DeSantis for the win

gwb-trading · May 13, 2021

Tsing Tao said:
Ah, and here it is. The last remaining pillar of resistance is shattered. The last bastion of "DeSantis faked the data, and Jones was the crusader" horseshit - gone.

How many posts in the DeSantis thread from GWB, or Here4Corpses or others who were so bent on the outright lie that this woman was the key to proving DeSantis faked data, and that Florida data couldn't possibly mean that their narrative wasn't correct from the start? Cognitive Bias run amok, says I.

Oh, you'll no doubt see the same cast of above mentioned "characters" immediately show up to defend her. They'll likely tell you that the National Review is a right wing publication, and attack the source or the author. They'll call everyone a COVID denier. They'll bring up comments at multiple degrees of separation that - someone who knew the author of this article - said 23 years ago while drunk at a frat party. "See? Their uncle's brother said that chemtrails" (or space magic or sea turtles or unicorns) "were real, and that means that this author supports those ridiculous statements!"

Because that's all they have. Innuendo. Character assassination. They cannot debate the hard data. "Believe the Science" actually means the "new Science ™" The Post-Covid Science. Not the science that has driven the development and improvement of the human race for centuries.

The Scientific Method is defined as: ...an empirical method of acquiring knowledge that has characterized the development of science since at least the 17th century. It involves careful observation, applying rigorous skepticism about what is observed, given that cognitive assumptions can distort how one interprets the observation.

Rebekah Jones, the COVID Whistleblower Who Wasn’t
The former dashboard manager alleges a vast data conspiracy in Florida; not a word of it is true.
This is a story about Rebekah Jones, a former dashboard manager at the Florida Department of Health (FDOH), who has single-handedly managed to convince millions of Americans that Governor Ron DeSantis has been fudging the state’s COVID-19 data.

When I write “single-handedly,” I mean it, for Jones is not one of the people who have advanced this conspiracy theory but rather is the person who has advanced this conspiracy theory. It has been repeated by others, sure: by partisans across the Internet, by unscrupulous Florida Democrats such as Nikki Fried and Charlie Crist, and on television, by MSNBC in particular. But it flows from a single place: Rebekah Jones. To understand that is to understand the whole game. This is about Jones, and Jones alone. If she falls, it falls.

And boy does it deserve to fall.

Jones’s central claim is nothing less dramatic than that she has uncovered a massive conspiracy in the third most populous state in the nation, and that, having done so, she has been ruthlessly persecuted by the governor and his “Gestapo.” Specifically, Jones claims that, while she was working at the FDOH last year, she was instructed by her superiors to alter the “raw” data so that Florida’s COVID response would look better, and that, having refused, she was fired. Were this charge true, it would reflect one of the most breathtaking political scandals in all of American history.

