The suspicious sidelining of Orlando’s top health official | Editorial

The Orlando area’s top public health official, Dr. Raul Pino, has been placed on administrative leave by Gov. Ron DeSantis’ office.

It happened in the middle of a pandemic, a few weeks after Orange County hit its all-time high for COVID infections, as hospitalization rates were climbing. This is when DeSantis decided to bench a trusted and passionate voice for public health in Florida’s fifth-largest county.

Pino has been a staunch advocate for Central Florida’s struggling low-income residents and a trusted advocate for its rapidly growing minority population. The Cuban-American Pino has also been adamant about making health information accessible to native Spanish-speaking residents and built critical partnerships with local leaders to expand the health agency’s reach. You’d think the governor’s office would want to keep someone like that on the job.

You’d be wrong.

Pino was sidelined after sending out an email chiding health department workers for a terrible vaccination rate. The doctor’s dismay makes perfect sense: Vaccination may not be as effective against newer COVID-19 variants as public health officials hoped, but it reduces rates of hospitalization and death, and it remains the best hope for slowing the spread of a virus that has claimed the lives of 64,000 Floridians.

In addition to not practicing what the department had taken such pains to preach, Pino said he was worried that unvaccinated employees might become “vectors” between the patients that many frontline workers treat and their own families.

Again, this makes complete sense. It’s exactly the kind of thing that Pino is paid to worry about — especially the day after the health department was forced to cancel prenatal clinic appointments because too many workers were out sick.

So why the suspension? A state Department of Health official offered this brief statement: “The decision to get vaccinated is a personal medical choice that should be made free from coercion and mandates from employers.”

That’s not what the U.S. Supreme Court says. The court upheld vaccine requirements for health care workers in a Jan. 13 ruling.

“Ensuring that providers take steps to avoid transmitting a dangerous virus to their patients is consistent with the fundamental principle of the medical profession: First, do no harm,” the court said, quoting a 2021 ruling that it would be the “very opposite of efficient and effective administration for a facility that is supposed to make people well to make them sick with COVID-19.”

Florida’s official stance — decreed by DeSantis, approved by the Legislature — is that state health officials can’t enforce a vaccine mandate. But Pino wasn’t enforcing anything. His email didn’t order anyone to get vaccinated and it was free of any threat or coercion.

He simply said it was irresponsible not to be vaccinated, and he’s right. He said it was pathetic that fewer than half of health department employees were vaccinated, and it is.

In other words, Pino was just saying what any science-respecting health official should say, when presented with the data he’d requested — information that’s public record and widely reported for other health professions. It’s no different from what he has said in more than 150 press conferences with Orange County government, exhorting the community to get vaccinated. It is a ridiculous reason to punish him.

So, of course, the governor’s office had to hint that there was something more. A few days after suspending Pino, Department of Health officials released a vague and unsubstantiated statement referencing the privacy of Orange County health department employee health records and referring the case to the department’s inspector general.

Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, testifying under oath at a Senate confirmation hearing Wednesday in Tallahassee, said he couldn’t discuss Pino’s case because of the I.G.’s inquiry, but Ladapo said the action taken against Pino wasn’t “political.”

Let’s call this what it looks like: A back-dated attempt to smear Pino and delay resolution of this case, potentially for months. It’s hard to believe the state doesn’t know how to conduct a quick search of Pino’s email to determine whether he requested or received any individual vaccine records for employees. It’s even harder to believe that — had they found such evidence — state officials wouldn’t have triumphantly brandished it days ago while national and local media had a field day mocking DeSantis for Pino’s inexplicable suspension.

So here we are: One of the largest county health departments in the state has no leader. Orange officials say they’ve had no communication from the state about an interim replacement. And as the scariest and most prolonged health crisis to hit the region in 100 years rages on, a trusted and rational voice has been silenced.

It makes no sense, unless you accept the fact that Florida’s leaders care more about scoring political points than saving lives. We don’t want to believe that, but DeSantis and his team leave us little choice.

The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Editorial Page Editor Dan Sweeney, and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.