Local officials, be nice to DeSantis or risk losing vaccine pop-ups | Editorial
Gov. Ron DeSantis sent a message to locals looking to get extra COVID-19 vaccine doses: Kiss the ring, or else.
DeSantis stopped in Manatee County Wednesday to announce a pop-up vaccination spot for 3,000 seniors at a planned community called Lakewood Ranch. The catch: only residents of two ZIP codes qualified. Those areas are predominantly white and well-off — and the least impacted by COVID-19 in the county.
But local officials and residents had better be grateful the great governor bestowed such honor on the county. And they’d better stop complaining that Manatee’s wealthiest residents are getting VIP access to shots when poorer, non-white residents have been disproportionately impacted by the coronavirus.
“If Manatee County doesn’t like us doing this, then we are totally fine putting this in counties that want it. We’re totally happy to do that,” DeSantis said during a news conference. “Anyone that’s saying that, let us know if you want us to send it to Sarasota or Charlotte or Pasco or wherever. Let us know — we’re happy to do it.
“There’s folks that are going to complain about getting vaccines. I’ll tell you what, I’d be thankful because you know what? We didn’t need to do this at all. We saw a need and wanted to get the numbers up for seniors.”
DeSantis was responding to criticism from some Manatee County commissioners who were concerned about the optics of picking and choosing who gets the vaccine.
For DeSantis, there’s nothing to see here — that the organizers of the vaccine pop-up are politically connected, nor that the Manatee commissioner who helped organize the pop-up, Vanessa Baugh, made sure she and the developer of Lakewood Ranch were on the list of people with priority for the vaccine, as the Bradenton Herald reported.
DeSantis contends the point of the pop-up was to get vaccines in the arms of as many seniors as possible, and that the 3,000 shots administered were in addition to the county’s regular allotment. He boasted during a news conference Thursday that 80% of Florida’s vaccines have gone to seniors.
Vaccinating seniors is a noble goal and getting doses to almost 5 million Floridians ages 65 and up is no easy task. But DeSantis’ combativeness with critics and the media during the COVID crisis is not new. The only acceptable narrative, in his view, is that he’s a champion of the people, there’s nothing to fix about vaccinations and the pandemic is under control in Florida (and if anything goes wrong, blame it on the Biden White House).
In his searches for glowing reviews in the past, DeSantis and his administration have withheld information about cases in nursing homes and schools early in the pandemic (they changed course after legal pressure), and instructed county-level spokespeople from the Department of Health to stop issuing public statements about COVID-19 until after the Nov. 3 election, as the Sun Sentinel reported.
Right now, though infections and hospitalizations are down in Florida after a January peak, we are ground zero for the more transmissible U.K. variant., which is expected to become the predominant strain of the coronavirus in the state by March.
DeSantis gets plenty of compliments when he goes on Fox News (he was on Fox & Friends Thursday with a World War II veteran who’s believed to be the two-millionth senior to get vaccinated in the state).
The governor of the nation’s third largest state will be criticized from time to time. The last thing Floridians need is a politician with a hurt ego retaliating against critics by withholding life-saving vaccines.
This story was originally published February 18, 2021 at 2:22 PM.