The Patriot Post® · DeSantis Aims for COVID-19 Accountability

Remember all that talk a few weeks back about a “pandemic amnesty”?

Remember that piece in The Atlantic by Ivy League economist and academic Emily Oster? Remember its call for letting bygones be bygones when it came to who did what to whom during the previous 30 months of masking up, locking down, mandating, and censoring? Remember how it condescendingly warned us that “dwelling on the mistakes of history can lead to a repetitive doom loop”? About how we should “acknowledge that we made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty, and then try to work together to build back and move forward”?

We do too. And we weren’t persuaded. Neither, it appears, was Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

Earlier this week, DeSantis convened a roundtable discussion that included Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo and world-renowned physicians, researchers, and public health experts. He also tweeted a promise of COVID-19 accountability for the medical establishment and issued a statement with additional details. His accountability plan has three components:

• Establishing the Public Health Integrity Committee. The Committee will be overseen by the Surgeon General to assess federal public health recommendations and guidance to ensure that Florida’s public health policies are tailored for Florida’s communities and priorities.
• Filing a petition for a Statewide Grand Jury to investigate crimes and wrongdoing committed against Floridians related to the COVID-19 vaccine.
• Leading further surveillance into sudden deaths of individuals that received the COVID-19 vaccine in Florida, based on autopsy results. The state will collaborate with the University of Florida to compare research with studies done in other countries.

The governor’s statement also took Team Biden and Big Pharma to task for pushing “widespread distribution of mRNA vaccines on the public, including children as young as 6 months old, through relentless propaganda while ignoring real-life adverse events.”

“At the end of the day,” he said, “what we’re looking for is to provide truth, to provide accurate data, and provide accurate analysis.”

Of course, DeSantis’s announcement wasn’t without its critics — including Anthony Fauci, who recently announced his retirement but who will nonetheless be called before Congress when Republicans grab the oversight gavels on January 3.

“I don’t have a clue … what he’s asking for,” Fauci told the friendlies at CNN. “I mean, we have a vaccine that unequivocally is highly effective and safe, and has saved literally millions of lives. The Commonwealth Fund has come out with a report just this past week, that vaccinations that have been administered over this period of time, this last year and a half to two years, has saved 3.2 million lives, 18 million hospitalizations, and approximately $1 trillion in costs. So what’s the problem with vaccines? I mean, vaccines are lifesaving. So quite frankly … I’m not sure what — what they’re trying to do down there.”

That’s his story, and he’s sticking to it. But it’s only a small part of a much bigger story — a story that includes Fauci’s role in funding dangerous gain-of-function research at the Wuhan virology lab just minutes from where, uh, the first bat flew into the first cloaca of the first turkey. In addition, there’s the little matter of Fauci’s involvement in the cover-up of Chinese complicity for the deadly virus.

Perhaps more than any person on the planet, the narcissistic Fauci fervently wishes that all this would simply go away.

But it won’t. At least not in Florida.

Columnist Jeff Jacoby is spot on about the missing step between failure and forgiveness. “Before there can be a reconciliation,” he writes, “there needs to be an accounting. Those who messed up must reckon with how they went wrong. Politicians and public health authorities whose decisions caused serious harm need to acknowledge what happened.”

Anyone who disagrees with this clear-as-day logic should be asked a simple two-part question: What are you afraid of, and what are you trying to hide?