Signing four medical freedom bills in Destin on May 11—including one making Florida the first state to ban controversial “gain of function” research—Gov. Ron DeSantis recounted his lonely fight against national health authorities during the COVID-19 pandemic.
He spoke to an enthusiastic crowd that gave him such a long-standing ovation when he walked in that he finally had to ask them amiably to sit down.
DeSantis defined the first term of his governorship—and began to make his name nationally—with his leadership pushing back against federally mandated social distancing, masks, lockdowns, and vaccines.
He credited Northwest Florida as an area that itself pushed back against lockdown.
“If you were here, you didn’t necessarily know there was a pandemic going on. You were able to make your own decisions. And so that, I think, led the way not just for the state of Florida but also for the country and the United States.
“At the time everything we were doing in Florida we were getting attacked [for]. We were getting attacked by bureaucrats like [Dr. Anthony] Fauci. We were being attacked by the political left. We were being attacked by corporate media. And we were even attacked by some Republicans.”
“But we stuck to our guns because we believed we were doing the right thing for the state.
“And now you look, and in Florida, we have way more people employed today than prior to COVID.
“A massive amount of wealth came into the state. We have a bigger workforce and more businesses.
“And you look at some of these other states that we locked down jurisdictions. Perpetual restrictions. What did they end up doing? A lot of them have still not recovered. A lot of them hemorrhaged population. They’ve hemorrhaged wealth. They locked kids out of school for over a year in some of these places like Chicago and other places that are failing.
“We can say definitively, Florida did it right. And those states did it wrong.”
Visitors from other states during the pandemic, he said, would tell him it felt like being in another country.
DeSantis recounted various steps he took contradicting the national medical establishment.
When evidence arose that monoclonal antibodies worked as a treatment against COVID, Florida moved to provide them and did so for thousands of people—provoking the federal government to stop it not once, but twice, despite the fact that it worked.
“They said, if people know there’s a treatment, then they might not want to do the vax, or they might not want to do a booster shot, so they wanted to de-emphasize treatment.”
People in other states have told him they learned about the treatment only through watching one of his press conferences online. Their own doctors hadn’t told them.
“Honestly, it’s sad that that would be the case. It’s sad that someone in another state would only know about a treatment because the governor of Florida is talking about it.
“All the physicians should have been talking about this. This was not something that should have been kept quiet.”
DeSantis sued the federal government on OSHA mandates requiring vaccinations in the workplace and won in the Supreme Court.
He sued and lost on requirements that medical personnel had to get the shots, he said, but Florida refused to provide federal regulators with the data about who was getting it.
“So they fined the state, but that’s fine. We ended up saving a lot of people’s jobs by standing up for that, which we’re happy to do.”
‘To Control Your Behavior’
“This is the bureaucracy acting on its own. The administrative state trying to deprive people of the right to put food on the table for their family, that you either had to do this, or you don’t work. Or you don’t eat. That was a disgrace to this country—and we fought him every step of the way on that.”Of the mandates, he said, “the purpose of them was not to safeguard your health. The purpose of them was to control your behavior. They wanted you to behave the way they thought, and they were willing to use coercion to do it.”
“What we saw with COVID is the medical establishment really lost its mind. They became very political. They are not listening to data even to this day,” DeSantis said.
Pediatricians trying to vaccinate babies are a good example, he said. “There is no evidence this does anything beneficial for them. And there may be problems with doing that.”
“Science isn’t about following the crowd. Medicine is not about following the herd. It’s about following the evidence and getting the right answers.
“And so you may have the crowd taking a position. They may be people that have a lot of credentials, but if they’re wrong, they’re wrong. And there is a right answer when it comes to this stuff.”
Florida’s Surgeon General, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, talked about how he and his family lived in Los Angeles as he taught at UCLA when the pandemic hit, figuring he'd remain there for his career.
‘God-Given Rights’
People wanted to make their own decisions about their lives, but “someone else decided that ‘I’ve got this boot, and I’m gonna stick it on your neck, and I’m going to say you have to make these decisions. Never mind the fact that so often, they didn’t make any sense, or they didn’t have any good evidence behind them.”“Individuals have absolute God-given rights to make on their own ... the decisions we make about our health, and how we take care of our ourselves.”
Ladapo said he and his wife decided he should take the job “because in the entire country there was one leader, only one leader across 50 states, who decided that ... he saw what was wrong and he would not let it stand.”
DeSantis signed four bills into law.
Senate Bill 252—labeled by his office “the most comprehensive medical freedom bill in the nation”—prohibits businesses and government agencies from requiring vaccine passports, prohibits employment discrimination based on vaccination or immunity status, and prohibits discrimination against Floridians based on COVID-19 vaccination or immunity status.
House Bill 1387—which DeSantis said was added to the package late in the legislative session to strengthen the measures, bans gain of function research in Florida. The Wuhan Institute of Virology, funded with Fauci’s approval with U.S. money, did this kind of research, in which dangerous viruses are strengthened for study purposes. It was likely the source of the COVID-19 outbreak, Ladapo said.
Senate Bill 1580—guarantees physicians freedom of speech and other rights. They can opt out of participating in or paying for treatments they have conscientious objections to. It protects whistleblowers among their ranks and it prohibits medical boards or the Department of Health from taking disciplinary action against doctors who speak out against the medical establishment.
Doctor Tells of Pressure
Dr. Joel Rudman, a freshman Republican representing Destin in the state House, said he was just a family physician practicing in nearby Navarre, “minding my own business until 2020.”He took to Facebook to reassure his patients and neighbors when the pandemic started. “[I said] ‘Look, we’re physicians. We deal with emergencies every day. We are going to get through this somehow, some way. We are not all going to die tomorrow.’ Contrary to what Tony Fauci was saying. And you know what? My community embraced it.”
But he became the target of “outside work activists” from California and northern Virginia, “who saw my Facebook posts. They hated them. They also hated my stance against masks and against those horrible vaccine mandates.”
They reported to the American Board of Family Medicine “in the hopes of humiliating me.” The board told him he was under investigation and threatened to yank his board certification.
“My 25-year record was spotless,” he said.
“Thanks to this bill, the persecution of Florida doctors stops today,” he said.
Others Speak Against Vaccines
Several speakers told of their own travails.One, occupational therapist Ginger Parsons, said she didn’t want to take the first COVID vaccination, but under pressure at work did so and had significant side effects. She had to choose, she said, between her profession and taking an experimental injection with potentially serious medical complications.
She declined the second shot because she'd already had COVID, acquiring natural immunity.
“I knew the second injection was unnecessary and yet it was still required. It just didn’t make any sense. I decided my husband and children would be better off with an unemployed wife and mother, than one who had a vaccine injury or death.”
Her religious exemption was eventually accepted, she said. But meanwhile, as the deadline for her termination approached, she faced hostility from coworkers, had to go through mandatory meetings with management, and had to wear different masks. Those who complied had stickers on their badges.
Parsons, whose shyness was apparent as she spoke—she doesn’t like public speaking, she said—called it all intimidating and invading her privacy.
Sterling Marquez said she was a young single woman working in human resources for a large health care company when the pandemic struck.
She balked at getting the vaccine over concerns for her health and her future children.
She worried about her job but decided she didn’t want to work for a company “that cared more about a jab, than about job performance.”
She remembered an offer DeSantis had made at a press conference, she said and contacted his office about opportunities.
“And I’m proud to say that just weeks after I made that call, I began working for the Free State of Florida.”
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