ORLANDO, Fla. — The already controversial Lakewood Ranch COVID-19 vaccination pod in Florida's Manatee County was carefully choreographed by organizers and the governor’s office to help him win reelection next year, texts obtained by The Bradenton Herald show.
Asked about the report Tuesday, DeSantis called it “nonsense” and suggested that the “partisan” news media didn’t want people in wealthy, Republican-leaning neighborhoods to get vaccinated.
The Lakewood “pop-up” site was limited to residents of two wealthy ZIP codes in Manatee County. Prominent Democrats have already called for an investigation after reports showed a Manatee commissioner included herself and developer Rex Jensen on a VIP list to get shots.
The Bradenton Herald and Miami Herald report revealed texts between Baugh and Jensen, including an exchange Feb. 9 in which Jensen texted Baugh, “Gov said he might show up. Should try to see if that would help him get exposure here.”
“Excellent point,” Baugh responded, pivoting to DeSantis’ reelection campaign next year. “After all, ’22 is right around the corner.”
Jensen had just finished a call between DeSantis and another Lakewood Ranch developer, Pat Neal, the newspapers reported. Neal gave $125,000 to DeSantis’ political committee in 2018 and 2019, and two other pop-up sites in Venice and Sarasota also were set up at his developments.
An advance team from the governor’s office visited the Lakewood site, the report said. Instead of randomly determining who would get the vaccine at the DeSantis event kicking off the pod, text messages indicated the governor’s staff asked Jensen to create a list.
“Amazing. They want me to maintain a list. They can’t. Screw this,’' Jensen wrote to Baugh on Feb. 9 after speaking to the Florida Department of Health, according to the report. Baugh then directed the Manatee County public safety director to limit the vaccines to the two wealthy ZIP codes in which Lakewood was located, emails show.
Asked about the report at a news conference in Lee County, DeSantis said Manatee was targeted because it was “one of the worst counties in the state” for senior vaccinations.
“They were like 20-some percent (of seniors vaccinated),” DeSantis said. “I had some counties that were 50% just a few weeks ago. So we said, ‘Where can we go to make an impact?’ So we did a senior pod at Lakewood Ranch, which is very successful, thousands of seniors got it. ... So what we did worked in Manatee, we’re not done in Manatee, but that’s what it was about.”
DeSantis said it was “a mistake to try to demonize certain seniors. I think there (are) some elements of, particularly, the partisan corporate media, who doesn’t want people being vaccinated who disagree with them politically. That’s insane.”
The pop-up site was criticized almost immediately by Manatee commissioners and other Democrats for targeting some of the wealthiest, whitest, most Republican neighborhoods in Manatee.
The latest controversy over alleged preferential treatment at pop-up sites comes after the Ocean Reef Club gated community in Key Largo came under fire for getting almost all of its residents vaccinated by the third week in January, well before the rest of the state.
Seventeen Ocean Reef residents had donated $5,000 each to DeSantis’ committee as of December, and another, former Republican Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner, gave DeSantis’ campaign $250,000 in February.
DeSantis claimed last week that the state had nothing to do with the local hospital distributing the vaccines there, but a Baptist Health spokesperson said the hospital was asked by the governor’s office to go into the exclusive neighborhood.
Democrats that include Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried and U.S. Rep. Charlie Crist, both potential DeSantis opponents in 2022, have called for a federal investigation into allegations of favoritism.
“Politics, not science, is driving Florida’s vaccine distribution,” Fried said on Twitter on Tuesday. “This is an abomination and a failure to all Floridians — @GovRonDeSantis must answer for this corruption.”
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