average and significantly less than the Californias and the New Yorks and the other lockdown states. And that's with us being a service and tourism based economy. You know, a place like California, they've got a big tech hub. Those people didn't miss a beat during the lockdown because they can work from home. Our folks had to be there in person. And obviously, a lot of our economies depended upon people being able to come here. Now, for a lot of this period, people couldn't

come from Europe and South America, some of our key, for a lot of this period, people couldn't come from Europe and South America, some of our key areas. A lot of Americans weren't willing to necessarily travel like they did. But I think what happened was because Florida kind of became the place where people knew they could escape to, we ended up having tourism pickup. We were able to make sure that these folks, I mean, these are blue collar people, that they were able to get back to work. And so the result was we were anticipated to have the worst unemployment due to COVID. We were better than the national average. We were also anticipated to have a massive budget shortfall because we weren't going to take in as much revenue.

Because not only did we not have that, we have more budget reserves now than we ever did. And we're consistently bringing in hundreds, if not a billion dollars more a month than the forecast do. And so we're probably doing better than even pre-COVID forecasts, but certainly we're doing way better than all those COVID forecasting. And here's the thing. People come up to me when I'm out and about and they will come up to me and I will have people break down and cry and give me a hug because they were able to keep their job and continue to provide food for their families or their business was able to succeed and I have people you know we kind of joke and say you know don't Fauci Florida that came from people telling me you know if you

had Fauci'd my business, I would be done. And that's very genuine. And some of these people are probably not terribly emotional people that do it. And you see it time and time again. So just think about that. That is not just dollars and cents. Those are people's livelihoods that are at stake. Their families are at stake. That has a whole host of psychological, physical health, all kinds of well-being that flows from that. Health insurance, making sure that they have all this stuff. And so that whole thing was so crude to say, oh, you're choosing this over that. First of all, I would say if interventions don't work, then why would you do them anyways? And I think that's pretty clear that they just didn't

work. But even if somehow you think some of these mitigations are effective, to not look at what harms those are imposing on other people and to just act like that any costs are fine and not look at the whole thing, that is very irresponsible. Yeah. So I think one of the rules of thumb people have used during that early days of the epidemic in decision making was the precautionary principle, which in practice meant you only look at the harms of COVID. You don't look at the harms of the intervention. So, I mean, it struck me as it violates every economic principle that you ever decide to take into account. But you do have to weigh that, right? So there are some lives at stake and there are livelihoods at stake.

But as you say, that's not the tradeoff, right? If the intervention doesn't actually produce much benefit as far as protecting people from COVID, and if the intervention ends up harming the livelihoods, how do you ignore that? It seems not right. And I think it's even stronger than that, because I think some of these interventions, forget about economics, you have to weigh the harms in other ways. So for example, with the nursing homes, we acted very quickly to stop traffic into nursing homes. We sent National Guard teams to offer tests for the residents. We created COVID-only nursing facilities. At the same time, we barred hospitals from

discharging a COVID-positive patient back to a nursing home like they did in these northeastern states, which led to so much excess death. And I think those are right. At the same time, as this went on, we had to look and say, okay, we're not allowing people to go into these nursing homes. They're not getting the visitation that they need. That is a harm. And that's a harm we have to face up to. And so in the summer, we had to figure out we need to go in a different direction. Still going to do focus protection. We're still going to provide everything that we can, but we cannot sever these people from the rest of the world. There was a 20 percent rise.

I saw a paper last summer in dementia related deaths in the United States. And that is loneliness. Deaths from this actually in some ways is focused protection. They're all in every policy. There's a tradeoff, I think. And not accounting for that is, I think, the root of a lot of the problems we've had in COVID. No, absolutely. And so, you know, what we ended up saying is we'll do the COVID-only facilities.

