IN-DEPTH: Florida Set to Approve Bill Targeting Vaccines, Masks, and Mandates—Some Activists Say It’s Not Enough

Copies of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis's newly released book, “The Courage To Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint For America’s Revival” at the Orange County Choppers Road House in Pinellas Park, Florida, on March 8, 2023. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

The Florida Legislature is poised to approve a medical freedom measure that vastly expands Floridians’ protections against what Gov. Ron DeSantis has called “medical authoritarianism.”

But even as that’s happening, some of the medical freedom movement’s leaders in the state are denouncing the bill as a sellout and a sham.

They decry the substitution of another bill for one that they had a hand in crafting. They say the replacement bill that’s moving toward passage greatly reduces the protections they sought and applies mostly to a nearly finished COVID-19 crisis.

DeSantis’s office, meanwhile, touts the new legislation as a powerful one that gives Floridians protections from being forced to take vaccines or wear masks in pandemics of the future. It also lends special attention to the use of experimental or mRNA vaccines such those used against COVID-19.

Syringes and vials of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine are prepared to be administered at a drive-up vaccination site from Renown Health in Reno, Nev., on Dec. 17, 2020. Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images

A leading voice for medical freedom in the state, Gainesville attorney Jeff Childers, sides with the governor’s office.

What’s Next

The bill passed the state Senate by a vote of 29–6 on April 27. It now heads to the state House, which has already advanced a similar measure through committees.

It will most likely come to the House floor on May 1, when the calendar will be devoted to bills that have already passed the Senate, according to the Florida House of Representatives Public Information Office.

Childers, a commercial litigator involved in COVID-19 litigation since the beginning of the pandemic, said he thinks medical freedom activists in Florida, a group he described as “very passionate and very active,” misinterpreted the state’s arcane legislative procedure. They decided DeSantis had caved to lobbyists.

Childers said he believes the opposite took place, that the governor’s office has taken a far more active role in strengthening the bill with amendments than it usually does.

“I don’t think that would have happened if pharma had them locked up,” Childers said.

“I applaud [medical freedom advocates’] passion. But politics is an arena of compromise. You don’t always get what you want on the first try. It’s a game of inches.

“Their position was, ‘We want a perfect bill or no bill.’”

Activists helped draft Senate Bill 222, which would make anyone declining to take any vaccine a class protected by civil rights, like race and sex are.

And that didn’t fly with legislators, Childers said.

Disney employee Nick Caturano speaks about discrimination against people who refuse the COVID-19 vaccine at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, in an undated photo. Courtesy of Nick Caturano

But the new bill, Senate Bill 252, prohibits discrimination or the requirement of proof of vaccination for COVID-19 vaccines, emergency use authorization (EUA) vaccines, or mRNA vaccines, such as those used for COVID-19, he said. All have become the subject of scrutiny over their risks.

The new bill protects pharmacists who provide ivermectin from being harassed by licensing agencies, Childers said.

It protects Floridians from being forced to wear a mask. And it requires doctors to warn patients of the risks of controversial COVID-19 treatments, such as remdesivir.

It also states that employees can’t be subject to workplace discrimination—such as being forced to eat in a separate lunchroom—if they opted not to get a COVID-19 jab.

Horse-Trading for Legislative Compromise

Childers said that the governor, the speaker of the house, and the Senate president each have their own priority bills. To advance those, he said, they often farm them out to legislative allies to act as sponsors, and horse-trade with each other for concessions to get their own most important bills passed.

It’s everything the legislature can do to get through those during its two-month-long session, Childers said. Independent bills, such as the one the medical freedom advocates helped draft, stand far less of a chance of passage.

Medical freedom advocates’ fears were heightened because the sponsor of the new bill, Republican Sen. Colleen Burton, had accepted a pharmaceutical industry donation, and an aide had told them the bill came “from the governor,” Childers said.

Most likely, DeSantis’s office gave it to Senate President Kathleen Passidomo, as that’s the procedure, Childers said. Passidomo likely then assigned it to a Republican senator without considering the content or politics surrounding it too closely, he said.

“It wasn’t because Colleen got a donation from Pharma,” Childers said.

Medical freedom advocates aren’t convinced.

