Ron DeSantis Meets Privately With Anti-Vax Activists

The Daily Beast reports:

The event, held at the state Capitol in Tallahassee, principally featured various COVID-19 masking skeptics. They included a Stanford professor with a history of opposing lockdowns, and a Tallahassee private school student who was “very concerned about masks being required this year.”

Still, the standout may have been Mark McDonald [photo], a Los Angeles clinical psychiatrist. “There is no medical rationale for vaccinating children,” he wrote in an email to The Daily Beast in which he also suggested both masks and vaccines “don’t work.”

In several posts on Facebook, McDonald asks why the government was pushing “unapproved experimental vaccines” on children, refers to the deadly pandemic as the “Wuhan virus,” and insists masking minors is “child abuse.”

Read the full article. McDonald is a member of America’s Frontline Doctors, the anti-vax nutbags group that made international headlines last year for its “demon semen” leader. The meeting with DeSantis was surely the result of attacks by the far-right after he urged Floridians to get vaccinated. McDonald stars in multiple anti-vax YouTube videos, some of which are interviews with the Chinese cult outlet, The Epoch Times.

NEW: Hours before federal officials issued new mask guidance to combat the surge of the Delta coronavirus variant across America, and even as his state’s hospitals were veering toward disaster, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis quietly met with anti-maskers https://t.co/3IAQAv8BIL

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) July 27, 2021