Ron DeSantis can’t quit Covid

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — America is moving on from Covid-19. Ron DeSantis can't stop talking about it.

With the Covid-triggered national health emergency set to expire Thursday, DeSantis has been crisscrossing the country touting his handling of the virus. DeSantis criticized “lockdown politicians” during a visit to California and called Florida a “refuge of sanity” amid pandemic closures when he was in South Carolina last month. At Liberty University in Virginia two weeks ago, the governor said he bucked the political and medical establishment to keep Florida open.

DeSantis, who is expected to announce a presidential bid in the coming weeks, has gone even further in his home state. The governor this year pressed Republicans in the Legislature to pass a series of Covid-19-related bills, including measures that permanently ban mask mandates in schools and prohibit businesses from firing employees who don’t get vaccinated.

“It's purely political,” said state Sen. Tina Polsky, a Democrat from Boca Raton, of the legislation to ban pandemic-era mandates forever.

DeSantis claims the new proposals are meant to ward off possible future mandates from the Biden administration, saying at a press conference last week in Florida that “they really just wanted to control your behavior.”

It’s no surprise DeSantis is spotlighting his pandemic-era record. The governor built his national reputation on defying Covid-19 restrictions, earning heaps of praise from conservatives and appearing regularly on Fox News. He championed in-person learning and kept schools open while banning mask requirements for Florida’s nearly 3 million public K-12 students. He waged high-profile fights with the Biden administration over vaccine requirements for workers and last year his administration even threatened the Special Olympics with a $27.5 million fine because the organization wanted to require its athletes to be vaccinated at an Orlando competition.

Now the governor will find out if he can sustain that strategy as he prepares to campaign more than three years after the pandemic began. Covid gives DeSantis an opening to attack former President Donald Trump, whose administration was responsible for the federal government’s early response. DeSantis chided Trump — without saying his name — during a Utah GOP meeting in April, saying that real leaders “don't subcontract out their leadership to health bureaucrats like Dr. Fauci.”

Erin Perrine, spokesperson for Never Back Down, a super PAC supporting DeSantis, was much more blunt recently when shetold NewsMax: “You saw President Trump stand with Anthony Fauci and have him try to force Florida into lockdowns. Governor DeSantis stood against that."

Recent polling shows Americans have mixed feelings about whether Covid is actually over. But for many, quarantines, masking on airplanes and virtual learning for kids are a thing of the past.

One indicator of the current mood is boosters and vaccinations. In Florida, which has the second highest population of people aged 65 and over in the country, the number of people getting booster shots has plummeted. About 8,000 people received Covid-19 booster shots during the last week of April, according to data from the Florida Department of Health. During that same time last year, about 47,000 people got the jab.

Throughout the pandemic, DeSantis faced harsh criticism for his hands-off approach to Covid. At the height of the Delta variant surge in the summer of 2021, Florida made up roughly one in five new infections nationally and at one point had more than 10,000 people hospitalized. Florida and DeSantis were mocked by late night TV hosts and denounced by Biden, who told GOP governors to “get out of the way” of their efforts to stop the spread of the virus.

A snapshot of the virus in Florida, however, shows a more complicated picture. Florida had more than 87,000 Covid-related deaths since the first cases of Covid appeared in March 2020 and its death rate was 13 highest in the nation, according to data from the New York Times. But according to that data, it had a lower death rate than New York and New Jersey, two Democrat-led states that imposed some mask and vaccine mandates.

DeSantis was also an early proponent of vaccinating the elderly and prioritized seniors over young, healthy workers in December 2020. But his stance eventually changed, and at a press conference in 2021 he stood next to people who were staunchly anti-vaccine, including one who falsely said the shot “changes your RNA.” DeSantis last December asked the state Supreme Court to empanel a grand jury to investigate Covid vaccines and the drug companies that manufacture them.

DeSantis defended his handling of Covid and praised Florida’s legislation that makes the bans on pandemic-related mandates indefinite. He repeated his stance when asked about it by a POLITICO reporter on Friday, saying that the Biden administration tried to deny people the right to work based on “whether or not they got an mRNA shot.”

Other Florida Republicans, when asked about DeSantis’ continuing Covid efforts and the pandemic-related legislation they passed, also blamed the president.

“Why did we do it? Joe Biden — you never know what he’s going to do next,” said state Rep. Randy Fine, who is head of the Florida House Committee on Health & Human Services. “The fact that we’re getting rid of the national emergency years after it should have ended, that tells you can’t trust Joe Biden.”

But DeSantis critics maintain that, given the current state of the pandemic, all DeSantis Covid moves are unnecessary.

"It's all messaging and theater,” said state Sen. Jason Pizzo, a Miami Democrat. “And we'll continue fighting back against it.”