Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) on Friday pushed back against Democrat and media claims that Americans still needed to follow coronavirus restrictions even after getting vaccinated, even though the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have shown to be 95% and 94.1% effective, respectively, at preventing symptomatic COVID-19 after two doses.
At a press conference in Lakeland, Florida, DeSantis said people who have received the vaccine should not have to continue wearing face masks.
“I also think it’s a problem that people, where, you’re telling people to get a vaccine and yet people who have been vaccinated for months are wearing two masks,” DeSantis said, according to WESH.
DeSantis also said multiple times at the press conference that people who have been vaccinated should not be worried about wearing masks, especially multiple masks.
“If the vaccine is effective, why would you be wearing two masks? Like some of these folks are doing. It doesn’t make sense,” he said.
Also at the press conference, DeSantis told people to consider themselves immune once they have received the vaccine.
“So, you know, my view is, if you get a vaccine, the vaccines are effective, you’re immune. And so act immune. If you tell people the opposite then, gee, if it’s not effective for them and it’s not gonna change anything, then what’s the point of going through it?” the governor asked.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has suggested that even fully vaccinated people should continue to wear masks and social distance, saying they can still spread the disease to others.
“Once you start pulling back, the thing you don’t want to have is to start having a plateauing that is so high, that inevitably things are going to go back up,” Fauci said recently. “You’ve got to get that baseline down lower than it is now particularly in light of the fact that we have some worrisome variants.”
Florida has fared better than most states with strict lockdowns during the pandemic, including New York and Michigan, despite the Sunshine State’s high percentage of elderly residents. On Monday, The Daily Wire reported that “Florida state health officials revealed that the state recorded a single-digit increase in COVID-19-related deaths for the first time in almost seven months.”
More from The Daily Wire:
Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who refused to institute harsh lockdowns in his state, recently conducted a roundtable discussion with a group of physicians and scientists who were, as The Wall Street Journal reported last week, “critical of strict lockdowns to fight the coronavirus.” During the video, DeSantis and the experts criticized some responses in the U.S. as too strict and ultimately ineffective, citing the damage done on a public-health level by locking down schools and businesses.
YouTube removed the video, claiming it spread misinformation. On Monday, DeSantis criticized the decision.
“The biggest media conglomerates, who claim to be avatars of the First Amendment and free exchange of ideas, they’ve really become cheerleaders for censorship. If something doesn’t fit the overriding narrative, then in their view it’s better that it gets left on the cutting-room floor. It’s best that you edit it out of existence rather than tell people the truth. So I think what we’re really witnessing is Orwellian; it’s a Big Tech, corporate collusion and the end result is that the narrative is always right. Well, I don’t think that’s what the American people want; certainly people here in Florida,” DeSantis said.