Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis called on state lawmakers to make permanent existing penalties for companies that require all employees get the Covid-19 vaccination, his latest move to curtail pandemic mitigation efforts.
The proposal would extend indefinitely measures DeSantis signed in 2021 that made Florida the first state in the country to threaten businesses with fines if they required workers to get the Covid-19 vaccine. Those measures pitted DeSantis and Florida against the federal government over President Joe Biden’s efforts to get the country’s workforce inoculated – a standoff that helped boost the Republican governor’s popularity among conservatives.
Now, as DeSantis considers running for president, he is reinstigating that battle. This time, DeSantis has encouraged skepticism of Covid-19 vaccines altogether, staking out a position far to the right of his top potential rival for the GOP nomination, former President Donald Trump, who continues to count the development of the vaccines as one of his administration’s chief accomplishments. “They were wrong about lockdowns,” DeSantis said Tuesday. “They were wrong about mask mandates. They were wrong about school closures. They were wrong about mRNA shots. They were wrong about vax passports and vaccine mandates.”