A week ago, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis triggered his critics on the left and in the MSM by calling for a Florida grand jury “to investigate crimes and wrongdoing committed against Floridians related to the COVID-19 vaccine.”
During a roundtable held on the “aggressive actions” the DeSantis administration wants to take against any alleged wrongdoings – actions which include establishing a public health integrity committee and taking a closer look “into sudden deaths of individuals that received the COVID-19 vaccine,” Florida’s Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo said it was imperative from ethical and medical standpoints that health care providers (and drug manufacturers) be crystal clear on the risks associated with vaccines, which Ladapo noted was not often the case with the coronavirus vaccine.
DeSantis’ positioning on this issue, coinciding with former President Donald Trump announcing his candidacy for president a month ago, now has the Usual Suspects proclaiming that he has deliberately moved “to the right of Trump” on vaccines ahead of a potential 2024 GOP presidential primary match-up, effectively making DeSantis, in the eyes of some in the media, an “anti-vaxxer.”
The Washington Post admitted as much:
A review of DeSantis’s public positions on the vaccines shows a full reversal that has unfolded gradually since 2021, seizing on the shots’ waning efficacy against new virus variants and portraying evolving scientific advice as deliberate deceit.The hard-line position he’s now staking out is taking on additional significance: DeSantis is widely seen as a potential presidential candidate in 2024, with many Republicans wanting him to challenge Trump for the GOP nomination and some seeing vaccines as a potential wedge issue to outflank the former president to his right.
NBC News “disinformation reporter” Ben Collins, who was recently suspended from talking on air about Twitter CEO Elon Musk reportedly because some things he’d either said or tweeted about Musk were “not editorially appropriate,” played the “anti-vaxxer” card on DeSantis in a recent MSNBC segment:
Naturally, Democrats, including failed 2020 South Carolina Senate nominee and DNC Chair Jaime Harrison, pounced and seized on the talking point, with others again trotting out the “DeSantis is worse than Trump” card:
The big problem here is that DeSantis’ position on vaccines isn’t a flip-flop, and it’s more like an evolution, thanks to things he’s learned over time. That doesn’t make him an “anti-vaxxer.” It’s just that what he’s learned over the last three years has made him more skeptical of claims from public health officials and drug companies, both of which have minimized the side effects and risks associated with taking the coronavirus vaccines.
As Florida Voice writer Brendon Leslie noted, as usual, DeSantis’ critics are trying to have it both ways. Initially they accused him of not being pro-vaccine enough and bizarrely criticized him at other points for pushing for seniors – the most vulnerable of all – to be the first to get it. Now, these same people are accusing him of something that, in reality, has not happened:
Something else to remember here is that the Washington Post has been one of the leading proponents of purposeful suppression of alternative viewpoints as it relates to COVID, its origins. The vaccine itself, as Stanford University Professor of Medicine Jay Bhattacharya – whose Twitter account was deliberately blacklisted under the old regime – reminded folks in a tweet:
One more thing to remember here as well is that if the WaPo were truly interested in prominent public figures doing 180s on their stances on the coronavirus vaccine, then they would have held Kamala Harris and Joe Biden accountable for their repeated instances of deliberately undermining it in 2020 ahead of the election, with both of them saying in so many words that they wouldn’t trust a vaccine that was created under the Trump administration.
In September 2020, Biden even floated a “board of scientists” idea, stating that we needed scientists to review other scientists to determine if the vaccine was safe.
“I will say that I would not trust Donald Trump and it would have to be a credible source of information that talks about the efficacy and the reliability of whatever he’s talking about,” Harris told CNN’s Dana Bash around the same time.
Public polling at the time also showed that the media/Democrat campaign to cast doubt on the effectiveness of the vaccine before it was released was bearing fruit:
Miraculously, all of that changed after Biden and Harris were declared the winners of the election.
To this date, not a single major media news outlet outside of Fox News has explored Biden’s and Harris’ willful election-year gameplaying on the vaccines, further proving the point that when it comes right down to it, the MSM doesn’t give a rat’s patootie about alleged “flip-flopping” on these matters unless they can try to pin it on a Republican.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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