florida and greg abbott in texas banning mask mandates and rushing regeneron popup clinics, anything but the free vaccine that definitely works. under the influence of all that ignorance, trying to reason with these people is like i don t know, i ve seen this movie before. it s like a farce that feels more like a documentary. yeah, yeah, welcome to idoc aidocray. you want us to put water on the crops? yes. like out of the toilet? doesn t have to be from the toilet but that s the idea. it has electro lites. okay, look, the plants aren t growing so i m pretty sure it s not working. i m no botanist but if you put water on plants, they grow. i ve never seen no plants grow out of no toilet. we didn t have to wait 500 years to get to there. we re not waiting to find how dumb we can get.
you know, jim, it s really complicated to try to put this in your mind because you re right, the great majority of children that will get infected with covid are going to do fine. but if you happen to be one of the parents of the 2% of children and your kids get very ill, it s 1% for you, right. the risk is a little like playing russian roulette. you never know where the danger is going to be. and the reality is that the best thing you can do is try to avoid your kid getting infected. and the way you do that as dr. fauci had said, is vaccinating everybody around that kid, 12 and older, everybody needs to be vaccinated, and having the in we did that, we could really decrease significantly the kid getting hospitalized. sad fact that s not happening in many places. you have governors in florida, texas banning mask mandates. you have a whole host of disinformation about vaccination that s leading people not to get vaccinated. adults, even when kids are at risk here.
then you have states like florida and texas banning mask mandates. i mean we watched it feels to me like this initial swing from republican governors in southern states and now we re seeing democratic leaders pull in the other direction. how does that change the contours of this national conversation around covid? well, i don t know if it changes the contours. in my own home state of mississippi, we re seeing over 20,000 kids quarantined, over 5,000 kids have contracted covid, so we still see those divides in interesting sorts of ways. covid-19 has been a blue dye into the body politic revealing our illnesses and sicknesses in so many ways. one of the problems we face is selfishness and a certain kind of self-centeredness that has resulted in people opting out of any perception of the public good threatens our democracy and
schools are opening in florida this week. i know in many parts of florida. then get out of the way and let public officials, let local officials do their job to keep students safe. this is serious and we are talking about people s lives. president biden said they re checking to see if it has the power to intervene in states like florida and texas banning mask mandates. desantis is holding firm for his part. we are going to do whatever we can to vindicate the rights of parents and make sure that parents are in the driver s seat when it comes to the health, education and welfare of their kids. and these should not be decreed by the government but something that a parent is ultimately making the decision on. so today president biden will meet virtually with governors and local leaders on covid response efforts butted indication secretary cardona is turning his focus back to race. having a virtual summit on
despite rising cases, florida and texas are still railing against mask mandates, even in schools. texas as of now does not require parents to alert parents to covid cases on campus. vanity fair argues that florida and texas are competing to come up with the dumbest rules. with me now, the president and founder of a media organization and the author of once i was you. maria, i want to get to where you are and why you are there but before i do, a story that i do think intersects with the reporting that you re doing. you have states like florida and texas banning mask mandates, continuing to play politics with this virus. and now you have their governors blaming the covid surge on immigrants. i would ask what is motivating them but i think it is pretty apparent to you, to me, to our audience. talk to me about that but also