‘If Ron DeSantis doesn’t have anything to hide why won’t he turn over the data’ https://www.rawstory.com/ron-desantis-hiding-vaccine-data/ While Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) drew criticism for holding back data on nursing homes, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) has been hiding data on the coronavirus infections and vaccine distribution, according to Mary Ellen Klas of the Miami Herald. Speaking to MSNBC on Tuesday, host Ayman Mohyeldin explained that of the 30 million COVID-19 cases in the United States, 2 million belong to the state of Florida, the third-most in the United States. However, there's a greater concern that the data for the state has never been reported correctly. DeSantis is also facing allegations of favoritism for vaccines. The grocery store Publix is one of DeSantis' biggest corporate supporters, and they were shipped 1 out of 4 vaccines in the entire state of Florida. They've never submitted to the state any plan for how they'll do the distribution for the vaccine. When asked about it, DeSantis went off on reporters shouting that it was "wrong" and a fake narrative." There was also a report weeks ago that a gated community with DeSantis donors were given vaccines sooner than other areas of the state. After the neighborhood was vaccinated, a Republican former governor donated $250,000 to DeSantis, the Tampa Bay Times reported. "The problem is that there are a lot of questions surrounding this, and we have been asking, you know, if the governor doesn't have anything to hide, why not just present us with the data?" asked Klas. "And where the distribution happened and when, and who was in charge of distributing? But they won't turn over that information. So, we are left to continue to speculate. It's pretty clear that there were places that were early recipients of the vaccine in Florida, and they were the people that got vaccines ahead of the line. This includes people who are founders of a hospital chain and, as you mentioned, there's a yacht community in the Keys that received early access. We just don't know why it is that that they were given this kind of attention." See the full interview in the video below: (Video in article at above url)
"DeSantis for the win" - Says Contact Tracing does not work.... still paying GOP political donors lots of money for Florida's contact tracing app. DeSantis says contact tracing didn’t work. So why is Florida paying for this app? The state has paid the app developer $4 million. The founder is the son of a donor to President Donald Trump. https://www.tampabay.com/news/flori...t-work-so-why-is-florida-paying-for-this-app/ Gov. Ron DeSantis’ newest target in his ongoing clashes with public health experts is one of the bedrocks of their profession: contact tracing. It “has just not worked,” DeSantis flatly told reporters last week in Palm Harbor. A day later, DeSantis convened a panel of his go-to scientists, who took turns picking apart the disease control tool. Despite these criticisms, DeSantis’ administration continues to pay a hefty sum for a New York company to supply the state with a contact tracing mobile application. The developer of the app, Twenty Labs, has received $4 million from Florida so far, according to the state’s online contracts database. The latest installment of $200,000 was paid on March 12 — a few days before DeSantis said contact tracing was an ineffective strategy. Florida hired Twenty Labs last summer with a no-bid emergency contract. The company had little track record in the arena of epidemiology before 2020, but its coronavirus app, Healthy Together, had received a plug on national TV from Vice President Mike Pence. The startup’s co-founder is the son of a Palm Beach billionaire and a donor to former President Donald Trump, a close ally of DeSantis. The contract with Twenty Labs is one of many the DeSantis administration signed over the past year in response to the coronavirus pandemic. The fast-changing nature of the crisis meant the state needed to move quickly to slow the outbreak’s spread. To do so, DeSantis and his agencies used emergency powers to forgo state laws that require competitive bids for state contracts. But a year into the pandemic, there has been little oversight or accounting of how DeSantis spent the money and even fewer answers as to why certain companies were tapped for state work. Department of Health spokesman Jason Mahon did not respond to questions about how Twenty Labs was chosen to build Healthy Together and why it was picked over other companies. “The state continually evaluates strategies that have worked to contain COVID-19,” Mahon said in a statement, “and we will continue to use our experience from this pandemic to guide future efforts to control diseases in Florida.” There are two apps for that At the time Healthy Together first appeared in the Google and Apple app stores, the Florida Department of Health already had a basic contact tracing mobile application, Stronger Than C-19, that was a few months old. It was built by a different company, World Wide Technology of St. Louis, at a price tag of nearly $450,000. In a March press conference, DeSantis said he personally green-lit the creation of the Stronger Than C-19 application. Its April launch was announced with a press release from the Florida Department of Health. Like the deal with Twenty Labs, this was also an emergency purchase. The most recent payment of $68,000 was delivered on Dec. 2. Mahon declined to say why Florida needed a second contact tracing application. He said Healthy Together was “an innovative solution” for local contact tracing and delivering test results. He added that all of Florida’s contact tracing expenses will be paid for with grants or federal funds, and that the state uses data from both its coronavirus apps “to inform our response to COVID-19.” The state paid both app developers throughout 2020 even as DeSantis was beginning to sour on contact tracing. In July of last year, a month after reaching a deal with Twenty Labs, DeSantis downplayed the strategy when faced with questions over the state’s commitment to local contact tracing efforts. “When you have a lot of