By Jefferey Jaxen

Florida’s pandemic response direction under Governor Ron DeSantis and State Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo has just trail-blazed another path by announcing significant changes to Florida’s COVID-19 guidance. In what it calls ‘Buck the CDC,’ DeSantis and Ladapo appeared on a Rumble video to lay out their initiative.

While the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been silent on updating its mask guidance to reflect the longstanding science or reflect the waning virus threat ending COVID-era restrictions around the world, Florida’s ‘Buck the CDC’ plan offers three new developments.

The Florida Department of Health is recommending against the forced masking of employees.

Doctors are allowed to practice medicine to treat COVID in the way they think is most appropriate to care for their patients. This ‘right to try’ stance includes using off-label products along with the ability to file a complaint with Florida’s agency for healthcare administration in the event a treating physician receives any pushback from hospitals.

And finally, the state is updating its daycare and school quarantine guidance to five days for school kids who test positive for COVID. The same recommended guidance will also extend to all Floridians.

The CDC is currently experiencing its biggest crisis the agency has faced in modern times as many are calling out the unscientific and politically motivated slants on their recommendations.

Vinay Prasad, associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco, recent wrote a piece titled How the CDC Abandoned Science in which he states,

“…[their] research is plagued with classic errors and biases, and does not support the press-released conclusions that often follow. In all cases, the papers are uniquely timed to further political goals and objectives; as such, these papers appear more as propaganda than as science. 

He continues,

The CDC’s use of this technique has severely damaged their reputation and helped lead to a growing divide in trust in science by political party. Science now risks entering a death spiral in which it will increasingly fragment into subsidiary verticals of political parties.

The CDC has taken increased scrutiny in its latest chapter of willful data obfuscation by refusing to publish data it has collected on booster effectiveness for 33M Americans aged 18-49. The CDC are also being criticized for failing to publish their information about child hospitalization rates and comorbidities in regards to COVID.

Even former CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield has been vocal slamming the agency’s ‘politicalization of how the data is presented’ in a recent interview on FOX news’ The Story with Martha MacCallum.

Jefferey Jaxen

Jefferey Jaxen is a health journalist and featured in his weekly segment, ’The Jaxen Report’, on The HighWire. As an investigative journalist, researcher, and compelling writer, Jefferey serves as Lead editor of The HighWire News and Opinion Team.

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