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:

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 

[Governor Dicey] 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.

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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.

. . .

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.