Joseph Ladapo lauds Ron DeSantis’ COVID-19 approach during New Hampshire event

State employees and assets continue to buoy Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign, with the latest example being Joseph Ladapo’s trip to the Granite State.

The Surgeon General accompanied the Governor to a “Medical Freedom Town Hall” in Manchester, where the two brought their patented brand of COVID-19 mitigation contrarianism to a New Hampshire audience.

Ladapo led off his remarks with comments on the “confusing” staging of the town hall itself.

“There are people behind you and I wonder who designed this,” the Surgeon General said. “I guess it gets the most people in the room maybe. But, I feel, you know, I’m thinking, I, I want to be talking and I want to see everyone I’m talking to, so maybe I’ll keep spinning.”

Ladapo continued to rotate while addressing the crowd, with his back to the camera often, and he continued spinning as well.

He noted that he went to medical school at Harvard, and had “very fond memories” of learning to ski in New Hampshire, along with taking trips to the Granite State to sample “maple candy” and “look at the leaves change.”

While Ladapo notes he has a “day job in Florida,” he said he was “invited to come support a man” that he has a “great deal of admiration for” in DeSantis. From there, he told his personal story, including working in a hospital in California as the pandemic became real.

“There was this atmosphere of panic,” Ladapo related, saying there were “new protocols” every day, with “panic and fear” driving decisions. Yet he noted that the disease affected “older people” and claimed it “pretty much left kids alone.”

Ladapo struggled against the COVID-19 consensus until the Governor’s Office called.

“They told me they had a vacancy coming up. They were looking for a new Surgeon General,” Ladapo recounted, saying the call struck him as “awfully strange.”

“I didn’t know what to think,” Ladapo related.

His wife urged him to take the gig, saying “that’s the call (she) had been waiting for.”

“A day or two later I had a job interview,” Ladapo said, and after the “fun interview” with DeSantis and former Chief of Staff Adrian Lukis, he got the job offer the next day. He now makes more than $500,000 per year before taxes, after taking what he repeatedly called a “gamble” to take the job.

Ladapo described DeSantis as “willing to do what he believed is right despite the opposition.” He also noted that he met Donald Trump and that, while he has “nothing against” the former President, “there’s no one running in this election who has the critical qualities” DeSantis has.

Ladapo also lauded DeSantis’ “amicability” and his “free-flowing love and care about other people,” by way of calling the Governor to the stage.

From there, it was DeSantis’ show, and it was replete with well-trafficked arguments about the pandemic, familiar to Floridians.

The Governor called for “accountability” regarding the coronavirus, including the “negative impact” of federal policy.

“They were wrong about school closures,” DeSantis said. “They were wrong about outdoor transmission. I was getting hammered because I had beaches open in Florida.”

DeSantis also defended his decision to tell state universities that they would not isolate college students, suggesting that cohort handled COVID-19 without any problems in his state.

“They’re going to go out and they’re going to go to parties, they’re going to intermingle, you know, what a lot of them may get COVID and it’ll go, it’ll cycle through and then they’ll go on with their lives. And not one person was even admitted to the hospital in the college age in Florida, even though they were out living normally,” DeSantis contended.

The Governor eventually got around to bashing Anthony Fauci, by way of saying the “medical swamp” needs to be “drained.”

“He had been there since the ’80s. We need term limits for bureaucrats,” DeSantis said of the former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.