Florida Governor Spokesperson Tweet About COVID Deaths Sparks Backlash, Twitter Account Disabled

Fred Piccolo, spokesman for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, reportedly received a negative reaction and deactivated his Twitter account after writing that the photos of dead victims of COVID should be juxtaposed with 99 images of people who survived the disease.

Piccolo was responding to a Reuters photo gallery on COVID-19 that aimed to highlight pandemic-fighting trials in hospitals and funeral homes in the United States

Commenting on the tweet, Piccolo wrote: “I’ve been asking myself since 99% [of] Covid patients survive, shouldn’t you have 99 survivor photos for each fatality? Otherwise, you are just trying to create a narrative that is not reality. “

Screenshots captured by Miami Herald reporter Ben Conarck and WLRN reporter Danny Rivero showed that Piccolo was responding in the middle of the night to a topic on Twitter by Corinne Perkins, editor of Reuters Pictures in North America.

Perkins wrote: “This topic is dedicated to those who say that we are not seeing images of the reality of COVID-19 in hospitals in the United States. This is not a complete list, but I wanted to highlight the stories @reuterspictures photographers bring to light. “

The tweets included photos of victims, bereaved families and crowded hospitals and funeral homes during the course of the pandemic.

Piccolo’s statement quickly received criticism from Twitter users, who found them insensitive to more than 330,000 in the United States who died of the disease, along with those who continue to suffer side effects after contracting the virus.

Daniel Uhlfelder, a lawyer who filed a lawsuit against DeSantis in March and dressed as the Grim Reaper to spread awareness about the disease on Florida beaches, called Piccolo’s comments “disgusting”.

“He is responsible for the governor’s communication message,” said Uhlfelder. “And he’s mocking or minimizing deaths. It’s just inexcusable. I don’t know how you justify it … This isn’t a game. These are people who are suffering and dying,” South Florida Sun SentineI reported.

Shortly after writing the tweets, the Florida spokesman deactivated his account. But in an interview on Wednesday, Piccolo told the Sun Sentinel that he was already planning to leave the social media site anyway.

“I have made people a lot more angry about other things in the past, this is just an observation that I think was worthy of dismay,” said Piccolo of his latest tweet. “But I said this would be my Christmas present to myself, to get out of the way, so I said, let’s do this.”

Piccolo’s comments follow months of intense scrutiny directed at the Florida governor and his administration for apparently failing to provide accurate COVID-19 data.

Piccolo himself has consistently minimized the coronavirus by questioning the effectiveness of mask use and mask mandates at least 16 times and claiming that COVID-19 is less deadly than flu at least three times, one Sun Sentinel report found.

Earlier this month, Florida police raided the home of Rebekah Jones, a former state data scientist who accused the government of falsifying coronavirus data to make it look like fewer people died or contracted the disease across the country. state.

“My concern is that in Florida we have not obtained all the facts and information about COVID, and it is clear that the governor does not wish to institute any type of COVID policy of any kind,” Ron Filipkowski, Florida attorney and former appointed to the 12th Circuit Judicial Nominating Committee by Governor Ron DeSantis, said earlier Newsweek.

“The truth was hidden from us during the pandemic.”

Newsweek contacted DeSantis for further comments, but received no response in time for publication.