{"id":26896,"date":"2020-09-01T12:28:48","date_gmt":"2020-09-01T16:28:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/?p=26896"},"modified":"2020-09-01T12:29:11","modified_gmt":"2020-09-01T16:29:11","slug":"look-at-how-the-mainstream-media-is-working-overtime-to-undermine-gov-desantis-covid-response-and-turn-the-state-against-trump-on-election-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/?p=26896","title":{"rendered":"Look at how the mainstream media is working overtime to undermine Gov. DeSantis’ Covid response and turn the state against Trump on Election Day."},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

\n

SOTN Editor’s Note:<\/strong> The MSM headline that follows says it all about the endless attempts by Deep State<\/em> to destroy Governor Ron DeSantis.\u00a0 No other governor in Florida history has faced so much derogatory fake news for simply trying to help the residents and taking sound steps to reopen the economy.\u00a0 What, pray tell, will happen if the state’s tourism and agriculture industries go bankrupt… because of an utterly staged Plandemic<\/em>?\u00a0 See: THE GREAT SCAMDEMIC<\/strong><\/span> OF 2020 IS COLLAPSING\u2026<\/a><\/h3>\n
\n

Ron DeSantis sidelined his health department. Florida paid the price.<\/h2>\n

Alexander NazaryanNational Correspondent,Yahoo News<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

As he usually did, DeSantis made sure to point out that his state was definitely doing better than New York, which had been dealt a crushing blow by the pandemic. Thousands had died there. Only hundreds had died in Florida.<\/p>\n

Sitting at the podium several feet from DeSantis was Scott Rivkees, who is both the state\u2019s surgeon general and its health commissioner. Near the end of the meeting, Rivkees spoke up to offer a note of caution, telling Floridians that until a vaccine can be made available, they would have to continue adhering to social distancing guidelines, which both President Trump and DeSantis had consistently downplayed.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs long as we are going to have COVID in the environment \u2014 and it is a tough virus \u2014 we are going to have to practice these measures so that we are all protected,\u201d Rivkees said. There was nothing remotely controversial in this assertion. Yet it would prove the surgeon general\u2019s undoing.<\/p>\n

The governor\u2019s communications director, Helen Aguirre Ferr\u00e9, approached Rivkees at the podium and whispered into his ear. After she left, he remained seated but seemed confused. Ferr\u00e9 came up to him again, and this time the confusion was dispelled. Rivkees rose and left the briefing room.<\/p>\n

About five minutes later, the briefing ended.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\"Dr.<\/div>\n<\/div>
Dr. Scott Rivkees is pulled out of a coronavirus briefing on April 13. (Fox10 News)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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. Instead, Ferr\u00e9 made him an unlikely martyr for science by confirming what many suspected: The governor in Tallahassee was as reluctant to confront the pandemic\u2019s messy reality as his counterpart and ally in the White House.<\/p>\n

In response to\u00a0subsequent questioning from Politico<\/a>, Ferr\u00e9 said Rivkees had a meeting with deputy chief of staff Adrian Lukis. The two men did, in fact, meet that day, several hours before the coronavirus briefing. They had not been scheduled to meet again.<\/p>\n

Rivkees\u2019s removal from the briefing was symbolic of DeSantis\u2019s approach to the pandemic: Downers are not allowed. Skeptics have no say. On the federal level, Trump has\u00a0largely sidelined the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention<\/a>, which would customarily guide the nation\u2019s pandemic response. Following the president\u2019s lead, DeSantis has done exactly the same with the Florida Department of Health, largely dismissing the agency as a potential ally, deciding instead to go it alone.<\/p>\n

The department \u201chas been MIA for months,\u201d says state Rep. Anna Eskamani, an Orlando-area Democrat who has emerged as a leading progressive voice and a potential gubernatorial challenger to DeSantis in 2022. \u201cNot only are they non-present or in touch with lawmakers,\u201d Eskamani says, \u201cthey seem to be doing more harm than good.\u201d She cites\u00a0recent reports<\/a>\u00a0that the department refused to allow school districts across the state to receive exemptions from holding in-person classes.<\/p>\n

