Vaccine tit-for-tat kicks off DeSantis’ new relationship with the Biden White House

The new administration in Washington is only a week old and the relationship between the White House and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is already strained.

Accustomed to Oval Office pandemic access with former President Donald Trump, DeSantis wound up this week in a tit-for-tat with President Joe Biden’s top press aide over the slow pace of COVID-19 vaccine distribution and administration. The rollout of the two-shot regimen has left Floridians frustrated as scarce appointments quickly fill up at hospitals, grocery stores and pharmacies.

DeSantis has dismissed Biden’s plan to set up federal vaccination sites as “FEMA camps” and accused the Biden administration of lying when it said Trump had no vaccine distribution plan. He responded to news of a coming “modest increase” in vaccine doses next week by telling Biden to speed it up.

As the new president rolls out his pandemic plan, DeSantis has quickly defined himself as an adversary of the administration, placing responsibility for the slow pace of vaccinations and muddled distribution on the White House. The finger-pointing is a marked departure from his close relationship with the Trump administration, though both the state and federal governments have continued to insist they’ll work together to immunize Floridians.

“When it comes to vaccinating our seniors, you really need to put politics aside and you need to do whatever we can to get the shots in the arms,” DeSantis said Wednesday, during one of several recent vaccine-related press conferences to tout Florida’s progress.

Biden announced Tuesday that the federal government had purchased 200 million new doses to distribute and planned to increase state allocations. According to DeSantis, the state is set to receive an increase of about 47,000 vaccine doses next week, bringing Florida’s weekly allotment to 307,000.

“The president … wants to ensure the vaccine is distributed to people across the country, including, of course, the millions of people who live in Florida,” press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday, immediately after remarking that the state had “a good deal of the vaccine” in its possession. “The president is going to be focused on that in a bipartisan manner, regardless of what any elected official has to say.”

The next day, DeSantis quickly announced that the state had been reserving hundreds of thousands of doses to ensure senior citizens who received a first shot also received a required second one. He also said that vaccine data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which as of Tuesday night showed Florida having administered about 1.6 million of 3.1 million doses, lags.

Asked whether the governor had shifted his tone on the pandemic now that a Democrat is in office, DeSantis’ spokeswoman, Meredith Beatrice, didn’t directly answer the question. But she referred the Miami Herald back to the governor’s statements on Tuesday during a press conference in Vero Beach, when he called Psaki’s criticisms “disingenuous.”

“Governor DeSantis’ No. 1 priority remains putting Florida seniors first and deploying vaccines as efficiently as possible,” Beatrice said.

Had Trump won the 2020 election, it’s unlikely that DeSantis would have had to defend himself against White House characterizations of a state failing to efficiently manage the vaccine rollout. Last year, Florida’s response to the coronavirus pandemic was frequently praised during White House coronavirus task force press briefings, though he at times disregarded their advice. In April, Trump brought DeSantis to the White House to share the state’s efforts to protect senior living facilities.

DeSantis also consulted Trump prior to major announcements, such as the decision to shut Florida down during the month of April.

“He’s going to have a less open relationship with this White House,” Brad Herold, a Republican strategist who managed DeSantis’ 2018 campaign, said of the governor. “He had a very close relationship with Donald Trump. He doesn’t know Joe Biden very well, and they’re from opposing parties. That’s just how this works sometimes.”

DeSantis’ critics say he’s clearly shifted his stance toward the federal government now that Trump is out of office.

“President Biden has been in office for six days. Where the hell has the governor been since the vaccines became available more than six weeks ago?” Palm Beach County Commissioner Melissa McKinlay, a Democrat, asked Tuesday during a meeting about the pandemic. “All of a sudden, now that we’ve had a transfer of power, he now recognizes there’s a vaccine supply problem?”

Even if Biden wanted to involve DeSantis in his efforts, it’s unlikely Florida’s governor would share a stage with a president from a different party. Former Republican Florida Gov. Charlie Crist was lampooned in 2009 by Republicans for hugging former President Barack Obama during a visit to Fort Myers to promote the new administration’s economic stimulus plan. Crist, now a Democratic member of Congress, left the GOP the following year rather than lose a Republican primary for a U.S. Senate seat.

It’s also possible DeSantis might benefit politically with Biden in the White House, a dynamic that allows the governor to position himself as a maverick who tackled the pandemic without following the playbook utilized by Democratic governors. Biden might not mind, either. Some around DeSantis said they got the impression that Psaki intentionally singled out Florida.

“I think it’s not a problem for Ron to have a foil with these national Democrats [criticizing him] for not going out and locking everything down like Gov. [Gavin] Newsom in California,” said Herold, who said Florida has kept hospitals from being overrun without suffering the worst of the pandemic-driven recession. “The results are showing themselves and they’ll be even more evident by the time this is all over.”

The last time Florida had a Republican in the Governor’s Mansion and a Democrat in the White House, then-Gov. Rick Scott rejected President Obama’s federal initiatives to fund high-speed rail and expand Medicaid, moves that still irk Democrats.

Nikki Fried, Florida’s elected Democratic commissioner of agriculture — and a possible DeSantis opponent when he runs for reelection in 2022 — said in a statement that “it’s clear that all Floridians would benefit from federal assistance to ramp up vaccinations.”

“The Biden administration’s goal is to protect all Americans from COVID-19, regardless of how combative our governor is,” said Fried. “A leader should never allow personal or political disputes to drive decisions affecting the people, and despite his track record, it’s my sincere hope that our governor will accept any help that can do good for the people of Florida.”