JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wants to prevent health care workers in the state from losing their licenses if they share views on COVID-19 that differ from what he called "Fauci-ism."
In a news conference Thursday in Panama City, DeSantis announced support for the Free Speech of Health Practitioners Act. The bill is currently under consideration by the Health and Human Services Committee, with a little more than a week left in the legislative session.
The bill would "protect health care workers from having their licensure revoked for simply exercising their right of free speech," according to a news release from DeSantis' office. It would also prohibit hospitals from interfering with a doctor's recommendation for COVID-19 treatment if the patient agrees and ensure doctors are providing patients with "all of the options for treatment," the release says.
"What we've seen, particularly over the last two years, has been a very politicized medical establishment," DeSantis said, "and they kind of have certain views, a lot of times they're informed by political ideology unfortunately, very, tracking closely with people like Dr. Fauci. And if practitioners dissent from that, there's movements to have reprisal against that."
DeSantis referred to a roundtable he held with a team of medical providers in 2021 that he said was "censored" by online platforms like Google and YouTube due to being labeled as misinformation.
"They said that it departed from what the quote 'majority view' on some of these things are," DeSantis said. "Here's the issue. It probably was the majority view that kids needed to be forced masking -- of people who were willing to speak out. Because most people in the medical knew it wasn't good, but they didn't want to speak out due to fear of reprisal."
Florida Surgeon General Dr. Jospeh Ladapo joined the governor to emphasize the importance of freedom of speech.
"It's really important, speech is the path to truth," Ladapo said. "We can't find truth without it, and this bill protects it."
Our news partners WTSP contributed to this report.