At a news conference in Sarasota on Friday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis refused to reveal whether or not he had received a COVID-19 booster shot. The governor — who has been vaccinated with a single-dose Johnson & Johnson shot — said that his booster status could be used as “a weapon” against him.
“That’s something that I think people should just make their own decisions on,” he said when asked about a booster by reporters. “I’m not going to let that be a weapon for people to be able to use. I think it’s a private matter.”
Later in the same conference, DeSantis railed against vaccine mandates and accused the CDC of politicizing the booster shot.
“We worked hard to be able to protect people so they don’t lose their jobs on that,” he said of his fights against vaccination mandates. “I have said publicly that the FDA recommended against boosters for people in my age group, but the CDC overrode that, and I think that was based on politics. I don’t think that was based on science.”
Florida resident and former president Donald Trump recently called politicians who don’t reveal whether or not they’ve had a booster shot “gutless.”
“I watched a couple politicians be interviewed and one of the questions was, ‘Did you get a booster?’ Because they had the vaccine and they’re answering like — in other words, the answer is ‘yes’ but they don’t want to say it, because they’re gutless,” Trump said in an interview with OAN.
The veiled shot at DeSantis seems to be part on an ongoing tiff between the governor and Trump. Political fixer and Trump acolyte Roger Stone took things out of the realm of subtweets, calling the governor a “Yale Harvard fat boy” and a “bad haircut in an ill-fitting suit.”
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This article appears in Jan 19-25, 2022.