Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis denied that he had anything to do with providing COVID-19 vaccines to a wealthy, gated Florida Keys community in January ahead of other state residents.
“I’m not worried about your income bracket, I’m worried about your age bracket,” DeSantis said at a news conference in Crystal River on Thursday when asked about a story in the Miami Herald that revealed almost all the senior residents of the Ocean Reef enclave in Key Largo got inoculated by Jan. 22.
The Herald report revealed that the management of Ocean Reef Club told residents that day that more than 1,200 seniors had been vaccinated over the previous two weeks. In all, 17 Ocean Reef residents had donated $5,000 each to the governor’s political committee through December 2020, the Herald reported using state records.
A month after the vaccinations Ocean Reef resident Bruce Rauner, the former Republican governor of Illinois, wrote DeSantis’ political committee a $250,000 check.
The governor said the vaccines must have come from a hospital system. The Keys Weekly newspaper reported on Jan. 21 that Baptist Health South Florida had offered vaccines to senior Ocean Reef residents, in a story that focused on the frustration of other area seniors in trying to get shots.
A spokeswoman for Monroe County said that like all early vaccines, the doses received by Baptist Health were allocated to the hospital group by the state because it met the state’s criteria, and the hospital then decided how to distribute them.
Ocean Reef Medical Center is aligned in cooperation with Baptist Medical, and “they received the vaccines as part of the Governor’s program to vaccinate communities with a population of 65+ with a homeowner’s association and onsite medical center with the ability to administer the vaccines,” Kristen Livengood said in a written statement.
“Communities like The Villages also received the same,” she said. “The allocations were coordinated through Baptist and the State of Florida, not through Monroe County. We were aware they received them, but they were not FDOH-Monroe County allocations.”
The Herald report comes after weeks of controversy over whether the wealthy communities targeted by the DeSantis’ vaccine “pods” were influenced by political considerations.
Three communities in Charlotte, Manatee and Sarasota counties developed by Republican fundraiser Pat Neal were chosen by DeSantis for pop-up sites. Neal contributed $125,000 to DeSantis in 2018 and 2019.
Only two ZIP codes were eligible at the Manatee site, and County Commissioner Vanessa Baugh included herself and the development’s CEO on a VIP list.
U.S. Rep. Charlie Crist and agriculture commissioner Nikki Fried, both potential Democratic challengers to DeSantis in 2022, have called for investigations of potential political pay-for-play.
Fried called Thursday for FBI’s public corruption unit to investigate Florida’s vaccine distribution, saying it’s not a coincidence that DeSantis’ political donors have gotten special access to the vaccine.
“I don’t need a law degree from Harvard to know that when there is smoke, there is fire,” she said at a news conference at the Florida Capitol. “The fact pattern is simply just too clear to avoid. Give campaign contribution big dollars, get special access to vaccines — ahead of seniors, ahead of our teachers, ahead of our farmworkers and so many of our residents here in the state of Florida who are scared and are wanting these vaccines.
“If this isn’t public corruption, I don’t know what is,” Fried said.
DeSantis stressed that Ocean Reef was not a pod vaccination location, calling the Herald story a “poorly executed hit piece.”
“That was not a site that we were involved in, in the Keys,” DeSantis said. “That was one of the South Florida hospital systems [that] went to this community of seniors, I think that’s great. I want seniors to get shots, I think they did a good job of doing that. We just weren’t involved with it in any way, shape, or form.”
DeSantis said hospitals “were getting the lion’s share of the vaccine” for the first few weeks. But most of those doses went toward vaccinating front-line medical workers.
“We had nursing homes, we had hospitals, some of the county health department started to get them at the end of December,” DeSantis said. “But we really didn’t see the big push even in the counties until January.”
DeSantis also defended Baptist Health going into Ocean Reef.
“It’s the age, not the income, that shows the risk,” he said. “ ... I think it was good that they did it. I support the hospital’s doing that. And really being proactive and trying to reach as many seniors as possible.”
DeSantis acknowledged that the sites run by the federal government will vaccinate teachers of all ages under President Joe Biden’s order, not just those 50 and older as part of the state’s vaccination guidelines. Police and fire over 50 are also eligible.
“Our view is, if you’re 25, you’re just at less risk than somebody that’s 80,” he said. “That’s just the bottom line, 95.7% of all COVID-related mortality above the age of 50. … At the same time, the federal government’s the one sending us the vaccine, if they want it to be for all ages, then they have the ability to go and do that.”
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(Sun Sentinel staff writer Skyler Swisher contributed to this report.)
