Governor Ducey Is Responsible For The Deaths of Thousands of Arizonans In Pursuit of Political Ambition

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Update to The Mass Murderer Trump Death Cult Governors Must Be Stopped Before They Can Kill Again (Updated) (August); Hold Trump Death Cult Governors Accountable For Their Criminal Negligence In Mismanaging The Coronavirus Pandemic (Updated) (October).

Last week, the Washington Post reported, Arizona’s pandemic outlook worries experts as mask and vaccine mandate battles rage:

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Arizona has caught up to New York when it comes to reported deaths per capita — even though the latter was ravaged by the coronavirus early in the pandemic before treatments or vaccines were developed.

Some health experts worry Arizona could be headed for a deepening crisis as winter approaches. Although average daily deaths from covid-19 remain much lower than during the state’s second wave in January, Arizona experienced a 138 percent increase in the seven-day rolling average of daily new deaths per 100,000 people last week, according to data collected by The Washington Post.

“It’s bad,” Will Humble, executive director of Arizona’s Public Health Association, told The Post.

Some public health experts say Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) lifted pandemic-related restrictions in March without putting in place measures to mitigate the risks of reopening, causing cases to rise again in July just as the more contagious delta variant was becoming the most common coronavirus variant in the United States.

Now, Ducey — who is vaccinated and has urged others to get vaccinated but argues it should be a personal choice — is engaged in a battle against the federal government on several fronts in an effort to prevent mask mandates in schools and vaccine mandates in workplaces in his state.

Last week, the U.S. Labor Department warned Arizona (and two other states) about its “continued failure to adopt” a Biden administration emergency public health directive requiring, among other measures, that health-care workers receive paid time off to get vaccinated and to recover from potential side effects. Ducey called the reprimand, which could result in the federal government stripping the state of its ability to enforce its own workplace safety standards, “nothing short of a political stunt and desperate power grab.”

Previously: Arizona is the first state to sue over Biden vaccine mandate on private businesses: “Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich filed the first lawsuit against the Biden administration’s upcoming COVID-19 vaccine mandate for private companies with at least 100 employees, arguing that the federal requirement violates the U.S. Constitution.” [It does not.]

This week, Arizona’s COVID-19 transmission rate is nearly three times the national average:

Data suggests that Arizona is heading in the wrong direction as new COVID-19 cases rise weeks away from the holiday season.

“Arizona does appear right now to be in a bit of a surge. We have the highest transmission rate in the country right now,” said Dr. Joshua LeBaer, executive director for the ASU Biodesign Institute.

LeBaer points to a recent increase in hospitalizations.

“The virus is out there and it’s still transmitting to people,” LeBaer explained during a briefing on Wednesday. “We have not seen an appreciable drop in weeks.”

The recent seven-day average percent positivity in the U.S. was 5.3% as of Tuesday, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Meanwhile, Arizona is experiencing a significantly higher range of between 10% to 14.9%.

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LaBaer says Arizonans should avoid large groups of people when indoors.

“This is not a good time to be in crowds in Arizona. We’re leading the country right now in transmission, so going out to crowded, indoor events without masks on would not be a good plan,” LeBaer said. “If you are around people who aren’t in your immediate circle, I’d be wearing a mask.”

According to the CDC, Arizona is one of 41 states with a “high” transmission rate.

Our Trump Death Cult governor has been a miserable failure at controlling Covid-19 in Arizona, and now he is suing the Feds to try to overturn workplace rules that give employees the option of getting vaccinated or tested weekly for the safety of their fellow workers and their families when they return home from work. The man is a monster. This is no longer criminal negligence, this is willful premeditated killing of Arizona’s residents in pursuit of his political ambitions in the Trump Death Cult.

It is a fair characterization to call him a mass murderer. He should be prosecuted.

Jim Small writes at the Arizona Mirror, The death toll of political ambition will be Doug Ducey’s legacy:

More than anything, Doug Ducey wants his legacy to be the massive tax cuts that he has given wealthy Arizonans. It’s an issue he campaigned on in his first gubernatorial campaign, and in whatever the next phase of his political career brings, he will surely point to it as a victory.