But it’s not true. Indeed, it’s nonsense from start to finish. Jones isn’t a martyr; she’s a myth-peddler. She isn’t a scientist; she’s a fabulist. She’s not a whistleblower; she’s a good old-fashioned confidence trickster. And, like any confidence trickster, she understands her marks better than they understand themselves. On Twitter, on cable news, in Cosmopolitan, and beyond, Jones knows exactly which buttons to push in order to rally the gullible and get out her message. Sober Democrats have tried to inform their party about her: “You may see a conspiracy theory and you want it to be true and you believe it to be true and you forward it to try to make it be true, but that doesn’t make it true,” warns Jared Moskowitz, the progressive Democrat who has led Florida’s fight against COVID. But his warnings have fallen on deaf ears. Since she first made her claims a little under a year ago, Jones has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars through multiple GoFundMe accounts (and, once she realized that she was losing a percentage to credit-card fees, through paper checks); she has become a darling of the online Left; and, by pointing to her own, privately run dashboard, which shows numbers that make Florida’s COVID response look worse than it has been, she has caused millions of people to believe quite sincerely that the state’s many successes during the pandemic have been built atop fraud. Stephen Glass, the famous writer-turned-liar who spent years inventing stories but got caught when he pushed it too far, could only have dreamed of such a result.
Jones’s journey began on May 18, 2020, on which day she was dismissed by the Florida Department of Health. Today, she claims that she was fired because she had refused to take part in a massive cover-up. But as her personnel file shows, not only was there no cover-up but the agency did everything it could to de-escalate the situation around this employee before it eventually became untenable. Indeed, as the records clearly show, indulging Jones had been its approach from the outset. At the time she was hired, the state government knew from its background check that Jones had completed a pre-trial intervention program in Louisiana in 2018, thereby securing a “no conviction” record for “battery of a police officer,” and it knew that she had entered into a deferred-prosecution agreement with the State of Florida in 2017 after being charged with “criminal mischief.” And yet it hired her anyway. Had she applied for a more important role, the forest of red flags that Jones leaves wherever she goes might well have prevented this mistake—especially given that she did not mention any of them in her application. But Jones wasn’t there to fill an important role. She was there to run a website.
That matters, for, with the enthusiastic help of the press, Rebekah Jones has unremittingly inflated the prominence of the position she held. And yet when one reads through the FDOH documents that chronicle the affair, one is struck by how dull and unheroic the whole thing really was. There are no “whistleblowers” anywhere in this story. There is no scandal. There is no grand fight for truth or justice. There is just a replacement-level government employee who repeatedly breaks the rules, who is repeatedly mollycoddled while doing so, and who is fired only when she eventually renders herself unworthy of the department’s considerable grace.

Jones’s bad behavior was first formally reported on May 6, 2020, when the IT director at the FDOH, Craig Curry, emailed the department’s labor-relations consultant, Tiffany Hicks, “looking for guidance” on “properly documenting actions of one of my employees and to get guidance on proper preparation in case action needs to be taken.” Among the “actions” that Curry sought to “document” were that the employee—Rebekah Jones—had written “posts on website [sic] and social media regarding data and web product owned by the Department that she works on without permission of management or communications”; that she had released infographics that “should have been identical to data published by our communication department” but were not; and, most seriously, that she had possibly exposed “personnel data” in the process. Asked to clarify the problem by Hicks, Curry confirmed that between April 9 and April 30, 2020, he had verbally told Jones to stop talking to the press without permission, and, more specifically, that he had told her to stop releasing health-department data or representing her employer without consent.

In her response to Curry, sent later that day, Hicks proposed one of two actions: that Jones should either be “separated” (i.e., fired) or else be put through a “Management Counseling” procedure that would “address and document the recent incidents.” The latter process, Hicks explained, “would be informal and would not be placed in the employee’s personnel file.” But “if similar behavior continues,” she added, “it is a [sic] management’s decision to move forward with termination.” Apparently, the department chose the second action, because, by the end of the day, Jones was still working at the FDOH, albeit in a slightly altered role. In his notes, Curry records that, having been “instructed by management to replace Ms. Jones as primary on the COVID Dashboard,” he called her “to notify her that she was being removed from her duties as primary GIS [geographic information system] developer on the department’s COVID-19 dashboard.” Again: This was not a termination. As Curry explicitly noted, Jones “was informed that she was maintaining her role as GIS team manager and was to resume normal day to day responsibilities, but she was to cease any duties and administrative roles associated with the COVID-19 GIS dashboard.”

Florida’s COVID-19 ‘Data and Surveillance Dashboard’ (Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
The next day, on May 7, 2020, Jones crashed the dashboard.

Without telling a single person what she was doing, Jones created a new account within the GIS system and moved a tranche of data into it. This both broke the setup and sincerely confused the department’s IT staff. “Because the team was not informed,” Curry wrote, it “began troubleshooting the issue as if it were a system issue”—which, of course, it was not. In the process, the FDOH asked Chris Duclos, a GIS manager and the only other person besides Jones who had “full administrative right [sic] in our system[,] to help.” This Duclos did, primarily “by modifying ownership of objects to return the process to the previous state”—that is, to roll back the system to how it had been when it was working. At 1:00 p.m. that day, aware that Duclos was reversing her power grab, Jones locked Duclos out of his account.

