DeSantis for the win
- Thread starter Tsing Tao
- Start date
People aren't born with dementia, Covert. Well, in your case they are but most people develop it over time.
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spread, regional outbreaks and death tolls were worse than he was telling Floridians, or he selectively focused on outdated statistics to make his case and ...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 much "winning". The Covid data DeSantis has been hiding shows THOUSANDS of more Covid deaths in a SINGLE COUNTY than the State of Florida revealed publicly. This makes DeSantis' Covid policy the most disastrous in the country by a huge margin. DeSantis basically sacrificed the lives of the people in his state in a wholesale manner to drive his failed political agenda.
DeSantis health officials release numbers on Palm Beach County COVID deaths after lawsuit
State health officials: Nearly 92,000 COVID deaths recorded in Florida; 6,500 fatalities in Palm Beach County
https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story...h-numbers-released-after-lawsuit/71439601007/
It took more than two years and a lawsuit, but Florida health officials are once again publicly reporting Palm Beach County's COVID-19 death toll, revealing a fatality count in the thousands.
The Florida Department of Health stopped reporting county-by-county COVID fatalities in mid-2021 because the state was “returning to normal,” an aide to Gov. Ron DeSantis said at the time. But Palm Beach County logged 3,549 more victims since then, the majority of all deaths in the county.
What's more, the majority of statewide COVID deaths have occurred since then too.
The state Health Department published the latest data without public announcement in late October at FLHealthCHARTS.gov. It shows weekly, monthly and yearly COVID case counts, deaths and vaccinations in each county by age group, race, ethnicity or sex.
What made Florida reveal detailed COVID death data after two years?
The state had to release the statistics after settling a lawsuit last month with former state Rep. Carlos Guillermos Smith, a Democrat from Orange County. Smith sued in 2021, claiming state officials violated Florida public records law when he asked them for daily COVID data and they claimed to have none. The USA TODAY Network, which owns The Palm Beach Post and other Florida newspapers, joined that lawsuit.
The Health Department switched from daily to weekly reports on June 4, 2021, removing information showing data for each of Florida’s 67 counties such as cases, hospitalizations, deaths or vaccinations for people in each age group, race or ethnicity along with more numbers such as the median age each day for those infected or how many cases were found in nursing homes.
What is Palm Beach County's COVID death toll?
The data the department uploaded last month shows 6,432 COVID fatalities in Palm Beach County as of Oct. 20. About 55% of those deaths happened after state health officials switched to less-detailed weekly reporting.
The state Health Department includes people who died within 30 days of testing positive or whose death certificate lists COVID as an immediate, underlying or significant contributing factor to the death. DeSantis has yet to make good on a promise he made in January 2022 when he said his administration would publish statistics differentiating between COVID-positive Floridians who died from the disease and those who died for another main reason.
While 82% of Palm Beach County’s victims were elderly, the detailed data reveals an explosion of deaths in 2021 among residents younger than 65.
Also: USA TODAY Network, other Florida news organizations join COVID-19 public records lawsuit
Just 17% of Palm Beach County COVID victims from Jan. 1 to June 3, 2021, were not seniors. But from June 4 through the end of the year, that ratio jumped to 33% as Florida logged more new infections and deaths than any other state in the nation.
When the state Health Department switched to weekly reporting that lacked fatalities among age groups in each county, DeSantis spokeswoman Christina Pushaw justified the decision by telling the News Serivce of Florida that “COVID-19 cases have significantly decreased over the past year ... and our state is returning to normal, with vaccines widely available.”
The CHARTS data also show Palm Beach County has fared better than the majority of Florida’s 67 counties when it comes to COVID deaths.
How Palm Beach County's COVID death toll compares to the rest of Florida
Palm Beach County tied Clay County — southwest of Jacksonville — for the 29th lowest death rate in 2022, with 100 COVID deaths for every 100,000 residents, according to a Palm Beach Post comparison of fatalities to the latest population estimates from the University of Florida Bureau of Economic and Business Research.
Palm Beach County is No. 33 in 2023 so far, with 36 deaths per 100,000 residents.
Florida logged 91,922 deaths as of Oct. 20, the CHARTS data shows. State health officials recorded 60% of those fatalities after June 4, 2021.
Here is how many COVID deaths state health officials have logged among Palm Beach County residents for each year:
- 2020: 1,969
- 2021: 2,394
- 2022: 1,520
- 2023: 549, as of Oct. 20
How do I find Florida's detailed COVID death data?
Go to https://www.flhealthcharts.gov/charts/default.aspx.
From there, select whichever age, gender, racial or ethnic groups for whom you want to see death statistics. The "Time interval" dropdown can be changed from yearly, to monthly or weekly.
Click the green Microsoft Excel icon in the upper right corner of the results to download them as a spreadsheet file.
Ron's campaign is going flat or south but in the larger scheme of things it just means that the pubs will pick someone else.
What is really grim is when a candidate's support is plummeting but the party is totally locked into him with no easy means of exit - think Dems and Joe Biden.
Havin' fun yet?
I dont understand why he tried to resuscitate his campaign by debating someone who is not even running? and is shocked it didnt work?
He committed to it with Hannity a while back after he stalled out and hoped it would give him more visibility and a chance to tout Florida more against Cali which he thinks is his central them (along with the anti-woke stuff) and that it would give him a boost.
Problem is he dropped another serious leg down by the time the debate actually came around and now he is debating from down in the hole and has lost a lot serious donors since then and Haley has gone a leg up. Some of the political characters develop personalities which get them through the ups and downs a least a little bit. Desantis has no personality though.
The problem with Ron DeSantis is he cannot even control those working under him. How does that inspire confidence? Take note his most ardent supporters and advisers on Twitter. They bash President Donald Trump and his supporters (voters) by their arrogance and debates them on the issues for which they are losing badly. Take the issue of Alvin Bragg charging President Donald Trump and what does Ron DeSantis do? He bashes President Donald Trump instead, of attacking Alvin Bragg and his abuse of power? Ted Cruz and even RINO Kevin McCarthy did a better job attacking Alvin Bragg. Ron DeSantis looked very weak and out of touch. He had an opportunity to stand for what is right but, he blamed the victim? That is like committing suicide on national TV when, at that moment, tens of millions of Americans were watching that on TV.