Former President Donald Trump shared a post on his social media platform on Jan. 30 featuring an anonymous user claiming that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had signed a law allowing for forced vaccinations.
The post was one of several Trump shared on Truth Social targeting DeSantis. Trump’s claim spread to Twitter, with several conservative influencers weighing in. But is it true?
“That’s just a flat-out lie,” attorney and medical freedom advocate Jeff Childers told The Epoch Times.
Childers publishes the daily blog “Coffee and Covid” and has successfully sued the City of Gainesville and Alachua County over mask and vaccine mandates.
“It’s just wordplay. The Governor never added anything to Florida Law giving the State the ability to vaccinate,” said Childers. “He took away employers and the State’s right to force vaccines even on a Typhoid Mary. All that stuff was already Law since 2002.”
In the post Trump shared, a user named @kagdrogo wrote: “DeSantis signed a bill that had a clause for forced vaccinations and involuntary quarantines hidden way down at the very bottom of the bill.”
The claim doesn’t fit the image of a governor who has spent the last year and a half fighting what he calls the “biomedical security state.” Yet the rumor continues to flourish on social media.
The portion of the post shared by Trump shows a screenshot of Florida’s statute concerning public health emergencies. Under current Florida law, during a declared public health emergency, the state health official has the power to “order an individual to be examined, tested, treated isolated or quarantined.” Until 2021, the word “vaccinated” was also part of the law’s language, but it was removed during the 2021 special legislative session.
Childers won an injunction on appeal against Alachua County’s mask mandate in 2021 on the grounds that it violated Florida’s privacy laws. He then used that case as a precedent to win a case against the City of Gainesville’s vaccine mandate. Childers says it is very unlikely the statute Trump shared would ever be used and, if it were, it would be struck down in court.
“I think the right-to-privacy argument would work against this just as well as with the case against the City of Gainesville,” said Childers. “Concern over this statute has always been overblown. It does not have a provision for mass vaccinations, only for one person who is proven to be a threat to public health.”
Medical Freedom Advocate Justin Harvey has a different perspective.
“Removing the word ‘vaccine’ from the language is a great first step, but we need to push for ‘quarantine, isolation and treatment’ to be removed now too,” said Harvey, who helped lead the charge to advocate for the laws passed in the 2021 special session. “No one person should have that type of authority. We just witnessed that slippery slope firsthand during the pandemic.”
The confusion over whether the legislature “snuck” a provision into SB 2006 allowing for forcible vaccinations may come down to simple confusion over how to read a bill.
“When a claim like this floats around the internet, it is important to understand there is a code that is key to reading bill action within bill text,” said DeSantis Press Secretary Bryan Griffin. “Words stricken are deletions; words underlined are additions. Thus, words in a bill text that are not underlined are existing statute.”
Why is Trump sharing this claim if it is not true?
“Trump is playing on people’s ignorance,” said Childers. “I will bet $10,000 to any of the people claiming this that they are wrong.”
At a press conference in Bradenton on Jan. 31, DeSantis once again refused to hit back at Trump and touted his electoral victory instead.
“If you take a crisis situation like COVID, the good thing about it is when you are an elected executive you have to make all kinds of decisions. You’ve got to steer that ship. And the good thing is that the people are able to render a judgment on that whether they re-elect you or not,” said DeSantis.
“In my case, not only did we win reelection. We won with the highest percentage of the vote that any Republican governor candidate has in the history of the state of Florida.”
Trump’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
