Although almost nothing is certain in life, there are two things we can be sure of when it comes to The New York Times: their “journalists” are not only incredibly dishonest, but are also horrible at math.
Case in point, their most recent pile of nonsense—unleashed by their so-called “investigative team,” titled “The Steep Cost of Ron DeSantis’s Vaccine Turnabout.”
This 3,000-plus word smear piece dressed up as journalism is nothing more than a heap of lies, omissions and easily disproven Covid theories—all in a pathetic attempt to discredit Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s strong record on Covid—in which he protected the most vulnerable, saved hundreds of thousands of jobs, allowed businesses to thrive, kept children in school and preserved the liberties and freedoms of Floridians.
Virtually every claim the Times makes about DeSantis, is either not backed by any legitimate science, data, or is a complete fabrication and distortion of the governor’s record.
Then again, no one should be surprised that one of the three “journalists” responsible for this hogwash is none other than Sharon LaFraniere, whom the Times boasts in her bio, received a “Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on Donald Trump’s connections with Russia.” In other words, she received an award for something that not only never occurred—but that this sad leftist propagandist outlet is still peddling and celebrating.
Let’s dive right into the Times lunacy.
The piece starts out hilariously enough by claiming that in September 2020, Dr. Deborah Birx who was part of the White House coronavirus task force, received what was described as an alarming call from DeSantis’s then Florida surgeon general, Dr. Scott Rivkees. What was so alarming? DeSantis no longer supported what the Times considered “preventive Covid measures,” including limiting indoor dining.
In other words, given that thousands of restaurants in lockdown states had either closed permanently during Covid, or were forced to adopt ridiculous and unscientific measures that only allowed them to operate at roughly twenty-five percent capacity, DeSantis wanted the businesses in his state to actually be able earn a profit. The governor did not want restaurants in Florida to have to close through no fault of their own; he did not want employees to be laid off and he wanted customers to be free to choose if they thought eating out was worth the risk. Oh the horror.
The Times also conveniently ignored that DeSantis only wanted to do away with so-called mitigation measures once the data clearly showed who was most adversely affected by the virus, and once it became obvious that states with extreme lockdowns fared no better than places that remained open.
What a travesty.
The article then goes on to claim without any irony that DeSantis stopped following the guidance of Dr. Birx and Dr. Anthony Fauci, and instead chose to listen to “academics who reinforced his thinking that older people and others who were vulnerable should be protected from infection, but everyone else should be allowed to lead normal lives.”
Well yes, given that the survival rate for individuals between the ages of 40 and 49—without pre-existing health conditions—is roughly 99.7 percent, and is even higher among younger people, that would seem to be an appropriate policy.
But evidently, when it comes to Covid, the Times still thinks that healthy 12 year olds should have been treated just like an overweight 70 year old diabetic with cancer.
Just to prove how stupid the Times thinks we are, the authors wrote this whopper deliberately designed to mislead us: “As of this summer, more than 345,000 Americans under 70 have died of the virus, and more than 3.5 million have been hospitalized with Covid. The disease has killed nearly 2,300 children and adolescents, and nearly 200,000 have been hospitalized.”
The Times wants us to be terrified by those numbers, but fortunately, I know how to do third grade long division.
Let’s look at the first claim, from the beginning of when Covid started (so roughly from the Fall of 2019, until June of 2023): 345,000 Americans under the age of 70 have died of the virus. We are not told anything about these so-called adults other than that they’re under the age of 70. We are not told if they have underlying conditions, are overweight, have heart problems, or diabetes. All we know is that 345,000 people between the ages of 18-69 supposedly died due to Covid.
Given that there are roughly 260 million adults in the U.S., that still only means that roughly 0.13 percent of adults under the age of 70 died from Covid.
The next scare claim from the Times that Covid “has killed nearly 2,300 children and adolescents,” is even more absurd. There are 73 million children living in the U.S., so that means approximately 0.003 percent of them have died from Covid, hardly an alarming number.
It’s not clear if the authors of this piece are aware that by citing those numbers, they inadvertently proved the governor’s point, which is that Covid poses almost no risk to young healthy people.
The Times piece then tries to blame DeSantis for refusing to encourage those under the age of 65 to get vaccinated, which they said resulted in hospitals in Florida supposedly overflowing in the Summer of 2021.
Leaving aside that there does not seem to be any reason for healthy children and young adults to take a vaccine that does not work the way the “health experts” told us it would—what evidence do the authors cite that hospitals in Florida were overwhelmed? They quoted a former chief executive at Oak Hill, which they described as “the biggest hospital in Hernando County,” a town with a mere population of barely more than 200,000 people.
Mickey Smith, the former chief executive, who the Times cited, apparently documented in a memo dated Aug. 13, 2021, “Our patients are younger and sicker.” The Times then said that Smith claimed, “Of 17 patients on ventilators in intensive care on Aug. 13, 2021, more than half were younger than 55. Only one was vaccinated.”
Once again the Times fails to provide any context of importance. Leaving aside the fact that 17 is hardly a large number of people on ventilators, we are not told anything about these patients, other than that at least nine of them are below the age of 55. We’re not even told whether or not they died. Instead we’re left to wonder what the ages and health conditions of these individuals are.
Of course this omission, like everything else in this hit-piece, is deliberate by the Times, because they will do anything to push a smear narrative against DeSantis.
The simple fact is that, even after all the smoke has cleared and many on the left have now reluctantly admitted that Florida got it right, while the health experts were wrong—the Gray Lady still can’t bring itself to give DeSantis credit where credit is due because they do not want him to be president.
Carpe Diem is the pseudonym for a writer who was a speechwriter in the Trump Administration.