ORLANDO, Fla. (Tribune News Service) — In January 2021, Gov. Ron DeSantis was proud to announce the one-millionth COVID-19 vaccine given out in Florida.

“We did it live on TV,” DeSantis told a Newsmax town hall four months later. “And I had a 100-year-old WWII veteran, they showed [his] shot, we were all clapping. They were interviewing him, and he just unilaterally said, ‘I want to say one more thing … Florida has the best doggone governor in this country.’ And I was like, ‘Hey, I’ll take that.’”

Back then, DeSantis often praised the state’s coordination with the Trump administration, which was partly responsible for the quicker-than-expected development of the vaccines, thanks to its Operation Warp Speed.

“For those great ‘historians’, please remember that these great discoveries … all took place on my watch!” then-President Donald Trump wrote on Twitter in 2020.

Now, the DeSantis and Trump presidential campaigns are squabbling over how each candidate handled the vaccine and lockdowns, particularly amid the worst of the pandemic.

A group backing DeSantis, who has embraced being anti-vax to the point of seeking a grand jury to investigate “wrongdoing” by their creators, used AI to create a fake image of Trump hugging White House health adviser Anthony Fauci, a hated figure on the right.

“We can never allow ‘Warp Speed’ to trump informed consent in this country ever again,” DeSantis said in May in an unsubtle nod to his opponent.

Trump, who has alternated between continuing to take credit for the vaccine and reposting anti-vax screeds on his social media site, has gone after DeSantis for his record on shutdowns in 2020, despite his working in conjunction with the White House at the time.

“Ron DeSantis ordered lockdowns, imposed Covid-19 checkpoints, and closed beaches, and despite it all, Florida still had a higher COVID-19 death rate per 100k than New York,” the Trump War Room posted on Twitter in May.

Kenneth Goodman, a bioethicist and director of the Institute for Bioethics and Health Policy at the University of Miami, said the sparring “would be just another ordinary example of the silly season in American politics if it weren’t that so many lives were at stake.”

“In the early days of COVID, we didn’t know what we were getting into,” Goodman said. “And the fact of the matter is, we were making big decisions under uncertainty. That those decisions are now being leveraged for political purposes is especially dispiriting.”

He compared the battle over who did less to combat COVID, and the rewriting of that history, to different factions of communists sparring with each other in the 1960s.

“The Marxists were trying to be holier than thou, and the Maoists were saying that the Trotskyites weren’t pure enough, and the Trotskyites were saying to the Marxists, ‘You’re not pure enough,’” Goodman said. “… Now we’re seeing it on the extreme right.”

Shutdowns and phases

DeSantis was initially wary of issuing a shutdown order in the early days of the pandemic in March 2020, instead blaming such shutdowns in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut for driving their residents to come to Florida. He ordered a mandatory 14-day self-quarantine for people from those states, as well as for cars with New York license plates to be stopped at the state border.

On March 20, he issued orders shutting down restaurants except for takeout or delivery, banning non-urgent medical procedures and surgeries, and closing most businesses in Palm Beach and Broward counties. He remained essentially in sync with Trump, who continued to be hesitant to recommend closures.

That all changed a week later when DeSantis cited the president’s change of heart in a meeting to explain why he had reversed course and issued a 30-day stay-at-home order for April.

“The president just the other day announced they are going to do a 30-day extension for the current guidelines,” DeSantis said, according to CNN. “…I think it is clear that that represents effectively a national pause. We’re going to be in this for another 30 days. That is just the reality we find ourselves in.”

Two years later, DeSantis said one of his biggest regrets was not forcefully opposing Trump on shutdowns in 2020.

“Knowing now what I know then, if that was a threat earlier, I would have been much louder,” DeSantis told a radio host.

At the same event in which DeSantis announced the shutdown, Trump praised DeSantis as a “great governor” who “knows exactly what he’s doing.”

Now that they’re rivals, Trump’s tune has changed. “Florida was actually closed for a great, long period of time,” Trump said in January.

He added on his social media site, Truth Social, that DeSantis did “FAR WORSE than many other Republican governors.”

In Florida, restrictions on businesses did continue for much of the summer. Most restaurants operated at 50% capacity until a phase 3 reopening in September, and bars were barred from selling alcohol for months under an order from Halsey Beshears, then-secretary of the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation.

“If you don’t follow the guidelines, and you pack huge numbers of people indoors that are very close, you’re creating an environment that you’re going to see more spread,” DeSantis said of the alcohol order in June 2020.

At the time, the phased reopening of Florida was controversial amid the surge in cases and deaths in the state over that summer. Many Democratic-led states continued shutdowns into 2021.

Trump claimed this month that then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo did a better job than DeSantis in handling COVID, a claim DeSantis said was “full of it.”

While New York did have much higher COVID deaths per capita in 2020, at 139 per 100,000 to Florida’s 56, Florida’s mortality numbers per capita have surpassed them.

Florida had 404 deaths per 100,000 residents compared to New York’s 397, as of the most recent CDC data available from March 2023.

Pushing the COVID vaccine

“It’s a particularly great day to be at Tampa General,” DeSantis told hospital staff on Dec. 14, 2020. “I had the honor of [being] at the loading dock when the first vaccines were received in the state of Florida.”

