MIAMI (CBSMiami) – In the midst of this pandemic, a SunSentinel investigation found that Gov. Ron DeSantis and his administration had been misleading the public about the crisis from the beginning.

According to thousands of pages of documents and over 50 interviews conducted by the SunSentinel, the governor and his team have done it through misinformation and spin as well as by muzzling local health officials across the state.

Q: Did your investigation actually reveal misinformation that was put up by the governor’s office? Because it’s one thing to focus on the positive. It’s another thing to deliberately mislead people. Did you find that?

A: Yes, indeed, yeah. This is one of the more difficult things to talk about. So we found that the governor spokesperson on his personal Twitter account, at least 16 separate times, discussed mask wearing in a way that experts consider to be misinformative. In keeping with the DeSantis administration’s greater position on masks, which is that you know where I’m if you want, the spokesperson would go ahead and say, Fred Piccolo, Jr., you know, there’s no need for a math mask mandate, they don’t work. That’s not factually accurate. They are shown to work. And in several instances, he actually compared COVID-19 to the flu, and said that the flu was equally deadly. That’s not accurate, either. And so this is a public official, and, you know, the governor’s number one spokesperson, and so we felt the need to fact check that misinformation coming out.