So much WINNING. Actually No, DeSantis loses yet another Sunshine law suit and had to hand over the Covid information he has been hiding. The data proves shows that DeSantis statements about Covid being in decline were completely false. "The data showed that community spread, regional outbreaks and death tolls were worse than he was telling Floridians, or he selectively focused on outdated statistics to make his case and ... claim Florida was “open for business.” This, sadly, is how authoritarians like Ron DeSantis operate -- without regards to people's lives while pushing a fabricated political narrative for his own gain. DeSantis administration settles lawsuit, will disclose COVID data and pay attorneys fees https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article280300224.html After two years of denying that detailed COVID-19 data relating to 2021 infections and vaccines existed,and then being forced by a court to turn it over, Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Florida Department of Health have agreed to a settlement that will require the state to disclose coronavirus data on its web site and pay attorneys fees for attempting to circumvent state public records law. The settlement, announced Monday by the Florida Center for Government Accountability, a non-profit public records watchdog which sued the state on behalf of former state Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith, requires the department to publish detailed COVID-19 data on the Florida Department of Health website and pay $152,250 in legal fees to attorneys representing FLCGA and Smith. “The department lied about the existence of these public records in court and did everything to restrict information and downplay the threat of COVID even while the Delta variant ripped through Florida — a decision that cost many lives,” Smith, an Orlando Democrat, said in a statement. Department of Health spokesperson James “Jae” Williams III, called Smith’s statement and the FLCGA’s press release “a political stunt” and said the agency “has always reported data to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.” “It is unfortunate that we have continued to waste government resources arguing over the formatting of data with armchair epidemiologists who have zero training or expertise,’’ Williams said. Smith, who in 2021 was a member of the House Pandemics & Public Emergencies Committee, sued the state in August 2021 after submitting a public records request to the Department of Health seeking detailed COVID-19 information in his home county as the cases of the Delta variant spiked. The Miami Herald, the Tampa Bay Times, and several other news organizations, as well as the First Amendment Foundation, joined the lawsuit. At the time, a third wave of cases was ballooning in Florida and hospitalizations were rising dramatically, but the Department of Health was changing the way it reported death data to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, giving the appearance of a pandemic in decline, a Miami Herald analysis found. The Florida Department of Health collects the COVID-19 death data published Monday-Saturday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. On Aug. 10, amid a surge in cases, Florida switched from reporting deaths by report date to death date, creating what experts called an “artificial decline” in the final two weeks of data. The agency also had started launching a series of criticisms on Twitter, accusing the CDC of publishing incorrect COVID numbers, but offering little explanation. In June 2021, the health department discontinued its COVID-19 dashboard and changed to a weekly report. But when Smith sought the detailed data in August, the agency said the information he sought was now confidential and exempt from public disclosure under a state law. On Aug. 16, 2021, FLCGA made the same public records request for all of Florida’s 67 counties and was denied for the same reasons. They sued days later. Smith and FLCGA urged the court to require an agency official to give a deposition about the department’s decision making. In January 2022, Leon County Circuit Judge John Cooper denied a Department of Health request for a protective order to prevent the deposition. The department appealed the ruling, and argued in court that the records requested did not exist. But after the appellate court upheld the trial court’s order requiring an agency official to answer questions under oath, the records were produced in March 2023. The First District Court of Appeal panel of judges was made up of Republican appointees Stephanie Ray, Timothy Osterhaus and Rachel Nordby. Both Smith and FLCGA said they had hoped the information sought would illustrate the larger impact of the virus in each region of the state — including the ages, sex, ethnic and racial demographics of those with confirmed cases of the virus, and vaccination rates for the county — to better inform the public of its risks. Public health experts have shown that trust in data is crucial to getting the public to comply with government guidelines for how to behave in a crisis. At the time of the Department of Health’s shift in policy in the summer of 2021, President Donald Trump had failed to win re-election and DeSantis was running fora second term as governorwhile attempting to position himself