As a scientist I am used to working in the shadows.

I wanted to really understand the world through careful application of scientific methods. Methods which ensure that the ideas that emerge are backed up by proven facts and are not just ideas that I favored.

For example, the testing of new drugs like the COVID vaccines are tested using the “double blind” method. Neither the patient nor the doctor knows who is given the actual new drug and who is getting a benign substitute. This is done because it eliminates any bias doctors and patients might have and it corrects for the placebo effect. If a new drug is no more effective than the benign drug (the placebo effect) then it is not considered effective.

A correctly done scientific analysis separates fact from fiction and gives solid facts that can be used to expand our modern world. All sorts of remedies for COVID were proffered through social media, including colloidal silver, which turned some people permanently gray. It really distressed me to see people taking advice from conmen who I would not even trust to mow my lawn.

This was hard for me to witness, but the straw that broke the camel’s back was the demonizing of the well-respected scientist Dr. Fauci by a major presidential candidate, Gov. Ron DeSantis. By attacking Dr. Fauci Ron DeSantis literally jabs his finger in my eye and in the eye of every living scientist and desecrates the graves of all scientists including such renown scientists as Newton, Einstein, Oppenheimer and Galileo.

Give them back, Ron DeSantis. Give back all the advances that science, along with engineers, technicians and mathematicians have given you. You don’t deserve them.

Give back your cell phones, cars, computers, electric lights, modern medicine; almost everything that defines our modern world. You wantonly ignored good scientific advice on wearing masks and social distancing. Even worse, in doing so, you carelessly helped spread the COVID virus to innocent people and contributes to the deaths of hundreds.

His political base deny that man has changed the climate while fires burn out of control in a drier and hotter west and coastal cities flood from rising sea levels and more violent storms. His base pays us back by crassly ignoring solid scientific advice that helps them and also your family.

In the unkindest cut of all they refuse to accept a vaccine that is given for free, a vaccine that can rid the world of COVID as vaccines have rid the world of the scourge of other viruses.

They reject the vaccine for inexplicable reasons. They do not deserve the fruits of our scientific labors. Give them back.

If this was all DeSantis did it would be bad enough, but he attacks the most vulnerable little children, who cannot defend themselves, the little gay and trans children. He does this against all current scientific knowledge for his own selfish political gains.

Only an inhuman monster would act that way. For that inexcusable behavior and the attacking of science I say:

“Give it back Ron DeSantis, give back everything that science has given you. You don’t deserve it.”