By 1:35 p.m. on the same day, Jones had been instructed to restore Duclos’s full administrative access. Six and a half hours later, at 8:08, she responded by saying that she would, and then, at 8:28, added that she intended to leave Florida to spend some time with her family in Mississippi. Except . . . she didn’t. Instead, as Curry recorded, Jones set Duclos’s permissions to a lower level than administrator, and left herself as the sole person within the FDOH who had administrator status. In response, Duclos emailed the state’s GIS vendor and requested that his full permissions be restored. This was done.

Then came a lull. Having been asked what on earth she was doing, Jones claimed that she had set herself up as the sole administrator as the result of “security concerns,” and, under the impression that this excuse had been accepted by the department, she started playing nice. Two days later, Curry reported, “the entire team seemed to be getting along and moving forward.” At 9:30 a.m. on May 15, encouraged by the improvement in Jones’s behavior, and having got the dashboard back up and running, the FDOH decided that “Management Counseling was still the correct option for previous occurrences.” That decision would last for only a few hours: At 1:46 p.m., Jones sent a mass email to everyone who used the dashboard—many of whom were external to the department—explaining that she was no longer assigned to the dashboard and suggesting that she had been removed because she had refused to manipulate data. Within minutes, the press began crawling all over the story. Three days later, Jones was fired.

From that moment on, Jones has sought relentlessly to portray herself as a martyr who was dismissed for telling “the truth.” Having waffled a little in the first few days, she quickly hit upon a specific claim to bolster this overall impression: that she
was instructed by Dr. Shamarial Roberson—the well-respected chronic-disease epidemiologist who is currently serving as Florida’s deputy secretary of health, and is the first African American to hold that post—to “delete cases and deaths” in order to present a rosier version of what was happening in the state. Absurdly accusing this official of being a “liar, fraud, murderer,” Jones now says that Roberson “asked me to go into the raw data and manually alter figures.”

This, of course, is preposterous—not least because it flies directly in the face of Jones’s initial story. Today, Jones insists that the members of an ever-growing cast within the government of Florida ordered her to “fudge” the numbers. Back in May 2020, however, the Associated Press reported that she had not alleged “any tampering with data on deaths, hospital symptom surveillance, hospitalizations for COVID-19, numbers of new confirmed cases, or overall testing rates,” and that she had acknowledged that “Florida has been relatively transparent.” Why did Jones initially decline to make such allegations? Because, as she knew full well, she had not been in a sufficiently senior position to have been able to do such a thing, even if she had been asked. In her role as the manager of the dashboard, Jones did not have the ability to edit the raw data. Only a handful of people in Florida are permitted to touch that information, and Jones was not among them. Instead, each day she was given a copy of the data and charged with uploading it into the system in a manner determined by the epidemiological team. Had she for some reason decided to alter that copy, it would have been obvious to everyone within seconds of its being compared with the original.

There is an extremely good reason that nobody in the Florida Department of Health has sided with Jones. It’s the same reason that there has been no devastating New York Times exposé about Florida’s “real” numbers. That reason? There is simply no story here. By all accounts, Rebekah Jones is a talented developer of GIS dashboards. But that’s all she is. She’s not a data scientist. She’s not an epidemiologist. She’s not a doctor. She didn’t “build” the “data system,” as she now claims, nor is she a “data manager.” Her role at the FDOH was to serve as one of the people who export other people’s work—from sets over which she had no control—and to present it nicely on the state’s dashboard. To understand just how far removed Jones really is from the actual data, consider that even now—even as she rakes in cash from the gullible to support her own independent dashboard—she is using precisely the same FDOH data used by everyone else in the world. Yes, you read that right: Jones’s “rebel” dashboard is hooked up directly to the same FDOH that she pretends daily is engaged in a conspiracy. As Jones herself confirmed on Twitter: “I use DOH’s data. If you access the data from both sources, you’ll see that it is identical.” She just displays them differently.

