Manatee County announced on Tuesday that the Florida Emergency Management Division would host a “pop-up” vaccination site at Rancho Lakewood this week for 3,000 residents of Manatee County, according to a county statement.
Vaccines, however, would be limited to people living on just two postal codes – 34202 and 34211.
Manatee County Commissioner Misty Servia, a Republican, criticized the selection of these two areas in a working session of the County Commissioners Council on Tuesday.
“You are taking the Whitest demographic group, the wealthiest demographic group in Manatee County, and putting it ahead of everyone else,” said Servia. “The optics are bad … very bad – I am very disappointed,” she added.
Commissioner Reggie Bellamy, a Democrat, also noted that he has “been fighting like hell to show people that the (vaccine) lottery is the same and that we cannot compromise the system”.
“And now, suddenly, someone is telling me that we were able to come in and extract names – extract a certain demographic group – and say, ‘These are the people we are going to serve’,” he added at Tuesday’s meeting.
County Commissioners Council President Vanessa Baugh, a Republican who strongly supports DeSantis, said the clinic “was run strictly by the governor who called Rex Jensen … they wanted to have an instant session at Rancho Lakewood.”
Jensen is the CEO of Schroeder-Manatee Ranch, the parent company of Lakewood Ranch, according to the company’s website. The venture is a wealthy community that boasts new home prices “from $ 180,000 to more than $ 1 million,” according to its website.
“It was not a choice about postal codes, it was a choice about where there is a high concentration of elderly people where you could have communities offering the opportunity for them to continue (to be vaccinated),” he said.
He also rejected the suggestion that the choice was politically motivated, saying he did not “understand the charge”.
DeSantis responded to county officials who were concerned about the choice.
“If Manatee County doesn’t like us to do that, then we are totally fine with putting it in the counties that want it,” said DeSantis.
“We will try to do more and more with the additional doses, but anyone in Manatee … if they do not want us to do it, just let us know and we will ensure that we send the doses to anyone who wants to,” he also repeated later at the press conference.
The governor also recalled that the doses to be distributed at this location are in addition to the doses attributed to the county as a whole and that he has organized two of these vaccinations every week in places like The Villages, Kings Point and Sun Cidade in Hillsborough County.
Meanwhile, Lakewood Ranch, in a statement to CNN, said its involvement in the clinic was only “to help identify a location that could accommodate 1,000 people a day.”
“We contacted Manatee County Commissioner Vanessa Baugh and asked if Premier County Campus, owned by the county, would be an option,” said spokeswoman Lisa Barnott in an email.
Barnott noted that Baugh coordinated the use of the site, as well as the use of the Manatee County registry of people who applied for vaccination.
State Democrats criticized DeSantis for his comments.
Florida Democratic Party chairman Manny Diaz said in a statement that DeSantis “should stop making policy on the distribution of vaccines here in Florida”.
“Threatening retribution and less access to the vaccine for communities that criticize the launch of the vaccine for its problems is shameful and inhuman,” added Diaz.
Democratic state senator Annette Taddeo said “it is disgusting and unacceptable for the governor to politicize life-saving vaccines”.
“The governor owes residents of Manatee County an apology and a public statement assuring the public that political games will not be used in the distribution of vaccines in our state. Period,” she added in a statement.
CNN’s Rosa Flores and Sara Weisfeldt contributed to this report.