Gov. DeSantis pushes Regeneron treatment for COVID-1 9 but hasn’t promoted vaccine the same way in months.

He hasn’t promoted the vaccine the same way in months

Gov. Ron DeSantis has crisscrossed the state almost every day over the past two weeks promoting a treatment for people who already have COVID-19. But the last time he held an event specifically to encourage getting vaccinated was four months ago.

Instead, he’s downplayed the vaccines, citing the breakthrough infections the shots don’t prevent and the vaccines’ apparent failure to achieve herd immunity.

It’s a strategy he’s stuck with even as cases, hospitalizations and deaths have surged to record levels in Florida and after the Food and Drug Administration

gave the Pfizer vaccine full approval. Critics say the governor is playing to a hardcore Republican base that’s skeptical to outright hostile of vaccines as DeSantis ramps up for a run for the presidency in 2024.

“He seems to be trying to walk a very fine line, where he’s definitely not an anti-vaxxer, and he will occasionally give a side comment that, yes, people should still get the vaccine,” said Aubrey Jewett, a professor of political science at the University of Central Florida. “But he doesn’t seem to be willing to invest the political capital to hold events and do a public relations campaign to try to convince Republicans, in particular, to get this shot.”

Mac Stipanovich, a Tallahassee consultant and anti-Trump Republican turned independent, called DeSantis’ strategy “politics, pure and simple.”

“He could leave his Regeneron [clinic] opening today and go to some vaccination site that his team has selected ... and stand there shaking hands with people who are being vaccinated and congratulating them on their being responsible citizens,” Stipanovich said. “That will never happen.”

Whenever he’s asked why he isn’t backing vaccination as fervently as REGEN-COV, the name of the medicine made by the Regeneron company, the governor always points to the 50 or so vaccine events he held over the winter and spring.

“There is no single policy priority that Governor DeSantis has devoted more time to this year than promoting COVID-19 vaccination,” DeSantis press secretary Christina Pushaw said Thursday. “He did over 50 public appearances in 27 counties focused on the vaccines . ... If someone is truly opposed to getting vaccinated — after all this time, all the data we have, and all the reports that most people who are hospitalized are unvaccinated — one more press conference from any politician (especially a politician who has always promoted vaccination) is not going to change their minds.”

She did not respond to a question about whether DeSantis was acting out of concern for the Trump base.

DeSantis did hold near-daily press conferences and events at vaccination sites as the shots were being rolled out. But that stopped not long after vaccine access was opened to all adults 18 and older on April 5.

That same month, DeSantis announced he was banning so-called “vaccination passports,” preventing businesses from requiring proof of vaccination from their customers.

Since then, the number of fully vaccinated people in Florida only recently passed 50% of the population, standing now at 51.5%, or 22nd nationally. Florida ranks 16th in the percentage of the population with at least one shot, at 63%.

Seniors are vaccinated

At the Orlando clinic last week, DeSantis said the priority was seniors and those at increased risk. “Our entire vulnerable population has basically been vaccinated,” DeSantis said.

DeSantis also hasn’t said much about the FDA approval. He said Monday that some people skeptical of the vaccine might have been waiting for it, and “now that it’s finally approved, maybe that will cause some people to say, ‘Okay, it went through a longer evaluation period. Maybe we’ll then go ahead and look at that.’ ”

Whether vaccine holdouts can still be reached is one of the biggest questions of the pandemic. But it seems one of the largest segments

of that group is DeSantis’ base.

An NBC News poll showed that just 50% of people who voted for former President Donald Trump in 2020 were vaccinated. Of Republicans in general, 55% were vaccinated. By comparison, 91% of Biden voters and 88% of Democrats are vaccinated, the poll found.

“He was willing to promote it when there was a huge demand that outstripped supply because he was selling to a willing audience, and basically was able to get credit for providing the vaccine that people desperately wanted,” Jewett said.

“But then when it looked like in May that the vaccine was in retreat, he issued executive orders declaring all local COVID rules null and void,” Jewett said. “He basically was declaring victory. I think at that point, he thought, ‘Well, we don’t need to do this anymore.’ And now we’re in a situation where there’s a lot of people who haven’t gotten it and don’t intend to get it. And a lot of those folks are Republicans.”

Trump draws boos

Even Trump himself was lightly booed at an Alabama rally last week when he told the crowd, “I recommend

[to] take the vaccines. I did it. It’s good. Take the vaccines.”

After the boos rang out, Trump began to back off.

“No, that’s OK. That’s all right. You got your freedoms,” he said. “But I happened to take the vaccine. If it doesn’t work, you’ll be the first to know. OK? ... But you do have your freedoms you have to keep. You have to maintain that.”

Stipanovich said the incident showed the anti-vaccine bias of the Make America Great Again base, a group that DeSantis depended on for his primary and general election victories in 2018 and voters he needs if he runs in 2024.

“Trump speaks at a rally, urges everyone gets vaccinated, and Donald Trump gets booed by his fawning acolytes,” Stipanovich said. “DeSantis can read the MAGA room; the MAGA room is hostile to vaccinations. So while he may not be overtly hostile, he’s not going to get involved in saving lives through proactive prevention because it’s harmful to his personal politics.”

DeSantis’ reluctance comes as other Southern Republicans are beginning to endorse vaccinations whole-heartedly. Alabama GOP Gov. Kay Ivey said last month it’s “time to start blaming the unvaccinated folks” for the spread. “I want

folks to get vaccinated. That’s the cure. That prevents everything.”

In Florida, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd also implored people to get shots after one of his deputies died, saying, “Listen to the doctors. Don’t listen to the politics. Get your vaccine.”

Kami Kim, director of the Division of Infectious Disease & International Medicine in the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine, said masking and distancing were the best way of blunting the current delta variant raging in Florida. But promoting vaccination is just as urgent, for this surge and for future ones.

“It’s clear that the sick people are unvaccinated,” Kim said. “What’s scary about this delta variant is a lot more people are getting sick, and a lot more younger people are landing in the hospital, and some of them are dying. So I think vaccination is really, really important to protect as many people as we can. ... If we still have a huge number of people like we do in Florida that are unvaccinated, we’re going to have more of these surges.”

‘Oasis of Freedom’

DeSantis has positioned himself as the “freedom governor,” Jewett said, referring to his repeated description of the state as an “oasis of freedom “amid COVID restrictions elsewhere in the country.

But DeSantis’ actions banning local districts from mandating masks in schools and other restrictions has already eaten into his support.

A Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday had DeSantis with a mixed approval rating, at 49% positive and 47% negative. But Quinnipiac also found that

46% of Floridians said DeSantis was hurting efforts to slow the spread of COVID-19, compared with 41% who said he was helping.

A majority of Floridians, 61% to

33%, said the spike in COVID-19 cases in Florida was preventable.

Despite evidence that his stances are becoming unpopular, Jewett

said DeSantis was going to stick to them. But that might be harmful to his political ambitions down the road, the professor said.

“It could seem [to voters] that he’s more worried about what the Republican base will think of him,” Jewett said. “And he seems to be more worried about that than he

is about you.”