Over and over and over, they have pushed stories that not only fail to land, but make the critics look progressively less credible.
The Washington Post claims that DeSantis gave a speech that “appeared to suggest . . . that getting a shot to protect against the coronavirus could cause infertility.” Joe Cunningham at RedState explains what they left out. The Post’s quotation:
“Think about how ridiculous it is what they’re doing by trying to force the nurses” to get immunized, he said in a speech announcing funding for nursing certification programs. “A lot of these nurses have had covid. A lot of them are younger. Some of them are trying to have families.”
The full quotation, reported in local Florida media:
“Think about how ridiculous it is what they’re doing by trying to force the nurses with these vaxes you know a lot of these nurses have had COVID, a lot of them are younger, some of them, they’re trying to have families, there’s a whole bunch of things that they have going on and so they don’t want to be forced to do it,” DeSantis said. “You see the shortages in there anyways, and now that is adding to it.”
In other words, DeSantis is focusing on both the hardship on the nurses and the counterproductive nature of firing them during a nursing shortage. Can you read the quotation as a nod toward reasons people give for refusing the vaccine? Sure: They’re young, they have natural immunity, some of them are worried about unproven theories of the vaccine affecting fertility. The latter is speculative hysteria, but as with many things, it does not come out of nowhere; as the New York Times (hardly a far-right-wing anti-vaccine outlet) reported last week:
A study published on Thursday found that women’s menstrual cycles did indeed change following vaccination against the coronavirus. The authors reported that women who were inoculated had slightly longer menstrual cycles after receiving the vaccine than those who were not vaccinated. Their periods themselves, which came almost a day later on average, were not prolonged, however, and the effect was transient, with cycle lengths bouncing back to normal within one or two months. . . . The delay was more pronounced in women who received both vaccine doses during the same menstrual cycle. These women had their periods two days later than usual, the researchers found.
Have we reached the point at which our urge to compel people to do things against their will is such that a public official can’t even mention people’s reasons for that resistance, when commenting on the downsides and hardships of compulsion?
There’s a reason many of us have compared DeSantis’s relationship with the media to the Road Runner constantly escaping Wile E. Coyote while the coyote’s traps explode in his face. Over and over and over, they have pushed stories that not only fail to land, but make the critics look progressively less credible the next time they come around.