We'll prioritize them for vaccination. But we're not going to dictate who's able to go in now that we know about the virus. Look, in March, it was one thing of 2020. But we need to let them have. And the families appreciate it. And people have been healthier as a result. And then, of course, I mean, you look at the economic stuff. People that lose their business or their job, that has, by definition, negative health impacts. Every study that's ever been done will show you that it has. Unemployment is bad for your health, right? There's no question about that. But also, too, the hysteria that leads to that line of thinking,

that caused deaths because the emergency room visits for heart and stroke plummeted like we've never seen before in March of 2020. It didn't all of a sudden, people didn't stop having heart attacks. They were so scared to go into the hospital because they thought they'd get COVID and die that they're having a mild heart attack at home and just suffering through it or a stroke and not going in. And I think we see this even today with people that show up at the hospital that had they gotten the normal care like they would normally pre-COVID have done, they probably wouldn't be in as bad a condition as they are. That was driven by the hysteria from public health officials, the media,

and it caused a lot of fear in the population. And that was one of the things that really bugged me about the lockdowns was that the economic harm is serious. But if you just walk down the street in some town and the businesses are all closed, that is psychologically very damaging for people. Whereas when people are out and being able to make choices and everything like that, you feel better. You just feel better about life, and that's a natural thing. And that doesn't even account for the dollars and cents. I mean, actually, so we should talk about the health harms because I think that's really important. So, for instance, there was an enormous drop in cancer screening that occurred last summer all throughout the country.

And women today are going to have come in with stage four breast cancer that should have been picked up last year. And they would have survived it if they'd been picked up last year that are going to die from it now. As you mentioned, heart attacks, diabetes monitoring. So what concrete steps did you take to try to address that, address the fear, as you say, but also to try to get the message that, look, these public health priorities are still public health priorities. I mean, COVID is not the only public health threat that people face.

Well, we were in March of 2020 told you have to limit these elective procedures because we're going to run out of rooms. As we got into April, I knew that wasn't true. So I was like, guys, you need to do these elective procedures. You guys make these decisions. And so we would go out, I would go to hospitals and I'd actually say, guys, you know, fellow Floridians, if you need to do something, they're open. They're open because the media would say when our census would be the lowest it's been in recorded history in Florida, they would say the hospitals are overwhelmed. Some people thought that there were no space in the hospitals. And I had people throughout the last year would say, yeah, you know, my daughter's going to have a baby,

but there's not going to be room in the hospitals. I said, what are you talking about? They're like, well, I'm like, where do you live? I'm like, well, the census is this. There's room. So that was put out there, and that told people, hey, maybe I shouldn't go in. There's not going to be room for me. Some of it was altruistic. Like, I don't want to take a bed if a COVID patient needs it. So we delivered the message, sign up. They're open for business. We need you guys going in and doing what you would

normally do. Do not buy this idea that the hospitals are overwhelmed or can't handle it. And so we did that a lot in April and May and June of last year just to try to get that. And gradually, it has come back. I don't know at this point if it's 100%, but they're much better off a year later. But the problem is, is how many of the people coming in now wouldn't have needed to be there had they not been spooked? I think Florida is probably needed to be there had they not been spooked. I think Florida is probably going to be less. And I think you see that in some of the excess mortality numbers compared to some of these other states. But still, there was so much fear that was instilled

that people foregoed some of these things that really can be can be lifesaving. And I think if you look at the total amount of toll that that's going to take, it's going to take us years and years. But between the school closures, the business closures, people not getting the care they need, I mean, you're looking at a toll that is incredible. I mean, an incredibly high toll. The thing is, is a respiratory virus, government can't necessarily stop that. A lot of those other things were induced by either hysteria or bad government policy. What I understood good public health practice to be before the epidemic is that public health reassures the public, gives them tools to

deal with the whole host of health problems people face. They don't create panic because it's so difficult to undo and it leads to bad decisions, decisions that actually undermine health in the long run. Well, not only that, I mean, I started to look at the pandemic preparedness for some of the other countries. And I looked at like Britain. And they said, for flu pandemics, they're like, there's no evidence that canceling large events stops the flu pandemic or stops the spread. They're like, but what it does do is it creates fear in the population because people think something's

wrong. It panics people and it makes it more difficult to be able to get through whatever you need to do. So there was always a very keen sense in a lot of this literature about the need to make sure everybody's calm and that these authorities should be calming influences. And instead, it seems like these authorities, they were ratcheting it up more than the data would ever allow. How ethical is that, right? So in the UK, for instance, there's a group called SAGE, which advises the government on scientific, there's a bunch of scientists that advise the government on science policy and COVID policy. And they had a subgroup, a behavioral subgroup, that adopted as a specific policy to panic the population. And I don't know if that's something official done in the US like that, but it sure felt like that. Like, how ethical is that for the government to panic a population?

