Investigate corruption in DeSantis’ vaccine response
One year into the pandemic, nearly two million Floridians have been infected by coronavirus. Over 32,000 have died. Untold numbers of people suffer from the virus’ chronic long-term effects. Until the nation reaches herd immunity, the numbers will only keep rising.
The tragedy of the misery felt by those grieving lost loved ones or slipping into poverty is that it did not have to be this way. Nothing about the current death toll was ever inevitable. It was not that Gov. Ron DeSantis lacked the expertise required to contain the disease. The issue of “how” has been quite clear. DeSantis always knew what needed to be done to contain the spread of the virus. The resources were there; the personnel was there, and the infrastructure was there.
What wasn’t there was leadership. DeSantis knew what needed to be done; he chose not to do it. For DeSantis, the approval of President Trump and his base was always going to be more important than protecting Floridians from this once-in-a-generation public-health catastrophe, especially if containing that crisis meant clashing with the millionaires and corporations, who are, for obvious reasons, generally not proponents of lockdowns. Those factors, combined with the governor’s chronic contrarianism and his contempt for experts and the press, meant that DeSantis let the virus rampage through the state, while disseminating the pacifying lie that the virus was always just one month away from defeat.
The current death toll is what happens when you have a “leader” less interested in actually solving problems than he is in political optics. Rather than containing the spread of the virus, DeSantis tried to convince the people of Florida that the disease really wasn’t much of a problem at all, which, of course, had the effect of actually making the problem even worse.
At every step of the way, DeSantis sought to minimize the virus, distort the facts and suppress the truth. He pursued a disastrous policy of premature reopening that only prolonged lockdown by fomenting subsequent waves of infection. Even as cases are on the decline, Florida has the ignominious distinction of having been the scene of major outbreaks several times throughout the past year. It turns out that no amount of political spin is an effective treatment against the coronavirus.
Of course, the pandemic is suddenly a serious issue for DeSantis the moment it threatens one of the governor’s well-connected political allies. This past February, it came to light that the governor was using his position to secure vaccines for wealthy Republican mega-donors. At the direction of DeSantis, the state of Florida set up vaccine clinics in upscale gated communities and registered thousands of their residents, allowing 6,000 people to jump ahead of the tens of thousands of seniors already on waiting lists. The communities, Kings Gate, Grand Palm, and Lakewood Ranch, were all developed by Patrick Neal and Richard Uihlein, both of whom donated over $100,000 to the Friends of Ron DeSantis Super PAC.
The administration’s management of the pandemic represents nothing less than a shameful grift, wherein politically connected donors and powerful corporate interests are able to secure favors and preferential treatment. Meanwhile, the state’s essential workers struggled to acquire the vaccine thanks to DeSantis’ narrow vaccine eligibility conditions. Unsurprisingly, it has always been the state’s essential workers, far removed from the gated communities of DeSantis’ friends, who have had to bear the brunt of the consequences every time the governor recklessly ignored scientific expertise.
While DeSantis’ premature reopening of Disney World and Miami resorts certainly delighted the corporations the Republican Party truly represents, it left ordinary high-risk Floridians to fend for themselves against a dangerous pathogen that the state government had already given up on fighting. On March 11, President Joe Biden announced that, thanks to the growing availability of vaccines, he expected American life to return to some semblance of normalcy by July 4. The resolution of this national nightmare, however, is no reason to forgive and forget the selfishness, ineptitude and corruption of people like DeSantis, whose “leadership” has cost thousands of lives and created needless suffering.