An outgoing top Florida official responsible for his state’s handling of the coronavirus had a warning for fellow Democrats Tuesday, saying they shouldn’t be so “naive” to believe conspiracy theories surrounding Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis‘ handling of the pandemic.
Florida emergency management director Jared Moskowitz is stepping down from his post to spend more time with his family, Mr. DeSantis announced Monday, praising Mr. Moskowitz for doing a “fantastic job” in emergency response for the pandemic and hurricane seasons.
Mr. Moskowitz, a Democrat who voted for President Biden, told Politico’s Marc Caputo shortly after the announcement that his fellow Democrats should beware of believing false narratives to support their own biases against the Republican governor.
“You may see a conspiracy theory and you want it to be true and you believe it to be true and you forward it to try to make it be true. But that doesn’t make it true,” Mr. Moskowitz said. “We’ve seen this, quite frankly, within the last four years with the previous administration.”
“But Democrats should not be so naive to think that they don’t accidentally participate in things like that — for instance when they forward things around that falsely claim Florida has more deaths than New York when it comes to coronavirus. That is just not supported by the data,” he continued.
“And in fact, for all the stuff about how Florida was not being transparent, it’s not Florida that’s in the national news,” he added. “It’s New York, that’s in the national news, and it was New York that had a cover up for the last six months, and hid 50% of the nursing home deaths. We would never have gotten away with that for 15 days in Florida, let alone six months.”
Mr. DeSantis has become a rising star among conservatives for his handling of the coronavirus, resisting widespread lockdowns and mask mandates while blue states like California and New York have kept many businesses and schools closed.
While New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and California Gov. Gavin Newsom were praised early in the pandemic, Mr. Cuomo now faces a controversy with his state’s treatment of COVID-19 positive nursing home patients and reporting of nursing home deaths, and Mr. Newsom is facing a mounting recall effort over his lockdown orders.
“What we showed in Florida is you need to lead. I got a lot of blowback. A lot of that was BS, quite frankly,” Mr. DeSantis told Politico. “We led on schools. We led on putting people back to work. We would not have had a Super Bowl [in Tampa] if it was not for me.”
Mr. DeSantis slammed “the national media and all these people who are self-anointed ‘experts’ … They all said Florida would be the worst. But Covid mortality is less than the national average per capita.”
Mr. DeSantis also criticized Democrats for elevating the work of a “conspiracy theorist” who publishes false information about Florida’s death numbers.
According to Politico’s Mr. Caputo, the governor was referring to fired state data scientist Rebekah Jones, who claimed in recent a tweet: “Florida passed New York this month in total #COVID19 deaths, per the @CDCgov excess deaths data as of 2/3/21, behind only Texas and California.”
According to Mr. Caputo, Ms. Jones misread the data and failed to include New York City in her analysis.
“If you’re paying to support @GeoRebekah for information like this, you’re not getting you money’s worth, unless confirmation bias and weaponizing inaccurate data analysis is more important than the truth,” Mr. Caputo wrote.
Florida is currently 27th in the country for its COVID-19 death rate and 4th in country in total number of deaths, coming in behind California, New York and Texas.
