In screenshots above, Sharyn Alfonsi of "60 Minutes" points a finger at Gov. Ron DeSantis as she confronts him in 2021 over his vaccine distribution policies. A top Democrat mayor called the CBS News report "intentionally false."
RCI editor's note: There are numerous signs campaign 2024 is building to peak hostility between legacy media and Republicans, and not just because of epic bad blood between Donald Trump and the press. Consider, too, more temperate Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin's recent "town hall" on CNN, which the conservative media monitor NewsBusters blasted as an orchestrated ambush.
Here, from "The Courage to Be Free," is DeSantis's account of what he describes as unfair treatment by "60 Minutes" of his handling of COVID-19 vaccine distribution in 2021; correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi suggested it was "pay for play" favoring the Publix supermarket chain. As vindication and riposte, the governor offers an unedited transcript of his clash with the reporter -- that is, including his remarks left on CBS's "cutting room floor," denoted by RCI for additional clarity with [bold brackets].
By Ron DeSantis
Broadside, HarperCollins
February 28, 2023
In the early part of 2021, my office got word that Viacom-owned CBS’s program 60 Minutes was down in Florida digging for dirt. There did not seem to be a coherent angle other than to try to find something to use to attack me on my administration’s response to COVID-19.
Eventually, a 60 Minutes team, with camera in tow, crashed one of my press conferences to pursue their conspiracy narrative about the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines in Florida. When the FDA first provided emergency-use authorization for vaccines in December 2020, the federal government charged state governments with distributing the limited supply across the population.
While I rejected mandates to require any Floridian to take the vaccine, at the time my hope was that the shots would produce steriliz- ing immunity such that those who took it would not get coronavirus. This, of course, did not happen, and the mRNA vaccines became a major flash point in the battle against the biomedical security state; as evidence piled up that the shots were not living up to expectations, lockdowners increasingly embraced more coercive mechanisms—from employment mandates to vaccine passports—designed to marginalize those who declined the shot.
Nevertheless, at the time, there was a massive demand among the population for the mRNA vaccines, and it fell to each state to apportion the availability. I bucked the CDC by prioritizing our senior citizens— the population most vulnerable to severe COVID-19—for access, in- stead of utilizing woke criteria based on “social vulnerability” status. My focus on seniors meant ensuring that the vaccine was widely dis- tributed across the state via hospitals, pharmacies, and public health departments. Because the demand for the shots among Florida’s seniors far exceeded the weekly supply the feds allocated to our state, we wanted to get the shots to pharmacies, which could quickly schedule appoint- ments and administer the shots.
Because Florida prioritized seniors, we immediately allocated shots to both CVS and Walgreens to offer to residents of long-term care facilities throughout Florida. Our state also allocated shots to hospital systems, public health departments, and to community sites for drive-through shots.
As a storm-prone state, Florida has a strong infrastructure for emer- gency response, which we used during COVID-19 to handle virtually all major logistical efforts, from setting up drive-through test sites in the early days of the pandemic to setting up early treatment sites all across the state. For the COVID-19 shots, the Florida Division of Emergency Management worked to get more providers online to assist with making vaccines accessible for the public. We enlisted major retailers with phar- macies, such as Walmart; and Publix, the state’s most popular grocery chain, in our effort.
A few weeks after the federal government sent the first shots to the states, Publix informed Florida’s emergency management agency that it could offer the shots at its pharmacies but wanted to start with a rel- atively small amount to make sure it handled it right. This made good sense. After all, pharmacy staff would have to significantly increase their workload without increasing the number of pharmacists.
The state allocated enough shots to Publix for the chain to offer the shots at its stores in Citrus, Hernando, and Marion Counties as a pilot program. I visited several stores that weekend to evaluate their perfor- mance and to speak with senior citizens about the experience. It was clear that Publix was doing a professional, efficient job, and that our seniors appreciated having the shots available at their local grocery store. This was especially helpful to our seniors because, even among those who limited what they did in public because of the coronavirus, virtually all continued to go to the grocery store.
Once word got out that Publix was offering the shots, Floridians wanted us to expand the distribution beyond the three pilot counties, which we did. We focused on communities that had a critical mass of seniors.
