Four months ago, Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis debuted a catchphrase to sum up his and his Party’s insistence that coronavirus vaccines and public health regulations were useless against the pandemic and that people should just ignore medical professionals and get on with their lives.

His “Don’t Fauci My Florida!” campaign started in mid-July with the rollout of t-shirts, bumper stickers, coffee mugs and a variety of other things on sale on his campaign website, to raise money for his reelection effort.

Besides filling the coffers of the DeSantis checkbook, the anti-science, anti-scientist slogan had a murderous secondary effect:  Florida saw more than 22,000 deaths in the last four month, tops in the nation and with Texas, the only two states to see more than 20,000 deaths over that time.

According to data from Worldometers, Florida and Texas–arguable the two most anti-science, anti-vaccine states–are the only two states who have seen more than 20,000 COVID deaths in the last four months.  In fact, they were the only two to have more than 10,000 deaths over that time.

California, the most populous state with one-third more residents than Texas and twice as many as Florida, had less than half of the fatalities.  New York, slightly less populous as Florida and one of the states hit hardest in the first wave, experienced one-sixth of the coronavirus fatalities over that time.