Things were looking pretty good in Florida on April 13, when Gov. Ron DeSantis and state officials held a press briefing in Tallahassee. A reluctant DeSantis had issued a lockdown two weeks before, but coronavirus infections were low, and he was eager to open the state back up again. In his presentation, the governor went through a number of slides, making over and over again the argument that Florida was doing well.
The governor’s communications director, Helen Aguirre Ferré, approached Rivkees at the podium and whispered into his ear. After she left, he remained seated but seemed confused. Ferré came up to him again, and this time the confusion was dispelled. Rivkees rose and left the briefing room.Had he simply been allowed to sit through the rest of the briefing, what Rivkees said would have attracted little notice, since his words of caution were anodyne in the extreme.
DeSantis, who has closely echoed Trump’s own calls for schools to return to normal, defended the withholding of such exemptions, even for districts that were continuing to see high infection rates. “It’s not up to the health department to say a ‘yes’ or a ‘no,’” he said. At a recent visit to a Jacksonville nursing home, DeSantis told visitors to quite literally embrace their loved ones. “Hell, hug ’em,” he urged. “I think that you could do that,” he said, as long as people wore face masks — and didn’t sneeze. As he spoke, a poster urging social distancing loomed over his left shoulder. Not a single health department official contradicted him, because not a single health department official was there.
The mere fact that Rivkees was leading Florida’s coronavirus response was surprising and, in itself, a testament to DeSantis’s inattentive administration of the state bureaucracy. Just finding a state commissioner and health secretary proved a challenge for the 41-year-old governor, who had not been involved in state government before running for Florida’s highest office. After several months, DeSantis finally settled on Rivkees, a prominent physician at the University of Florida.
The University of Florida also investigated Rivkees for potential conflicts of interest having to do with his consulting work in the private sector. In addition, he falsely claimed to have addressed the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine. A little more than a week after Rivkees was removed from the briefing, DeSantis announced the formation of his reopening committee. The committee was stocked with business leaders, such as the chief executive of the Publix supermarket chain and the president of Walt Disney World. There was the hospital commissioner and the commissioner for elderly services, but not a single expert from the department of health.
You are out of touch with reality! DeSantis is doing a fantastic job!
Now do NY which has a smaller population and 32,000 deaths. 🤷🏻♂️🤷🏻♂️🤷🏻♂️
incompetent is as incompetent does
From the data, Florida isn’t that bad. I can’t even get a haircut here in CA.
Florida is so bad 900 people PER DAY are fleeing to there from Democrat states 🤔
Florida is in far better shape than NY, PA, or California. I see you must have gotten your orders from the DNC to push this nonsense since the internal polling shows Dems getting crushed
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