But his true legacy will be the thousands of Arizonans who have died needlessly on his watch, as he repeatedly and stubbornly and maliciously mismanaged the COVID-19 pandemic.

It has been on his watch that COVID-19 became the leading cause of death in Arizona, even as other similar states — where the governors implemented simple and common-sense measures to blunt the spread of the illness — managed to limit the death toll of the novel coronavirus.

It has been on his watch that the pandemic in Arizona has become more deadly than in New York. According to The New York Times’ invaluable data tracking, the Grand Canyon State has seen 288 people per 100,000 die from COVID-19, surpassing the 287 per 100,000 in the Empire State.

That is particularly horrendous, given that New York City was the epicenter of the pandemic as it first began to spread in the United States in April 2020. Fear gripped the city, and spread nationwide, as hospitals there were quickly overwhelmed, health professionals didn’t have access to the equipment they needed — both to keep themselves safe and to treat the ill — and morgues were overflowing. Nearly 1,000 people per day were dying.

On top of that, the global medical community was still learning exactly how COVID-19 worked, leaving few reliable ways to treat it. And little was known for sure about how it spread, hamstringing efforts to contain it.

By the time the coronavirus began spreading widely in Arizona in June, many of those questions had been answered. Infectious disease experts had figured out that the virus spread through the air, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was telling Americans to wear masks in public places.

The month before our first spike in cases, ignorance about how to respond to COVID-19 was replaced by politics, with then President Donald Trump spending the month increasingly politicizing efforts to limit the illness and urging states that had restricted commerce — including Arizona — to ignore CDC guidelines and re-open nonessential businesses.

And if there’s one thing about Ducey that you can take to the bank, it’s that he will reverse course at a moment’s notice in pursuit of praise. Faced with a few bad headlines, Ducey’s backbone melts like a Crayon on a Phoenix sidewalk in July.

Initially, Ducey’s about-faces worked to preserve public health. Remember when Ducey told schools they should stay open, and then dozens of school districts announced they were halting in-person learning to protect students and staff? Days later, Ducey was suspending classes.

The governor was likewise nowhere to be found when cities began declaring public health emergencies and closing down bars, in-restaurant dining, fitness centers, movie theaters and other businesses where people regularly come in close contact with each other. The mayors were praised for taking bold and decisive action. Two days later, Ducey announced that he was ordering all bars to close and shutting down restaurant dining rooms across Arizona.

But as the political winds changed, Ducey’s COVID-19 policies became littered with choices aimed at preserving his political standing among Republicans — and Trump. He lifted the stay-at-home order right before Trump came to town in May, spurring the state’s first major wave of cases. 

Trump hated masks, and Ducey couldn’t be bothered to do more than impotently suggest that Arizonans wear them — while he refused to — and certainly wouldn’t entertain mandating mask use. Until, of course, public pressure mounted that he display just a modicum of leadership … at which point he told cities and counties to handle it themselves, so unwilling was he to make a decision that would upset the president who stridently opposed masks because encouraging their use might make people think the pandemic was real and quite dangerous.

That’s the backdrop for how we arrived at this moment, with Arizona surging from behind to pass New York as a more deadly place in the pandemic — an ignominy made all the more horrifying when you realize that 3,840 (and counting) Arizonans have died since April 1, a week after free vaccines became available to anyone who wanted them.

Ducey was quick to tout the early successes of the state’s vaccination distribution program, and the state was among the most efficient at getting vaccines into bodies in the spring. But as summer arrived, our vaccination rates plunged and haven’t recovered — as if Ducey’s promise that we would “vaccinate our way out” of the pandemic never happened.

It would be bad enough if the governor was MIA, merely watching as things got worse while the Delta variant surged through Arizona, bringing a new spike in cases and deaths, filling hospitals along the way.

What we got instead was intentional sabotage. With the prospect of his prized tax cuts in danger of not passing, he sold out our public health in the name of capturing GOP votes. He barred mask mandates in our schools, said cities couldn’t require masks or vaccines, and decreed that businesses can ignore public health rules.

As bad press mounted, Ducey then did exactly what we knew he would: He denied doingthe thing that he’d bragged about doing only weeks earlier.

It was a fitting declaration from a coward whose political ambition killed the people he swore an oath to protect. And that will be his legacy in Arizona.





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