DeSantis, who has closely echoed Trump\u2019s 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. \u201cIt\u2019s not up to the health department to say a \u2018yes\u2019 or a \u2018no,\u2019\u201d\u00a0he said<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\"A<\/div>\n<\/div>
A protester sets up bags representing dead bodies during a funeral procession demonstration by the New Florida Majority (NewFM) against the reopening of Florida, in Miami, on May 27, 2020. (Chandan Khanna\/AFP via Getty Images)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Rivkees, who did not respond to multiple requests for comment, appears to have ceded control to political appointees. The state\u2019s top health official lost all influence after the April 13 briefing, says Rebekah Jones, a geographer who managed Florida\u2019s coronavirus dashboard and\u00a0whose firing in early May represented a scandal of its own<\/a>. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t a slow disappearance,\u201d she told Yahoo News. \u201cRight after that press conference,\u201d she said, \u201che wasn\u2019t in the picture.\u201d<\/p>\n

Others say he has been exasperated by political battles with the governor\u2019s office. “We don’t do anything unless the governor’s office is involved,” one current employee at the health department told Yahoo News. Rivkees, that employee said, has grown to dislike DeSantis. \u201cHe’s got handcuffs.\u201d<\/p>\n

The result has been an unmitigated disaster, with Florida now home to more than half a million coronavirus cases and 10,000 COVID-19 deaths.\u00a0 And yet DeSantis continues to chart his own mystifying course, musing about how reopening schools is\u00a0tantamount to killing Osama bin Laden<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\"Florida<\/div>\n<\/div>
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis during a news conference on the state’s status in the coronavirus crisis on April 26. (Joe Burbank\/Orlando Sentinel\/TNS via Getty Images)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

At a recent visit to a Jacksonville nursing home, DeSantis told visitors to quite literally embrace their loved ones. \u201cHell, hug \u2019em,\u201d\u00a0he urged<\/a>. \u201cI think that you could do that,\u201d he said, as long as people wore face masks \u2014 and didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\"\"<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

On Saturday, Feb. 29, a patient at a Sarasota hospital became Florida\u2019s first confirmed coronavirus cases. Only nobody knew, because neither DeSantis nor Rivkees said a word. The following morning, a reporter for the Tampa Bay ABC affiliate called Sarasota County health officials, asking about the case. The reporter\u00a0was told<\/a>\u00a0it was a hoax. State health department officials waited another 12 hours to confirm to that reporter\u00a0that the news was, in fact, true<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The next morning, Rivkees spoke at a press conference with DeSantis, acknowledging that he and others had known for some 36 hours about the Sarasota case without telling anyone (there was another case in Hillsborough County, that of a woman who had travelled to Italy; it was also kept secret). Well-coiffed and in his 60s, Rivkees spoke calmly, even as reporters shouted questions about why the public had not been informed earlier. He is much taller than DeSantis, and much more at ease before cameras. Standing behind him, DeSantis looked like the lesser official.<\/p>\n

Public health experts have never been under more public scrutiny than during the coronavirus pandemic. On the national level, Dr. Anthony Fauci has been widely celebrated for standing up to purveyors of misinformation, including President Trump. Others, like Dr. Mitchell Katz of New York City\u2019s public hospital agency (a much closer adviser to the city\u2019s mayor than his counterpart in the health department), have received harsh and justified criticism. In one of the pandemic\u2019s more notorious misjudgments,\u00a0Katz told the mayor<\/a>\u00a0that there was \u201cno proof\u201d that closures were effective and that broad immunity to the new virus would soon develop.<\/p>\n

The mere fact that Rivkees was leading Florida\u2019s coronavirus response was surprising and, in itself, a testament to DeSantis\u2019s 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\u2019s highest office. After several months, DeSantis finally settled on Rivkees, a prominent physician at the University of Florida.<\/p>\n

