DeSantis for the win

gwb-trading said:
"DeSantis for the win" -- Let's see how his rollout of the vaccine for the elderly is doing.

MAGA Retirement Enclave Is Ground Zero in Florida Vaccine Shitshow
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-v...y-are-ground-zero-in-florida-vaccine-shitshow

From claims of flagrant partisan favoritism to fears of getting sick in long lines, the rollout is not going smoothly in a state where the governor’s COVID skepticism is legendary.

On Christmas Eve, Dr. Jeff Lowenkron, a top doctor in The Villages, delivered an ominous holiday message to residents about the spread of coronavirus in Florida’s most politically infamous retirement community.

As the chief medical officer for The Villages Health, a health-care provider that operates six clinics in the sprawling central Florida development, Lowenkron has access to real-time stats about new cases and hospitalizations. According to his Dec. 24 weekly email newsletter, a copy of which was shared with The Daily Beast, Lowenkron revealed that the two main hospitals were treating 94 patients with COVID-19, of whom 19 were in the intensive care units.

“Local hospitalization numbers for COVID are at the highest they have been and are rising,” Lowenkron warned. “The Villages Health has seen an increase in positive test numbers in our test sites, as well as among our staff who are treating patients.”

But Lowenkron didn’t give a timetable for when Villagers could expect to get vaccinated. This even though Gov. Ron DeSantis had just days earlier used the Trumpian retiree stronghold as the backdrop for his big announcement that, unlike much of the rest of the country, Florida would be prioritizing senior citizens over essential workers.

"Those people who got the vaccine have put in long years of service and all of them are within the age group to qualify for it." -- — John Calandro, former president of the Sumter County Republican Executive Committee

On Tuesday, Shirley Schantz, a 73-year-old retired nurse, said she had not gotten any more information about The Villages Health’s vaccine rollout plan since Lowenkron’s mass email. “There seems to be no plan,” Schantz said. “If there is a plan, most of the residents don’t know about it.”

What is certain is that five Republican Villagers who have held elected office or positions within local GOP clubs were among those who received the vaccine last week when DeSantis held the press conference at the UF Health The Villages Hospital. The Republican Villagers’ starring roles ignited criticisms from their Democratic counterparts and the editorial board of the online newspaper The Villages-News, which was the first to report on the quintet’s Republican connections, as well as their ties to Mark Gary Morse.

The president of The Villages development company, Morse and his family have a long history as Republican Party rainmakers, according to the Tampa Bay Times. Morse’s executive assistant said her boss was out of the office until next week and unavailable for comment, and attempts to reach the local Republicans who got early vaccines were unsuccessful.

Critics accused DeSantis of a shameless, GOP-first photo-op to make him look good amid all the bad press he’s been getting for his uber-libertarian intransigence regarding mask mandates, business lockdowns, and social distancing. In the following days, DeSantis’ vaccine rollout has been roundly slammed by infectious disease experts, and turned into a logistical mess for the county offices of the state health department.

But it was the appearance of naked partisanship—hordes of GOP voters in The Villages powered Republicans into statewide office once again in November—that marked a fresh fiasco in a state where Gov. DeSantis can’t seem to get anything right on COVID.

“One of the principles of effective communication is being fully transparent,” said Dr. Marissa Levine, a University of South Florida infectious disease professor. “By him giving the appearance that this is politically driven, his communication has not been effective. That undermines the whole framework.”

DeSantis should base his decision making on strong data and an ethical framework given the demand for the COVID-19 vaccine is currently outpacing the supply, Levine added. “Was it just him who made the decision or was it informed through a process that ensures equity?” she asked. “We really haven’t heard that.”

The governor’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

John Calandro, former president of the Sumter County Republican Executive Committee, dismissed the criticisms. He noted the five Republican Villagers were between their late sixties and mid-eighties.

“Those people who got the vaccine have put in long years of service and all of them are within the age group to qualify for it,” Calandro told The Daily Beast. “I don’t know how they were selected. I think if they would have picked four [Villagers] off the street, people would have complained. I am just happy we are going to be a target community [to get the vaccine].”

Suffice it to say his Democratic neighbors feel rather differently. “Even in the time of the coronavirus, it all depends on who you know,” Marsha Shearer, a director for The Villages Democratic Club, told The Daily Beast. “I think it comes down to who votes Republican among the old people who live in The Villages.”

Instead of pandering to elderly folks, DeSantis should have prioritized giving the vaccine to essential workers such as teachers, teachers’ aides, grocery store clerks, and bus drivers, Shearer said. It’s a strategy that is backed by top infectious disease experts and that DeSantis has scoffed at.

“I finally got in touch with someone and they informed me it was now first-come, first-serve starting on New Year’s Day.... It’s scary.” -- — Edward Kippel

“As we get into the general community, the vaccines are going to be targeted where the risk is the greatest, and that is in our elderly population,” DeSantis said at last week’s presser. “We are not going to put young healthy workers ahead of our vulnerable elderly population.”

