Judge: News media can join state COVID-19 data suit
A judge ruled Monday to allow a group of national and state news media — including The New York Times, Washington Post and Associated Press — to join a lawsuit against the Florida Department of Health over its decision to withhold detailed data on the COVID19 pandemic from the public.
Judge John Cooper of the Second Judicial Circuit in Tallahassee issued the ruling over the objections of the state’s legal counsel, Rick Figlio, who suggested that doing so would turn the case into “unmanageable political theater” — a claim the judge disputed.
Cooper set the case for trial on Sept. 29-30, rejecting a request from Figlio to postpone the matter for at least 40 days.
“The statute says [the case must be heard] immediately,” Cooper said in a hearing held over Zoom. “I didn’t draft the statute. I don’t know why people have a hard time understanding that statutes are supposed to be enforced.”
Cooper is the same judge who struck down Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ ban on school mask mandates. An appeals court has put the ruling on hold while DeSantis appeals.
The current lawsuit was filed Aug. 31 by state Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith, D-Orlando, and the Florida Center for Government Accountability against the Florida Department of Health and outgoing Surgeon General Scott Rivkees. It seeks to force the state to restart its daily COVID dashboard, halted June 5, which had included detailed information on cases and deaths, including gender, race, ethnicity and county-by-county totals. The dashboard also showed current and cumulative cases in all long-term care facilities and prisons.
Figlio said FDOH had determined “internally” that such detailed information was “no longer a public health necessity,” meaning that state law precluded the department from publishing it.
His comments likely indicate the arguments the state will present at trial.
“Isn’t that convenient?” Smith said after the hearing. “The state is saying we’re the ones that get to decide if public information is public ... The reality is that they made this COVID data available every day for over a year on the public dashboard — and then decided that right now those same records should not be available to Floridians even though the delta variant made COVID-19 worse in the last three months than at any point previously in the pandemic.”
Figlio also argued that the data — nearly all of which the state
provides daily to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — is not readily available in a format that can be published on a public website.
“There’s data that exists in indecipherable form” that took several department employees a lot of time to assemble, Figlio said.
Several news organizations, including the Orlando Sentinel, have had to file public records requests to get data revealing the true picture of the pandemic within Florida, including which areas of the state have been hardest hit and whether the virus was spreading in longterm care facilities. The Sentinel also sued the department twice to get information on the spread of the pandemic.
In a motion last week, eight news organizations — the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, AP, Gannett, McClatchy, The New York Times, Scripps Media, Times Publishing Co. and The Washington Post — as well as the nonprofit First Amendment Foundation filed to intervene as plaintiffs.
The Orlando Sentinel did not seek to join the suit to avoid involvement with a local lawmaker on whom the newspaper reports.
“The Sentinel had been a leader in fighting for public records access, going to court twice this year and succeeding both times,” said Julie Anderson, editor-inchief of both the Orlando Sentinel and Sun-Sentinel. “We were confident the strong media coalition would succeed without us joining the fight first brought on by an elected official in our coverage area.”