After winning a decisive appellate court battle that required the Florida Department of Health to turn over COVID-19 data withheld from the public during the height of the pandemic, the legal battle over the records has ended with a settlement agreement.
They shouldn’t be allowed to settle.
The settlement appears to force them to produce all the missing records, which is all the suit was about. No point in continuing a suit if the settlement gives you everything you want.
Honestly this is just as much about them working through the court system for me as it is about their opposition getting the intended result. Florida’s Governor and his administration have cost a lot of lives and I want things to be costly for them and the tax payers who support them.
It makes me sad that this is how it ends. They just settle and go on their way. Won’t bring back any of the dead or curb any future bullshit.
The settlement agreement requires the Department to provide detailed COVID-19 data for the next 3 years, including vaccination counts, case counts, and deaths, aggregated weekly, by county, age group, gender, and race.
While the litigation was pending, the Department claimed in court that the records requested did not exist. But after the appellate court upheld the trial court’s order requiring the Department to produce a corporate representative for deposition, the records were produced in March 2023.
“The settlement agreement vindicates the position of Rep. Smith and FLCGA. The Department hid public records during the height of the pandemic to fit a political narrative that Florida was open for business,” said Michael Barfield, Director of Public Access Initiatives at FLCGA. “Transparency and accountability are not negotiable. The Constitution mandates it.”
Produced the records they had. Does nothing for all the covid deaths that were deliberately ascribed to some other issue.
“The Department lied about the existence of these public records in court…”
To me, this is a tremendous issue. This is perjury. Government agencies showing disrespect for court oaths is wholly unacceptable. Perjury at this level justifies prison time.
Not to mention: they targeted a state health official and her family with a SWAT raid because she was making DeSantis look bad by calling out the falsification.
THAT is the authoritarianism that everyone is warning against. It’s not coming. It’s already here, and it has been for years.
