Florida Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried (D) said in an interview that the Republican governor Ron DeSantis
Ron DeSantisFundraising quarrel points to Trump-GOP fissures Survey: 81 percent of Republican voters have a favorable opinion from Trump DeSantis to Biden: thinking of reinstating ‘insane’ COVID-19 restrictions MORE is letting its “rich white donors” skip the line for COVID-19 vaccines.
“What we are seeing here in our state is that the governor is favoring his white and wealthy donors,” said Fried on a Friday. interview with MSNBC.
“What is happening is that the governor who never had a plan for how vaccines would be launched, so he has this miscellaneous plan and is allowing many white and wealthy donors to get ahead of the line where our minorities and all our communities disadvantaged people are still waiting for the vaccine, ”she added.
Fried’s accusations that DeSantis is playing favoritism with the distribution of the vaccine prompted her to ask the FBI to investigate the subject in early March.
The charges came after The Miami Herald reported that almost all residents 65 and older in a wealthy Key Largo enclave were vaccinated against COVID-19 in January, and many of those residents made donations to the DeSantis government campaign.
Although all residents were eligible for the vaccine, Fried believes the community was given priority due to their connections.
“There are some people who are more upset with me for vaccinating the elderly than with other governors, whose policies killed the elderly, and that’s a joke,” said DeSantis in response to the Miami Herald story.
“I’ve never seen corruption like this,” said Fried. The alleged corruption is the reason why she believes the FBI needs to get involved.
But DeSantis insisted that he had no involvement in helping the community mentioned in The Herald’s story to be vaccinated.
“That was not a website that we were involved with, in The Keys,” said DeSantis. “This was one of South Florida’s hospital systems [that] I went to this community of elderly people. I think this is great. I want veterans to have injections, I think they did a good job at that. We were simply not involved in this in any way, shape or form. “