Ron DeSantis Takes His Authoritarian Ambitions to the Next Level

As you’ve probably heard by now, Florida governor Ron DeSantis is a bad man who should not be allowed to make decisions that affect people’s lives. What evidence do we have to back that statement up? Well there’s his bigoted “Don’t Say Gay” law. His absurd crusade to prevent schools and businesses from talking about racism. His bullying of anyone who disagrees with him. The fact that he thinks it’s fine to treat immigrants like chattel. The list, quite obviously, goes on and on and also includes the fact that he demonizes public health safety measures to score political points and just today announced his intention to criminalize what he alleges is the nefarious pushing of COVID-19 vaccines.

Yes, on Tuesday, the governor of Florida, who is seen as Donald Trump’s biggest competition for the 2024 GOP nomination should he choose to run, said during a press conference that he has petitioned his state’s Supreme Court to convene a grand jury to “crimes and wrongdoing” related to the life-saving shots. What kind of “crimes and wrongdoing” does DeSantis want investigated? While he offered no specifics live, his petition suggests he believes that anyone who recommended people receive the lifesaving vaccine—for example, the CDC and Joe Biden—must have been financially compensated to do so. Sayeth Ron:

“The federal government, medical associations, and other experts have created an expectation that receiving a COVID-19 vaccine is an ethical or civic duty and that choosing not to get vaccinated against COVID-19 is selfish and harmful to others…. It is impossible to imagine that so many influential individuals came to this view on their own. Rather, it is likely that individuals and companies with an incentive to do so created these perceptions for financial gain. 

The grand jury announcement was made following a roundtable with Florida surgeon general Joseph Ladapo, who among other things, has recommended that healthy children not get vaccinated against COVID-19, despite the CDC and American Academy of Pediatrics advising they do so; promoted hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin as effective treatments for the virus; refused to wear a mask while meeting with a state senator who had been diagnosed with breast cancer and was about to start radiation; and his former supervisor at UCLA claimed his opinions on COVID-19 violated the Hippocratic oath to do no harm.

“Our CDC, at this point, anything they put out, you just assume, at this point, that it’s not worth the paper that it’s printed on. It’s not serving a useful function. It’s really serving to advance narratives,” DeSantis said at the roundtable. He also suggested parallels could be drawn between the recommendation by health professionals and leaders to get vaccinated against COVID-19 and the pushing of opioids by drug companies, noting that Florida recently “got $3.2 billion through legal action against those responsible for the opioid crisis. So, it’s not like this is something that’s unprecedented.” (Note: Opioids kill tens of thousands of people in the US per year while COVID-19 vaccines…do not.) And, as conservatives are now contractually obligated to do, he threw in some half-baked conspiracies about Big Tech, accusing it of punishing “scientific dissenters” who questioned mandates and lockdowns. “Your policies or your positions or your analysis of this medical science should stand on its own, and if it’s not able to accept criticism, if you can’t defend the policy against valid criticism, then maybe you need to be looking in the mirror, but that’s not what these elites wanted to do,” he said.

While some people cynically believe that the highly educated DeSantis does not actually think vaccines are bad, and that he’s only taking this position to appeal to the anti-vax crowd, people close to him insist that is truly not the case, and that the governor is actually this stupid. “This isn’t about 2024. This is about what DeSantis believes in,” one Republican told NBC News.