Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and Donald Trump, both declared candidates in the 2024 presidential election, are swatting back and forth at each other over how each handled the COVID-19 pandemic.
Though most critics of Trump’s actions during the pandemic have accused him of undermining public health guidance, downplaying the severity of the disease and pushing a litany of unverified treatments, DeSantis claimed during a podcast appearance Thursday that Trump had actually delegated too much power to Dr. Anthony Fauci, then the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, throughout the pandemic.
“I think he did great for three years, but when he turned the country over to Fauci in March of 2020, that destroyed millions of people’s lives,” DeSantis said of Trump on “The Glenn Beck Program,” a day after announcing his candidacy. “And in Florida, we were one of the few that stood up, cut against the grain, took incoming fire from media, bureaucracy, the left, even a lot of Republicans, had school open, preserved businesses.”
In reality, Florida had the third-highest number of COVID-related deaths in 2021, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In terms of deaths per capita, Florida ranked 18th among the states for that year. In general, blue states had the lower rates of deaths while red states had the highest, data shows.
CARLOS BARRIA