Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

OPINION:

Rubio’s wacky COVID-19 stances are dangerous

Where’s David Letterman when you need him?

Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio deserves his own Top Ten List of COVID Falsehoods.

His hometown, Miami, continues to be the state’s epicenter of the raging coronavirus pandemic, this time around more contagious in its latest incarnation, omicron.

Almost two years in, most of us — and especially so elected officials — ought to be pros at promoting best practices for how to help the public stay as safe as possible.

Yet, the record numbers of infected, the hospitalized on the rise and people still dying mean nothing to the senator, who is better suited for Republican foreign policy talking points than dispensing on-the-fly silly, dismissive — and dangerous — public-health information.

Rubio is so out of his league on the subject of COVID-19 that he keeps striking the wrong chord at the worst time, and in the most public way — via his favorite soap box, Twitter. It’s as if he were doing it on purpose for the sake of the spectacle.

Just when you think he couldn’t possibly go there, the senator becomes an even worse caricature of himself.

On Tuesday, when news of the death of a prominent 46-year-old anti-vaccine (all vaccines) California lawyer from COVID was trending, Rubio tweeted this:

“We have a record number of cases because Omicron INFECTION is virtually unpreventable. But we have solid evidence that Omicron ILLNESS is far less severe,” he said.

That omicron infection is “virtually unpreventable” is patently and malignantly false. We have infections because people aren’t wearing masks. And although this new variant infects even the vaccinated, the symptoms have been less severe, knocking the legs out from under anti-vaxxers’ ridiculous argument that vaccines don’t work.

Omicron is more easily transmitted, which makes it so dangerous. But Rubio is cherry-picking half-truths. He makes the situation seem hopeless, that there’s nothing that can be done. He’s spreading dangerous information that could cost the lives of the unvaccinated, who are more vulnerable to the disease.

“It’s time to get back to normal & learn to coexist with an endemic virus by managing risk & mitigating harm,” Rubio goes on to say, never bothering to tell people that vaccination and wearing a mask are the best ways to mitigate harm.

As to whether this is an endemic virus, that remains to be seen. We don’t know what will happen in three months. Maybe the coronavirus will become endemic like the flu, but medical experts aren’t even going there yet.

Instead, they’re desperately sifting through scientific data and begging states like Florida to be more transparent with theirs because it is vital to assessing everything from risk and probability to treatment.

“This calls for a little bit of prudence interpreting scientific data,” a Miami-based COVID expert tells me. “We don’t know what may happen in three months. When it comes to cherry-picking data, the in-your-face-problem is data changing daily. ... Uncertainty shapes new science.”

The expert points to monoclonal treatments that Gov. Ron DeSantis keeps plugging despite the fact that “evidence is sketchy” and they don’t work very well.

“The most dramatic development is vaccines that work,” he said. “To suggest otherwise is a sad and cruel deception. If everyone had worn a mask when we said, ‘Wear a mask,’ if everyone had vaccinated, we’d have a lot less dead people.”

What Rubio is saying isn’t based on good science and isn’t good public policy.

With Florida breaking COVID infection records by stunning numbers, Rubio tweeted on Jan. 3 this stream of consciousness, no periods (my annotations are in brackets):

“There is no Omicron hospital ‘surge’ in Florida [false, say medical personnel living again through the exhaustion of being care providers]

“People admitted for non-COVID reasons get tested [true, of course they should; don’t you think their health care workers deserve to know this?]

“If they test positive, they get counted as a ‘COVID patient’ [and why not?]

“The majority of the 5,400 ‘COVID patients’ in #Florida are in the hospital for non-COVID reasons” [The point being? Maybe you broke a bone, come to the hospital with COVID, develop pneumonia from it and die.]

COVID can become the more important thing you are in the hospital for.

It’s as if Rubio is purposefully twisting information to confuse and push the Republican argument that everything is going swell in Florida, that the DeSantis-led GOP cadre has the pandemic under control when, in fact, they know they don’t.

And we do, too.

But guess who doesn’t?

The people listening to Rubio and DeSantis-influenced nonsense on Cuban radio in Miami.

The people listening to conservative radio in red Florida.

The people who aren’t listening to any media, but soak up prevailing falsehoods.

If the management of COVID in this state were going as smoothly as Rubio and DeSantis want us to believe, why is the state withholding information and deceiving us about the data? Why can’t the Department of Health show statistics about who getting COVID is vaccinated and who isn’t?

No one is asking for patient names, simply numbers. This is particularly perverse.

Truth is, a public official of Rubio’s rank spreading misleading and false information makes us all less safe — not just from COVID, but from everything.

Fabiola Santiago is a columnist for the Miami Herald.