Or, to put it more bluntly, she displays them badly. When you get past all of the nonsense, what Jones is ultimately saying is that the State of Florida—and, by extension, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—has not processed its data in the same way that she would if she were in charge. But, frankly, why would it? Again, Jones isn’t an epidemiologist, and her objections, while compelling to the sort of low-information political obsessive she is so good at attracting, betray a considerable ignorance of the material issues. In order to increase the numbers in Florida’s case count, Jones counts positive antibody tests as cases. But that’s unsound, given that (a) those positives include people who have already had COVID-19 or who have had the vaccine, and (b) Jones is unable to avoid double-counting people who have taken both an antibody test and a COVID test that came back positive, because the state correctly refuses to publish the names of the people who have taken those tests. Likewise, Jones claims that Florida is hiding deaths because it does not include nonresidents in its headline numbers. But Florida does report nonresident deaths; it just reports them separately, as every state does, and as the CDC’s guidelines demand. Jones’s most recent claim is that Florida’s “excess death” number is suspicious. But that, too, has been rigorously debunked by pretty much everyone who understands what “excess deaths” means in an epidemiological context—including by the CDC; by Daniel Weinberger, an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health; by Lauren Rossen, a statistician at the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics; and, most notably, by Jason Salemi, an epidemiologist at the University of South Florida, who, having gone to the trouble of making a video explaining calmly why the talking point was false, was then bullied off Twitter by Jones and her followers.

For a year now, pretty much everyone who has criticized Jones has met the same fate as did Salemi. It doesn’t matter who they are, or what they have been arguing, the play is always the same. First, they are called a sexist or a racist or a member of the “alt-right.” Next, it is implied that they are working with Ron DeSantis or with Vladimir Putin—or, sometimes, with both. Then they are told that they hate “science”—or, if they disagree with her or expose a given lie or confirm that she does not have the qualifications or experience she claims, that they have sold out. And, finally, they are added to Jones’s “enemies” list (she really has one, and used to publish it online), and an attempt begins to get them kicked off Twitter or Substack or whatever portion of the Internet they are using to explain the ruse. Because a good number of the people Jones has targeted are not journalists or public figures, but scientists and public servants, such attacks work pretty well. If your career is in epidemiology, and your employer is a public university, there is little to be gained by attracting scandal.

One is almost left impressed by the strange alchemy with which Jones manages to transmute her own bad behavior into lucrative victimhood. A 342-page “manifesto” that Jones penned in 2019 gives example after example of this tendency. She manages to cast herself as the injured party in the passages in which she describes violating a no-contact order to engage with an ex-boyfriend, damaging his car, and harassing his mother. She also manages to cast herself as the victim in the parts in which she records being fired from Florida State University for having sex with a student in her office and for lying to her employer about her criminal record. She even presents herself in defensive terms in a now-removed part of the document that contains explicit text messages between her and her ex-boyfriend, as well as close-up photographs of the man’s genitals. (A misdemeanor stalking case against Jones, filed by Florida in 2019, is ongoing, although the cyber-harassment and cyber-stalking charges have been dropped or narrowed, as were earlier charges, relating to the same individual, of trespass, felony robbery, and contempt of court.) Everywhere Jones goes—whether it’s Louisiana State University (where she got her master’s), Florida State, or the Florida Department of Health—she seems always to leave a trail of wreckage. And somehow, it’s always someone else’s fault.

A warrant for Rebekah Jones’s arrest, on felony charges.
This tendency continues today. Much of the national attention that Jones has received is the result of her insisting that, having learned about her “whistleblowing,” Governor DeSantis used his “Gestapo” and “raided” her house, putting her children in danger. But this, too, is a ridiculous lie. Late last year, the police did indeed execute a search warrant on Jones. But they did so because a data breach at the FDOH—in which the personal information of 19,000 employees was stolen—was traced back to the IPv6 address that Comcast had assigned to Jones’s house. Governor DeSantis had nothing to do with it. The search warrant—which alleges that Jones committed a felony by not only temporarily accessing personnel data she had no right to access but permanently stealing it—was initially signed by Judge Joshua Hawkes, a Republican appointee, but subsequently upheld by Judge John Cooper, an elected judge in heavily Democratic Leon County. (Florida does not have explicitly partisan judicial elections.)

