Politics. Presidential debates are a modern confection, a way to expropriate the enthusiasm of team sports and graft it onto some of the most imperfect humans one could conjure.
Debates primarily serve the purpose for a candidate to assure his/her devotees that they look and sound better than anyone else on the stage. Minds are rarely made up.
That all makes last week’s debate between Gov. Gavin Newsom of California and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida all the stranger. Only one man – Gov. Ron DeSantis - is a candidate for the office of president.
Gov. Newsom was there, as best as we can tell, both a surrogate for President Joe Biden and as a possible successor.
At least that is what we thought.
Notwithstanding these oddities, the debate was the first national forum in which the thing the two men are arguably best known for – public health response to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic – discussed their records.
Gov. DeSantis rightfully claimed the benefits of rejecting many non-pharmaceutical interventions including lower unemployment, fewer business closures and better educational outcomes. Gov. Newsom, despite some irrefutable data points to the contrary, argued the opposite was true.
While political leaders across the globe are accepting their ouster, in part due to public health policies and all the knock-on effects of inflation, unemployment and migration, the person responsible for the U.S. public health emergency policies, former President Donald Trump, has avoided even so much as a discussion.
Which left Gov. Newsom playing the part, not so much of the current president as the former; ignoring what is evident to nearly everyone while pretending no minds should be changed.
It begs the question; how long can such widespread denial endure?
Policy. In Texas, not long.
Fresh off an impeachment trial, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a claim against PFE alleging violations to the Texas Deceptive Trade Practice Act. These include misrepresentations of relative risk reduction, durability of protection, transmissibility; protection against variants, and a scheme to conceal the COVID vaccine’s underperformance.
In many ways, Paxton’s case is an echo of the tobacco litigation that originated in 1994 with a complaint, similarly using state consumer protection laws, filed by Mississippi Attorney General Mike Moore.
The tobacco litigation also arose out of the federal government’s ongoing fecklessness. Then, as now, the federal bureaucracy could never untangle itself from the conflicts inherent in managing the interests of industry and over 500 Members of Congress
So, the states acted.
In the coming months we should expect other states to initiate their own investigations. Florida has already done so. Many states will be reticent, especially those such as California, where leading political figures doubled as pharmaceutical salesman in 2021.
But if there is gold in those hills, as the 46 states in the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement learned, a change of heart is easily accomplished. If North Carolina did it, any state can.
Power. General Paxton would probably have a compelling complaint with just four counts. However, the fifth, which alleges affirmative efforts to censure or silence those dissenting views that might trigger larger skepticism, is the stuff that enrages the public.
More importantly is that PFE’s efforts – largely through the intervention of former Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and PFE board member, Scott Gottlieb – would not be known had X/Starlink/Neurolink CEO, Elon Musk, not invited independent journalists like Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi to review Twitter’s files. They have subsequently published and testified about what they found.
Absent this alleged subterfuge, the Texas complaint would look less like the tobacco litigation and more like a run-of-the-mill consumer protection claim. Lying, whether it is over California’s net out-outmigration or the efficacy of a vaccine, is never a great long-term plan, especially when practiced on a grand scale.
No wonder everyone is after Elon Musk.
Have a great rest of your weekend.
Emily Evans
Managing Director – Health Policy
Twitter
(Politics, Policy & Power is published in the quiet of Sunday afternoon or holiday Monday and attempts to weave together the disparate forces shaping health care. It makes no attempt to defend or prosecute the views of any established political party or cause. Any conclusions to the contrary rest with the reader alone.) in the U.S.