During this time, I met with local officials in Palm Beach County, including Mayor Dave Kerner, a Democrat. The purpose of our meeting was to try to increase availability of the shots for senior citizens in the county, which had a large population of seniors, but lacked the extensive health-care infrastructure of a county like Miami-Dade. We had already launched a program to administer shots on-site at senior communities, with the first iteration taking place at the Kings Point retirement com- munity in Delray Beach.
Mayor Kerner told me that Palm Beach County wanted to distribute vaccines through Publix in part because about 90 percent of seniors in the county lived within a couple of miles of a Publix. I agreed that this made sense and told him that I would get this done. Soon thereafter, dozens of Publix stores offered the shots to seniors throughout Palm Beach County. Our seniors were thrilled.
60 Minutes was not.
The reporter, Sharyn Alfonsi, accused me of conspiring with Publix to provide the grocery store chain with the “exclusive right” to distribute the shots in Palm Beach County, citing a Publix donation of $100,000 to my political action committee (which ultimately raised more than $150 million from everyone else). The reporter was accusing me of committing a crime. But did the reporter have any real evidence to sub- stantiate such a defamatory accusation? Of course not. 60 Minutes was interested not in real facts or hard evidence, but in weaponizing innu- endo to advance CBS’s partisan agenda.
I responded by debunking this accusation. Publix did not have an exclusive right to distribute the shots; in fact, CVS and Walgreens had been provided them weeks before Publix had been. The state had also made a concerted effort to enlist other pharmacies, such as Walmart, in our effort, but these pharmacies were not ready when Publix first raised its hand; they came online shortly thereafter. This was all in addition to the hospitals and community sites that had been providing shots to seniors the entire time. What is more, I explained how I had met with the local officials in Palm Beach and how they requested that the state bring the shots to Publix because so many of their seniors lived close to a Publix.
At that point, I figured that I had debunked this false narrative. CBS had nothing more on me and would not dedicate a 60 Minutes segment to such an easily discredited accusation. In the weeks right after the press conference, CBS appeared to go away. But I underestimated the partisan zeal of 60 Minutes.
Eventually, my office received a series of hostile written questions about Florida’s distribution efforts. CBS was going all-in with their garbage narrative, after all.
60 Minutes also tried to insinuate that using Publix to distribute vac- cines was racist, citing a predominantly black community near Lake Okeechobee, which was far away from Palm Beach County’s population centers and thus did not have a Publix within two miles.
The segment was so obviously designed to further 60 Minutes’s preferred narrative that it drew a swift backlash. Even some of my critics were outraged that 60 Minutes had deceptively edited the response I had provided at my press conference. Below is my full exchange with CBS’s Sharyn Alfonsi. The text in bold is what 60 Minutes selectively edited out of its segment.
A Transcript Unexpurgated
SHARYN ALFONSI: Publix, as you know, donated $100,000 to your campaign, and then you rewarded them with the exclusive rights to distribute the vaccination in Palm Beach—
RON DeSANTIS: So, first of all, that—what you’re saying is wrong. That’s—
SHARYN ALFONSI: How is that not pay to play?
RON DeSANTIS: That, that’s a fake narrative. [Begin deletion in bold] So, first of all, when we did, the first pharmacies that had it were CVS and Walgreens. And they had a long-term care mission. So they were going to the long-term care facilities. They got the vaccine in the middle of December. They started going to the long-term care facilities the third week of December to do LTCs. So that was their mission. That was very important. And we trusted them to do that. As we got into January, we wanted to expand the distribution points. So yes, you had the counties, you had some drive-through sites, you had hospitals that were doing a lot, but we wanted to get it into communities more. So we reached out to other retail pharmacies—Publix, Walmart—obviously, CVS and Walgreens had to finish that mission. And we said, we’re going to use you as soon as you’re done with that. For Publix, they were the first one to raise their hand, say they were ready to go. And you know what, we did it on a trial basis. I had three counties. I actually showed up that weekend and talked to seniors across four different Publix. How was the experience? Is this good? Should you think this is a way to go? And it was 100 percent positive. So we expanded it, and then folks liked it. And I can tell you, if you look at a place like Palm Beach County, they were kind of struggling at first in terms of the senior numbers. [end deletion] I went; I met with the county mayor. I met with the administrator. I met with all the folks in Palm Beach County, and I said, “Here’s some of the options: we can do more drive-through sites, we can give more to hospitals, we can do the Publix, [Begin deletion in bold] we can do this.” They calculated that 90 percent of their seniors live within a mile and a half of a Publix. [end deletion] And they said, “We think that would be the easiest thing for our residents.” [Begin deletion in bold] So we did that, and what ended up happening was, you had sixty-five Publix in Palm Beach. Palm Beach is one of the biggest counties, one of the most elderly counties, we’ve done almost 75 percent of the seniors in Palm Beach, and the reason is because you have the strong retail footprint. So our way has been multifaceted. It has worked. And we’re also now very much expanding CVS and Walgreens, now that they’ve completed the long-term care mission. [end deletion]
SHARYN ALFONSI: The criticism is that it’s pay to play, governor.
