JANUARY 2022 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

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1. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. DeSantis has been trying to make a name for himself as a Republican willing to be a Worse Donald Trump, and he hasn't been missing a single beat lately in trying to out-Trump the former Dear Leader. He was quick to realize that Republican voters really, really wanted fake COVID-19 treatments, and while he ceded the "what if we somehow shoved a disinfecting light up everyone's ---" territory to Donald, he went all-in on hydroxycholorowhateveride, then switched to becoming the nation's top promoter of monoclonal antibody therapies after the state's hydroxywhatever stockpiles were proven utterly useless.

DeSantis has, in fact, been touting extremely expensive monoclonal antibody treatments as preferable to being vaccinated against Covid. Imagine his fury, then, as the emergence of the omicron COVID-19 variant turned those drugs from expensive-but-plausible early treatments to utterly useless.

The FDA announced this month that it will be revoking the emergency use authorizations for regeneron and Eli Lilly-manufactured monoclonal antibody treatments. The reason for the reversal is straightforward: While the therapies did appear to have some merit in fighting earlier COVID-19 variants, they have proven to be ineffective in combating the omicron variant now responsible for over 99% of new U.S. Covid cases. They've been tested; they don't work. The FDA, therefore, is withdrawing emergency use authorization for now so that people aren't being treated with drugs that the FDA and the companies themselves agree aren't useful.

The point of treating sick Covid patients is to make them less sick, after all. The point isn't to load them full of treatments that don't work so that scientifically illiterate political figures like Ron DeSantis can boast to their fans that they know the secret cure for our pandemic troubles.

As you can imagine, Ron is extremely furious that he has once again centered his political ambitions on a miracle cure that turns out to not do a damn thing, and because Ron is a Republican, and therefore a hoax-promoting fascist, he is instead insisting that this is all a trick, the FDA is doing it to spite him and to hurt Florida, and he's going to make sure Florida's many, many seriously ill Covid patients are pumped full of the two treatments even if he has to sue the federal government to make it happen. .

And, that is not all. Commenting on a speech where he railed against testing for the Coronavirus, DeSantis raised eyebrows when he asked whether people got screened for illness prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Now think about it," DeSantis said Friday. "Before Covid did anyone go out and seek testing to determine if they were sick? It's usually you feel like you're sick and you get tested to determine what you maybe have come down with."

Sorry, moron. Preventive screenings for numerous diseases, including sexually transmitted infections and forms of cancer, are common even in people who do not have any symptoms of the disease. Even DeSantis’ wife advocates for preventative cancer testing and talked about her own breast cancer diagnosis.

Someone needs to tell Governor Shit-for-Brains that new discoveries cause behavioral changes. Before polio, did anyone go out and seek the polio vaccine? Before cancer, did anyone go out and seek mammograms, colonoscopies or pap smears? Before fire, did anyone go out and seek to boil water? 

What a man! The same man who allowed one million COVID-19 tests to expire in a warehouse. Do we need more evidence that DeSantis’ brain has been separated from his cerebral cortex? And, this imbecile has serious presidential ambitions. He has all the credentials for the GOP.