LIFE IN DESANTIS’S FLORIDA: Time Travel to America.
Now comes word that Joe Biden has selected Levine to be his assistant secretary of health. According to USA Today, the nomination is historic since Levine will likely be the first openly transgender federal official to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate.
“Dr. Rachel Levine will bring the steady leadership and essential expertise we need to get people through this pandemic — no matter their zip code, race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability — and meet the public health needs of our country in this critical moment and beyond,” Biden said in a statement. “She is a historic and deeply qualified choice to help lead our administration’s health efforts.”
Levine’s failed record in Pennsylvania proves otherwise, but why let facts get in the way of making identity politics history?
In contrast to Levine’s dismal performance, Florida officials elected to keep COVID patients out of nursing homes despite the possibility that doing so might stress the state’s hospital facilities. As it turned out, this was the right call. Florida’s most vulnerable citizens in nursing homes have been spared state-mandated exposure to COVID, and the state’s hospitals have maintained adequate patient capacity.
While Pennsylvania’s economy and people continue to suffer under lockdown, Florida — while requiring reasonable public health measures — is wide open for business. People here are free to patronize restaurants, bars, hotels, and enterprises of all types and sizes. This place is booming, and, once here, it doesn’t take long to realize just how unnatural, depressing, debilitating, and destructive life in lockdown has been.
I was there last month in Fort Myers to celebrate my aunt’s 100th birthday (she’s doing fantastic). Masks were required in stores such as Publix supermarkets. But restaurants and others shops were often mask optional. As Karol Markowicz wrote last month, “It’s a lie, though, that Floridians aren’t taking the novel coronavirus seriously. What they have done is discard the policies that don’t work, while retaining the ones that do.”
