Category Archives: Ron DeSantis

‘Trump is not my God’: how the former president’s only vaccine victory turned sour

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A rigid anti-vaccine stance among Trump’s supporters means Republicans can’t reap the benefits of Operation Warp Speed

She is fiercely loyal to Donald Trump. But when the former US president came to her home city and praised coronavirus vaccines, Flora Moore did something she never thought possible. She booed him.

“He said take the vaccine but we all booed and said no,” she recalled of Trump’s event with broadcaster Bill O’Reilly in Orlando, Florida. “He heard us loud and clear because the Amway Center was packed. We let him know ‘no’ and a couple of us even hollered out, ‘It’s killing people!’”

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‘Florida’s Trump’: DeSantis focusing on nonexistent issues as election looms, critics say

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Opponents say the governor leans on ‘wokeness’ and culture war issues that are irrelevant to the real needs of Floridians

There are still almost 10 months until Florida’s voters elect their next governor, but the campaign of the Republican incumbent, Ron DeSantis, appears well under way.

In a red-meat-for-the-base address at the opening of Florida’s legislature last week, themed around the concept of “freedom” but described by critics as a fanfare of authoritarianism, DeSantis gave a clear indication of the issues he believes are on voters’ minds. They include fighting the White House over Covid-19, ballot box fraud, critical race theory in schools and defunding law enforcement.

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This fourth grader just wants to go to school. Florida’s risky Covid policies force her to stay home

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Governor DeSantis’s ‘soft-on-Covid approach’ makes the classroom too dangerous for immuno-compromised children

The only place nine-year-old Reefy Kinder wants to be is in school with her friends. She has missed so many lessons in six years battling a long-term gastro-intestinal condition, including more than 30 surgeries during many months as an inpatient at Orlando’s Arnold Palmer children’s hospital, that she figures she has a lot to catch up on.

Standing in her way, according to Reefy and her mother, Jamie, are Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, and his handpicked new state surgeon general Joseph Ladapo, an opponent of mask mandates who believes vaccines are no more effective than eating healthily and losing weight in the fight against Covid-19.

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Ron DeSantis appoints anti-mask and anti-vax doctor as Florida’s surgeon general

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Dr Joseph Ladapo attacked concern over the pandemic as ‘Covid mania’

A medical professor who is opposed to mask and vaccine mandates, attacked concern over the pandemic as “Covid mania” and likened the eating of fruit and vegetables to the benefits of vaccination has been named as Florida’s new surgeon general.

Dr Joseph Ladapo has been appointed to the role by Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor who has railed against restrictions placed upon day-to-day life to dampen the Covid-19 pandemic and has sought to block funding for schools in the state that have attempted to make students wear masks to stop the spread of the virus that has killed more than 675,000 people in the US since the pandemic began.

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