By Noreen Marcus, FloridaBulldog.org
Gov. Ron DeSantis, who like President Donald Trump still has it in for Dr. Anthony Fauci, is making another run at blaming the retired public health leader for COVID-19’s toll on Florida.
But the governor has at least one hurdle to clear: His first attempt failed. A statewide grand jury found no criminality in efforts to contain the virus that has killed more than 87,000 Floridians.
During the grand jurors’ 18-month term, “we did not find any statute that we believed would be an appropriate vehicle for a criminal indictment,” their final report states.The report went to the Florida Supreme Court in November and was unsealed on Jan. 6.
Disbanding the grand jury might have ended the criminal inquiry but didn’t. Fauci received some unwanted attention when then-president Joe Biden pardoned him in advance as one of Biden’s last official acts. Trump responded by removing Fauci’s security detail as one of his first official acts.
And DeSantis announced he’s counting on new Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier to prosecute Fauci, the “chief henchman” of the U.S. coronavirus response. The governor not only rejected Fauci’s health guidance but attacked him viciously.
Biden’s pardon protects Fauci from federal prosecution, not from state prosecution. DeSantis emphasized the difference in recent remarks to the Yale Federalist Society.
The pardon “may end up boomeranging” against Fauci, DeSantis said, according to Florida Politics. The attempt to “shield him from accountability … may have actually sparked state-based efforts to ensure his accountability.”
REPORTS SLAM U.S. OFFICIALS
Threats of prosecution “create immeasurable and intolerable distress for me and my family,” Fauci, now a Georgetown University professor, told Politico.
He retired in 2022 after 38 years as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (part of the National Institutes of Health) and advisor to presidents including Trump and Biden.
Fauci’s name appears nowhere in the three reports from the Florida grand jury directed by Statewide Prosecutor Nicholas Cox. But the institute Fauci headed is referenced directly or indirectly throughout, especially in the grand jury’s second interim report dated May 21.
The report tries to establish that officials of public health agencies — chief among them, presumably, Fauci — caused drug overdoses.
Its reasoning goes like this: Officials “suppressed” information about unproven virus “cures” that desperate people wanted to try. Instead of using approved treatments, the people tracked down dicey ones on the gray market, didn’t know how to use them and suffered overdoses.
“We lay every overdose that occurred at the feet of those who authored this campaign of vilification,” the report states in bold italic type. The allegedly vilified drug is Ivermectin, an animal parasite-fighting paste that can cause seizures, coma and death in humans, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
SUPER-SECRET GRAND JURY
The 18-member statewide grand jury on COVID-19, drawn from five judicial circuits around Tampa, cost taxpayers about $2 million and operated with zero transparency. Florida keeps grand jurors’ names confidential.
Their final, 144-page report critiques Pfizer and Moderna research and safety protocols and argues the big drug companies had conflicts that may have produced “bad science” along with life-saving vaccines.
But the report doesn’t read like a science-based paper with footnotes and source lists. The one and only footnote appears on page 67; instead of listing sources, the appendices complain about subpoena resistance, explore the downside of school closures, and question the efficacy of the widely prescribed drug Paxlovid.
So there’s no way of telling who shaped grand jurors’ opinions about the quality of science that Pfizer and Moderna used to develop vaccines. The report doesn’t identify witnesses and explains away this secrecy by noting they could have filed challenges and delayed publication.
The unwritten plea is: Trust us. More than 40 witnesses “only brought existing data to our attention and assisted us in understanding their meaning,” the report says.
Statewide prosecutor Cox also granted requests from Pfizer and Moderna to withhold the names of their representatives who testified.
GRAND JURY FOUND ‘ISSUES’
The grand jury asserted that it identified significant problems.
“While we did not find criminal activity, we did find a pattern of deceptive and obfuscatory behavior on the part of [drug] sponsors and regulators that often straddled the line between ethical and unethical conduct,” the report says.
“More importantly, however, not finding any indictable criminal activity does not mean we did not find any problems.
“On the contrary, there are profound and serious issues involving the process of vaccine development and safety surveillance in the United States,” it says.
“Some of those are acute, COVID-19-era problems that are unlikely to occur outside the context of another once-in-a-hundred-year pandemic. Others, however, are systemic; they will occur over and over until someone fixes them,” the report says. It offers recommendations for procedural reforms.
If, despite the grand jury’s work, Attorney General Uthmeier does file criminal charges against Fauci in Florida, he’ll have a hard time making them stick, legal experts say. Fauci’s agency didn’t promote Florida-only policies that Uthmeier would need for proof that Fauci hurt Floridians.
Also, public officials like Fauci are indemnified from prosecution — in theory, so they’re free to make decisions without fear of retaliation. The U.S. Supreme Court applied this principle last year when it granted Trump, a convicted felon, near-total immunity for his official acts.
ONE VOICE IS STILLED
Nevertheless, the DeSantis administration probably could get away with making a show of indicting Fauci; strong public pushback is unlikely. One of the governor’s few fearless critics, state Sen. Geraldine Thompson, D-Windermere, died last week.
She knew what it meant to be targeted by a powerful politician bent on revenge.
In 2021, the year after Thompson beat DeSantis in a legal battle over a Supreme Court appointment, she had to deflect a state ethics complaint. The charge: Thompson had a conflict of interest because some money in a budget item she supported went to an African American history museum she founded. The complaint quickly faded away.
Thompson called out the obvious political payback.
“They went through all the mechanisms that they could think of,” she told Florida Politics at the time. “And when nobody would pursue it as a criminal matter, they said, ‘Well, we’ll try ethics. We have a different standard.’ “
“That’s the bottom line. It’s reprisal. It’s retaliation,” Thompson said.
“And it’s out of the Trump playbook to use governmental agencies to attack your detractors.”
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