Jones now claims that she was “terrified” by the police’s visit. But even this seems to be highly questionable. Not only did she prepare for the visit by creating a made-for-the-cameras sign that read “Biden hire me!”—hardly the instantaneous work of someone who is surprised that the cops are at the door—but she subsequently spread a host of extraordinary claims about the conduct of the police that, after festering online for a while and spawning a swiftly dropped lawsuit from Jones, were flatly disproven by the release of the body-camera footage. As the Tampa Bay Times recently noted, despite Jones’s having “claimed on Twitter that the agents ‘pointed a gun in my face. They pointed guns at my kids,’” the bodycam video “does not appear to show police pointing their guns at anyone in the house.” On the contrary: It shows the police waiting outside patiently for 22 minutes; it shows them trying to minimize the disruption to her children by encouraging her to come and talk to them at the door; and it shows them repeatedly calling Jones to find out why she wasn’t cooperating. After the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) had released the footage, a spokesman confirmed what anyone who watches it can see: that at no point during the search did the agents point their guns at anyone in the house.

They did, however, find enough of what they were looking for in Jones’s home for another Leon County judge, Nina Ashenafi Richardson, to sign a warrant for her arrest. In January, Jones turned herself in. She is currently awaiting trial. Thus did her stint at the FDOH end as her stints elsewhere seem to have ended: in disgrace, in termination, with the cops showing up at the door, and, eventually, in the filing of charges. Until now, Jones has got away with it every single time. Eventually, though, her luck is going to run out. And when it does, no amount of flailing or distraction is going to prevent the bills from coming due.

— This article appears in the June 1, 2021, issue of National Review.
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LOL. National Review. An entire piece dedicated to character assassination with selected documents leaked from the DeSantis administration including portions of her personal file (which is against the law). The fact that the DeSantis administration will go to great lengths to smear Rebekah Jones shows what a threat they perceive her to be.

This article does not really bring any new facts to light.... it simply arranges the already known information into a clear hit piece.

This is a woman after all who has been recognized by leading science and technology organizations in the U.S. for standing up for the truth --- but Ron DeSantis does not want facts revealed - nor does he believe in following science.

gwb-trading · May 13, 2021

Yes... DeSantis is still doing his best to chase the entire cruise industry away from Florida.

Cruise Lines May Avoid Florida Ports Due to State's Proof-of-Vaccination Ban
Norwegian Cruise Line plans to require COVID-19 vaccination documentation from guests and crew members — a rule that is banned in Florida under legislation enacted by Gov. Ron DeSantis
https://people.com/travel/norwegian-cruise-line-may-skip-florida-ports-ban-vaccine-passports/

Cruise lines and the state of Florida are butting heads over conflicting rules surrounding COVID-19 vaccinations for passengers.

Later this summer, Norwegian Cruise Line, which is headquartered in Florida, plans to launch ships to the Caribbean and Europe at limited capacity and require guests and crew members to be vaccinated against COVID-19. However, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently enacted legislation that bans businesses from requiring proof of vaccination in the state.

Frank Del Rio, chief executive of Norwegian Cruise Line, said during a quarterly earnings call Thursday that because of DeSantis's rule, the cruise line may skip over Florida ports altogether, according to the New York Times and the Sun-Sentinel.

"We certainly hope it doesn't come to that," Mr. Del Rio said. "Everyone wants to operate out of Florida. It's a very lucrative market."

According to the Sun-Sentinel, Del Rio also stated, "At the end of the day, cruise ships have motors, propellers and rudders, and God forbid we can't operate in the state of Florida for whatever reason, then there are other states that we do operate from. And we can operate from the Caribbean for ships that otherwise would've gone to Florida."

Several major cruise lines have already moved their ships to operate out of international ports since sailings were halted in the U.S. last year. Norwegian has plans to sail out of Jamaica and the Dominican Republic starting in July, the outlet reports. Royal Caribbean ships will depart out of the Bahamas and Bermuda, while Celebrity will sail from St. Maarten.