DeSantis\u00a0claimed\u00a0<\/a>that the selection took so long because he had been performing \u201cdue diligence.\u201d What that due diligence involved was unclear, but his appointment quickly led to details of Rivkees\u2019s sometimes disconcerting professional history to resurface.<\/p>\n

There were, for one, concerns about his temperament, with former colleagues\u00a0describing him to the Tampa Bay Times<\/a>\u00a0as \u201chot-headed\u201d and vindictive, more concerned with the business of medicine than medicine itself and unpleasant to work with.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\"Florida<\/div>\n<\/div>
Florida Surgeon General Scott Rivkees on May 6. (David Santiago\/Miami Herald\/TNS via Getty Images)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

More troubling were allegations of sexually inappropriate behavior. Rivkees had been investigated by the University of Florida, where he arrived from Yale in 2012, for making sexually inappropriate comments. \u201cIf we can\u2019t agree on this we\u2019ll have to get naked in a hot tub and work it out,\u201d he was reportedly fond of telling students. At a social gathering, he approached veterinary students and told them he and they \u201chad something in common,\u201d namely that \u201cneither one of us can have sex with our patients.\u201d (Rivkees is a pediatrician.)<\/p>\n

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\u00a0falsely claimed<\/a>\u00a0to have addressed the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine.<\/p>\n

Then\u00a0there was his memoir<\/a>\u00a0of working as a resident at Massachusetts General Hospital. Published in 2014 and\u00a0generally well reviewed<\/a>, \u201cResident on Call\u201d is rife with stories of doctors behaving badly, stealing drugs and having sex in the hospital. Rivkees\u2019s own participation in the hospital\u2019s fraternity-house-basement atmosphere appears to have been confined,\u00a0in his telling, to a few romantic encounters, such as sneaking away to an older wing of the hospital for trysts with \u201ca girl from New Jersey who flew in to help make my nights pass more quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n

DeSantis defended his choice of Rivkees, downplaying the University of Florida allegations by claiming that the nominee had been \u201cdinged for making a comment or two.\u201d He was so eager to have Rivkees join his administration that he allowed him to keep devoting 20 percent of his time to his\u00a0work at the university<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A spokesperson for the University of Florida told Yahoo News that that arrangement remains in effect to this day.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\"\"<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

A little more than a week after Rivkees was removed from the briefing, DeSantis\u00a0announced the formation of his reopening committee<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\"U.S.<\/div>\n<\/div>
U.S. President Donald Trump participates in a “COVID-19 Response and Storm Preparedness” event with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis at the Pelican Golf Club in Belleair, Florida, U.S., July 31, 2020. REUTERS\/Tom Brenner TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The absence of Rivkees, in particular, was impossible to miss.<\/p>\n

Inside the department, politics dominated decision making, say current and former employees of the department. Jones alleges that Carina Blackmore, the head of the infectious diseases department,\u00a0 Courtney Coppola, the departmental chief of staff, and Dr. Shamarial Roberson, Rivkees\u2019s second-in-command, pressured her in late April to change data on the dashboard to better suit the governor\u2019s reopening criteria.<\/p>\n

When Jones objected, she was removed from managing the dashboard and then fired from the health department altogether, and has since filed a whistleblower complaint. \u201cRon DeSantis has routinely given false numbers to the press. His underlings at DOH follow his example and his direction,\u201d her attorneys said at the time.<\/p>\n

With the diminution of Rivkees after the April 13 briefing,\u00a0the lack of direction left the department open to rivalry and political influence. Jones describes the mood at the health department as \u201ccraziness,\u201d with Blackmore allegedly telling her not to share data with Florida\u2019s emergency management department.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\"Florida<\/div>\n<\/div>
Florida governor Ron DeSantis answers reporters questions with Vice President Mike Pence at the Westminster Baldwin Park retirement community, in Orlando, Fla., Wednesday, May 20, 2020. Pence and DeSantis visited the facility to assist in delivering PPE supplies in response to the coronavirus crisis. (Joe Burbank\/Orlando Sentinel\/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)<\/figcaption>