Ron Desantis doesn’t have to keep Joe Ladapo as the Florida surgeon general.
I realize people think back to when Ron Desantis wasn’t so vocally against the covid vaccines and think that somehow because he’s not actually been in the media seen out hiking with RFK Jr., that must mean he’s not really anti-vax himself. But there’s no other way to describe what’s going on here.
Ron Desantis didn’t have to hire Joe Ladapo, and he doesn’t have to keep him. Joe Ladapo was in with the Great Barrington Declaration crowd from the get go, and was in the meeting at the White House — named by the U.S. Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis as having been invited by Dr. Scott Atlas in August 2020 along with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Martin Kulldorff, and Dr. Cody Meissner. They were backing Scott Atlas who supported a strategy of “facilitating disease-acquired herd immunity” and the anti-mask policy he was advocating for was found by the Select Subcommittee to be consistent with the pursuit of that aim.
Joe Ladapo’s Wikipedia page is quite a read, saying that when he was later appointed as the Florida Surgeon General in 2021 because Desantis had liked his op-eds — “He repealed quarantine rules for schoolchildren exposed to COVID-19 as his first executive action.”
In 2022, Ron Desantis assembled a panel of scientists to serve under Joe Ladapo, to evaluate federal public health advice to make sure it’s “tailored” to Florida, and most of the panel members are connected to the Brownstone Institute — the panel included Bret Weinstein, Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, and Tracy Beth Høeg, and when I tried to find out what connections these people had to Florida at the time to be able to tailor public health advice to that particular state, I couldn’t find the connection, these people were mostly all in other states.
Joseph Ladapo made an unwarranted and unreal assertion that there was a study that backed up anti-vax claims of risk from covid vaccines, and some months later it was revealed that the original eight-page study, provided by the Florida Department of Health, “initially stated that there was no significant risk associated with the Covid-19 vaccines for young men” and that it was Ladapo who did edits to replace that language to claim there was. Joseph Ladapo in 2024, was still using his platform as Florida’s State Surgeon General to instruct doctors to stop recommending covid vaccines, and citing anti-vax misinformation. Ladapo also refrained from recommending measles vaccination or even isolation, during a measles outbreak in Florida
Joseph Ladapo also had gone on the podcast of former Trump official Steve Bannon, saying that the vaccines are ‘the Antichrist of all products’ associating them with the devil, and saying the vaccines are “showing “disrespect” to the human genome” — which seems to be an evocation of the “gene altering” conspiracy theories promoted by anti-vaxxers, but which have no basis in reality.
Ron Desantis has been anti-mandate. If you are anti mandate — that’s anti-vax because vaccination is a community level public health measure and a security concern. This has been the case, there have been mandates since the early days of vaccines. There have been mandatory vaccinations in the military — for what should be obvious reasons. There have been vaccine mandates in healthcare jobs — for what should be obvious reasons. There have been vaccine requirements for schools — for what should be obvious reasons. Being against vaccine mandates is anti-vax.
I’m not falling for disingenuous arguments around Ron Desantis hedging anything. Ron Desantis sometimes tries to “both-sides” climate denial too. He was quoted in the news equating people who recognize fossil fuel as having a role in climate change claiming they are just the same as the people claiming the government is manufacturing hurricanes. He said that just 5 months after he signed some bill in Florida that was full of climate denial junk. This is all both preposterous and dangerous.