As vaccine rollout continues across the country, many states have taken positions on whether getting vaccinated should be required for various activities. For example, New York requires guests at MLB and NBA games to provide proof of vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test within 72 hours of attendance, the NYT reported.

But Florida has taken the exact opposite stance.

"I have refused to take the same approach as other lockdown governors," DeSantis, 42, said in a statement last week after signing a bill that bans vaccine passports. "In Florida, your personal choice regarding vaccinations will be protected and no business or government entity will be able to deny you services based on your decision."

Last month, Del Rio wrote a letter to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) director, Rochelle Walensky that proposed plans to go back to sailing as soon as July under their new guidelines.

Under Norwegian's updated safety guidelines, all crew members and guests must be fully vaccinated at least two weeks before boarding their ship, now through at least Oct. 31, 2021, when they'll reassess plans for the future. COVID-19 tests will also be administered before and after the trip.

Del Rio also added that Norwegian will start sailing at 60 percent capacity on July 4 and increase capacity gradually until they reach 100 percent in September.

"We hope that everyone is pushing in the same direction, which is we want to resume cruising in a safe manner, especially at the beginning," Mr. Del Rio said on Thursday's earnings call. "Things might be different six months from now or a year from now."

n North America, cruise companies halted all sailings in the Caribbean last spring. Individual countries enacted stringent travel restrictions, and the CDC issued a "no-sail order." At the time, several cruise ships across the world had become sources of major COVID-19 outbreaks.

The CDC has not yet announced when cruises will be allowed to resume operation in the U.S.

gwb-trading · May 13, 2021

DeSantis pardons plague rats

Florida governor Ron DeSantis announces pardons for Covid rule breakers
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...d-pardon-florida-desantis-masks-b1846862.html

Florida governor Ron DeSantis has announced a statewide reprieve for anybody facing fines or jail terms for breaking Covid regulations in the state.

The GOP figurehead, and a staunch ally of former President Donald Trump, did not introduce a state order on face coverings, but Florida’s counties and municipality, as well as firms, were able to do so.

Talking with a couple who were facing jail terms for breaking rules on face coverings in Broward County, Mr DeSantis told Fox News viewers on Wednesday that a reprieve was coming into force from Thursday, with full pardons for all Floridians in the coming weeks.

“[I’m] glad to be on to be able to say that effect tomorrow morning, I’m gonna sign a reprieve, under my constitutional authority,” said the governor.

“So that will delay the case for 60 days for both of them, and then when our clemency board meets in the coming weeks, we’ll issue pardons not just for Mike and Jillian, but for any Floridan that may have outstanding infractions for things like masks and social distancing.”

The announcement by Mr DeSantis came after Mike and Jillian Carnevale, a gym owning couple from Broward County, were arrested for not enforcing face covering rules in July and August of last year.

Cory Strolla, a lawyer for the Carnevales, told Fox News that “the only resolution they [a judge] would approve is a 10 day jail sentence for Mike, and that was before Jillian’s case was transferred”.

“So the way Broward state charged it, Mike is actually facing two second degree misdemeanours with a total of 120 days in jail, and Jillian is facing one with a total of 60 days in jail,” said Mr Strolla.

Mr DeSantis continued by challenging the rules on face coverings for exercise, in reference to recommendations from the World Health Organisation (WHO).

“The fact is, it’s not even right to be wearing masks when you’re exercising. The WHO advises against it, it’s not healthy for people to be doing that in the first place so it was a bad restriction,” said the governor, “[it] should be advisory and not punitive and so we’re happy to use our constitutional authority”.

Florida, among the first states to end all forms of Covid restrictions in March, is the third worst for infections in the US, with over 2.9m cases, and 35,000 fatalities.

gwb-trading · May 13, 2021

DeSantis stands his ground on chasing the entire cruise industry out of Florida. Fails to recognize that the cruise lines are the strongest supporters of requiring vaccinations for cruises -- not only the CDC. On top of his failed understanding that Florida cannot regulate international transportation -- this is a federal government function by law. It may be time to point out once again that cruise ships can easily be moved to other U.S. ports outside of Florida -- which is already happening.

