Florida Department of Health agrees to settlement, to provide more detailed COVID-19 data

The Florida Department of Health has agreed to a lawsuit settlement requiring it to provide more detailed COVID-19 data, after initially refusing and saying it didn't exist.

The department will also have to pay the $152,500 in legal fees of the suing attorneys.

Those attorneys represented former Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith, D-Orlando, and the Florida Center for Government Accountability.

That COVID-19 data will detail vaccination counts, case counts and deaths. It'll be aggregated weekly for the next three years, grouped by county, age group, gender and race.

The department provides more general data every two weeks.

“All Floridians have a constitutional right to public records and the right to receive critical public health data in a timely manner in order to make informed decisions impacting the health and safety of their families," Smith said in a Monday morning press release.

"The Department lied about the existence of these public records in court and did everything to restrict information and downplay the threat of COVID even while the Delta variant ripped through Florida — a decision that cost many lives," said Smith, who is currently running for a state Senate seat. "The DeSantis administration settled in our favor because they knew what they did was wrong."

The governor's office referred a media request to Florida Department of Health.

Jae Williams, the department's press secretary, called the press release a "political stunt" and its characterization strange, pointing to line in the settlement agreement that reads it "is not and shall not in any way be construed as an admission by any Party of any wrongdoing or any violation of any law."

"It is unfortunate that we have continued to waste government resources arguing over the formatting of data with armchair epidemiologists who have zero training or expertise," he said in an email. "While some individuals may continue to grapple for political relevancy and disregard providing the public with the truth, we will continue serving Floridians by executing our core mission of protecting, promoting, and improving the health of all people in Florida. "

He emphasized the court did not order the state to display the data. The department had decided to do so, he said.

"COVID-19 data will shift from the previously published Biweekly Reports and now solely be available on Florida CHARTS alongside all other public health data," he said.

News sources joined lawsuit: USA TODAY Network, other Florida news organizations join public records lawsuit

How it started: Two months later, finding Florida COVID data by county can be frustrating — but possible

What's the background on this?

The situation started when Smith, at the request of an Orange County Board member, asked the Department of Health for data on pediatric hospitalizations and cases.

At the time, Florida was at the epicenter of the 2021 summer COVID-19 surge, fueled by the delta variant, and No. 1 in pediatric cases.

His request was denied. According to the department: “The specific data you have requested for Orange County are considered confidential and exempt from public disclosure” under Florida statutes and rules.

A little while later, the Florida Center for Government Accountability, a nonprofit watchdog organization, made the same public records request for all of Florida’s 67 counties and was denied for the same reasons.

FLCGA and Smith filed suit. Several major news media companies, including the USA TODAY Network, joined the suit. So did the First Amendment Foundation.

The department claimed in court that the requested records did not exist, according to the press release. But the department released the records in March following a state appellate court order.

The parties negotiated a settlement after FLCGA informed the department that those records satisfied the public records requests made almost two years before, according to the release.

"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, FLCGA's director of public access initiatives. “Transparency and accountability are not negotiable. The Constitution mandates it.”

DeSantis and COVID-19

The settlement comes as DeSantis uses his COVID-19 record to try and gain more support in his White House bid.

Florida's governor rose to conservative stardom early in the pandemic in large part due to his COVID-19 polices, such as penalizing mask and vaccine mandates.

His administration, at the same time, slow-walked or refused coronavirus-related public information requests, drawing controversy and lawsuits, such as Smith and FLCGA's.

He picked Joseph Ladapo as Florida's surgeon general. Ladapo, who's also named in the lawsuit, frequently defies medical consensus to boost vaccine skepticism.

DeSantis rode his stardom into a presidential campaign, but hasn't managed to reach even shouting distance of former President Donald Trump's dominant lead.

Attempting to chip away at some of the MAGA vote, DeSantis has elevated coronavirus and vaccine skepticism conspiracies, and attacked Trump for the COVID-19 restrictions that happened during his presidency.

"Why are we in this mess? Part of it, and a major reason is because how this federal government handed COVID-19 by locking down this economy," DeSantis said during the first GOP presidential primary debate. "It was a mistake. It should have never happened. And in Florida, we led the country out of lockdown."

This reporting content is supported by a partnership with Freedom Forum and Journalism Funding Partners. USA Today Network-Florida First Amendment reporter Douglas Soule is based in Tallahassee, Fla. He can be reached at DSoule@gannett.com. Twitter: @DouglasSoule.

This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Settlement: DeSantis' health department to provide Florida COVID data