these asymptomatic 20-year-olds, there’s not a lot of contact tracing that’s being effective with them, because they haven’t been as cooperative with doing it,” DeSantis said. Contact tracing is one of the oldest methods of disease control. It involves interviewing a person to determine the source of their illness and building a list of people they may have infected. It can be a critical tool for spotting emerging hot spots so public health officials know where to direct their time and attention. At the onset of the pandemic, Florida enlisted hundreds of public health students to assist in its statewide contact tracing effort. Local county health departments used CARES Act dollars to hire more people to interview infected residents about their recent histories. But critics said the effort was disorganized and underfunded, and within months, the staff, many of them temporary hires, could hardly keep up with the volume of new cases as the outbreak reached every corner of Florida. Lately, DeSantis has suggested that the coronavirus posed too great of a challenge for contact tracing to work. At an event last week, DeSantis and a group of hand-picked scientists held a one-sided debate on the efficacy of contact tracing and they reached the same conclusion, calling it “counterproductive,” and “the wrong strategy.” “To think that it can be used for a pandemic is naive to the max,” said Martin Kulldorff, a professor at Harvard Medical School and a leading skeptic of the coronavirus response advocated by most scientists. Tom Hladish, a research scientist at the University of Florida’s Emerging Pathogens Institute, said Florida never implemented a comprehensive or cohesive contact tracing strategy. That’s why it failed, not because contact tracing doesn’t work, he said. “It’s like showing up to a house on fire with a squirt gun and saying water doesn’t put out fires,” Hladish said. “You didn’t do it right in the first place.” Ties to Trump donor Twenty Labs is a startup that created Twenty, a social meet-up app. It didn’t have a background in disease prevention when the company launched Healthy Together in Utah, but it swiftly generated national buzz with spotlights on the Today show and on the popular technology website TechCrunch. It received another boost in April during a nationally televised White House coronavirus task force briefing when Pence highlighted Healthy Together as a key element of Utah’s pandemic response. Jared Allgood, the chief strategy officer for Twenty Labs, told the Tampa Bay Times that a representative from Florida approached the company after the launch of Healthy Together in Utah. The company initially helped the state with “scaling up their contact tracing operation,” Allgood said. Twenty Labs created a case management system that could handle all the data input from the thousands of local workers hired to interview new coronavirus cases. The original contract was signed in June by Shamarial Roberson, the state’s Deputy Secretary for Health, and Darren Peltz, the company’s CEO and co-founder. Peltz is the son of Nelson Peltz, a hedge-fund billionaire who has helped run some of the largest companies in the world. Last year, Nelson Peltz threw a fundraiser for Trump’s reelection bid at his palatial Palm Beach estate that cost $580,000 per couple to attend. Twenty Labs shares a Manhattan address with Trian Partners, the hedge fund company started by Nelson Peltz. Darren Peltz used an email address for Trian Partners on the contract he signed with the state. The news website Florida Bulldog first reported in December on the contract with Twenty Labs and its ties to Trian Partners. Mahon didn’t respond when asked if the state’s decision to hire the developer was influenced by the White House. The governor’s office entered into a second pact with Twenty Labs later in 2020and Healthy Together launched in Florida in November. Three states now use Twenty Labs’ contact tracing app — Utah, Florida and Oklahoma. After someone takes a coronavirus test, they receive a text message encouraging them to view the result through the app — sometimes duplicating results sent directly by the local county health department or the testing site. If they tested positive, they’re encouraged to complete a contact tracing assessment through the app. Allgood told the Times that Healthy Together has 1.6 million Florida users and has delivered 5 million test results. Allgood said Healthy Together has helped cut down the time it takes to learn about someone’s positive infection. About 40 percent of app users who test positive conduct their contact tracing interview through the app, usually within 2.5 hours, he said. It can sometimes take days for a county health department to reach out to someone who tested positive. “If you’re making the phone call three weeks late, then you’re not actually doing contact tracing,” Allgood said. “So, in that sense, I think we agree with Gov. Desantis.” Michael Wiese, chief epidemiologist at the Florida Department of Health in Hillsborough County, said contact tracing remains a critical tool, especially as case volume decreases and variants appear. Healthy Together has helped capture some of that data, he said. Other local health department officials told the Times that the data from Healthy Together is often incomplete or subjective, and still requires an in-person follow-up call. Others, like the Hernando County branch of the state health department, don’t use data sent from the app, a spokeswoman said. “Even after receiving data in our system from the app, our investigators still call subjects to gather information,” said Maggie Hall, spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Health in Pinellas County, “which is how contact tracing really works — and has worked — to protect the public.” Unlike the rollout of the Stronger Than C-19 app, the state did not publicize its partnership with Twenty Labs or the launch of Healthy Together. There’s little acknowledgment of the app on the website for the Florida Department of Health. Hladish told the Times: “I’m a software developer and an epidemiologist who works for the state of Florida, and I had no idea (Healthy Together) existed.”
