Amid coronavirus scare, Rick Scott says Fla. was ‘extremely transparent’ about Zika
Florida Sen. Rick Scott sent a letter to President Donald Trump this week encouraging the administration to be “open and transparent” about the threat of novel coronavirus in the United States, citing Florida’s experience during the Zika epidemic while he was governor as an example of being “extremely transparent.”
“I encourage you to use the lessons we learned from Florida’s handling of the Zika virus by distributing as much information about the virus as possible to keep Americans and local officials informed,” Scott wrote in the letter on Wednesday.
But Scott’s administration was criticized by public health experts, local government officials and residents for concealing information during the height of the 2016 Zika crisis, including not notifying people about infected mosquitoes that were found near their homes and workplaces and not identifying out-of-state residents who were infected with the virus in Florida.
The Zika virus is transmitted by mosquitoes, causing fever, muscle and joint pain. It can also cause devastating birth defects in women who are infected while pregnant. The new coronavirus, which emerged in China late last year, is a respiratory virus that has infected thousands of people and caused hundreds of deaths. The United States has seen a dozen confirmed cases so far.
Miami-Dade County was ground zero for Zika infections, with hundreds of people infected and an unprecedented warning issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention telling pregnant women not to travel to Miami. So far, no novel coronavirus cases have been confirmed in Florida.
During the Zika epidemic, Miami-Dade County officials were told by state officials not to share information with the public about where Zika-positive mosquitoes had been trapped, even when it was in someone’s backyard or near a school or tourist destination. Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez’s former communications director, Michael Hernández, told the Miami Herald he was in the same room as then-Gov. Scott when state officials told county officials not to tell the public the locations of the traps.
“The county government itself didn’t object to providing that information. However, we were told by state officials not to,” Hernández said. “I do not recall the reasoning for it.”
The Herald filed suit against the county in September 2016, seeking disclosure of the trap locations on the grounds that the information would help the public make decisions about precautions to take if they lived or worked nearby, and help inform the county debate on a controversial insecticide used to control the mosquito population. Shortly after the lawsuit, Hernández said officials received a letter from the surgeon general telling them the information could be released.
“The mayor, myself, and the county officials were quite puzzled, because it directly contradicted what we were being told,” Hernández said.
But in his letter to Trump this week, Scott said the way his administration handled the crisis is a positive example of transparency during a public health threat. Scott said that “one of the most effective strategies utilized was being extremely transparent with new and accurate information.”
“We put out daily updates to keep Floridians safe and up-to-date information, and thanks to a coordinated local, state and federal response to the Zika virus, Miami-Dade was the first jurisdiction in the world to disrupt the cycle of local transmission,” Scott wrote.
Arthur Caplan, director of medical ethics for New York University Langone Medical Center, said it “seems somewhat hypocritical claiming transparency when it was not done well during the Zika outbreak.”
“They didn’t have timely release of information, didn’t let people know who got sick when visiting,” Caplan said. “I thought their sharing of information under Scott and his administration was more sensitive to tourism and economic implications than it was to disclosing public health concerns.”
Caplan said he supported the call for more transparency on novel coronavirus — with one caveat: “I don’t really want it done the way Florida did it.”
Chris Hartline, a spokesman for Scott, pushed back against criticism that the former governor was opaque in handling Zika, saying Scott “took swift action to get out in front of the Zika virus at its emergence internationally.” He cited daily updates by the state, including maps available to the public to view the neighborhoods of confirmed cases.
He said Scott allocated $26.2 million in June 2016 for Zika preparedness and response, organized roundtable discussions and “made Zika virus tests available to pregnant women at no cost through county health departments.”
State officials did provide maps showing areas of concern, but those encompassed several city blocks. That did not satisfy local residents and business owners in the affected areas of Wynwood and Miami Beach, who complained about not knowing the exact locations of Zika infections. The Zika warning zone in in Wynwood encompassed a one-square-mile area, residents said, five times larger than the 500-foot-radius where health officials pinpointed the initial cluster of cases.
And while pregnant women had access to testing, Scott’s decision to make that free overwhelmed the state’s under-prepared labs. Women who needed to know their status before deciding whether to carry their babies to full term had to wait five weeks or longer for results from the state Department of Health as the agency grew overwhelmed from a bottleneck of tests, with the backlog reaching 800 to 900 pending results in early September 2016, at the height of the crisis.
Hernández, the mayor’s former spokesman, said Miami-Dade County responded well to an unusual health crisis, but he characterized the state government’s role as supporting the efforts of county officials who had to make front-line decisions like where to spray insecticide.
“The county mayor was the individual who decided if we were going to spray, when we were going to spray, and how often we would be spraying, “ he said. “That wasn’t a gubernatorial decision. They may say differently.”
This story was originally published February 7, 2020 at 4:16 PM.
