By Clemens Heni, Ph.D., March 26, 2021
A few days ago, Governor Ron DeSantis from Florida had a roundtable talk with a couple of scholars in epidemiology, medicine about the current Corona crisis.
Among them were Prof. Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford University, Prof. Martin Kulldorff from Harvard University, and Prof. Sunetra Gupta from Oxford University (via Internet). In addition to the virtual roundtable of the same scholars and DeSantis from September 2020, Dr. Scott Atlas, a former White House task force member on Corona, was among them. They looked back at six months without lockdown and mandatory face masks in Florida. It is a success story!
Screenshots, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlSFjeKu0B8
Asked by DeSantis if he still thinks that his lockdown scepticism from September 2020 still holds, Bhattacharya responded:
Lockdowns are the single biggest health mistake in history.“
You can watch parts of the session here.
These few minutes give you an insight view of a democratic procedure, based on medical, epidemiological and sociological scholarship. In Germany or the UK, France or Italy, such anti-lockdown epidemiologists would never ever have been invited to a roundtable by a Governor, to be sure.
Gupta, Bhattacharya and the other scholars involved, mentioned and emphasized the unbelievable costs of lockdown, both here and in the southern countries. They also mentioned that lockdowns do not only harm, worse, they do not even prevent the spread of the disease (look at the numbers in Merkel’s Germany from November 2020 until today, with hardcore lockdowns). Finally, the mortality rate in lockdown states such as California (or New York, New Jersey and dozens of other states in the US) are higher than in Florida.
Such discussions are among the reasons, why the US is (at least in part) still a vibrant democracy, and Europe and the UK are not.