‘Are you kidding me?’ Gov. DeSantis says no way to vaccine passports for cruises
https://floridapolitics.com/archive...says-no-way-to-vaccine-passports-for-cruises/

The CDC is requiring proof cruise passengers have been vaccinated. But the Governor won't budge on a vaccine passport ban.

Gov. Ron DeSantis is standing firm, saying there will be no exception for cruise ships in the state’s new vaccine passport ban. The news comes after a report indicated the cruise industry had been lobbying the Governor’s office for an exemption.

The fate of Florida’s multibillion-dollar cruise industry is pitting the CDC’s cautious coronavirus rollbacks against DeSantis’ politically calculated embrace of personal liberties.

“The problem is the CDC,” DeSantis said. “The problem is not Florida.”

Speaking to reporters at a news conference in Ormond Beach Thursday, DeSantis described his view of the CDC’s latest directive for the cruise industry.

“’Oh, by the way, if you’re sunbathing you have to make sure they’re wearing a mask while they’re sunbathing,’ DeSantis said speaking as if he were the CDC.

“Are you kidding me?” DeSantis quipped. “That is an absolute farce. So, we’re challenging the authority of the CDC to be involved to this extent.”

The cruise industry has been stalled since a no sail order issued by the CDC in March 2020. At DeSantis’ direction, Florida is suing the CDC over order. A hearing was heard by a federal judge in Tampa Wednesday. DeSantis said he thinks the hearing went well.

“We think we got our points across. We think the judge was receptive,” DeSantis said. “We’ll see what happens.”

The latest directive from the CDC stated that if the cruise industry can prove 95% of passengers are vaccinated, large-capacity cruise ships can start sailing in July. Otherwise, they have to wait another 6 months.

But proving vaccinations is not easy to do in Florida, where the Governor recently signed a law banning any businesses or institutions from requiring proof of vaccination documentation. If a cruise company violated the ban it would have to pay up to a $5,000 fine on a per passenger basis. The per passenger interpretation of the new law is according to Rep. Tom Leek who sponsored the House version of the bill (SB 2006).

“We want them to be able to make decisions about how they’re going to handle a lot of this stuff, that, obviously, is within the context of Florida policy that respects the medical privacy of all Floridians,” DeSantis said.

Michael Rubin, vice president of the Florida Ports Council, said during the Florida Seaport and Transportation Economic Development Council security meeting Monday that the cruise industry was hoping for an exception to the ban. A spokesperson for the Governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

If Florida can’t find a workaround to its vaccine passport ban or the new CDC order at least one major cruise line, Miami-based Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings, has threatened to launch their ships from somewhere other than Florida. DeSantis has suggested cruise lines will go out of the country to ports in the Bahamas.

And on Thursday, DeSantis made a bet that cruise passengers don’t need assurance from vaccine passports before they start cruising again.

“If we are successful in the courts, I am willing to bet anyone that people are going to want to cruise from the state of Florida,” DeSantis said.

Tsing Tao · May 13, 2021

Tsing Tao said:
They'll likely tell you that the National Review is a right wing publication, and attack the source or the author.

Because that's all they have.
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gwb-trading said:
LOL. National Review.
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Check and mate. So predictable.

Tsing Tao · May 13, 2021

gwb-trading said:
And on Thursday, DeSantis made a bet that cruise passengers don’t need assurance from vaccine passports before they start cruising again.
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He could be right. And maybe Florida doesn't need Norwegian Cruise lines. Maybe a consolidation is in order. Maybe NCL decides to come back to the table if all the other cruise lines acquiesce. Or maybe DeSantis caves and makes a deal. Either way, its a non-story. Just more shrieking by our resident Coronaphobic.

Snarkhund · May 13, 2021

https://nypost.com/2021/05/13/how-rebekah-jones-peddled-lies-about-florida-covid-19-deaths/

El OchoCinco · May 13, 2021

gwb-trading said:
DeSantis stands his ground on chasing the entire cruise industry out of Florida. Fails to recognize that the cruise lines are the strongest supporters of requiring vaccinations for cruises -- not only the CDC. On top of his failed understanding that Florida cannot regulate international transportation -- this is a federal government function by law. It may be time to point out once again that cruise ships can easily be moved to other U.S. ports outside of Florida -- which is already happening.

