Target: Ron DeSantis, Governor of Florida
Goal: Lift restrictions on school districts trying to impose critical public health measures.
They should be preparing to go back to school or playing with their friends. Instead, they lie in hospital beds across the country. Machines breathe for them. The terror of gasping for breath sends them into panic attacks, and doctors must sedate them. Too many of them will never see the outside of a hospital again. In the United States, their numbers have grown exponentially over the past few months. In Florida, those numbers have skyrocketed. While they fight for their lives, their governor is busy ensuring more like them will fill the ICU in the tough months to come.
The mutation of COVID-19 known as the delta variant (as transmissible as the chicken pox) has rapidly increased infection rates country-wide. Florida has become the nation’s largest hot-spot with 11,515 hospitalizations at most recent count. Children across the nation now account for 21 percent of new cases. Weighing these disturbing new realities, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently revised its guidance to encourage universal mask-wearing indoors. The American Pediatrics Association has joined this chorus, citing the tremendous danger for unable-to-be-vaccinated children in particular.
Despite these grim realities, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis continues to play politics with this pandemic and put the lives of even his youngest constituents in danger. The governor recently signed an executive order banning schools from a state with the highest rate of delta-driven COVID spread in America from implementing mask mandates. If any school attempts to put the health if the children under its care first, crucial funding could be withheld from that school. The governor is instead content to let school playgrounds become his latest cultural battleground and risk ostracizing students who want to protect their health.
Sign the petition below to demand this public health enemy and political opportunist stop bargaining with the lives of children.
PETITION LETTER:
Dear Governor DeSantis,
Governor, in your own words, you’re going to “stand in the way” of efforts to curb a disease that has killed hundreds of millions of people around the world, and an ever-increasing number in your own backyard. Playing politics with a public health crisis for adults is one matter. Imposing your partisan will on actions that could lead to the deaths of children is on quite another despicable level.
In one week’s time, the number of children across this country hospitalized with COVID-19 rose 85 percent. Doctors are giving heart-wrenching accounts of tending to their young and dying patients who leave this world terrified and hooked up to tubes. Just imagine for a moment if such a fate befell your own child. Kids cannot protect themselves. They rely on adults to make responsible decisions and to always look out for their best interests. For this pandemic in particular, they are the most vulnerable.
Rather than provide them with the support and the security they need, you are politicizing their health, their livelihoods, and their very futures. No one sees you banning uniforms in schools, which are intended to shield children from bullying and ostracization (a consequence they will surely face as your culture wars reach the playground). No one sees you raging about routine childhood vaccinations intended to safeguard children. Instead, you threaten and intimidate school districts that do want to ensure the physical and emotional health of their young charges.
Governor, put the politics aside. Be a true leader who sets the right example for young Floridians. Lift the ban on school masking policies immediately.
Sincerely,
[Your Name Here]
Photo Credit: Karolina Grabowska
A parent has the right to decide for their child. Hopefully their decision will mean life and not death. Kids are getting gravely sick with Covid plus Delta. They are dying. A parent, unless for religious reasons, might not be able to live knowing their child died or was permanently maimed by this virus. There is a vaccine. No child has to die. False information and politics has played a vinimous part in the deaths. Politicians don’t care. They only want to stuff their pockets with money made off being reelected. I wish we could clean the slate! This will get worse not better until better decisions are made and people vaccinated and hospital beds available for those who did get vaccinated yet have other medical concerns, hearth attacks, emergency operations, strokes, etc. Unvaccinated people have no right to fill up beds when it was their choice to remain unvaccinated.
PM I agree with you 100%. The people who refuse to wear a mask or get vaccinated should not be treated if they get sick. I know that sounds cruel but they are the ones keeping this shit going.
Totally agree with everything you wrote!!
Governor De Santis: You MUST NOT stand in the way of efforts to protect Floridians from contracting COVID. You are supposed to CARE for your citizens. It’s disgraceful and shameful and heinous that you’re PREVENTING them from this deadly disease.