Mo Van Hoek, of Children's Health Defense, speaks at a press conference in Kissimmee, Fla., on Oct. 13, 2022. Nanette Holt/The Epoch Times

“I think the health care lobby got to DeSantis and the Republicans,” Mo van Hoek, a co-founder of the Medical Freedom Coalition, said. “This bill is obsolete. It offers us no protection, no value.”

“It isn’t prescribing freedom,” she said, alluding to DeSantis’s often-referenced “Free State of Florida.”

“This just reeks.”

Tom Oltorik, Florida director for MoveFreelyAmerica.org, said that he worries that financial deal-making played a role.

“It’s not about We the People—it’s about the money,” Oltorik said. “There’s a huge financial iron curtain around Tallahassee. You can’t get through it.”

Bad Bill or Better Bill?

The governor’s office emphatically maintains that the new bill is better for medical freedom.

“In 2021, Governor DeSantis signed legislation to protect Florida jobs and parents’ rights to make health care decisions for their students, banning private employer vaccine mandates and mask mandates across the state,” Jeremy Redfern, the governor’s deputy press secretary, said in an email to The Epoch Times.

“Earlier this year, Governor DeSantis proposed legislation to make protections from COVID mandates permanent and protect Floridians from the biomedical security state.”

Redfern called Senate Bill 252 the “nation’s strongest and most expansive” medical freedom legislation.

“Under this legislation, Floridians and their children will never be forced to cover their faces in public, nor can an employer fire an employee for refusing to take an experimental vaccine,” Redfern said in the written statement.

“In addition, this bill prohibits all mRNA vaccine requirements while mRNA is still being studied and evaluated. Finally, this bill ensures that religious and medical exemptions to any vaccine are respected and that Floridians have informed consent regarding their medical treatment.”

The governor remains “committed to upholding freedoms from COVID mandates and will fight against local governments, businesses, and corporations trying to impose these authoritarian policies,” Redfern wrote.

Advocates expressed mistrust.

“With DeSantis, you have to look at the fine print,” Oltorik said. “If lobbyists are involved, he does one thing in the large print for constituents and another thing in small print to satisfy the status quo and keep the special interests happy.”

Tom Oltorik, the state director of Move Freely America. Courtesy of Jay Maloney

Van Hoek and Oltorik both cited the enormous financial stakes of health care decisions such as these. The pharmaceutical and health care industries are huge political donors difficult for most politicians to go against, Oltorik said.

Some of the new bill’s protections, including the specific vaccine protections, sunset in two years, they said.

“We’ve got two more years to see how mRNA vaccines perform,” Childers said.

Judging from his recently published book, “The Courage to Be Free,” DeSantis believes in the issue.

He devotes Chapter 11 to his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. And he spotlights his disagreement with numerous aspects of the federal approach to fighting the disease, led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to the president in 2021 and 2022.

Most of the chapter specifically addresses COVID-19—how it was treated, how it should have been treated, specific vaccine policies, and more.

“My view was simple: No Floridian should have to choose between a job that they need and a shot they don’t want,” DeSantis wrote in the book. “It was especially galling to me that [President Joe] Biden and his ilk were prepared to see policemen, firefighters, and nurses lose their jobs over the shots.”

He wrote, “To be successful, a leader must be willing to take these hits ... this is simply the price one must pay for exercising leadership. ... When I took strong stands against the prevailing narrative on draconian coronavirus policies, I may have been vilified by the usual suspects, but I was able to save the livelihoods of millions of people throughout Florida. The Fauci-worshipping coastal elites had no regard for these people, and it fell to me to protect the people of Florida from the destructive biomedical security state.”

Tanya Parus, president of the Sarasota County chapter of Moms for America and a medical freedom specialist for the national group, said she doesn’t believe that the new bill is as good as the one many medical freedom activists wanted.

“They pulled a switcheroo,” Parus said. “DeSantis ran on this stuff. It’s even in his book. I don’t know why he'd change course on this.”

Childers said the advocates resent the stalling of their own bill, which was introduced but never calendared or put before committees.

“It was really their golden child. They felt it was torpedoed. They misunderstood. It was coincidence. Everyone is thinking about the same issues.”