to seek the GOP nomination for president. Condemning the reliability of COVID-19 data and the federal government’s handling of the COVID-19 virus, as well as discrediting the science behind the vaccine, would become a central plank in DeSantis’ platform. The August 2021 decision was not the first time the DeSantis administration had withheld COVID-19 data from the public as the governor was pursuing a different political narrative, however. In the spring of 2020, when Trump was seeking re-election and was hoping to show that the virus was on the decline, the governor and his agency officials changed the way the state handled other infectious diseases. DeSantis announced that most of the state would reopen for business on May 4, 2020, citing a “data-driven strategy” and success at achieving the federal “benchmarks” that included a drop in infections. But when the Miami Herald obtained the data and examined it against the governor’s claims, it became clear that the governor either wasn’t aware the data showed that community spread, regional outbreaks and death tolls were worse than he was telling Floridians, or he selectively focused on outdated statistics to make his case and help the president claim Florida was “open for business.” The settlement agreement vindicates the position that “transparency and accountability are not negotiable. The Constitution mandates it,’’ said Michael Barfield, director of Public Access Initiatives at FLCGA. “The Department hid public records during the height of the pandemic to fit a political narrative that Florida was open for business.” The settlement agreement requires the Department of Health to provide detailed COVID-19 data for the next 3 years, including vaccination counts, case counts, and deaths, aggregated weekly, by county, age group, gender, and race. Williams said the Department of Health will now display the COVID data “like other diseases” and it will “shift from the previously published Biweekly Reports and now solely be available on Florida CHARTS alongside all other public health data.” FLCGA said in its statement that it will continue to monitor the department’s compliance with its legal obligations under the agreement and will release the COVID-19 data to the public for educational and research purposes.
So the Covid death data which the DeSantis administration was forced to hand over from court order -- amply demonstrates that Ron DeSantis was hiding data, lying and his actions caused thousands of lives in Florida. ‘That decision cost lives’: Covid data case further deflates Ron DeSantis’s campaign Settlement over withheld virus data that critics say cost thousands of lives comes at pivotal time for Republican governor and his teetering campaign https://www.theguardian.com/us-news...esidential-campaign-covid-data-florida-deaths A courtroom settlement over withheld Covid-19 data that critics say cost thousands of lives has deflated Ron DeSantis’s campaign trail persona as a courageous freedom warrior who kept his state open during a deadly peak of the pandemic. It comes at a pivotal time for the Florida governor, whose teetering run for the Republican presidential nomination is mired in financial difficulties and collapsing poll numbers in early primary states. Among the efforts DeSantis has made to try to arrest his slide among Republican hardliners include positioning himself as a champion for “medical freedom”, and defying federal health guidance to advise Floridians against taking new Covid-19 booster shots. The settlement ends a two-year legal battle between the DeSantis administration and a coalition of Democrats, open government advocates and media outlets that began in June 2021 when the Florida health department ended daily updates of Covid cases, deaths and vaccinations on its online dashboard. The department will pay the plaintiffs’ $152,000 legal bill and resume regular posting of the data that DeSantis’s communications team insisted at the time was no longer necessary because cases had “significantly decreased” and that Florida was “returning to normal”. In reality, as DeSantis dismissed reporting on the pandemic as “media hysteria”, the Delta variant of the virus was just taking hold, and cases and fatalities spiked, to a record 385 a day in Florida by September 2021. Simultaneously, Florida led the nation in pediatric Covid hospitalizations. Critics dubbed DeSantis “the Pied Piper of Covid, leading everybody off a cliff”, as he forged ahead with an executive order banning mask mandates in schools, having already signed legislation awarding himself veto power over coronavirus mandates set by municipalities. “Twenty-three thousand Floridians died during the Delta surge, and not only did the DeSantis administration restrict information on Covid during that time, they repeatedly downplayed the severity of the outbreak to fit their political narrative and help DeSantis run for president. That decision cost lives,” said Carlos Guillermo Smith, a Democratic former state congressman who filed the lawsuit against the Florida health department, later joined by the Florida Center for Government Accountability. “Our school leaders were struggling to make informed decisions about how to mitigate the spread of Covid, whether it be masking or social distancing policies, or other strategies. They needed