Well, I think it's unethical. And I think it's ultimately counterproductive for public health, because I think their credibility has been totally destroyed by what's happened. And I think a lot of these people, they look at the public as kind of the unwashed masses. They don't think they're smart. And they think that and they worry. So I think they indulge in like noble lies. For example, they refuse to acknowledge natural immunity. Like if you've recovered from COVID, the immunity, it's clear, it's durable, it's there. They won't. And I think the reason they don't is because they think if they acknowledge that you're immune, then people are going to think, oh, well, maybe I'll just get infected by you. That's better, which I don't

think people would think that, but they think that that may cause behavior choices that they disagree with. So they lie and they don't tell the truth. And I think you've seen that. I think you've seen it with the masks, the mask, obviously every, there's not been a single clinical trial in this whole year and a half that showed cloth masks reduce or stop the spread of a respiratory virus, COVID or otherwise. And they've had a lot of time to study this. And basically, the waves follow a seasonal pattern, regardless of masking. But I think, and I think they in their hearts know that. I mean, you've got to be really dumb to think otherwise. But I think they think that if they told people they need to wear a mask, then that would tell people, oh,

who cares about COVID do? Whereas if they're wearing that mask, they're constantly reminded about COVID. And so I think that they wanted the mask more for the psychological impact rather than the medical impact. Just to create a visual reminder that we are in the middle of a pandemic, as if we didn't already know that, right? I mean, I agree. And I also think just from a clinical, I think a lot of physicians did a good job. But I mean, you'd have some of these physicians that would become like Twitter celebrities or whatever. They'd actually go on and they would attack their patients and say, oh, well, this person didn't get vaccinated.

This person didn't socially distance or didn't wear a mask. And I'm like, that is incredibly unethical to go out there. And I just look at previous things. You know, you didn't see the public health community attacking people with other diseases like they have with this. But it's almost as if people that get infected with COVID, they've tried to turn it into a moral failing, which that's just not the way it is. This is a very contagious respiratory virus that people are going to be impacted by one way or another. This is one of these things we learned, I thought, with the HIV epidemic. You don't blame somebody that gets sick. You care for them. You provide compassion and care for them. And actually, the weirdest kind

of attack that I've seen is when lockdowns don't suppress the cases. The cases go up despite the lockdown. Public health then turns on the public and says, you're not sacrificing enough. Even though people have lost their businesses, they've lost their children's education, they've lost, they made all kinds of sacrifices. And yet public health turns on people and says, you're not doing what we say. They never, I don't know if there's been a single intervention that they've acknowledged has been ineffective at this time. And we clearly know many of them have been totally ineffective. And I would say probably all of them, but certainly many of them. And yet they won't admit that they were wrong about that, which is, to me, very concerning because this was a difficult situation.

I'll give you a mulligan for some of those early days, but if you're stuck in the sand and you're not going to take your head out and acknowledge reality, I mean, that's a huge, huge problem. And that's why I think going forward people are not going to trust public health. How do you address that? Because public health actually is important why I think going forward, people are not going to trust public health. How do you address that? Because public health actually is important, I think. I mean, it's not like it's a good thing that public health has in some ways been discredited or in many ways been discredited. I think reestablishing that trust is going to be very important in order so that people can get good advice about how to improve their health, care for others in the community. How do you fix that?

Well, look, I think the truth is powerful. People know when they're being lied to. And if you're speaking the truth, if you're honest with people. So it's like with vaccines and stuff, you know, if there's a side effect, you tell them. You don't say that there's not. You tell them and then let people make these determinations, you know, how they see fit. But to try to sweep things under the rug or to just not be honest, that does not work. I mean, especially in this age now. You may have been able to get away with that 60 years ago, but now if these people come out and say something, you'll

have people online will immediately point out that they're not being honest about something. And so I just think you've got to show that you're telling the truth. And that means if you're advocating a certain way forward, if you're identifying data points that may not fully support it, to me, then I at least think, okay, you're at least acknowledging reality. But when they try to sweep things under the rug that conflicts with their worldview, if they're taking positions that are more political. But I do think it has been very politicized. And I don't know if this would have been the same in the pandemics of 68, 57, right?

But it's incredibly political. Part of it was an election year. Obviously, Trump was a unique figure in terms of how some of these people would have responded to him. But I think you got to get rid of the politicization. It should be based on data. It should be based on science. Public health is supposed to reach everybody. And when it's politicized, essentially, it means it's not going to reach half the country one way or the other. That's a failure of public health, a deep failure. That has to end, I think, before we fix anything like that.

