‘Apolitical’ Statewide Grand Jury endorses DeSantis’s anti-mask, anti-lockdown policy choices

By Noreen Marcus, FloridaBulldog.org

A statewide grand jury is writing a chapter of Florida history that says Gov. Ron DeSantis’s administration was “following the science” by rejecting masking and lockdowns at the peak of the COVID-19 public health crisis.

Look for at least one vaccine maker to be portrayed as a villain in the final product. The grand jury empaneled in Tampa has until Dec. 26 to fulfill its stated mission by delivering an indictment – unlikely –or a commentary.

In February the grand jury released an interim report that begins by forcefully asserting its own impartiality. “First and foremost, as an institution, the Statewide Grand Jury is apolitical. The members of this Grand Jury are not public officials and we have no specific agenda with respect to these issues,” the report says. 

But the report goes on to assault the actions of federal agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Guided by lawyers from Statewide Prosecutor Nicholas Cox’s office, the 18-member jury found the agencies’ pandemic guidelines were ill-advised and based on faulty risk assessments.

The report also defends fringe views of the coronavirus, rebranding them as scientific truths: “It is a sad state of affairs when following the science constitutes an act of heresy, but here we are.”

Former Florida Surgeon General Dr. Scott Rivkees, who led Florida’s virus eradication efforts until September 2021, put the report in a national context in an interview with Florida Bulldog.

“Florida is the only state to have a grand jury of this nature,” he said.

The interim report doesn’t suggest the grand jury will devote its remaining time and resources to compiling practical scientific advice on how to minimize lives ruined or lost in the next epidemic, or towards examining abuses in the awarding of COVID related contracts.

A great deal was lost in the COVID-19 pandemic. Florida had 93,000 deaths; U.S. deaths topped 1.1 million. According to the CDC, in 2022, 6.9 percent of U.S. adults who survived coronavirus attacks reported long-COVID symptoms – fatigue and respiratory and neurologic problems.

THE INDIANA MODEL

Rivkees, today a professor in the School of Public Health at Brown University in Providence, RI., praised the approach taken by Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb of Indiana. Mainstream scientists there helped a biodefense commission plan for a future virus outbreak. “The commission supports public health and has honest, bipartisan input,” he said.

But in Florida, “public health has now become part of a political wedge issue,” Rivkees said. He likened it to critical race theory, book censorship and LGBTQ rights.

Rivkees has criticized the DeSantis administration for questioning the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines. He said the experts who shape Florida public health policy “really are on the medical fringe, something which is very different than what they did in Indiana.”

He referred to the Public Health Integrity Committee that DeSantis launched simultaneously with the statewide grand jury in December 2022, five months before the governor announced his presidential bid. The chair is Rivkees’s controversial successor, Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo, a staunch opponent of vaccines and other virus mitigation measures.

In a published study, Rivkees shows how politics, as opposed to science, seemed to motivate DeSantis throughout the pandemic.

For example, he wrote that DeSantis announced the purchase of 1 million doses of hydroxychloroquine soon after then-President Donald Trump promoted the drug on March 21, 2020.

On April 8, 2020, the governor held a press conference to display a COVID-19 patient who’d been treated with hydroxychloroquine. DeSantis and Trump were allies at the time.

“Recent data show that the use of hydroxychloroquine during COVID-19 has been linked to about 17,000 deaths,” Rivkees wrote.

TWO SKETCHY SOURCES

The interim grand jury report doesn’t identify potential targets of criminal indictments due to secrecy rules. The rules don’t apply to authorities that reinforce the report’s conclusions, however.

Two of them look sketchy.

The report quotes Dr. Donald Henderson, “one of the world’s most famous epidemiologists,” for his successful work to eradicate smallpox. He opposed quarantines.

“As experience shows, there is no basis for recommending quarantine either of groups or individuals,” Henderson wrote in 2006, the report says. “The problems in implementing such measures are formidable, and secondary effects of absenteeism and community disruption as well as possible adverse consequences, such as loss of public trust in government and stigmatization of quarantined people and groups, are likely to be considerable.”

So what did Henderson, once chief of the CDC’s virus disease surveillance program, have to say about mass lockdowns during a once-a-century pandemic? We’ll never know because he died in 2016, a relevant fact the report doesn’t disclose.

To resolve whether masks help keep the coronavirus from spreading, the grand jury turned to The Cochrane Library, a U.K. nonprofit that collects and synthesizes scientific research data. The report describes Cochrane as the “gold standard” in its field.

“There is uncertainty about the effects of face masks,” Cochrane researchers wrote in January 2023, the report says. “The low to moderate certainty of evidence means our confidence in the effect estimate is limited, and that the true effect may be different from the observed estimate of the effect.”

Two months after Cochrane’s mask report surfaced, the Toronto Star published a story with this headline: “How the Cochrane Review went wrong. Report questioning COVID masks blows up, prompts apology.”

Apparently, Cochrane’s analysis was based on shaky data. Still, “the authors concluded that masking in the community made ‘little to no difference.’’’ This last phrase went viral, the newspaper reported.

It must have reached Florida’s COVID-19 grand jury, which somehow missed the subsequent apology.

MUCH TO DO BY DEC. 26?

When DeSantis asked the Florida Supreme Court to convene a statewide grand jury on COVID-19, the assignment had little to do with masking or lockdowns.

The jury was supposed to investigate “crimes and wrongdoing committed against Floridians related to the COVID-19 vaccine,” according to a Dec. 13, 2022 statement from DeSantis’s office.

“The Biden Administration and pharmaceutical corporations continue to push widespread distribution of mRNA [COVID] vaccines on the public … through relentless propaganda while ignoring real-life adverse events,” the statement continues. “These risks include coagulation disorders, acute cardiac injuries, Bell’s palsy, encephalitis, appendicitis, and shingles.”

Fact check from Dr. Rivkees: “These are events that have been described, but cause and effect have not been proven. When you have more than 700 million doses of vaccine that have been administered in the U.S., vaccines are going to intersect with a wide variety of medical conditions.  An abundance of information shows that the mRNA vaccines have an excellent safety profile and serious adverse events are exceedingly rare.”

Judging by the grand jury’s interim report, in eight months the jurors didn’t even begin to tackle their main task of ferreting out criminality in the COVID-19 vaccine industry. As of now they have seven months to complete their assignment and produce indictments – or not.

Perhaps the grand jury does not need to take any punitive action to accomplish its real goal.

In October 2022, Surgeon General Ladapo came out against vaccination for men aged 18 to 39. He relied on an anonymous study that showed a relatively high incidence of cardiac-related deaths among men who had COVID-19 shots.

Medical professionals pushed back hard. Dr. David Gorski, a Detroit surgical oncologist and critic of the anti-vax movement, said Ladapo’s stance represents the first time in American history “a state government weaponized bad science to spread anti-vaccine disinformation as official policy.”

Now the grand jury may be incorporating that disinformation into an official account of Florida’s COVID-19 history.