Florida Governor and potential 2024 GOP Presidential candidate Ron DeSantis continues his reckless anti-vaxxer extremist campaign

DeSantis pushes for a grand jury investigation of COVID vaccines and its manufacturers and promoters

Dec 14, 2022

Florida Governor and potential 2024 Presidential candidate Ron DeSantis (R) continues his deranged anti-COVID vaccine extremist campaign, as he announced yesterday that he urged the Florida Supreme Court to empanel a grand jury to investigate COVID vaccines. DeSantis also called for creating an alternative to the CDC that would serve to pander to anti-vaxxer, COVID denialist, and anti-public health conspiracists as part of the right-wing war on the medical community.

His fellow Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo also has a history of anti-vaxxer extremism.

DeSantis was previously a champion of vaccination and was all for the COVID vaccine early on, including the creation of a statewide children’s vaccine registry in the pre-COVID times of 2019.

Eric Bradner and Kit Maher at CNN:

CNN — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Tuesday asked his state’s Supreme Court to green-light an investigation of “any and all wrongdoing in Florida with respect to Covid-19 vaccines,” his latest move to cast doubt on the vaccines’ effectiveness and amplify fears about side effects.
In the petition filed with the Florida Supreme Court, the Republican governor requests the empaneling of a grand jury to investigate a broad group of entities associated with the development, distribution and promotion of the vaccines, including pharmaceutical manufacturers and their executive officers, as well as medical associations.
DeSantis also said Tuesday he was launching a public health integrity committee – a panel that would counter the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which DeSantis said “is not serving a useful function; it’s really serving to advance narratives rather than do evidence-based medicine.” The panel would assess guidance and actions from federal agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health, US Food and Drug Administration and the CDC.
DeSantis has made Covid-19 vaccine skepticism his calling card ahead of a potential run for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. The governor, who cruised to victory in his bid for a second term in November, is positioning himself to the right of former President Donald Trump, a potential rival who who was in office when the vaccine was developed.
The announcements Tuesday came at a roundtable focused on vaccines that DeSantis led. The Florida governor’s surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, during the roundtable pointed to examples of the vaccine causing myocarditis, inflammation of the heart, and said pharmaceutical companies need to provide more data to independent researchers so they can further study the side effects from vaccines.

His moves towards the anti-vaxxer fringe could be seen as a way to stand out in the 2024 GOP primary for the Presidency, in contrast to the pro-COVID vaccine but anti-COVID mandates candidate Donald Trump.

Marc Caputo at NBC News on how DeSantis is outflanking Trump on the right on vaccinations, especially the COVID vaccine:

For about a year, Donald Trump’s confidants, advisers and boosters have worried that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was positioning himself to get to the right of the former president over the issue of Covid vaccines.
DeSantis, who is mulling whether to challenge Trump in the 2024 Republican primary for president, deepened those suspicions Tuesday.
At a roundtable he convened of Covid vaccine skeptics and opponents — including his own surgeon general — he formally called on the state Supreme Court to impanel a grand jury to investigate whether pharmaceutical companies criminally misled Floridians about the side effects of vaccines, a position at odds with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
DeSantis was a major booster of the vaccines last year and once called them lifesaving, but he later turned against them, mirroring a shift in conservative Republican opinion. By January, he refused to say if he even got a booster, and that prompted Trump — whose Operation Warp Speed led to the rapid development of the vaccines — to take a thinly veiled shot at him, albeit not by name, for being “gutless.”

Rebekah Sager at Daily Kos:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is pulling out all the stops to attract COVID conspiracy voters in his quest for the 2024 Republican crown. This weekend, he started laying the groundwork by indicting the COVID-19 vaccine, citing an unfounded conspiracy about the vaccine’s side effects.
Speaking at a private event, DeSantis announced his administration intends to impanel a statewide grand jury to “investigate any and all wrongdoing” by the makers of the mRNA vaccine.
“We are going to work to hold these manufacturers accountable for this mRNA [vaccine] because they said there were no side effects, and we know that there have been, and there have been a lot,” DeSantis said at the event.

Despite what DeSantis and his anti-vaxxer cronies think, the COVID vaccines are highly safe and effective.

Song:

Disturbed
“Bad Man”
Divisive (2022)

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