Did Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis fiddle with the data to cover up rising COVID-19 deaths in his state? That’s the latest narrative that liberal media outlets, Democratic candidates, and other DeSantis critics are running with.
MSNBC’s headline blared, “’Cover-up’: Florida’s MAGA governor in COVID scandal on death count data.” The network’s Chief Legal Correspondent Ari Melber accused DeSantis of “misleading the public” and “downplaying” the crisis. Meanwhile, the anti-Trump advocacy organization the Lincoln Project accused the governor of “orchestrating a cover-up — in an effort to hide how badly he has failed Florida.”
There’s just one problem with this grand narrative: It isn’t true.
The controversy stems from a recent report in the left-leaning Miami Herald, ominously titled, “Florida changed its COVID-19 data, creating an ‘artificial decline’ in recent deaths.”
“As cases ballooned in August … the Florida Department of Health changed the way it reported death data to the CDC, giving the appearance of a pandemic in decline,” the newspaper reported. It quoted multiple critics and generally painted the statistical change as nefarious in nature. The dramatically framed article provided fuel for DeSantis’s critics and was echoed throughout liberal media and online circles.
.@AriMelber: As Gov. DeSantis ignores safety measures, a new report shows he might be misleading the public and hiding the accurate death numbers. According to reporting from the Miami Herald, coronavirus deaths in the state are not declining. https://t.co/tWepuuBvLT
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) September 2, 2021
Deeply troubling. Again.https://t.co/uEGQMhLkTE
— Nikki Fried (@NikkiFried) August 31, 2021
.@GovRonDeSantis is orchestrating a cover-up — in an effort to hide how badly he has failed Florida. https://t.co/nTYWh4BobQ
— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) August 31, 2021
But if you keep reading, buried many paragraphs down in the story are a few key facts. First, the supposed “cover-up” simply involves changing from recording deaths as they are reported to recording deaths under the date they specifically occurred. Whether one form of reporting is better than the other is something for experts to squabble over. But neither constitutes a “cover-up,” and neither is inaccurate. Indeed, the article contains a quote from an expert defending the change.
“Deaths by date of death curve is the most accurate you can get,” University of South Florida epidemiologist Jason Salemi told the Miami Herald. “You know exactly when people died. You know how to construct the curve and exactly when we were experiencing surges in terms of deaths.”
And, perhaps most glaringly, both sets of data are still publicly available. That’s right: Anyone who wants to see deaths by reporting date can still do so.
That’s not much of a cover-up. Indeed, per the Wall Street Journal, the new reporting method Florida is using is also used by “New York City, Puerto Rico and states such as Alabama, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina, Rhode Island, South Carolina and Texas.”
Journalists can’t claim to know what forms of public health data reporting are superior to others. So how can a GOP governor be accused of a “cover-up” for following the same procedures as New York City?
The honest truth is that the liberal media just hate DeSantis. While journalists were screeching that we should “follow the science” and hide in our homes forever, DeSantis rejected their approach and reopened his state. The doomsday outcomes predicted never really materialized, leaving alarmist reporters and TV anchors with egg on their faces — and fueling a vendetta against DeSantis. (They may also view him as a real threat to the Biden-Harris administration’s 2024 reelection chances.)
None of this is to say the governor’s policy response to the COVID-19 crisis isn’t fair game for criticism. COVID-19 policy is a matter of life and death, with tremendous economic, social, and health ramifications. Every elected official should be thoroughly scrutinized for how he or she has handled the crisis to date. But making up false narratives about a “cover-up” is disgraceful and serves only to undermine any more legitimate criticisms of DeSantis the media might have.
Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a libertarian-conservative journalist and a Washington Examiner contributor. Subscribe to his YouTube channel or email him at [email protected].
