With a dystopian backdrop of Zoom attendees and surrounded by anti-vax academics and state health officials, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis used a Tuesday roundtable discussion to call on Florida’s Supreme Court to impanel a grand jury to investigate alleged vaccine “misconduct” in the state. “Today, I’m announcing a petition with the Supreme Court of Florida to impanel a statewide grand jury to investigate any and all wrongdoing in Florida with respect to COVID-19 vaccines,” DeSantis said to a round of silent applause from background viewers. Meeting attendees, including the governor’s vaccine-skeptic surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo, voiced a desire to hold vaccine manufacturers “accountable” for largely discredited side effects of the shot, pointing to conditions like myocarditis, which has proven extremely rare. They also challenged the authority and legitimacy of scientific analysis from the nation’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Our CDC, at this point, anything they put out, you just assume, at this point, that it’s not worth the paper it’s printed on,” DeSantis said, declaring that the state had decided to invent its own agency. “In Florida, we’re creating what we’re calling the Public Health Integrity Committee.”
