The Florida Supreme Court has approved governor Ron DeSantis’s request to convene a grand jury to investigate “wrongdoings” associated with coronavirus vaccines.
The request was approved by five of the six justices who participated in the Thursday ruling, according to a report from the USA Today Network – Florida. DeSantis appointed a majority of the justices on the seven-member court.
DeSantis first announced his intention to file the petition on December 13, during a live-streamed roundtable discussion about vaccine accountability that he held with the state’s surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo.
“I think people want the truth that I think people want accountability,” DeSantis said at the time. “You need to have a thorough investigation into what’s happened with the shots.”
DeSantis did not specify what “wrongdoing” the grand jury would investigate, but he said the grand jury would come with legal processes to obtain information from vaccine manufacturers and “those who committed misconduct.”
DeSantis also announced in mid-December that he is establishing a Public Health Integrity Committee, to be overseen by Ladapo, which will assess federal public-health guidance and recommendations. His office also stated that the state will also be “leading further surveillance into sudden deaths of individuals that received the COVID-19 vaccine in Florida, based on autopsy results.”
Most health officials agree that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are safe and effective at preventing serious illness or death from Covid-19. DeSantis was an early supporter of the vaccines, and credited them with “saving lives” and “reducing mortality.”
The grand jury will sit for the coming year and be presided over by Thirteenth Judicial Court judge Ronald Ficarrotta. Previously, DeSantis impaneled a grand jury to investigate immigration issues such as the smuggling of children and drugs.
Stanford University’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Harvard Medical School’s Martin Kuldorff, a biostatistician, are among the people DeSantis has appointed to serve on the seven-member Public Health Integrity Committee.
Bhattacharya was named in journalist Bari Weiss’s early-December installment of “The Twitter Files.” According to her report, Twitter executives and content moderators approved putting Bhattacharya on a “Trends Blacklist” to stifle the dissemination of his tweets because he had argued that coronavirus lockdowns were detrimental to children’s development. Kuldorff has also publicly challenged the efficacy of pandemic lockdowns on low-risk population groups, including children.
Kuldorff and Bhattacharya were co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration that condemned strategies such as lockdowns, contact tracing, and isolation as disproportionately targeting “the working class and the poor to carry the heaviest burden.” As of December 2022, the open letter has garnered nearly one million signatures, 50,000 of which are medical practitioners.
DeSantis also appointed biologist Bret Weinstein to serve on committee. Weinstein was famously chased off campus at Evergreen State College in Washington in 2017 for objecting to a race-based “Day of Absence,” that asked white people to leave the school for a day. He later resigned. He is an advocate of alternative Covid treatments, including ivermectin, and has downplayed the effectiveness of the coronavirus vaccines.