Bernard Ashby, a Miami-based cardiologist who is the Florida state lead for the Committee to Protect Medicare, said DeSantis showing off five retiree Republican Villagers getting inoculated fits a consistent pattern by Florida’s top elected official of putting politics over people. “It is all about optics and not about the substance,” Ashby said. “He’s given seniors the impression that the cavalry is on its way to the rescue, and giving people a false sense of hope.”

Indeed, since DeSantis proclaimed seniors were his next vaccination priority, hospitals and county health departments providing vaccinations for 65-and-over Floridians have been inundated with an onslaught of elderly people hoping to land their first dose. It’s a scenario that foreshadows a long delay given the limited run of vaccinations being distributed across the state and the country.

In Lee County, hundreds of senior citizens camped out in front of immunization sites hours before the places opened to jab them on a first-come, first-served basis.

In Lake County, which borders Sumter and includes a small portion of The Villages, the Health Department initially announced it would offer vaccinations to senior citizens later this week at two locations. The Dec. 29 press release instructs people to call and register for an appointment. But the following day, the Lake Health Department issued another directive informing local elderly folks that the vaccinations would be given on a first-come, first-serve basis beginning on Jan. 1 and that appointments will not be accepted.

The divergent instructions left Edward Kippel, a 78-year-old who said he had coronary artery disease, frustrated. The retiree, who along with his wife live in Lake’s portion of The Villages, said he kept getting a busy signal and messages that the health department’s phone line was not in service for several hours on Tuesday.

“I finally got in touch with someone and they informed me it was now first-come, first-serve starting on New Year’s Day,” Kippel told The Daily Beast. “I saw on TV people waiting in line in other parts of Florida. Some weren’t wearing masks. It’s scary.”

A spokesperson for the Lake County Health Department did not respond to an email requesting comment.

To be sure, the troubles with Florida’s vaccine rollout mirrors those of other states, argued Dr. William Haseltine, chairman of the US-China Health Summit and a world-renowned infectious disease expert. Haseltine said the Trump administration shoulders some of the blame. “States need financial and material support from the federal government,” he explained. “The federal government did not work with states on detailed plans on how they would distribute the vaccines.”

Still, DeSantis has exacerbated the problem in Florida, Haseltine said. “The governor has handled this crisis as bad as anybody could,” he added.

Lowenkron, the Villages doctor, did not respond to phone messages seeking comment. But he assured email recipients that his employer, in conjunction with the Sumter County Health Department and the two UF Health hospitals in the area, was working on a plan that would entail an online sign-up process and a drive-through vaccination with space for a 15-minute observation after the inoculation.

However, the Sumter County Health Department is still prioritizing vaccinations for doctors, nurses, nursing home staffers ,and old people living in long-term care facilities, according to biological scientist and spokeswoman Megan McCarthy. Those groups have been prioritized almost universally nationwide in the earliest wave of vaccinations; it’s in the second tranche after them that states like Florida and Texas are diverging by putting all seniors before workers.

A majority of The Villages is located in Sumter County, where a total of 221 vaccinations had been administered, according to the Florida Health Department’s Dec. 29 vaccination report. Statewide, 175,465 Floridians had gotten the vaccine, including 35,456 people 65 and over.

On Wednesday, the Sumter County Health Department said it received 2,500 doses of the Moderna vaccine, according to a press release. The first people to get inoculated from the new batch will be medical personnel working a mass vaccination event at a future undetermined date, as well as health-care workers currently caring for COVID-19 patients on a daily basis. The goal is to have a sizable vaccination force ready to administer the immunization shots, the press release states.

“Following the initial distributions to high-risk frontline health-care workers and long-term care facility staff and residents, the health department will work to provide vaccines to additional priority groups,” McCarthy said in an email statement.

She added, "Updates on how residents will be able to receive the vaccine will be announced as soon as those plans become available."

On Wednesday afternoon, a Sumter Health Department email obtained by The Daily Beast indicated people could begin calling a phone number on Jan. 4 to schedule a future appointment to obtain the vaccine.

Meanwhile, in Lake County, Kippel’s frustration at the prospect of jumping over other elderly folks to get it was palpable.

As he put it, “I want the vaccine, but I am not sure I want to expose myself to the virus while waiting in line to get it.”
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How quickly this turned from "we'll prioritize the elderly over 1st responders" to "we'll prioritize fund raiser, donors, and republicans over other elder".
 
Here4money said:
How quickly this turned from "we'll prioritize the elderly over 1st responders" to "we'll prioritize fund raiser, donors, and republicans over other elder".
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Yes.... it is totally f@cked up. At first I gave DeSantis credit for pushing a policy of having the elderly vaccinated first because Florida has the largest percentage of people over 65 in their population.

Now it has turned out his program is just a scam to prioritize his donors, fund raisers, and Republicans above others while still squawking about "protecting the vulnerable". In the meantime the unprivileged elderly in Florida are sitting in long lines overnight out in the weather in lawn chairs desperately trying to get vaccinated (without success). Simply absurd.
 
gwb-trading said:
Yes.... it is totally f@cked up. At first I gave DeSantis credit for pushing a policy of having the elderly vaccinated first because Florida has the largest percentage of people over 65 in their population.

