Florida Democratic Congressman Charlie Crist requested that he US Department of Justice investigate the actions of Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis relating to the location of a vaccine distribution site in a development run by a political donor, Evan Donovan of WFLA reports.
Last week, DeSantis defended the state-funded vaccination site at Lakewood Ranch in Manatee County, where only people from two wealthy ZIP codes were eligible for the 3,000 available inoculations. Crist notes that the ZIP codes also have some of the lowest coronavirus infection rates in the county.
DeSantis brushed aside allegations of political favoritism–Lakewood Ranch was developed and is run by company run by a person, Rex Jensen, who donated $900,000 to DeSantis’s gubernatorial campaign–saying that he chose the location because of the concentration of elderly people in the development. DeSantis also threatened to pull the vaccination site and put it in a different county if people continued to question his decision.
Lakewood Ranch is a 33,000 acre development just south of Tampa.
A former Florida governor and state attorney general, Crist requested acting Attorney General Monty Wilkinson to investigate whether “the Governor’s blatantly political vaccine distribution decisions, which do not seem to be in the public’s best interests, violate federal law and merit a full federal investigation.”