RON DeSANTIS: And it’s wrong. It’s wrong. It’s a fake narrative. I just disabused you of the narrative. And you don’t care about the facts. Because, obviously, I laid it out for you in a way that is irrefutable.
60 Minutes knew that its false narrative could not withstand scrutiny, so it decided to leave my deconstruction of its narrative on the cutting room floor. This represents the all-too-common impulse in modern corporate media whereby facts that contradict the desired narrative are ignored. Why let the facts get in the way of a desired narrative?
Almost immediately after the 60 Minutes segment aired, even Democrats in Florida cried foul. Jared Moskowitz, a Democrat and then director of Florida’s emergency management agency, responded by tweeting that he had “told [60 Minutes] that the @publix story was ‘bulls—’ Walked them through the whole process.” In fact, Moskowitz pointed out that “Publix was recommended by @FLSERT [State Emergency Response Team] and @HealthyFla [Florida Department of Health] as the other pharmacies were not ready to start. Period! Full stop! No one from the governor’s office suggested Publix. It’s just absolute malarkey.”
Democratic Palm Beach mayor Dave Kerner also put out a statement condemning the 60 Minutes segment. “The reporting was not just based on bad information—it was intentionally false,” he said. “I know this because I offered to provide my insight into Palm Beach County’s vaccination efforts and 60 Minutes declined. They know that the governor came to Palm Beach County and met with me and the county administrator and we asked to expand the state’s partnership with Publix to Palm Beach County.”
60 Minutes could have put Moskowitz and/or Kerner on the air, but that would have destroyed its narrative. Indeed, CBS surely realized that allowing two Democrats to explain the actual rationale for the use of Publix would have eliminated the entire premise of the segment. So 60 Minutes ignored the truth to try to preserve its smear.
60 Minutes’s attempt to frame the Publix issue as a racial controversy was just as absurd—and CBS yet again ignored evidence that refuted its narrative. It was true that although over 90 percent of seniors in Palm Beach lived close to a Publix, some of the small, rural communities on the easternmost part of the county did not have such close access. 60 Minutes tried to make it look like Florida’s program was intentionally excluding these predominately black communities.
What 60 Minutes didn’t tell its viewers was that a full two months prior to the segment airing, I opened a site at the local high school of a predominantly African American town called Pahokee in the eastern part of the county. I had appointed John Davis, a former Florida State University football star from Pahokee, as Florida’s secretary of the lottery the prior year. Immediately after the Publix sites started in Palm Beach County, John came to me and asked if we could do a site in the rural part of the county. I approved it, and the site went live shortly thereafter.
Of course, 60 Minutes also ignored that the State of Florida launched a program at the very beginning of the distribution efforts (and prior to Publix getting any shots) to partner with predominantly African American churches and other religious organizations. Incredibly, 60 Minutes relied on a left-wing state representative to launder their racial narrative, but failed to acknowledge that the state had conducted an event for COVID-19 shots at a predominantly black church in that representative’s Palm Beach County–based district more than two and a half months prior to the airing of the 60 Minutes piece.
CBS and 60 Minutes faced a legitimate backlash because they had made such a dishonest, poorly executed smear. When even prominent Democrats call out a media organization for lying about a prominent Republican, the outlet must have really stepped in it. While I always believed 60 Minutes to be overrated and considered the program to be a pioneer for deceptive editing, many Americans were surprised and disgusted at CBS’s attack on me. 60 Minutes wanted to impugn my character, but the segment instead did significant damage to 60 Minutes’s reputation.