Now it has turned out his program is just a scam to prioritize his donors, fund raisers, and Republicans above others while still squawking about "protecting the vulnerable". Simply absurd.
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In fairness I would opt out of a DeCuntis photo op if asked.
 
Trump and Florida's little Trump don't care about the lack COVID vaccines or their failed distribution...

You know how Nero fiddled while Rome burned? That’s how much Trump cares about the lack of COVID vaccines
https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/carl-hiaasen/article248218080.html

The day before returning to the White House for New Year’s Eve, Donald Trump played golf at his country club in West Palm Beach. He was there from 9:26 a.m. to 2:33 p.m., a leisurely round.

Meanwhile thousands of his fellow Floridians in the same high-risk bracket spent many of those hours strangling their phones, unsuccessfully trying to get an appointment for the first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. Others lined up early at inoculation sites, only to be sent home after supplies soon ran out.

“Operation Warp Speed” currently looks more like “Operation WTF.” The big rollout is rocky and slow throughout the country, but the only surprise is that people are actually surprised.

Given the hapless void of federal leadership, think of how many things would have to go right in order to vaccinate an entire population — or even, say, 70 percent — of 331 million people. The supply-chain logistics are mind blowing, the costs astronomical.

That there are even vaccines available is amazing, considering how new this virus is. Lots of folks remain skeptical about receiving the injections, and whatever decision they make will have Darwinian consequences.

With the grim winter surge in COVID hospitalizations, multitudes of informed Americans are rightfully worried about getting sick, and they want to get inoculated as soon as possible. The key to sanely enduring the next few months is to lower one’s expectations, keep your masks on and make friends with your phone.

Being a certain age, I have a vaccine hotline number on my speed-dial. It always rings busy, but I dutifully try over and over. The county where I live received only a few hundred vials and ran out within hours. Officials say they don’t know when more will arrive, but they’ll let us know.

The Trump administration had promised 20 million vaccinations by the year’s end. As of New Year’s Day, about 14 million doses had been distributed nationally and only 2.8 million Americans had received the injection.

Many states received smaller shipments than expected, and have pleaded for federal funds to help expedite and organize the mass vaccines. The president tweeted Wednesday that the government has done its job, and told the states to “get moving.”

Then he went to the golf course.

In Monroe, Louisiana, the family of Luke Letlow was planning his funeral. Newly elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, Letlow died last week after being hospitalized with COVID-19.

He was only 41 and had no underlying health issues, according to doctors. He had a wife and two young children. That he was a Republican is irrelevant; the virus doesn’t care.

After all this time, predicting who will get fatally sick and who won’t is still dicey. Nationwide, about 344,000 Americans died from COVID-related causes in 2020 — substantially more than all the U.S. soldiers killed during World War II.

In Florida, where the death toll has surpassed 21,000, we have a governor who, like Trump, sidelined the infectious-disease experts, downplayed the breadth of the threat and ducked responsibility when the outbreak exploded.

And, like Trump, Ron DeSantis is now banking on the vaccine to sanitize his legacy of denial and misdirection.

The politicization of the pandemic has cost way too many lives, and at this point the jig should be up. Almost everyone understands that COVID-19 is far more deadly than common influenza, and almost everyone knows somebody who’s gotten seriously ill or died.

So of course the vaccine appointment hotlines are lighting up while the shots get administered in a relative trickle. Florida dispensed less than 25 percent of the 1.2 million units it received before Jan. 1. With no plan coming from Tallahassee, each county must patch together its own program.

That’s discouraging, but hardly shocking. For Floridians, any expectation of bureaucratic efficiency is unrealistic — ask anyone who spent weeks and even months trying to collect emergency unemployment payments on a state website apparently managed by stoned raccoons.

In the end, patience will win out because there’s no other way. Not all 22 million Floridians want to be vaccinated, but those who do — and aren’t in urgent need — will eventually be able to get their shots at a CVS or Walgreens.

The trick is staying safe until then. The state’s positivity rate for COVID-19 tests jumped ominously to 11.5 percent by Thursday.

While working on this column, I continued trying to phone my local COVID hotline, as advised. Finally the call went through, and a short recorded message said the vaccine was all gone, for now. Click.

Which was more helpful than a busy signal. But not much.
 
More Americans who don't understand the difference between Federal, State and local govt.


You think Cuomo would have allowed Trump and the Federal govt to decide who, how and when the vaccine is administered?
 
jem said:
More Americans who don't understand the difference between Federal, State and local govt.


You think Cuomo would have allowed Trump and the Federal govt to decide who, how and when the vaccine is administered?
More...

Trump’s CDC defined the phases for who gets the vaccine in which order. We are seeing Florida and Texas not following the Trump administration mandate.

DeSantis proclaimed that Florida would do those over 65 first before healthcare workers. What actually is occurring is donors and supporters of DeSantis and GOP are moved to the front of the line in Florida while the elderly are lined up overnight in lawn chairs outside only to be told in the morning no vaccine is available for them.
 
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