Today, Florida has among the lowest case rates in the nation and around 80 percent of its adult population is vaccinated against COVID-19.
In August, when the Delta variant was hitting Florida and the South, Krugman — a useful straw man on this issue — couldn’t stop tweeting and writing and speaking about the deadly Delta variant. Krugman, like many others, was adept at taking useful partisan snapshots of the pandemic. And his New York Times column often focused on allegedly nefarious policies that perpetuated the problem. COVID was a red-state crisis, he explained. By late August, Florida’s cases began to drop. You could probably most accurately measure the state’s COVID rates by simply checking in with Krugman.
I concede that the following is an unscientific survey of Krugman’s words — or, rather, just as unscientific as his COVID analysis. But, it seems, the last time the columnist tweeted the word “Florida” was August 19. The last time he mentioned “DeSantis” was August 27. (And he still deserves an apology.) The last time Krugman mentioned the Republican “death cult” was September 28. The last time he mentioned COVID was October 1, and the “pandemic” October 7. The last time the Nobel Prize winner used the word “Delta” on Twitter was on September 6, noting that it was “amazing to me how many news reports on the Delta disaster manage to avoid mentioning ‘Republicans.’” Is it more amazing than a columnist writing piece after piece, tweet after tweet, blaming Florida’s allegedly nihilistic policies for spreading Delta but then simply ignoring the entire issue when it’s inconvenient? I think not.