Why is Florida’s governor ramping up his anti-vaccine rhetoric?

On 13 December 2022, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis held what he ominously called a “Covid-19 mRNA vaccine accountability roundtable.”1 The event featured his surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo, and Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya, authors of the Great Barrington Declaration and now senior scholars at the Brownstone Institute, a libertarian think tank.The roundtable was a high visibility opportunity for the governor to escalate his opposition to covid-19 vaccines. As Dylan Scott, health care reporter for Vox noted, the roundtable was part of an intensifying campaign by DeSantis to “discredit the covid-19 vaccines, the drug companies that produced them, and the public health officials and government leaders who urged Americans to get them.”2The event did not come out of the blue. DeSantis and Ladapo have previously alarmed the public health community, both in Florida and nationwide, with their sceptical statements about covid-19 vaccines and their suggestion that the public has been misled…
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