Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Supreme Court justices John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh lacked “backbone” for not striking down the Biden administration’s health care worker vaccine mandate.
In two decisions Thursday, the nation’s top court struck down the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for large businesses, but upheld its mandate for most healthcare workers.
Roberts and Kavanaugh sided with the court’s liberal justices, upholding the the health care-worker vaccine mandate, five to four.
“Honestly, Roberts and Kavanaugh did not have a backbone on that decision. That’s just the bottom line,” DeSantis said on an episode of the right-leaning podcast Ruthless.
DeSantis has said Florida will not enforce the healthcare-worker vaccine mandate, which he believes would sideline nurses who have natural immunity to COVID-19.
“In other states they fired nurses who are not vaccinated. Many of them have natural immunity from prior infections. So they’re actually bringing back to work nurses who are COVID-positive. They are vaccinated but we know that’s not stopping it … Meanwhile the unvaccinated, likely immune from prior infection, healthy nurses are on the sidelines, fired?” DeSantis said.
DeSantis also fired a shot at the president’s chief medical advisor, Anthony Fauci, who initially denied to Congress that the National Institutes of Health had funded gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses in Wuhan, China, before later admitting and defending it.
“Fauci funded them at the Wuhan lab and he lied about it. And why is he not being prosecuted for lying to Congress?” DeSantis asked.