COVID-19 Vaccine Card – Courtesy: Shutterstock – Image by vovidzha
A government watchdog organization declared Monday that the Florida Department of Health was required, as part of a settlement, to reveal three years’ worth of comprehensive COVID-19 data.
The Florida Department of Health is required to provide COVID data on its website for the following three years as part of a settlement between the Florida Center for Governmental Accountability (FLCGA) and former Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith.
The FLCGA stated in a press statement that the state must additionally pay $152,250 to cover legal costs.
In July 2021, Smith, who was a member of the Pandemics and Public Emergencies Committee, filed a public records request for COVID-19 data in Orange County. This took place around a month after the Department of Health stopped routinely posting COVID-19 data online in daily reports that contained thorough county-level data.
As the deadly Delta variant wave devastated the state, Florida reduced its COVID reports under the leadership of Dr. Joseph Ladapo, the new surgeon general. According to a Tallahassee Democrat study, Florida was the nation’s leader at the time in both pediatric hospitalizations and cases per capita. Ladapo and Governor Ron DeSantis insisted on the continuation of business as usual and frequently minimized the efficacy of safety measures like masking and immunizations.
Smith’s request was rejected by health officials who claimed that the data he was looking for, which included the county’s vaccination rates as well as the ages, sex, ethnicity, and demographics of people with confirmed cases of the virus, was private and not open to the public. For the same reasons as Smith’s request, attorneys for FLCGA submitted comparable records requests for each of Florida’s 67 counties.
The Florida Department of Health was sued in August 2021 by FLCGA and Smith for refusing to produce public records. A motion in support was signed by numerous journalistic organizations and First Amendment defense groups.
The medical community has criticized Ladapo and Gov. Ron DeSantis’ management of the outbreak in the two years after the lawsuit was filed. Many medical professionals were outraged by the state’s decision to solely recommend COVID-19 boosters to adults 65 and older.
The Florida Department of Health argued that the records FLCGA was seeking didn’t exist as the legal dispute progressed in court. The Florida Department of Health did, however, provide the documents in March 2023 after an appellate court mandated that a departmental official take a deposition.
In spite of informing a judge that such records didn’t exist, according to FLCGA’s assessment of those records, the Department routinely distributed detailed COVID-19 data.
The parties reached a settlement after FLCGA and Smith decided the records that had been released fulfilled the demands for records made in July 2021. In the lawsuit, neither Ladapo nor the Florida Department of Health admitted to any misconduct.
“The Department lied about the existence of these public records in court and did everything to restrict information and downplay the threat of COVID even while the Delta variant ripped through Florida — a decision that cost many lives,” Rep. Smith said in a statement. “The DeSantis administration settled in our favor because they knew what they did was wrong. We held them accountable, we required them to be more transparent and to hand over records they claimed didn’t exist, and we protected the public’s constitutional right to know.”
As part of the agreement, the Florida Department of Health must post thorough COVID-19 data on its website once a week for the following three years. The FLCGA stated that it will keep an eye on the health department to make sure it is adhering to the agreement.
According to the Florida Department of Health’s most recent two-week report, COVID-19 has claimed the lives of almost 91,000 Floridians. The state has received reports from more than 7.8 million people who have tested positive for the illness.
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Chris began his writing as a hobby while attending Florida Southern College in Lakeland, Florida. Today he and his wife live in the Orlando area with their three children and dog.
