Blatant gamesmanship shown by DeSantis on county vaccine fines

Gov. Ron DeSantis is punishing a Florida county for fighting the deadly COVID19 virus by requiring vaccines. His action smacks of extreme partisanship, selective enforcement and reckless disregard for human health.

It’s vindictive and wrong, but it’s not surprising, coming from an anti-mandate governor and his lapdogs in the Legislature who passed a law that encouraged this.

DeSantis’ public flogging of a pro-vaccine county occurs as a new study in the scientific journal The Lancet shows how vaccinations save lives. The study found that if Floridians got vaccinated at the same rate as in higher-performing New England states, 16,000 more people would still be alive here.

But DeSantis is the law in Florida, so forcing people to get vaccinated is illegal. Applying a new law he championed, the newly weaponized Department of Health slapped a fine of $3.57 million on Tallahassee’s Leon County for requiring proof of vaccination to work there.

Fourteen county employees were fired for refusing to get vaccinated against the coronavirus and 700 others got shots to keep their jobs. The law (SB 2006) allows $5,000 fines for each violation of a ban on vaccine passports and the Leon County cases, 714 in all, added up to a fine of $3,570,000.

The county should fight this, and it will, “using any legal remedies necessary,” County Commission Chairman Rick Minor told the Sun Sentinel Editorial Board.

Leon is a medium-sized county of about 300,000 people, about the size of Fort Lauderdale and Hollywood combined, with a budget of $281 million.

To give you an idea of the impact of a multimillion dollar fine on the Leon treasury, the county parks and recreation budget this year is $3.2 million. As the home of state government and the three public higher education institutions of Florida State, Florida A&M and Tallahassee Community College, more than a third of all property in the county is tax-exempt.

In Leon, like all counties, firefighters must be tobacco-free for a year and swear to that or they don’t get hired, period. That has been a state law since 1989, with the support of a firefighters’ union. Yet DeSantis decrees a vaccine mandate illegal — even though it’s the best defense against the worst public health crisis in our history. The recklessness is astounding.

DeSantis’ attack on vaccine mandates is meant to inflict fear and it will. Punishing one county sends a chilling message to the other 66. Orange County, with a requirement like Leon’s, could be next; the city of Gainesville dropped its vaccine mandate.

DeSantis is unmistakably discouraging people from being vaccinated against COVID-19 and frames it as an issue of personal freedom. Bunk. This pushes Florida closer to a police state run by a powerful central government, where DeSantis outlaws local mask mandates and bullies counties and school boards that challenge his dangerous, politically motivated policies. Disagree with DeSantis? You’ll pay a price.

Florida’s calculating governor picks targets with care. Even though the $5,000 penalty applies to businesses as well as governments, DeSantis has not acted against private companies. Disney, for example, requires vaccinations as a condition of employment. Why not punish Mickey? Because he’s big and powerful and likes Republicans. Selective enforcement.

The political tension between red and blue is no greater than in Florida’s capital city. Leon County’s government is literally across the street from the Capitol building, where Republicans repeatedly show contempt for local government with preemption laws that strip counties and cities of legitimate home rule authority.

Little Leon is too inviting a target for DeSantis’ red-meat wrath, and so far, this couldn’t have played itself out any better for him. Politically, Leon is a miniature version of Broward as a reliable source of Democratic votes. DeSantis got 36% of the Leon vote in 2018 against former Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum, and the governor will get trounced there again in 2022. The reason it looks so partisan is that it is.

Leon County’s help wanted ads carry a disclaimer: “We are committed to providing a safe and healthy workplace for all our employees. Therefore, COVID-19 vaccines are required for both current and newly hired employees, unless a medical or religious accommodation has been approved.”

A simple, reasonable common-sense condition of employment will come at a steep price, if DeSantis has his way. The governor picked a fight with Leon. The county should give him one.

The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Editorial Page Editor Dan Sweeney, and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.

PHIL SEARS/AP Gov. Ron DeSantis lives and works in a county (Leon) with a vaccine mandate for county workers. For that, his administration imposed a fine of nearly $4 million.