The 144-page final report of the statewide grand jury investigating potential wrongdoing related to the development of COVID-19 vaccines is a remarkable document, though not for the reason its authors, or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who called for this investigation in 2022, seem to believe. Organized just as the governor was preparing to run for president, the grand jury has been a lingering remnant of headier days for DeSantis, when he and his advisers had grander ambitions not yet extinguished by his frigid rejection in Iowa’s caucus.
Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo appears with Gov. Ron DeSantis at Ocala Health in 2021. They announced that a monoclonal antibody was available for transplant recipients, immunocompromised individuals and those who have a negative reaction to the COVID vaccine.
Key to DeSantis’ presidential strategy was to ride a wave of pandemic-era disenchantment among Republican primary voters, and this grand jury, whose work DeSantis hyped along the way, was intended to brandish the governor’s reputation as his party’s leading science skeptic. But as DeSantis’ campaign wilted near the end of 2023, and his near-certain future as a relatively minor figure in the Trumpified Republican Party came into clearer focus, so too did the grand jury’s usefulness expire. And so it had mostly faded from public consciousness until this week, when, to little fanfare, state officials unsealed the final report disclosing the grand jury’s conclusion: It found no evidence of criminal activity by vaccine manufacturers.
DeSantis, who previously worked hard to generate publicity for the grand jury, mustered only a single social media post this week about the anticlimactic report, which, as of Tuesday, DeSantis said he was “still reading” — unmistakable politician-talk when events don’t turn out quite as planned.
The report, written with an almost brazen self-seriousness given its partisan origins, managed to uncannily parrot the DeSantis administration’s sometimes tortured views about vaccines, the pandemic and federal regulators. Curiously, for example, the grand jury seems to have concluded that federal officials and pharmaceutical companies didn’t engage in problematic behavior in Donald Trump’s first term, during which the pandemic exploded into American life and the vaccines themselves were actually developed (the act the grand jury was tasked with criminally investigating). It was only in “the following years” — i.e., the unstated term of President Joe Biden — that bad actors “squandered” the “good will” the government had apparently earned.
To match its pompousness, the grand jury report also reveals an amusing lack of self-awareness.
“As we write this Final Report, we are keenly aware that the debate around all aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic, including vaccines, has become incredibly polarized,” the report said. “Given the political, social and cultural wars that have been waged over the last four years, asking those who read this document to keep an open mind is probably asking for too much.”
Culture wars that have been waged is a clever, passive way of avoiding an inconvenient truth: The strident, self-assured DeSantis has been perhaps the leading pandemic culture warrior in American political life, a figure who courted controversy and worked with seeming deliberateness to inflame divisions — as the very existence of this grand jury, charged with the predictably fruitless task of searching for vaccine-related criminal charges to levy, demonstrated.
The report also seemed determine to, like DeSantis, elide the staggering toll the pandemic exacted in the United States — more than 1 million deaths, including tens of thousands of Floridians — grudgingly conceding at one point that, “unfortunately, a small subset of (COVID-19) hospitalization cases result in death.” The report described the pandemic vaguely as a “dark time” and that most “Floridians — and most Americans, for that matter — have moved on with their lives and would probably prefer to keep the events of those years in the rearview mirror.”
The report said the grand jury did not want to be “perceived as dismissive of (COVID-19) risks,” but the unmistakable impression the report leaves, the entire premise it’s built upon, is that the risk of taking a COVID-19 vaccine for many or even most Americans is somehow either comparable to or more fearsome than the virus itself, and that this risk has been concealed from the public — provocative and fringe views rejected by most public-health experts but framed in the report as common-sense and pro-science. Those are also views that are, not by coincidence, espoused by DeSantis’ controversial surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo, who is himself a fringe figure in the world of public health.
Without splashy criminal charges to throw around, one can feel the report’s authors — attorneys in the Office of Statewide Prosecution, overseen by Attorney General Ashley Moody — stretching for something meaningful to impart over the course of the turgid 140-plus pages.
They ultimately had to settle for mealy mouthed, insipid language that — despite the report’s admonishment to readers to abandon their own preconceived notions — likely reflects the priors of the lawyers who wrote it. There are “profound and serious issues involving the process of vaccine development and safety surveillance in the United States,” the report declares.
They also, perhaps inadvertently, stumble on a bit of truth: “This Grand Jury finds itself in the awkward position of advocating for a series of changes to a group of private and public entities who did not ask for them and are unlikely to be particularly interested in adopting them.”
Nate Monroe is a Florida columnist for the USA Today Network. Follow him on Twitter @NateMonroeTU. Email him at nmonroe@gannett.com.
This story was updated to add a video.
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Grand jury undercuts Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ claims of COVID crimes
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