‘Are you kidding me?’ Gov. DeSantis says no way to vaccine passports for cruises
https://floridapolitics.com/archive...says-no-way-to-vaccine-passports-for-cruises/

The CDC is requiring proof cruise passengers have been vaccinated. But the Governor won't budge on a vaccine passport ban.

Gov. Ron DeSantis is standing firm, saying there will be no exception for cruise ships in the state’s new vaccine passport ban. The news comes after a report indicated the cruise industry had been lobbying the Governor’s office for an exemption.

The fate of Florida’s multibillion-dollar cruise industry is pitting the CDC’s cautious coronavirus rollbacks against DeSantis’ politically calculated embrace of personal liberties.

“The problem is the CDC,” DeSantis said. “The problem is not Florida.”

Speaking to reporters at a news conference in Ormond Beach Thursday, DeSantis described his view of the CDC’s latest directive for the cruise industry.

“’Oh, by the way, if you’re sunbathing you have to make sure they’re wearing a mask while they’re sunbathing,’ DeSantis said speaking as if he were the CDC.

“Are you kidding me?” DeSantis quipped. “That is an absolute farce. So, we’re challenging the authority of the CDC to be involved to this extent.”

The cruise industry has been stalled since a no sail order issued by the CDC in March 2020. At DeSantis’ direction, Florida is suing the CDC over order. A hearing was heard by a federal judge in Tampa Wednesday. DeSantis said he thinks the hearing went well.

“We think we got our points across. We think the judge was receptive,” DeSantis said. “We’ll see what happens.”

The latest directive from the CDC stated that if the cruise industry can prove 95% of passengers are vaccinated, large-capacity cruise ships can start sailing in July. Otherwise, they have to wait another 6 months.

But proving vaccinations is not easy to do in Florida, where the Governor recently signed a law banning any businesses or institutions from requiring proof of vaccination documentation. If a cruise company violated the ban it would have to pay up to a $5,000 fine on a per passenger basis. The per passenger interpretation of the new law is according to Rep. Tom Leek who sponsored the House version of the bill (SB 2006).

“We want them to be able to make decisions about how they’re going to handle a lot of this stuff, that, obviously, is within the context of Florida policy that respects the medical privacy of all Floridians,” DeSantis said.

Michael Rubin, vice president of the Florida Ports Council, said during the Florida Seaport and Transportation Economic Development Council security meeting Monday that the cruise industry was hoping for an exception to the ban. A spokesperson for the Governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

If Florida can’t find a workaround to its vaccine passport ban or the new CDC order at least one major cruise line, Miami-based Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings, has threatened to launch their ships from somewhere other than Florida. DeSantis has suggested cruise lines will go out of the country to ports in the Bahamas.

And on Thursday, DeSantis made a bet that cruise passengers don’t need assurance from vaccine passports before they start cruising again.

“If we are successful in the courts, I am willing to bet anyone that people are going to want to cruise from the state of Florida,” DeSantis said.
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To be fair DeSantis has no power to do anything here.... if Carnival or RCL want proof of vaccination they are private companies and can decide who gets on or who does not get on their ship....

The state law ban on business requiring vaccinations seems to me to be unconstitutional and a huge overreach on the part of the government. Ironically hypocritical GOP supporters are suddenly silent on government overreach because.... well they are fucking hypocrites.

DeSantis,,, like Trump... over imagines his power as a government official and needs to be quiet...

Tsing Tao · May 13, 2021

Snarkhund said:
https://nypost.com/2021/05/13/how-rebekah-jones-peddled-lies-about-florida-covid-19-deaths/
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I posted that in a separate thread. GWB immediately shrieked and laughed because it was from a news source he doesn't "accept" because it isn't left wing.

fan27 · May 13, 2021

Shortly after getting to work today, we received an email stating we no longer had to wear masks in doors. Cheering and clapping could be heard all over the office! Desantis for the win!!