Florida has a new state surgeon general today, and I’m sure everybody is itching to know who Gov. Ron DeSantis—the man who devoted himself to attacking pandemic safety measures as a means of furthering his political ambitions in the party of Trump-addled anti-maskers, vaccine conspiracy theorists, and mass death enthusiasts—has chosen to replace the outgoing surgeon general that none of you have ever heard of. DeSantis sidelined him so aggressively during the pandemic the poor man was in danger of meeting Jimmy Hoffa.

Who’s the new top Florida health official? Who got the DeSantis rose? Surprise! It’s this guy:

Meet hydroxychloroquine touter, mask skeptic, vaccine-dismissing Dr. Joseph Ladapo, last seen buttering up one of Donald Trump’s preferred crackpot pandemic cures during a period when Trump was casting about for pandemic solutions that would involve not doing one damn thing on his part. Ladapo is a surgeon general DeSantis can trust to toe the Florida Republican line when making the state’s schools, government agencies, restaurants, cruise ships, and alligator feeding ponds into glorious breeding grounds for new COVID-19 variants.

There wasn’t a chance in hell DeSantis was going to pick anyone who wouldn’t nod approvingly at Republican talking points. DeSantis exists to serve DeSantis, and whether Floridians die while DeSantis postures for a Trumpian presidential run is a side issue at best.

As for Lapado, he is an interesting choice. The “America’s Frontline Doctors” group who presented themselves to America in that video—a video Google removed for promoting pandemic misinformation—is dodgy as hell and not near the “frontlines” of anything. However, Tea Party Patriots co-founder Jenny Beth Martin is involved. The bizarre boosting of hydroxychloroquine by the group’s various members should have caused some sort of reckoning when it became apparent the treatment was snake-oil nonsense. Still, Lapado and the others appear to be indifferent to damage done by those claims.

Early in the pandemic, Lapado had already scrambled to the press with a Wall Street Journal op-ed defending anti-maskers, social distancing refusers, and other public health menaces with a relentless barrage of talking points straight out of Republican mouths. There wasn’t any word that Lapado was prepared for U.S. deaths to inch towards the 700,000 mark back when he suggested that public policy goals should be focused on “not overwhelming hospitals” rather than on preventing Americans from getting sick in the first place.

We can take from his backing of the DeSantis approach even now that he has absolutely no issue with the current number of pandemic deaths—and believes the nation can tolerate considerably more.

Indeed, Lapado is all-in on the DeSantis approach. At the press event announcing his appointment, Lapado announced the state will “reject fear as a way of making policies” and declared it was “senseless” to prioritize vaccines over, for example, “eating more fruits and vegetables.”

Yeah. So he’s a quack, then. A quacky, quacky quack. A Trump-approved, Republican Party-talking-point-spewing quack eager to cast aside his once-impressive medical credentials to announce instead that maybe if you all ate more apples, then you wouldn’t need vaccines in the first place. Got it.

All of this suggests that the Florida public remains extremely boned. The state’s conspiracy-promoting Republicans have no plan to reduce pandemic deaths and absolutely no interest in doing so. DeSantis instead seems to be attempting to reach “herd immunity” the hard way: by allowing the state’s entire population to be exposed and getting the mass deaths over with, hopefully before the 2024 presidential campaign begins.

Even setting aside the monstrous nature of that approach, it’s astonishingly dangerous. As we’ve seen, the COVID-19 virus has shown a tendency to mutate into new forms. The current strain of concern, delta, has every chance of again mutating into something more dangerous still. As in Texas and other Southern states, the choice to make petri dishes out of local populations rather than responding aggressively to new outbreaks may yet produce a dangerous variant named after one of the Republican charlatans currently cultivating it.

I don’t know what to tell you, Florida. A majority of Floridians voted for this, and there’s still been no push among Florida voters to hand DeSantis’ behind to him on a platter and pass off pandemic responsibilities to somebody who doesn’t have a child’s soccer trophy where his soul should be. It seems that for the state’s Republican voters, cult adherence is indeed a more motivating force than keeping their own families alive, much less anybody else’s.