I mean, before people start trusting public health again. And part of that is going to be media behavior, too. I mean, they politicized every aspect of COVID policy, and they thought that it benefited their agenda or whatever, but the fact of the matter is, you know, I think that that really hurt the effort of handling this, I think, in a way that would have been more beneficial for people. So handling this, I think, in a way that would

have been more beneficial for people. So now, can I, let me stop. One more question about COVID outcomes, and then we'll go to reform of public health more generally. So I looked at the data for Florida's COVID age-adjusted, Florida is one of the oldest states in the country, you'd expect to have worse COVID outcomes. And yet, when you account for that fact, Florida is one of the, I think, top 10 or top 11 states in the country in terms of the lowest COVID death rates. I mean, that's interesting, I think. But if you look at the data on income differences in COVID death rates in Florida, or race differences and ethnic differences in COVID, it's actually much more equal, for instance,

than in California. In Los Angeles County, for instance, if you lived in Beverly Hills, you had one-third the mortality per capita, age-adjusted, for COVID than if you lived in Watts, three times, or in largely Hispanic neighbors, there were enormous ethnic disparities where ethnic minorities and poorer people had much worse outcomes than richer people. I mean, to me, it looks like the lockdowns were, in some ways, if it benefited anyone, it was relatively well off, right? Now, how important is that in your thinking? How do you

think about giving minority populations in Florida the tools to thrive? I mean, I think that's the way I've been looking at it. But I wonder if it's moved in your thinking as well. Well, I think because we were open and getting kids in school and doing that. I mean, I think our society functioned like a society would function, whereas I think some of those lockdown states, they're imposing artificial restrictions or barriers. And I think the result is, is that that doesn't necessarily apply equally across every single demographic. Whereas for here, you know, we pretty much wanted Florida to be Florida. We were doing certain things to protect vulnerable populations and obviously doing other things. But it was not where one segment of society was supposed to carry the load for another segment of society.

I mean, that was just not – I didn't think that was good policy, period. And I certainly don't think it would have led to better health outcomes. Well, it certainly hasn't in California, I think. Okay, so let's go back to better health outcomes. Well, it certainly hasn't in California, I think. Okay, so let's go back to public health. And I want to talk about a few, actually more broadly than just public health. I want to talk about some of the interventions, the lockdown interventions that have happened are absolutely extraordinary in terms of what I thought Americans had rights to. So, for instance, the right

to having your child have an education. That's a basic, it may not be a right, I don't know if that's the right word for it, but it's like a basic expectation of American society. Or the right to religious worship. So in California, in the county where I live, there was a decision by the county health officer that people could not hold Bible studies in their private homes. And it took a Supreme Court case to reverse that. And it's one of these things where it lost in the trial court, it lost in the circuit court, and then it took a Supreme Court case to reverse that. And it struck me as that it took a very long time for any kind, and, you know, for governors.

Many governors actually had powers I didn't even realize governors had to essentially shut down society indefinitely with no ability for the legislatures or the courts to push back. So what's, you as your governor, like, what is your view on that? Like, what's the appropriate use for a governor for that power? Should governors have that kind of power without a check and balance

the way we've seen through much of the last year and a half? Well, no, I mean, in fact, so one of the things I, so in Florida, we protected religious worship. Obviously, we got kids in school. I mean, we were- But you're very fortunate

to have you as a governor that respected that. In California, it was quite the opposite. No, no, no. I understand that. And so there was never any concern about me abusing these emergency powers because my view was I want to use these powers to lift people up. I don't want to lock them down. But we also understood what some local governments tried to get away with. I had to override these local governments to make sure everyone could work and businesses could operate everything in summer of 2020. So I went to the legislature this past session and I said, look, going forward, we can never let this happen again.

