DeSantis & Abbott : Will They Be Held Responsible for Mass Dying of Adults & Children?

Hospitals are filling up and children are near death across a swath of Red states from Texas to Florida. The governors of those two states are leading a movement.

Republican Governors Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas have gone all-in on a high-stakes bet, and the example of Donald Trump suggests they may just win it. Win or lose, though, they're both tenaciously hanging onto their bans on mandated masks in schools.

Their bet is that they'll get away with letting tens of thousands of their citizens and thousands of their citizens' children die or get "long COVID" and the people of their states will simply forget and move on.

They're encouraged in that belief by the scientific reality that contagious diseases usually follow a predictable curve of increasing infections until hitting a point where so many people are dead or immune that the disease can no longer expand its range. From there, the disease incidence declines steadily and eventually flattens out to a low level. Add in rapidly expanding vaccination and the curve collapses even faster.

It happened centuries ago with the Bubonic Plague (aka the Black Death) and Smallpox, among other diseases. Before vaccines it happened every year with chickenpox, mumps and measles. It happens now every year with the flu as it did in a big way in 1918. We've all seen that curve both in history and in our own lives.

The question is how many adults and children in Florida and Texas will have to die or get "long COVID" before those states hit the "herd immunity" threshold...and whether the good citizens of those states (particularly the Republican voters) will tolerate that level of disability and death just to satisfy the tough-guy egos of their respective governors.

After all, Trump presided over what was arguably the worst period of unnecessary mass deaths and disability in the history of America...and DeSantis and Abbott voters still love him.

Multiple scientific analyses of Trump's response to the pandemic, the most credible highlighted by Dr. Deborah Birx after she left the White House, show that at least 400,000 Americans would not have died if Trump had simply put into place a nationwide mask and social-distancing mandate like most other countries did.

But Trump, afraid that any concessions to public health would soften the economy and therefore his re-election chances, chose instead to encourage people to ignore masks and other protective measures and just go shopping and get back to work.

That part of Trump's bet didn't quite work out as planned: he lost the election. But his longer-term bet, that most Americans would soon forget and not blame him for all those unnecessary deaths, has paid off.

Instead of being saddled with the Stalin-like title of a mass murderer of his own people (Stalin used famine instead of disease), Trump is back to holding rallies and basking in the warm glow of his cult's adoration -- while continuing to spread disease among his followers!

DeSantis and Abbott think they can pull off the same trick, and they may well be right. Killing large numbers of Americans rarely sticks to Republicans.

George W. Bush made a similar bet back in 2001 after 9/11, as Spencer Ackerman documents in detail in his new book Reign of Terror. Bush could have simply taken the Taliban up on their offer to arrest Bin Laden and turn him over for prosecution, but instead he began bombing the second-poorest country in the world, where the average income was around $700 a year.

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