DeSantis Declares War on CDC Over COVID-19 Vaccines

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is asking a grand jury to investigate whether Floridians were misled by COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers after claims by his state's surgeon general that the vaccines could potentially harm those who received it.

In a roundtable discussion Tuesday, DeSantis—a longtime skeptic of the science deployed to stall the spread of the virus at the start of the pandemic—announced he would launch a grand jury investigation into "any and all wrongdoing" involved not only in the creation of the vaccines themselves, but how they were used in Florida and any long-term harms that could have come as a result of their use.

He also announced the creation of a board to "advise the public and provide oversight" of the public health establishment in what he described as a counterweight to institutions like the Centers for Disease Control, with which he regularly clashed during the pandemic over recommendations to self-isolate and wear masks in public settings.

"We've seen over the past few years, really, the bankruptcy of the public health establishment," DeSantis said during the discussion before criticizing public health officials' decisions to attend and promote racial justice protests at the height of the pandemic.

"If that doesn't just go to show this is all just a huge political farce, I don't know what it is," he added. "...I think you've continued to see people in these bureaucracies and in this establishment behave in ways that have totally squandered any type of confidence or goodwill that people would have.

"And our CDC at this point, anything they put out, you just assume at this point that it's not worth the paper that it's printed on."

To prove his point, DeSantis relied not only on Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo—who has regularly shared opinions about COVID-19 and vaccines that fly in the face of medical consensus—but figures like Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya.

Since the start of the pandemic, Kulldorff and Bhattacharya have been favorites of conservative institutions like the Brownstone Institute and Hillsdale College for their skepticism of the science behind the vaccines, the severity of the virus and measures intended to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

"We know that there's been a lot of faith destroyed in public health," DeSantis said. "And I think that it's important that we have folks who people actually can rely on when they're looking to answers and when they're looking for guidance on some of these really, really important issues that people have today."

While DeSantis' perspective lingers in the national zeitgeist well after the height of the pandemic—approximately 1 in 4 adults, as well as roughly one-third of Republicans, have some skepticism about the vaccine, according to recent polling by the Morning Consult—a clear plurality of the medical community continues to support vaccination.

That support has come particularly after a precipitous decline in the weekly number of deaths as vaccines became more widely available.

"Vaccines saved millions of lives and $1 trillion in medical costs averted during the pandemic," epidemiologist Eric Liang Feigl-Ding wrote on Twitter after DeSantis' press conference. "Guess we remember why he's called Ron #DeathSantis."

Some issues with the vaccines, however, have elicited some occasionally hyperbolic critiques from right-wing sources.

Some research from the National Institutes of Health and others have probed rare cases in which coronavirus vaccines may cause "long COVID"-like symptoms in some patients, including brain fog and blood pressure swings.

DeSantis would later use his authority to ban the distribution of the vaccine to young children in his state, drawing rebukes from members of Congress.

Then there was a recent trove of documents obtained via a Freedom of Information request that found a small group of people who allegedly suffered injuries from the vaccines, though it is unclear from the data whether the vaccine caused those injuries.

On the whole, however, CDC data has shown "low rates of medical care after vaccination," the agency told Reuters, "particularly hospitalization."

Facing investigation by a Florida grand jury, Pfizer—one of the chief manufacturers of vaccines—concurred.

"Regulatory agencies across the world have authorized the use of our COVID-19 vaccine," Pfizer wrote in a statement to The Daily Caller following DeSantis' announcement.

"These authorizations are based on a robust and independent evaluation of the scientific data on quality, safety and efficacy, including our landmark phase 3 clinical trial. Data from real-world studies complement the clinical trial data and provide additional evidence that the vaccine provides effective protection against severe disease," the company said.