You know why morons and selfish assholes target Florida and Texas and Sweden for hate day after day. . because the left does not want you to know the fascist shutdowns and lockdowns and all the other sick in the head non-data backed quackery that has been promoted by Fauci and the media and governors like Newsom was tremendously destructive to peoples mental health, physical health and financial lives... for no valid data or reasons.
Florida drops to #29 when ranking states by cases per 1M pop. Florida drops to #27 when ranking states by deaths per 1M pop. Florida has been open since June of 2020. Florida has had in person schools since end of August 2020. Florida is ranked 39 in % of vaccine dosages administered (this is not a great stat). Florida is one of the best in the nation at nursing home cases and nursing home deaths per 100 residents. And Florida has the most elderly of any state. All of the panic porn peddled about the Covid "deadly variants" hasn't yielded jack shit at this point (thankfully). According to the BLS, in Jan 2021, Florida has an unemployment rate of 4.8 percent, the 18th best in the nation and one of the most improved since the crisis began. Florida's housing market is literally unstoppable. There are an estimated 700 people a day moving to Florida (net migration). DeSantis' popularity is rising from his low last July (understandable, as that was when Florida was suffering the outbreak other states were going to get later on, and the media and lap dogs were all after him). The Mason-Dixon survey found that 53% of Florida voters approve of the governor’s job performance. That's still well below the 62% approval rating DeSantis had two years ago, but it’s a big improvement from the 45% of voters who approved of the governor’s performance in July. The poll also has DeSantis leading in head-to-head matchups with two potential Democratic rivals in the 2022 governor’s race, Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried and U.S. Rep. Charlie Crist. DeSantis leads Fried 51% to 42% in the poll and is up on Crist 52% to 41%, with the rest undecided. All in all, a great tale. Watch the haters post now,
Let's compare the recent figures from Florida and California... Ron DeSantis' Florida boast rings hollow https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/23/opinions/ron-desantis-gavin-newsom-covid-sepkowitz/index.html New cases of Covid-19 in the United States have fallen in the last two months to about 55,000 a day. That seems like a whopping number until you compare it with the more than 200,000 daily cases reported in early January. Deaths have also fallen, to about 1,000 a day from more than 3,000. Concern is growing that the US may be at the start of yet another rise in cases. These numbers are promising, but the ups and downs and ups tell an important lesson about keeping perspective in a pandemic. Today's promising numbers would have been horrific at this time last year and are hardly as good as they need to be. The pandemic is nothing if not dynamic, with ever-shifting expectations and outcomes. Similarly, the actions that looked wise last month can seem ill-advised today, when new data and results cast a new light on decisions and the people who make them. No one knows this more than the country's governors. Since the Trump White House dumped the job of handling the pandemic almost entirely into their laps, they have had to respond on the fly. Without a coordinated, effective federal response the states have had to fill the gap. Some governors have been heroes in this crisis, others goats. Many, strangely, have been both. We are already seeing the first wave of "who won and who lost" sorts of stories pitting various governors' responses against each other in horse-race fashion, as if these were early polls for the 2024 presidential election. Take the recent flurry of articles on the pandemic "performance" of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. He was in the spotlight last spring, when some on the right declared him a visionary for ignoring medical advice and reopening his beaches for college kids' fun-in-the-sun. Cases did not rise at first -- or perhaps reported cases did not rise, as some questioned the Florida government's transparency in reporting data -- and DeSantis briefly stood in the winner's circle. Then reality stepped in. A surge of summer cases forced the imposition of some restrictions on Floridians, like local mask mandates imposed by mayors in some cities in South Florida. Cases decreased for a few months until, as in the rest of the country, early November to mid-January saw an even more alarming spike of infections (and another round of accusations about the accuracy of the counting). DeSantis has denied these claims throughout, considering them all "political." Now DeSantis is claiming again to be a master of pandemic control, as