After winning a decisive appellate court battle that required the Florida Department of Health to turn over COVID-19 data withheld from the public during the height of the pandemic, the legal battle over the records has ended with a settlement agreement.
“The Department lied about the existence of these public records in court…”
To me, this is a tremendous issue. This is perjury. Government agencies showing disrespect for court oaths is wholly unacceptable. Perjury at this level justifies prison time.
Not to mention: they targeted a state health official and her family with a SWAT raid because she was making DeSantis look bad by calling out the falsification.
THAT is the authoritarianism that everyone is warning against. It’s not coming. It’s already here, and it has been for years.
They shouldn’t be allowed to settle.
The settlement appears to force them to produce all the missing records, which is all the suit was about. No point in continuing a suit if the settlement gives you everything you want.
Honestly this is just as much about them working through the court system for me as it is about their opposition getting the intended result. Florida’s Governor and his administration have cost a lot of lives and I want things to be costly for them and the tax payers who support them.
This helps so much now that so many died…. So much justice /s
Produced the records they had. Does nothing for all the covid deaths that were deliberately ascribed to some other issue.
It makes me sad that this is how it ends. They just settle and go on their way. Won’t bring back any of the dead or curb any future bullshit.
The settlement agreement requires the Department to provide detailed COVID-19 data for the next 3 years, including vaccination counts, case counts, and deaths, aggregated weekly, by county, age group, gender, and race.
While the litigation was pending, the Department claimed in court that the records requested did not exist. But after the appellate court upheld the trial court’s order requiring the Department to produce a corporate representative for deposition, the records were produced in March 2023.
“The settlement agreement vindicates the position of Rep. Smith and FLCGA. The Department hid public records during the height of the pandemic to fit a political narrative that Florida was open for business,” said Michael Barfield, Director of Public Access Initiatives at FLCGA. “Transparency and accountability are not negotiable. The Constitution mandates it.”
Future generations will never understand how we waxed so on and on about justice and how this kind of “justice” was commonplace.
Here’s a link to the actual article
On Aug. 16, 2021, FLCGA made the same public records request of the Department for all of Florida’s 67 counties and was denied for the same reasons.
On Aug. 31, 2021, the FLCGA and Smith filed suit against the state health department over the denied release of public records.
…news outlets including the Associated Press, USA Today, New York Times and the Washington Post filed a motion to intervene in the case to support the FLCGA and Rep. Smith in their pursuit of public records that detail COVID-19’s spread throughout Florida. The parent companies for the Miami Herald, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, the Tampa Bay Times, and television company Scripps Media joined in the motion. The First Amendment Foundation also joined.
The settlement agreement requires the Department to provide detailed COVID-19 data for the next 3 years
Shit the CDC isn’t even providing that data anymore