DeSantis was full of praise for the Trump administration as the state received the initial doses of vaccines, which were administered to frontline health-care workers.

“This is a really, really significant milestone,” he said. “… We want to see as much of this rolling off the assembly line and getting into hospitals as we can.”

In the first few months of the vaccine rollout, DeSantis crisscrossed the state holding events to promote them.

“If you look at the number of people we’re vaccinating, we keep doing it, man,” DeSantis said at an event in Palm Beach in January 2021. “I think that’s going to save a lot of lives.”

In April, DeSantis said Floridians shouldn’t “be freaking out” over the CDC’s recommendation to pause the Johnson & Johnson vaccine because of blood clots that occurred in six women.

“You also have to balance that against how many people are alive today because they had the J&J vaccine,” he said. “I mean, there’s no question that it saved lives already.”

But by then, DeSantis had already held the first of his controversial medical roundtables with proponents of the controversial theory of herd immunity through natural infection. The first roundtables focused on criticizing masks and other anti-COVID restrictions, not the vaccines.

But DeSantis noticeably cut down on his vaccine promotion events after opening up shots to all ages in the spring of 2021. He began citing the breakthrough infections the shots didn’t prevent and the vaccines’ apparent failure to achieve herd immunity.

By that summer, when the Delta variant wave hit Florida, he was instead mostly touting the monoclonal antibody treatment produced by Regeneron.

Asked why he wasn’t backing vaccination as fervently as the monoclonals, DeSantis and his staff always pointed to the 50 or so vaccine events he held over the winter and spring.

One month later, DeSantis chose Joseph Ladapo as state surgeon general. Ladapo immediately began questioning the safety and efficacy of vaccines, touting research that he said showed “troubling safety signals of adverse events” from shots.

Critics have claimed Ladapo has used flawed research, leading U.S. health agencies to send Ladapo a letter stating that “not only is there no evidence of increased risk of death following mRNA vaccines, but available data have shown quite the opposite: that being up to date on vaccinations saves lives.”

A study released in December by the Commonwealth Fund that found COVID vaccines saved more than 3 million lives and prevented over 18 million additional hospitalizations in the U.S.

By the end of 2021, which included the Delta wave over the summer and the beginning of the Omicron wave, Florida had 53,788 COVID deaths.

In December 2022, DeSantis held his latest roundtable to announce a Public Health Integrity Committee made up of professors, researchers and doctors who all have vocally opposed widely held scientific consensus regarding COVID-19 vaccines.

He also asked the Florida Supreme Court to convene a grand jury to investigate the vaccine makers, and the court complied.

Florida now has one of the lowest rates of fully vaccinated residents in the country at just 12%, according to CDC data, with just 31% of those 65 and older fully boosted.

As of May 1, a total of 88,219 Florida residents have died since the pandemic began.

“Probably the major reason for DeSantis changing his mind about vaccines was the fact that more and more Republicans were staying in polls that they didn’t trust the vaccine, and they didn’t like the vaccine, and they were never going to get the vaccine,” said Aubrey Jewett, a professor of political science at the University of Central Florida.

DeSantis, who unlike many other politicians did not get a vaccine shot on camera, has refused to say if he ever received boosters, a stance Trump has called “gutless.”

Trump has continued to praise the development of the vaccine on his watch. Last week, he told a radio host “it was a miracle that we got it. Operation Warp Speed was an unbelievable thing.”

The DeSantis campaign has used footage and quotes of Trump’s boasts. On June 3, the DeSantis War Room tweeted about an Iowa voter who told Trump, “we have lost people because you supported the jab.”

“Trump responds by praising the COVID mRNA shots, doesn’t acknowledge any of the adverse effects,” the account wrote.

The Trump campaign has responded with clips of their own of DeSantis’ early backing of the vaccine. “Each vaccine administered brings a sense of relief and increased hope and optimism,” DeSantis says in one video tweeted by the MAGA War Room.

Hard to change minds

Goodman said he was saddened by the campaigns’ strategies on COVID.

“This is definitely through the looking glass,” Goodman said. “We’re used to exaggerations, we’re used to falsehoods during campaigns. We are not used to this kind of toxic misrepresentation.”

The attacks on the vaccines in particular, he said, reveal a serious misunderstanding of public health science.

“We get that not everybody who gets the vaccine is perfectly protected,” he said. “But at the population level, we save lives with the vaccine. And what they’re doing is they’re misrepresenting utterances at the time as if every utterance was infallible. … The world is more complicated than these candidates are able to understand.”

Amid the sniping between the campaigns, Jewett said it would be hard to actually change any minds in a GOP primary based on regurgitating COVID history.

“It’s probably frustrating to Trump and his team that they can’t get more credit for helping to develop that vaccine,” Jewett said. “… If anything, some of his supporters are probably willing to forgive him for that, because they like him for so many other things.”

As for Trump’s attacks on DeSantis, Jewett said Trump and his team are going to have a very difficult time convincing many Republicans that DeSantis was a “shutdown governor.”

“DeSantis really increased his national notoriety because of his ‘Free State of Florida’ slogan,” he said. “…That’s an image that a lot of the Republicans around the country already have in their head. And that’s going to be difficult for any negative advertising from Trump and Trump’s team to shake.”

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