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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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Jones aside (I am in her district and she's...interesting.) there is some fishiness involving Florida's Covid reporting in particular. They haven't supplied data to the CDC, for example, for a few weeks: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#county-view?list_select_state=Florida&data-type=CommunityLevels (there are NOT zero cases or deaths). The state surgeon general, Joseph Lapado, also has a...questionable record of statements and actions during the pandemic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Ladapo.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but DeSantis loves Lapado playing down Covid for tourism reasons and attracting the kinds of residents who feel the same way. No one in FL is interested in lockdowns, but playing down vaccination and failure to encourage vaccination in a state full of old people is just poor leadership. Failure to update Covid data with the CDC makes it difficult for residents to determine risk. And there have been issues with Florida's leadership throughout the pandemic.

Florida updates it's data every two weeks. Demanding daily updates for number of cases of one particular virus, indefinitely, seems like an unusual demand for rigour: Nowhere pre-2020 was this demand expected. Nor is it clear what purpose such data would serve to individuals in determining risk. Case numbers are largely a product of testing, unlike inherently delayed random sampling. And this is even if we believe that the CDC is something that is respectable enough to be worthy of being supplied data by anyone.

Ladapo's questionable statements like... Supporting informed consent, as any medical professional should? Acknowledging that there's no empirical evidence for masks?

Florida's vaccination was done on the basis of oldest first. This seems obvious enough to me as a strategy, but apparently many US states decided to vaccinate "essential workers" including people in their 20s at negligible risk first? Do you think that a strategy other than by age is more effective?