Meet the anti-Fauci:
Florida’s sane surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo
America has had 20 long months with Dr. Anthony Fauci as the spokesman for the government’s COVID response, poorly explaining to us both the pandemic and the concurrent illogical restrictions.
Perhaps it’s time for some new voices.
The media dub Joseph Ladapo, Florida’s surgeon general awaiting confirmation, a “firebrand” who’s “controversial.” He opposes mask and vaccine mandates — and so is erroneously called “anti-vax” by his foes.
But Ladapo came off as none of these things when I spoke to him for an exclusive interview last week. Calm and poised, Ladapo became a national figure after a clip of him saying the obvious — “The data do not support any clinical benefit for children in schools with mask mandates” — went viral.
In so many ways, the Nigerian-born Ladapo is the anti-Fauci. While the oft-criticized Ladapo has stayed consistent, frequent television-guest Fauci has reversed himself many times on many details of pandemic policy without showing any data to support those reversals.
In August 2020, Fauci said, “The default position with K-12 schools should be to reopen them.” In November and December of that year, he praised reopening schools in New York City, though the city was in the middle of a COVID spike, famously saying: “Close bars, open schools.”
But in January, shortly after President Joe Biden was sworn in, Fauci had a change of heart. After meeting with teachers unions that month, Fauci openly pushed for schools to wait on reopening until Biden’s recovery bill had passed.
Similarly, in August 2020, Fauci opposed mandating vaccines, the very position that gets Ladapo labeled an anti-vaxxer. “I don’t think you’ll ever see a mandating of vaccine, particularly for the general public. If someone refuses the vaccine in the general public, then there’s nothing you can do about that. You cannot force someone to take a vaccine.”
By September 2021, Fauci was calling for “many, many more mandates” to end the pandemic. Last week he said, “We know that vaccines absolutely save lives. And we know that mandates work.”
The flip-flopping and the open politicization of national health-care policy to fit Democrats’ desires have done a lot of damage to health officials’ public trust. Ladapo’s measured consistency is a refreshing change.
While Fauci said even post-vaccination, he wouldn’t go to restaurants or events, Ladapo stressed to me the importance of living “a fulfilling life.” He said, “COVID is a health risk people have to manage. So is cancer, strokes, heart disease, accidents, injuries. That should have been the goal throughout the pandemic — to live a fulfilling life while managing risk.”
Throughout our conversation, Ladapo stressed the importance of vaccines as a tool to fight COVID. It’s the belief in using other tools as well that has made people wrongly refer to him as “anti-vax.”
“Vaccines are available. Treatments are available,” Ladapo said. “If you do get COVID, get treated early.”
Ladapo believes medical leadership has not stressed the importance of a healthy lifestyle to defeat both COVID and other ailments. He thinks doctors should encourage people to “become as healthy as possible. It’s good for all prevention: heart disease, diabetes, etc.,” he said. “The big picture is not COVID, the big picture is health.”
Gov. Ron DeSantis pushed the idea that life should go on throughout the pandemic. He too is being wrongly portrayed as “anti-vax” because of his opposition to mandates, a view Biden shared last year. Our family spent nearly five months in Florida in the winter of 2021, drawn by the normalcy of the state, especially where children were concerned. The governor was on television daily, urging people to get vaccinated. My husband and I were both vaccinated in Florida under his program.
But vaccination can’t be the only way forward. Thousands of people are hospitalized across the country with breakthrough infections.
Ladapo argued doctors haven’t made enough effort on the treatment side: “The other component that other states should adopt is both preventative and treatment. Makes me sad as a scientist and a doctor that more effort is not made to connect patients with treatments. That has cost many lives during the pandemic.”
He believes it’s political. “150,000 Floridians got monoclonal antibody treatment. It reduces hospitalizations by 70 percent or more. Because of the politics, the treatment wasn’t used in many other places.” Florida was famously using the treatment during the summer spike when the Biden administration took over distribution and cut Florida’s supply.
Ladapo refers again and again to the data. It’s his passion. While at Harvard Medical School pursuing his M.D., he also got a PhD. “You only do that,” he told me, “if you love data and data analysis.”
To Ladapo, being the “anti-Fauci” means “being considerate of the fact that health means more than avoiding a virus. It’s been a terrible time with social isolation, loneliness. What we’ve done to children has been criminal, disconnecting them from their peers and disrupting their education even though they’ve always been at low risk. There are multiple components of health.”
COVID isn’t everything, in other words. Go live.