What if Governor DeSantis had imposed vaccine mandates ??? (Part A, 1st experiment, Governor DeSantis)

Last update: Monday 6/20/22 

The previous note posted to this blog ended with an awkward question: Had Governor DeSantis made one exception to his anti-mandate posture by requiring public and private sector employers to vaccinate their employees, would the death rate for all residents in Florida have been as low as the death rates in California and New York?

DeSantis in 2024 -- the COVID good news and bad news

Last update: Tuesday 6/14/22 

A few days ago, The Guardian published an article headlined, "Is rising Maga star Ron DeSantis the man to displace Trump in 2024?"

Its second paragraph declares, "The rising star of the conservative Maga movement – named for Trump’s “make America great again” campaign slogan – has beaten the former president in several recent polls of party activists, some of whom appear to finally be growing weary of Trump’s “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen."   

Does the CDC have full access to its most important data?

Last update: Monday 6/13/22 

The editor of this blog has come to believe that a substantial proportion of the CDC's guidance that limited our behavior during the pandemic was not based on limits derived from an underlying "science" of the coronavirus, but on the CDC's limited access to the petabytes of data in its own repository.  

How well have our vaccines protected the oldest members of our society against COVID?

Last update: Saturday 6/11/22 

Throughout the pandemic the coronavirus has killed a far higher percentage of the oldest members of our society than any of the younger age groups. Using CDC data, this blog note compares the death rates for vaccinated persons with the death rates for unvaccinated persons within each age group

Elections 2024 ... Risk averse Democrats vs. risk tolerant Republicans ... Part 2 (Age groups and vaccinations)

Last update: Wednesday 6/8/22 

This is the second of two blog notes that position Florida's Governor Ron DeSantis as a prototype for GOP candidates in 2024 who might run on platforms that oppose COVID mandates. Part 1 examined the rationale that Governor DeSantis -- an ambitious, highly educated, risk tolerant, potential 2024 candidate -- seemed to employ in his contrarian management of the pandemic in Florida for over two years. This second part examines some of the CDC's COVID statistics by which DeSantis and other GOP candidates might be judged when presenting their cases to an electorate that was still divided into risk tolerant vs. risk averse voters ... assuming that the pandemic is still raging in 2024.