Putting politics in front of lives: DeSantis faces criticism over Floridas Covid-19 response – CNN
But Floridians who rely on Gov. Ron DeSantis and his administration might hardly know the pandemic is still a serious danger.
The Florida health department’s social media feeds have barely mentioned Covid-19 in months, breaking the silence only this week to celebrate the arrival of the first vaccines. DeSantis has consistently downplayed the severity of the pandemic, following President Donald Trump’s lead in denouncing mask mandates and restrictions on businesses. The governor has blocked local governments from enforcing their own measures to protect residents from coronavirus, and sidelined health experts even as he promoted questionable science, according to CNN interviews with more than a dozen Florida officials and experts.
Two Florida health department employees told CNN that the agency’s former communications director ordered them in late September not to focus on Covid-19 in their public messaging. They said they believed their jobs would be in jeopardy if they pushed back.
“We’re putting politics in front of lives,” said one of the health officials, who asked not to be named to avoid retaliation. “We are being handcuffed and kept from keeping the public properly informed so they can make informed decisions to protect their lives and the lives of others.”
Governors have emerged as the key figures in America’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, with decisions by individual leaders broadly shaping policy in their states. As cases climbed around the country, even some Republican governors who previously opposed mask mandates or social distancing rules have reversed course, with GOP leaders in Iowa, North Dakota, Alabama and elsewhere putting new restrictions in place as their states spiked.
South Florida Sun-Sentinel and other news outlets in the state have previously found. To the frustration of local mayors from both parties, he continues to ban cities and counties from enforcing mask mandates or setting stricter capacity limits on businesses and restaurants.
“I gave up talking to the governor a while back,” said Hialeah Mayor Carlos Hernandez, a registered Republican, who said that his calls and letters to DeSantis pleading for more flexibility have gone unanswered for months. “It’s a large city here, but I feel sometimes we have been left alone.”
DeSantis’ office did not answer CNN’s questions about the state’s handling of the pandemic or make the governor available for an interview, and the health department did not respond to repeated requests for comment. In public statements, DeSantis has argued that the state’s response was focused on protecting the elderly and vulnerable while keeping businesses open.
More than 1.1 million Floridians have tested positive for Covid-19 so far, about 5% of the state’s population. Florida is the 26th highest state by per capita confirmed cases, according to data from Johns Hopkins University, putting it in the middle of the pack for the country. On Thursday, the state reported its highest new daily case count since July.
Some parts of the state have been hit harder than others: Miami-Dade County, Florida’s largest urban center, has the highest per capita rate of confirmed coronavirus cases of any of the 50 most populous counties in the US, a CNN analysis of the Johns Hopkins data found.
As a close ally of President Trump, DeSantis seems to have modeled his approach to the pandemic on the President’s strategy of denial. And in the key swing state, some observers see the governor’s unwillingness to air bad news in the months before the election as a political gift to Trump.
“I think this governor is absolutely following whatever the President says and does, and I think he thinks this is going to help him get elected,” said St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Kriseman, a Democrat. “It’s really quite remarkable, the lack of leadership.”
Health officials say they were told to avoid talking about Covid
Unlike in many states, Florida counties don’t have their own independent health agencies. Instead, county health offices are local bureaus of the state department, funded through a mix of state and county revenues.
That means that the state health department — and ultimately DeSantis — have even more direct power to shape the public health messaging and pandemic response affecting the state.
The two Department of Health employees who told CNN they felt constrained to share more information with the public said that Alberto Moscoso, the department’s former director of communications, instructed county health spokespeople not to focus on Covid-19 during a conference call in late September. Instead, they said, he urged them to practice “blue sky” messaging — a PR tactic that prioritizes good news in order to distract attention from crises.
The department’s Twitter feed was a textbook example of how that messaging strategy works. In the first few months of the pandemic, the health department had a prolific presence on social media: Between March and August, the department’s account sent out an average of about 139 tweets a month that included the words “coronavirus,” “covid” or “pandemic” — more than four a day.
infections from floodwater, the importance of screening for
hearing loss in newborns, and suggestions for how to
safely defrost a turkey.
The Twitter account made no mention of how daily tallies of newly confirmed coronavirus cases, hospitalizations and deaths were on the rise — although it did retweet a handful of tweets from DeSantis that touted upcoming vaccines, and also posted an image and link to a Covid-19 safety tip sheet.
triumphant announcement this week that the first doses of a Covid-19 vaccine were being administered.
recent snapshots captured by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
Caught between instructions from the central office and providing accurate information during the biggest public health crisis in a generation, the two health officials told CNN they felt like they were walking a tightrope.
“It is difficult, but it is doable,” one of the health department employees said. “Sometimes, I ask my partner organizations to use my messaging or get it out through interviews with experts… we all just figured out different ways to get around the rules.”
The other health official said it was frustrating to see misinformation about the pandemic going viral and finding themselves unable to respond with facts.
“We could have saved a lot more lives if we were allowed to do our jobs,” the official said.
Still, other employees working in the county health offices insisted that they hadn’t experienced any kind of directives from the state preventing them from talking about Covid — or said that it made sense that state officials would set standardized messages.
“I’ve never felt I was being asked or pressured about what information we could share with the public regarding Covid,” said Melissa Watts, the public information officer for the state health department’s branch in Pasco County. “There was no interaction about what we could or could not tweet. I shared any information I considered appropriate in doing my job.”
online dashboard with a variety of statistics and maps about the pandemic.
allegations from health officials that they were muzzled by the former communications director.
