Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said his state will fight back against President Joe Biden’s plan for the Labor Department to draft an emergency rule that would require all employers with 100 or more employees “ensure their workforces are fully vaccinated or show a negative test at least once a week.”
During remarks on Sept. 9, Biden said that the United States “can and will turn the tide” against COVID-19 by mass vaccinations, while casting blame “at the 80 million” people who haven’t been vaccinated. “We’re in a tough stretch,” he said. “This is not about freedom or personal choice,” he said. “It’s about protecting yourself and those around you.”
“Governor DeSantis is focused on working for Floridians,” Christina Pushaw, press secretary for DeSantis told The Epoch Times.
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“Yesterday’s White House spectacle was a desperate attempt to regain control of the narrative and distract from the Biden administration’s abject failures: Afghanistan, the border crisis, and the COVID-19 response.”
“Vaccine mandates are unscientific, ineffective, and fundamentally wrong,” she said.
“In Florida, we will fight back.”
While speaking to the media the next day, DeSantis noted how Biden has been critical of Florida’s Parents’ Bill of Rights (pdf), saying Biden believes that school boards should be able to “force five-year-old kids to wear masks all day.
“That’s what he thinks is appropriate government?” he said. Yet, he institutes an unprecedented mandate, “which even his own people have acknowledged in the past is not constitutional. That’s not leadership.”
DeSantis said Biden promised—when campaigning in 2020—that he would “shut down the virus.”
Yet today the country has 300 percent more cases than there were a year ago “when we had no vaccines at all.”
“He’s doubling down on things that are going to be very destructive for the livelihoods of many, many Americans,” he said.
“Nobody should lose their job based on this decision.”
NEW – Florida Gov. DeSantis says Biden’s vaccine mandates are “not based on science” and “will ultimately lose in court”. pic.twitter.com/gPbFwEUe0q
— Eli 🦅 🇮🇹 🇺🇸🇷🇺 (@solagimma) September 12, 2021
On Sept. 10, the Biden administration suffered another setback when the First District Court of Appeal temporarily reinstated Gov. Ron DeSantis’s ban on school mask requirements, saying they “have serious doubts about standing, jurisdiction and other threshold matters.”
Not only did Leon County Circuit Judge John Cooper rule the ban illegal he took the uncommon step of removing an automatic stay while DeSantis appealed his ruling.
“Just like last year in the school re-opening litigation, the First District Court of Appeal has reinstated Florida’s ability to protect the freedom for parents to make the best decisions for their children while they make their own ruling on the appeal,” Taryn Fenske communications director for DeSantis told The Epoch Times. “We look forward to winning the appeal and will continue to fight for parents’ rights.”