AP Hit Piece Accusing Ron DeSantis of Pay-to-Play Scandal Burns to the Ground

Another day has passed and that means a fresh Ron DeSantis conspiracy theory must be birthed. The latest one (and the most serious charge in a while) comes from the Associated Press, which trumpeted that ‘DeSantis top donor invests in COVID drug governor promotes‘ in the headline.

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Sounds awful, right? Clearly, the bad Florida man is promoting a COVID treatment so his top donor can make money off it and then redistribute funds back via political donations. And, to be sure, that’s the takeaway most took as the internet exploded with another cycle of accusing DeSantis of being everything from anti-vax to wanting people to die.

So what’s the real story? Well, it does involve a DeSantis donor, but not at all in the way it was being framed. Rather, the donor is a hedge fund manager that manages almost $40 billion in assets. The company in question makes up a tiny fraction of the total investments to the point where it’s irrelevant. In fact, they aren’t even really investments. Rather they are call options.

Further, the treatment in question…works. In fact, the article admits that, though, their headline was meant to give a different impression.

Yes, we are once again seeing the press freak on DeSantis for doing something that works to help save lives in Florida. This first transpired when he was accused of pay-to-play for using Publix locations to distribute the vaccine. That was also nonsense and 60 Minutes ended up looking foolish in the end.

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RedState asked DeSantis’ press secretary, Christina Pushaw, for a comment on how this went down. This was her response.

It’s incredible— the corporate media insists for weeks that Governor DeSantis is “doing nothing” about COVID. But when he promotes and expands access to life saving treatment for all Floridians, the same media attacks him for it!

In short, this is another made-up, non-scandal driven by the press’ abject hatred of DeSantis. The fact that this latest attempt was so lazy is sad but not surprising. Even past the initial, false insinuation that something nefarious was going on here, is the argument that DeSantis shouldn’t tout life-saving COVID treatments if one of his donors has an investment in it? That people should be left to die so as to avoid hurting the AP’s sensibilities?

No serious person would argue that. Unfortunately, we are surrounded by unserious people, including in the journalistic establishment.

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