data, they needed information, but the state made it unavailable, then said it didn’t exist. “All Floridians have a constitutional right to public records and receive them in a timely manner. And what’s interesting about the governor’s arguments about Covid is he repeatedly talks about giving people the choice over masks and vaccinations, but without critical public health data how are they able to make informed choices?” Smith said the settlement became inevitable when an appeals court ordered the health department earlier this year to produce documents containing Covid data it claimed did not exist. “The DeSantis administration was caught red handed lying about the existence of these public records in court, repeatedly claiming that the records we were requesting didn’t exist, then saying even if they did exist, they would not share them because they were somehow exempt,” he said. In a statement to the Guardian, the Florida department of health noted that the settlement did not include any admission of wrongdoing or violation of any law, and that the state had always reported data to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). “It is unfortunate that we have continued to waste government resources arguing over the formatting of data with armchair epidemiologists who have zero training or expertise,” department spokesperson Jae Williams said, in a swipe at Smith. Williams said it was inaccurate to say DeSantis had “lost” a court fight. “Governor DeSantis isn’t a party in the settlement agreement,” he said. Public health analysts, meanwhile, welcomed the resumption of publication of Covid data, and lamented the “politicization” of both the process and the virus. “There’s no valid excuse for withholding information from the public except in the rare circumstance where there’s a bona fide concern that if you release certain data you’ll cause panic, and that the panic itself would cause more damage than the withholding of the data. I don’t think there was any case for that to be made here,” said Jay Wolfson, distinguished professor of public health, medicine and pharmacy at the University of South Florida. “It was unfortunate because it didn’t only politicize whatever we were doing about the disease, it politicized medicine and science. It reduced the public’s reliance and belief there was a source of good science behind the medicine they could rely on, and gave them less basis for trust.” Wolfson added that public confusion was understandable when federal health agencies such as the CDC were recommending vaccination boosters, while DeSantis’s hand-picked state surgeon general warned against them. “There’s an old term called the sacred trust of medicine. It suggests there’s a special relationship people have with their medical provider, a trust that if you have any questions you consult your physician,” he said. “The politicization didn’t help because even physicians weren’t sure what to do. In Florida, there was a concern, ‘Do I require my patients to get vaccinated? Do I suggest it, or do I run the risk, certainly recently, of being sanctioned by the state if I do?’” For Smith, a prominent critic of DeSantis, the episode marks another failure for the governor’s sagging run for his party’s presidential nomination. “Folks have largely moved on from Covid to more pressing issues that are impacting their lives, property insurance, rising costs and prices in Florida, access to health care, housing, there’s so much that’s on people’s minds the governor is not talking about and doesn’t have any solutions for,” he said. “He launched his presidential campaign with a continuation of his war on woke and culture wars and gender ideology and all kinds of stuff. When Republican voters grew tired of that he shifted over to his record on Covid, which still didn’t earn him any points. He keeps changing the subject to see what sticks, but at the end of the day, whatever he’s selling people aren’t buying.”
All this settlement does is force Florida to continue reporting COVID data, that only a handful of nutjobs like yourself, continue to hide in their houses and fret over. The rest of us have moved on with our lives (some of us, rightfully so, hadn't given a shit in the first place). DeSantis didn't "hide" anything. He wasn't "caught" doing anything. They just stopped posting the data because it doesn't mean shit anymore. And this lunatic Carlos, a member of the GWB NPC fan club apparently, wants the data published.
Hopefully he'll just get back to governing Florida again. Its not like he's going to win the Presidency anyway.
As usual, you don't understand what is going on here, putting your all-too-usual ignorance on display. "It is against Florida law to knowingly provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization." "National SJP has affirmatively identified (itself) as part of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood - a terrorist led attack. The State University System of Florida has at least two institutions with active national SJP chapters." "These chapters must be deactivated." People can still say, write, or post online anything they want. But the state of Florida will not support their operations. That's not violating free speech. That's just not funding a terrorist organization. Try harder, Cuddles. You can do it, I've got faith in you.