States have the right to ignore federal mandates. Nullification As A Growing Form Of Resistance To The Federal Government By U.S. States points out:
“Nullification is a legal doctrine, which argues that states have the ability — and duty — to invalidate national actions they deem unconstitutional. In its most overt manifestation, this form of resistance is used by state leaders to dispute perceived federal overreach and reject federal authority. Less overt forms of the practice involve actions by states to ignore or refuse to implement federal policy initiatives they deem outside the scope of federal authority. Nullification declarations appeared in U.S. political debates as early as the late 1700s, when Thomas Jefferson presented it as a way to preserve the principles of the constitution while states resisted unwanted direction.”
On Monday, March 7, Gov. Ron DeSantis and Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo of Florida spoke at a roundtable of doctors skeptical of COVID-19 mitigation measures as scores of doctors and scientists tuning in worldwide were shown on a huge wraparound screen behind the panel.
“The Florida Department of Health is recommending against giving coronavirus vaccines to healthy children. Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo made the pronouncement at a Monday roundtable discussion on coronavirus mitigations policies moderated by Gov. Ron DeSantis. Ladapo, who leads Florida’s Department of Health, said his department’s recommendation would be the first of its kind in the country.
The announcement came after a 90-minute discussion among 10 doctors and researchers who rejected the benefits of various coronavirus mitigation measures such as vaccine mandates, mask requirements and business and school closures, saying instead those policies only caused harm. ‘I think what Florida’s guidance reflects is the latest research,’ DeSantis told reporters at a news conference at Plant City later in the day. He said healthy kids are at low risk for the virus and that he’s seen studies showing there’s ‘very little benefit’ for them.
The Department of Health released a copy of the written recommendation Tuesday. It said that ‘healthy children aged 5 to 17 may not benefit from receiving the currently available COVID-19 vaccine,’ and that ‘there are certain risks to consider that may outweigh benefits among healthy children.’
Monday’s panel event was billed as ‘The Curtain Close on COVID Theater,’ and was held in a professionally lit studio in West Palm Beach with 10 guest speakers, including doctors and researchers from around the country. Among them were three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, a highly controversial document that recommended against lockdowns because of what they said were ‘devastating’ public health consequences.”
“On a floor-to-ceiling screen behind the panelists were square tiles with video feeds of attendees, many of whom were staffers at various government agencies in the DeSantis administration, including the Department of Children and Families, the Department of Economic Opportunity, the Department of Juvenile Justice and others.
Panelists touched on several themes championed by DeSantis, including what speakers called the ‘censorship’ of doctors who dissent from the mainstream coronavirus guidance. Some accused the CDC and other government agencies of becoming politicized or of working with media outlets to buy ‘surreptitious advertising’ promoting vaccines.
Robert Malone, a vaccine researcher who has become a vocal proponent of the anti-vaccine movement during the pandemic, said the ‘deep state’ has kept doctors from using ‘repurposed drugs’ like hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19. Numerous studies have found that drug has no clinical benefit in fighting the virus….
Another speaker, Joseph Fraiman, an emergency room doctor in Louisiana, said the ‘severe’ side-effects of the vaccines compared to the mild symptoms caused by the coronavirus in children means there’s no ‘clear benefit.’ ‘If you have a healthy child, the chances of that child dying are incredibly low, essentially close to zero if not actually zero,’ he said. Fraiman then bashed the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for not doing enough research on the coronavirus vaccine, saying it’s left a vacuum of information. ‘We have no idea if vaccines reduce transmission in kids or in adults,’ he said.”
- Jay Bhattacharya, Ph.D., professor of health policy at Stanford, research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, which calls for focused protection of the most vulnerable
- Martin Kulldorff, Ph.D., former professor of medicine at Harvard University, now senior scientific director of the Brownstone Institute, a biostatistician and epidemiologist with expertise in vaccine safety evaluation, co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration
- Joseph Fraiman, a rural emergency physician and clinical scientist, specializing in harm-benefit analysis
- Sunetra Gupta, Ph.D., Oxford University professor, an epidemiologist with expertise in immunology, vaccine development and mathematical modeling of infectious disease, co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration
“According to Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, one of the most egregious mistakes made was to ignore the fact that there’s a thousand-fold difference in risk between the lowest and highest risk groups. Children are at virtually no risk of dying from COVID, yet children have been forced to bear the burden of disease prevention. “Almost from the very beginning of the pandemic, we adopted policies that seem like they were tailor-made to harm children,” he said.
According to Dr. Sunetra Gupta, decision makers chose to do the very things we knew, for certain, would cause harm. They inverted the precautionary principle to minimize harm, and chose to maximize harm instead.”
We Must Hold Decision Makers to Account
As noted by Ladapo, one of the things we must remember and remain intent upon as we move forward is to hold people accountable for their public health decisions. Two years after the “two weeks to slow the spread,” we have ample evidence proving the decision makers “didn’t know what they were talking about,” Ladapo says.
They abused their power, they manipulated data, they lied, and they now want us all to forget what they said and did. We cannot let them get away with it. Many errors were made, and those responsible must be held to account. “Their choices, that they made for everyone, were the wrong choices that led to, basically, no appreciable benefit,” Ladapo says. “We cannot let them forget. We have to hold them accountable. We have to let the country, the world, know what the truth is — because it’s the right thing to do, and because it can happen again if we don’t.”
Stunning Denials of Science
Kulldorff, in his opening remarks, points out what he believes is one of the most stunning parts of this pandemic, and that is the denial of the basic science of natural immunity. Even doctors and hospitals that “should know better have demanded vaccine mandates for people who have already had COVID,” he says.
Perhaps even worse, hospitals have fired staff who have had COVID and have natural immunity, simply because they did not want to get the experimental jab. Those with natural immunity are not just less likely to get COVID again, they’re also far less likely to spread it to others. This makes them among the most valuable staff members a hospital can have, yet they were routinely discarded.
“That goes against basic principles of public health,” Kulldorff says. “And to have a director of the CDC who questions natural immunity, which we have now, is sort of like having a director of NASA who questions whether the earth is flat or round. It’s just mindboggling that we’ve come into a situation like that.”
Fraiman, whose clinical research expertise includes risk-benefit analysis, also expresses disbelief and frustration over the scientific censorship we’ve seen in the last two years. He points out that many of his colleagues are simply too afraid of getting fired to speak the truth.
DeSantis, similarly, highlights how incredibly difficult it has been to publish and find research that contradicted the official narrative, and even when available, the mainstream media would refuse to acknowledge it, whereas they would endlessly publicize speculation and statements of opinion that had no basis in fact or science, but supported — however flimsily — the official narrative.
I would add that so-called fact checkers have even gone so far as to “fact check” scientific peer-reviewed publications, labeling them as “misinformation” or outright “false,” resulting in their being censored on social media!
The Inversion of the Precautionary Principle
Gupta, who has some 30 years of expertise in mathematical modeling of infectious disease, points out that “The powers that be told us the measures and restrictions would work, but we didn’t know they would work,” she says. “It was a rather incoherent set of goals,” she says. “One thing we knew for certain was that lockdowns and other restrictions would have enormous cost, yet that’s what we went ahead and did. We inverted the precautionary principle of trying to minimize harm, by doing the one thing we knew would cause harm.”
I would add that the scale of that harm was never calculated or addressed at any point along the way. It’s as though it didn’t matter how great the harm was, as long as there was the appearance that we were doing everything in our power to prevent COVID.