DeSantis and the health department did not answer CNN’s questions about the officials’ claims. Fred Piccolo, the governor’s spokesperson, told the Sun-Sentinel that “messaging on prevention and COVID-19 has reached saturation,” arguing that Floridians are already doing everything they can to stop the virus’ spread.
But experts said they were surprised by the lack of Covid messaging from the department. Dr. Marissa Levine, a public health professor at the University of South Florida and the former health commissioner for the state of Virginia, called it “very concerning.”
“Denial may be our biggest challenge,” Levine said. “It’s a really important time to be putting out messages in all media that are consistent and coherent.”
Delays in when Florida reported coronavirus deaths have also raised questions about how transparent the state was about the severity of the pandemic in the run-up to Election Day.
that was first reported by the Sun-Sentinel.
Throughout most of the fall, the state reported dozens or hundreds of these backlogged deaths every week. But from October 24 to November 7, the state reported a total of just four deaths that had taken place more than a month earlier.
The reported drop in deaths wasn’t because the state had caught up on its backlog — it went back to reporting dozens of month-old deaths during the week after Election Day and in the weeks that followed. The temporary decline painted a rosier picture of the pandemic in Florida as voters were going to the polls.
said it would scrutinize reported Covid deaths more closely to make sure they were caused by the virus. That shift in procedures could have led to the dip in the data, Salemi said.
“It could be they’re taking more time with certain deaths,” Salemi told CNN. “This to me is all a bit of a black box.”
DeSantis stops mayors from putting stricter rules in place
Over the course of the pandemic, DeSantis has followed in Trump’s footsteps in criticizing policies designed to slow the virus’ spread, such as mask mandates and restrictions on restaurants and bars. And as cases have risen this fall, he’s refused to allow cities to put in place stricter rules than the state — leaving local mayors feeling defenseless.
A CNN review of DeSantis’ public statements about Covid over the last nine months found that he has been quick to comment on vaccines or therapies but slow to talk about increasing case rates or methods to slow the spread.
Nearly from the start of the crisis, DeSantis denounced what he described as “draconian, arbitrary restrictions that have nothing to do with public health” in other states around the country. In a Fox News interview in mid-May, he argued that “some of this stuff… has devolved into social control” and “absolutely it’s gotten out of hand.”
He all but declared victory over the virus at a May 20 press conference, comparing Florida to New York and boasting that “we have a lower death rate than the Acela corridor, DC, everyone up there… We’ve succeeded and I think that people just don’t want to recognize it.”
DeSantis urged Floridians to follow social distancing guidelines, he still found ways to play down the virus, arguing that the pandemic was mostly hitting younger Floridians who faced far lower death rates than their parents and grandparents. And he parroted Trump’s approach of
blaming rising cases on increased testing and
touting unproven drugs like hydroxychloroquine.
he sent nurses and health care workers to Miami-Dade and other counties to tend to the sick.
DeSantis announced on September 25 that he would move the state to “phase three” reopening — lifting all state restrictions on businesses, banning local governments from enforcing mask mandates with fines, and limiting those governments’ ability to cap restaurant and bar capacity. “Every business has the right to operate,” he said at a press conference. “You can’t just say ‘no’ after six months and just have people twisting in the wind.”
Now, two and a half months after the reopening order, cases and hospitalizations are again rising, with the average daily cases topping 10,000 this week — not far from the seven-day average in mid-July. This time, however, DeSantis has held firm on avoiding new state mandates and blocking local governments from going further.
There will be “no lockdowns, no fines, no school closures” in Florida, DeSantis declared on November 30 — a few days before the state recorded its highest new daily cases in more than four months. “No one’s losing their job because of a government dictate,” he said. “Nobody’s losing their livelihood or their business. That is totally off the table.”
Local mayors told CNN that the lack of autonomy to set their own policies on issues from masks to bar restrictions had hamstrung their ability to respond effectively to the pandemic.
Hernandez, the Hialeah mayor, said that while he wants to keep businesses open, too, the best way to do that is with common-sense regulations. Under DeSantis’ executive order, the city can fine businesses — but not the people breaking the rules.
During the summer, “people in public places were wearing masks because they knew they could be fined,” Hernandez said. But now, he said, some people walk around in public without any face covering because they know the government can’t force them to put on a mask.
“I think that’s why you see these numbers go up,” Hernandez said.
“From the beginning, the communication from the governor’s office has been atrocious,” said Kriseman, the St. Petersburg mayor. He said that DeSantis’ order reopening the state, and his comments denouncing restrictions, had led to a widespread impression among the public that “masks were not required any more, social distancing was not required any more.” DeSantis’ approach “has resulted in additional cases,” he argued.
Still, political observers in the state say DeSantis is unlikely to pay any political price for his handling of coronavirus. If anything, Trump’s recent Sunshine State victory suggests DeSantis’ messaging proved effective, said Steve Vancore, a Florida pollster and political consultant who has worked with candidates and groups of both parties.
“Any negativity about his handling of coronavirus did not translate on Election Day,” Vancore said, adding that the President’s three percentage point win was “as much a victory for DeSantis as it was for Trump.”
Throughout the pandemic, DeSantis followed the President’s lead on another issue: the experts he’s listening to. DeSantis has surrounded himself with commentators who have denied or played down the severity of the pandemic, even as his administration has sidelined experts both inside and outside the state government.
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