And so we did a number of reforms, kneecap the local government's ability to shut things down. But also, I wanted them to restrict the governor. And some of my staff's like, well, why would you want that? You're doing it. And I said, you know what? If I am doing orders that are so bad that the legislature is going to call a special session to override it, maybe I should think twice before doing that. So in Florida, if a governor were to ever do an order to say, shut churches down, the legislature could come in with the majority vote and override it. So you absolutely need

checks and balances. We have them in Florida, even though our experience isn't like California. I see how my election had gone the other way. We probably would have had California's experience in Florida. So we took action. But I also think the courts, they were very weak throughout most of the beginning of COVID. Now they're starting to do a little bit more. Historically, some of these powers have been acknowledged, but for a very short period of time, like a two-week emergency, what this was turning into, this Fauci-ism, was never-ending restrictions until there was, what, not a single case identified. At that point, the courts absolutely needed to be more aggressive.

And they've been very weak now. We've won some decisions. We beat the CDC on the cruise line restrictions. I know the moratorium on evictions, they're going to lose on that too. So you start to finally see it. But I think at the end of the day, the reason why you have a written constitution in courts is so that if they come after you, you go in and you get relief. You don't get relief an hour and a half later. You need to get relief in the instant. And so I think we've done some good reforms to protect Floridians far into the future, but these courts were weak. That was my experience. I had never been an expert witness before this, and I've done a whole bunch of sort of pro bono expert witness work in this. And what

I've seen over and over is exactly what you said. Judges who wouldn't, I mean, I think basically out of fear, fear of maybe the disease, but also fear of being accused of not taking the disease seriously, making decisions that are not really consistent with what my understanding of what the law should be. Essentially closing down businesses, closing down schools, closing down churches, upholding enormous fines on religious worship, not protecting basic rights of the people. But how do you fix that? I mean, how do you, it's not, because it's, now we're talking about an emergency time,

people, judges are people too, they're subject to panic just like anyone else, I guess. How do you create a situation, how do you create a structure so that that kind of protection of basic fundamental civil rights holds even during an epidemic? Well, we, what we did in the reforms I signed, I mean, we make it very explicit that, I mean, here are the protections for people. Local governments can't go beyond this. And so you would absolutely, so for example, if someone, if a school district tried to close the schools indefinitely, you'd be able to go in and most likely you're going to get relief based on what we put into place.

So I do think that there does need to be legal reforms across the country through legislatures. And I think that that will make judges probably fear, feel a little bit better because as of right now, it's basically been like, hey, you declare an emergency and then there's these powers that have been utilized in the past. And so therefore you can do it. And there was a history of it. I mean, it's not like they pulled it out of thin air, but I think they took it, and they took it to such an nth degree to where you'd have kids in, like, L.A. not get in school for a year. That is not in any way consistent with the rule of law.

Okay, so this is the last topic, I promise. But I really wanted to ask you about this because this is something that both you and I together have been subject to, is censorship by the media of basic discussion. So, you know, you invited me kindly to this panel in March where we discussed COVID policy. I thought that was good government, right? You're showing the advice that you're getting from various scientific advisors that are informing your decision-making. You put it on TV so that the public can see it,

and they may disagree with us or agree with us, whatever. But the point is that this is now a clear and open... It's like an open government, right? And yet YouTube censored that video. Okay, so I have certain feelings about this, but I would love to hear your thoughts about how is that consistent with sort of American norms of free discussion, American norms about good governance? And what can we do in the future to try to address – because it's tricky, right? YouTube is a private company.

They have some capacity. Well, I think – I mean, first of all, if we go back to March of 2020, I mean, if you had put something up about this coming from the lab in Wuhan, they would have censored you and taken you down. And now we look and say that's the most likely reason why this happened. You also, if you had append a criticism of lockdowns, that would be taken down. People didn't want to publish it. The tech companies were censoring it. And you look, that's one of the most important discussions, a policy discussion any society could have to just shut down your economy. And Facebook and Twitter, their view was

there was no room for even debate on that because it conflicted with the prevailing orthodoxy. So I think these tech companies, instead of being platforms that liberate people to share ideas, they've now become really enforcers of a prevailing narrative in the country. And so if Fauci says that masks are work, then they're going to enforce masks work. And if you say that they haven't been effective, they're going to censure you or put a disclaimer on you. If you say lockdowns are bad, well, at least last year, they would have said you can't be heard as a result of that. And so clearly, since that's not how it works, I mean, in science in particular, people always ask questions. When the new data comes in, you always have to reevaluate all these assumptions. That's just how it works. But it seems like that's not

