DeSantis’ appointment of Joseph Ladapo is troubling on two levels. It means the state’s top public health official will be disseminating health advice out of line with leading public health guidance across the country and downplaying the state’s extraordinary Covid crisis. It will also give more expert heft to DeSantis’ extreme policy choices as he continually denies the dangers of Covid in his state despite jaw-dropping hospitalization rates and casualties in recent months......

Ladapos' Covid-related views are out of line with many of the medical experts who populate his previous institutional homes, as well as mainstream scientific thinking about threats of Covid and how to mitigate them, like the efficacy of masks. And it appears he deploys his fringe views to support lax policies to guard against Covid.

During a news conference marking his new position Tuesday, Ladapo said of vaccines, “There is nothing special about them compared to any other preventive measure.” This is despite the fact that medical experts and public health officials around the world have described the vaccine as the best defense against Covid. He also suggested that getting one should be a personal decision.....

Ladapo is a signatory of the controversial 2020 Great Barrington Declaration, a statement published on a website sponsored by a libertarian think tank and signed by scientists calling for non-high-risk people to resume normal life during the pandemic and to let herd immunity protect the public. (Some of the names on the list were fake, and almost all were later made private.) This theory of resolving the pandemic was a fringe view: Most scientists and public health experts pointed out that this approach would be unprecedented, lacked scientific backing, ethically problematic and that there was no plausible way to prevent transmission to high-risk people.

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