‘Fauci Ran That Government’: DeSantis Rages At The Trump Administration’s Covid Lockdowns

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) tore into 2024 GOP frontrunner and former president, Donald Trump, during an interview on Fox News Monday.

Anchor Bret Baier showed DeSantis a clip of Trump slamming him and his record on the Covid-19 pandemic in June.
“He has better PR than other governors, but other governors did a better job than Ron DeSanctimonious,” Trump told Baier in the clip.

“He used to say the opposite. Let’s just be clear. You go back a year or two, he would say, what a great job I’ve done in Florida, how I’m one of the country’s great governors, how Florida is such a great state,” Desantis replied of his primary opponent, adding:

He always said that for years and years until about three days before the midterm election. Then he started to attack me. And I think it’s because he saw that we were going to win a big victory. And I think he viewed me as a political threat. So now he’s flip-flopped on all that and is trying to say we did a bad job.

I fought his administration to keep our state open, to have kids in school. Fauci, the task force, all those people, they were sending me missives, even January of 2021, right before he left office. His task force was telling us in Florida to close. And so he didn’t have control over his own government.

He didn’t have control over Fauci. Fauci ran that government. His last year in office, Trump should have fired him. He did not do that. He elevated Fauci and he made Fauci an international celebrity. And here’s the thing. I fought back against it. But the reality is, Fauci’s policies were adopted in a lot of the blue states. Kids were locked out of school for a year. You had businesses shuttered for good small businesses.

“Should the U.S. have locked down at all?” Baier asked.

“No! No. It was a catastrophic mistake to do that. Back at that time, there was a lot of uncertainty. I get it. But knowing what we know now, that was a catastrophic mistake. And we can never let that happen to our country again,” DeSantis replied.

“Did the vaccine work?” Baier followed up.

“It didn’t stop the spread. We were told if you take the vaccine, you will not get Covid. That is not true. And now for CDC to say they should be doing annual boosters like a flu shot, there is not sufficient data to support that. One of the things I’m going to do, we’re going to bring a reckoning to the medical swamp in DC,” DeSantis replied.

Watch the full clip above via Fox News.