Florida's beach-tourism-restaurant industry is said to be doing well. Never mind that the state's seven-day infection rate of 143.9 per 100,000 population places it 12th highest of the 50 states. DeSantis is so tickled with himself that he even gathered admiring scientists like the former Trump coronavirus adviser Dr. Scott Atlas -- a neuroradiologist -- to celebrate his prescience. He played the same trick in September when he thought the worst had passed. The problem is this: by the time the ink was dry on DeSantis' latest claim that "Everyone told me I was wrong ... (but) it's clear. Florida got it right," newer data showed trends flipping to the wrong direction. For example, as of March 22, over the last seven days, Florida has had the most Covid-19 cases in the country, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the 12th highest per capita case-rate, the fourth highest number of deaths, and the 17th highest death rate. California Gov. Gavin Newsom seems to be following an exact opposite pattern from DeSantis in both praise and ridicule. Once celebrated for his pandemic management, he is now getting poor marks on managing. He has not strutted or had roundtables of fan-doctors to sing his praise. But the fact is California's recent numbers are much better than those of Florida, coming in at about 47th in the country with a case-rate 46.8 per 100,000, according to the CDC's data, and fewer deaths as well. Why is DeSantis up and Newsom down? It's simple: Florida is ignoring the death toll and instead pushing the upbeat metrics the governor would like America to pay attention to: jobs are up! and schools are open! DeSantis stood up to the Covid-19 threat like John Wayne would have done! DeSantis is not the only governor trying to dart into the spotlight using a mix of cherry-picked metrics and a tough guy, damn the scientists pose. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem shrugged off the pandemic threat then proclaimed her approach a success despite the facts. Rather than wallow in reality, she chose to celebrate an active economy and the joys of hunting season (note: the South Dakota new-infection rate is climbing the charts once again and sits at 105 per 100,000 South Dakotans ). And Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who energetically ignored all medical advice, then listened, then ignored, then listened, now has reopened the state. Yessir, he has let us know that he has decided to play hardball with the virus, and will scare the living daylights out of it -- despite those 46,000 Texans who have died of Covid-19 and despite the state seeing the country's second highest number of deaths in the last seven days. These rate-the-governors perspectives ignore a basic fact: it is no time for trophies. The pandemic is still very much with us. It is too early to compare who did what better than the next person. Every governor and state have had ups and downs, and the months ahead will still be full of bumpy, bad surprises, as Europe is now finding. Focusing on the governors' personalities and self-serving "performance reviews" turns the discussion into a raucous sack race at the county fair between too many ambitious but quirky officials. Worse, this obeisance to economic and social factors as measure of success creates a series of disturbing false equivalencies as they compare deaths against the economy. In a pandemic, there is only one outcome of any relevance: the number of people who die. For the 1919 Spanish Flu outbreak, the accounting -- 675,000 deaths in the US and 50 million worldwide -- is how we quickly evoke the depth of the tragedy. For Covid-19, this will also be what we discuss -- not a 2.3% difference in employment rates, but rather the staggering number of persons who died. Measuring Covid-19 management on anything other than the number of human lives lost is not only disgraceful, it will also almost certainly lead us to make all the wrong decisions once again and usher in yet another Covid-19 resurgence in the US.
I've always liked Scott when he was governor, he actually came to our company to host an event (or rather, we hosted the event and he joined it). A lot shorter than I expected, but then again I'm very tall. I think he did good for Florida, and he was a straight and direct individual.
We can pick a short enough timeframe to push whatever narrative we want. Did you know California's numbers are worse in the last 3 hour period? If your trend is correct, I'm sure we'll see it turn up in the numbers. But right now, Florida's numbers overall are getting better, not worse.
Speaking of numbers -- let's talk about dollar sign numbers. Can you explain to us why DeSantis is paying GOP donors big money for a Contact Tracing app while claiming contact tracing is totally ineffective. https://www.elitetrader.com/et/threads/desantis-for-the-win.345108/page-341#post-5350771