Another DeSantis gimmick fizzles: grand jury finds no COVID-19 crimes

The 144-page final report of the statewide grand jury investigating potential wrongdoing related to the development of COVID-19 vaccines is a remarkable document, though not for the reason its authors, or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who called for this investigation in 2022, seem to believe. Organized just as the governor was preparing to run for president, the grand jury has been a lingering remnant of headier days for DeSantis, when he and his advisers had grander ambitions not yet extinguished by his frigid rejection in Iowa's caucus.

Key to DeSantis' presidential strategy was to ride a wave of pandemic-era disenchantment among Republican primary voters, and this grand jury, whose work DeSantis hyped along the way, was intended to brandish the governor's reputation as his party's leading science skeptic. But as DeSantis' campaign wilted near the end of 2023, and his near-certain future as a relatively minor figure in the Trumpified Republican Party came into clearer focus, so too did the grand jury's usefulness expire. And so it had mostly faded from public consciousness until this week, when, to little fanfare, state officials unsealed the final report disclosing the grand jury's conclusion: It found no evidence of criminal activity by vaccine manufacturers.

DeSantis, who previously worked hard to generate publicity for the grand jury, mustered only a single social media post this week about the anticlimactic report, which, as of Tuesday, DeSantis said he was "still reading" — unmistakable politician-talk when events don't turn out quite as planned.

The report, written with an almost brazen self-seriousness given its partisan origins, managed to uncannily parrot the DeSantis administration's sometimes tortured views about vaccines, the pandemic and federal regulators. Curiously, for example, the grand jury seems to have concluded that federal officials and pharmaceutical companies didn't engage in problematic behavior in Donald Trump's first term, during which the pandemic exploded into American life and the vaccines themselves were actually developed (the act the grand jury was tasked with criminally investigating). It was only in "the following years" — i.e., the unstated term of President Joe Biden — that bad actors "squandered" the "good will" the government had apparently earned.

https://www.heraldtribune.com/story/news/columns/nate-monroe/2025/01/10/grand-jury-undercuts-florida-gov-ron-desantis-claims-of-covid-crimes/77592392007/