The Florida governor was slow to respond to the pandemic, and his distribution plan for the Covid-19 vaccine was marked by chaos, but critics say he was quick to recognize political gold at these precious doses.
Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican, ignored federal guidelines and prioritized vaccinating the elderly – one of Florida’s most powerful electoral blocks – first.
When Holocaust survivors and Cuban survivors of the Bay of Pigs disaster – revered members of two other major Florida constituencies – had their first shots, DeSantis made sure he was there for press conferences.
And now the governor is accused of using the Covid-19 vaccine to reward powerful political supporters and developers, creating pop-up vaccination sites in planned communities that they have developed and where Republican voters predominate.
In response to recent criticism from Republicans and Democrats in Manatee and Charlotte counties, both south of Tampa, where a website was created last week and another started dispensing doses on Wednesday, DeSantis said local lawmakers should be more thankful
“I’ll tell you something, I wouldn’t complain,” said the governor. “I would be grateful to be able to do that.”
DeSantis said his “first strategy for the elderly” focuses on retirement communities that are willing to help organize vaccination events and that Manatee County is behind other parts of the state in putting needles in the arms of 65-year-old residents or most.
The governor said the state had set up similar locations in the Kings Point community in Palm Beach County, Sun City Center in Hillsborough County and in The Villages retirement community northwest of Orlando.
“If Manatee County doesn’t like us to do that, we are totally fine with putting it in the counties that want it,” he said.
There was no response from the DeSantis government when NBC News asked for comment, but on Thursday the governor was in Largo, Pinellas County, in another hastily organized vaccination operation.
There, DeSantis boasted that he vaccinated the second million elderly people in Florida, a 94-year-old Korean War veteran named Vern Cummings, whose vaccination was broadcast live on FOX News.
Earlier, US Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a South Florida Democrat, criticized DeSantis for threatening Manatee County.
“Threatening that he would withdraw the vaccine if people do not like the way the delivery system is working is vile and shows the insensitive indifference he had in how the vaccine was treated,” she said on Wednesday.
But there is little to stop DeSantis from distributing vaccines any way he wants.
In December, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued recommendations on who should be vaccinated first. But the Trump administration essentially left the dose distribution to governors, said Philip J. Palin, a veteran government consultant who specializes in providing supplies to catastrophe survivors.
This allowed DeSantis to put the elderly in the same category as frontline health care workers, and the result was chaos when some counties started offering injections on a first come, first served basis.
In Charlotte County, officials said they were taken by surprise when a vaccination post was suddenly opened last week in the Kings Gate retirement community in Port Charlotte and 3,000 doses were dispensed.
Harvey Goldstein, who sits on the county’s Republican executive committee and does not live in development, said he learned of the pop-up when a regular Republican Party meeting was canceled so that some of the members could have their photos.
“It looks like they were allowed to skip the line ahead of the 90,000 people in the county who are still waiting to get a chance,” Goldstein, 81, told NBC News.
“If you establish rules about who should be vaccinated first, they should apply to everyone. I didn’t hear any justification for them to go ahead of the people who registered in the county. “
Goldstein said he suspected that the reason Kings Gate received special treatment is because it was built by Benderson Development and “they use a heavy hammer in Tallahassee”. NBC News contacted the company’s marketing director, Julie Fanning, but there was no immediate response.
Charlotte County Democratic Party chairwoman Teresa Jenkins said DeSantis’ decision to open a vaccination center in Kings Gate gave the impression that “politically connected people who are likely to vote for the governor are being prioritized.”
“There is a lot of anger out there,” Jenkins told NBC News. “Many of us go online every morning trying to schedule a vaccination appointment. We have people who are waiting and waiting for their pictures. And here we see vaccines being distributed in areas where there are mainly political supporters of Governor DeSantis. “
Of the 1,900 Kings Gate residents, Jenkins said, only 150 are registered Democrats.
“That says something,” said Jenkins. “And we are very angry about it.”
Some of that anger was shown on Tuesday at a meeting of the Manatee County Commission, where many participants first learned that 3,000 doses were being delivered on Wednesday at another vaccination post at Lakewood Ranch, a rich development that was extends between the county of Manatee and the Sarasota border.
“For my life, I can’t understand why we would vaccinate the wealthiest neighborhoods in the county before everyone else, especially the needy neighborhoods and the large number of residential parks manufactured in our community,” Manatee County Commissioner Misty Servia, a Republican , wrote in a text message to The Bradenton Herald.
Lakewood Ranch’s parent company, Schroeder-Manatee Ranch, belongs to the Uihlein family in Illinois, which has donated millions to the Republican Party.
Family member Dick Uihlein gave $ 900,000 in 2018-2019 to the political committee of the Friends of Ron DeSantis, according to state election records. He and his wife, Liz, were also major funders of former President Donald Trump’s campaign and were highly critical of federal pandemic restrictions.
Both were subsequently tested positive for Covid-19.
In an email to Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, Schroeder-Manatee Ranch spokeswoman Lisa Barnott said neither Dick nor Liz Uihlein was a shareholder in the company.
“The state [Gov. DeSantis] called our CEO and asked to maintain a pop-up clinic at Rancho Lakewood, ”she wrote. “We connected them with our county commissioner, who coordinated the use of the county-owned Premier Sports Campus.”
The commissioner in question was the chairman of the Manatee County Commission, Vanessa Baugh, a Republican close to DeSantis and who defended the decision at the public meeting on Tuesday.
“It’s a good thing, not a bad thing,” said Baugh. “Did I stop to think that this advice and others would be so upset about it? No, to be honest, I didn’t. I think it was a great idea. “
Shortly after NBC News contacted Baugh for more details, his spokesman sent a statement from the commissioner that said, in part:
“I fully support the governor, his Covid-19 response and his team’s decision to vaccinate a group of elderly people who have a vaccination average below the state,” he said.
Baugh ended by thanking DeSantis “for standing firm in the face of so much criticism from the media”.
“Florida has remained open, has kept families employed and even managed the pandemic better than most other states,” she wrote.
Florida, according to the latest count from NBC News, reported 1.84 million Covid-19 infections and nearly 30,000 deaths from the coronavirus, some of the nation’s worst figures.
Most of these infections and deaths came after DeSantis, a staunch supporter of Trump, declared victory over the virus during a visit to the White House in April and reopened the state despite objections from health experts.