really been the goal of these companies to foster free exchange of ideas, because I think had they been more open, I think we could have averted, at least in some respects, some of the harms that ended up happening from some of these policies. So it raises huge questions about if this is the primary means of speech in this country, are we going to subcontract out the contours of what that means to a handful of oligarchs in Silicon Valley who, let's just be clear, they do not share the values of the average American. They have a much different ideology. They have much different values, and they're entitled to that. But for them to impose that and try to craft one narrative for everybody

and try to keep other people who made dissent. That's a huge problem. And I think part of it was they were aided and abetted by the scientific community, who was very herd-like in this. It seems to me that you had some people in the scientific community that were very ideological about this. They were set in their ways. They weren't going to listen to the data. I think you probably had a lot of people who understood the data, but just didn't want to speak out. I mean, your grant money's at stake, the way you'd be treated

by your colleagues. I mean, I know people like you were willing to speak out, but I guarantee you there's probably many more people who saw the same stuff that you did and believe what you were saying was correct, who just didn't want to go there. They didn't want to step into that briar patch. And so I think that these companies, they honestly believed, hey, this is science. What these people are telling us is the science. These other people are anti-scientific. But in reality, that was just a consensus developed by some of the people who were louder and who had access to some of these levers of power. It's true how to regulate that, right?

So the government then saying that you guys aren't allowed to make these kind of decisions is also— So what we've done in Florida—so we tackled it in Florida in a bill, and it's being litigated now. But basically what we said is this. Okay, you're not like a normal company. You're exercising more power and influence over the daily lives of Americans than the monopolies of the early 20th century, for sure. So to say that you should be treated the same as a local store here, obviously people see the distinction in that. You're more akin to like a common carrier.

So it's like if you sign up for phone service, phone company's not gonna listen to what you're saying and if they don't like what you're saying, cut off your service. Now it's not exactly like that, but there's an analog. So what we said is this. We said, OK, you guys claim you're not publishers, because you get all this liability protection from the federal government, that you're just a forum where people could say.

So if I say I like the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on Facebook, that doesn't mean Facebook endorses the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Tom Brady. We get it, right? So they take that position. But then they have, and they do have terms of service opaque. The way they apply that on people, it's not fair, it's not uniform, and it disproportionately impacts voices that are different from the narratives they're trying to support. So what we said is that's basically a fraud on the consumer. You make billions of dollars off taking people's information and selling it when they use your services. You're telling them it's an open forum, and then you're effectively

discriminating based on viewpoint. So we authorize lawsuits on a consumer fraud theory. So it's not saying they have to host anything in particular, but when you have this as your business model, this is what you purport to the public, and then you're not following through on that, we believe there's action. And so it went to district court in Tallahassee. We got an unfavorable forum, so we didn't think we'd be successful. But the judge said that companies are different. Section 230 doesn't preempt this, and there is a role for states to be able to protect their citizens against censorship into platform.

It's not just the political debate, though. We have citizens who are tied into Facebook, email, text, payment processing, web hosting for small businesses. In fact, I have a friend that she had her Facebook business account locked because they went back and found six months ago she posted a meme that they didn't like. So they locked it and with no recourse or anything. And so the question is, they've created this massive, basically public square. You really can't work in society effectively without being involved with technology at

some point. And so with that comes some, I think, some rules of the road. So that's what we're trying to do. It's not necessarily forcing them to do what or what. Although I would say, though, even if you said you must host all First Amendment speech, their First Amendment rights are, they're not endorsing the speech. That's how they get the liability. If they're going to claim First Amendment, then they shouldn't be getting liability because that's an acknowledgement that they're endorsing what's on their platform. So you've got to figure out one way or another. But I think the status

quo is clearly unacceptable with big tech. And I do think individual Americans need some protections. Florida was the first out of the gate. We're going to get a ruling on the appeals court hopefully by the end of the year. And if we need to come back next legislative session and tweak it, we will do that. But this is going to be a perennial issue. And it's going to be an issue that has huge implications on self-government going forward. The American norm of free expression needs to be upheld, whatever the legal structure is. And your rights, we're used to, and the founders were right about this, our rights are at risk from government power. And that's true. That's why you have a written constitution, separation of powers. But your rights also

can be infringed by massive private power. And that's what we have there in Silicon Valley. And the question is, you know, what do we do about it? Governor, thank you so much for the time. I really appreciate it. I know how valuable it is, but it's been an honor to be able to talk with you. Oh, yeah. Thanks so much. Thank you. Appreciate it.