As Florida Governor Ron DeSantis hopes for the White House to continue to head from bad to abysmal, his campaign was just handed another blow.
Out on the campaign trail, DeSantis has tried to run on his “COVID success” as a kind of in-your-face “Freedom Fighter” who kept Florida open and working when others closed. However, a recent settlement in a lawsuit paints a very different picture, one that says the Governor’s COVID policies cost “thousands of lives.”
Among the efforts DeSantis has made to try to arrest his slide among Republican hardliners included positioning himself as a champion for “medical freedom” and defying federal health guidance to advise Floridians against taking new COVID-19 booster shots.
The settlement ends a two-year legal battle between the DeSantis administration and a coalition of Democrats, open government advocates, and media outlets that began in June 2021 when the Florida health department ended daily updates of COVID cases, deaths, and vaccinations on its online dashboard.
The department will pay the plaintiffs’ $152,000 legal bill and resume regular posting of the data that DeSantis’s communications team insisted at the time was no longer necessary because cases had “significantly decreased” and that Florida was “returning to normal.”
In reality, as DeSantis dismissed reporting on the pandemic as “media hysteria,” the Delta variant of the virus was just taking hold, and cases and fatalities spiked to a record 385 a day in Florida by September 2021. Simultaneously, Florida led the nation in pediatric COVID-19 hospitalizations.
Critics, including those who filed the suit, dubbed DeSantis “the Pied Piper of COVIDvid, leading everybody off a cliff” as he forged ahead with an executive order banning mask mandates in schools, having already signed legislation awarding himself veto power over coronavirus mandates set by municipalities.
“Twenty-three thousand Floridians died during the Delta surge, and not only did the DeSantis administration restrict information on COVID during that time, but they also repeatedly downplayed the severity of the outbreak to fit their political narrative and help DeSantis run for president. That decision cost lives,” said Carlos Guillermo Smith, a Democratic former state congressman who filed the lawsuit against the Florida health department, later joined by the Florida Center for Government Accountability.
“Our school leaders were struggling to make informed decisions about how to mitigate the spread of COVID, whether it be masking or social distancing policies, or other strategies. They needed data, they needed information, but the state made it unavailable, then said it didn’t exist.
“The DeSantis administration was caught red-handed lying about the existence of these public records in court, repeatedly claiming that the records we were requesting didn’t exist, then saying even if they did exist, they would not share them because they were somehow exempt,” he said.
The settlement marks yet another failure for the governor’s sagging run for his party’s presidential nomination. Several recent surveys, nationally and in early-voting states, show DeSantis so far behind Donald J. Trump that the former President and his campaign no longer even consider DeSantis a threat.