Gov. Ron DeSantis signs COVID-liability bill into law

and i want to obviously thank our great legislators our senate president speaker of the house cfo and all the great uh senators and representatives who are up here uh today we're we're signing a bill which you you look at some of these things that haven't been happening as much and i think part of the reason is is because there's a fear of of liability that okay if you if you have one of these events are you going to end up having to battle lawsuits so i think a lot of people have governed themselves accordingly with that fear but we also don't unders we also believe i think as a legislature and certainly me as the governor that um you know we don't want to be in a situation where people are are scared of being sued uh just for doing normal things and so we worked very early on to look at to see ways that we could provide some certainty for both businesses and health care providers this is obviously a top priority for many of us up here and i think that the legislature has been able to deliver today so we're excited about being here we're excited about being able to sign the bill i think it's very common sense there have been other states that have done this but i think that probably most of the states have not yet done it and so so we're uh maybe not quite tip of the sphere like we are on big tech and some of the other stuff but i think we're i think we're certainly near the top and we appreciate uh their uh their thoughtful efforts here and i hope that this will provide some uh some certainty for folks if you look in florida uh nationally the unemployment rate is 6.2 percent here in florida it's 4.7 and that's with still having some of the issues with liability people are concerned but that's with there being a federal lockdown on the cruise line industry uh that's with there not being the type of flights that we're used to having coming in where people are coming and spending money in florida so uh we're ahead of the curve much more ahead of the curve of our you look at states like new york california even texas we're far ahead of them in terms of our economic uh performance and better um and the health metrics as well which we appreciate so but this i think is going to be really really good so this bill will be effective uh immediately and i think the message is is you know we want folks to be able uh to live their lives provide opportunities for people to do different things and then let individuals make the decisions about what they want to do you know you want to go listen to the band go do it you don't that's fine but we want those opportunities for as many people as possible so i thank uh senator simpson i thank speaker sprouls and and everyone here i'm going to let them come up and say a few words and then i will um sign the bill chris well thank you governor i appreciate you holding this event today i tried to talk to senate president to karaoke when this is over uh but we couldn't agree on a song it's really the first thing we haven't been able to agree on all session long what we're doing here today is very important you know the governor mentioned that there's other states who have addressed coveted liability for businesses and healthcare but i'm proud to stand with him with president simpson with our colleagues in the senate and the house to tell you that this is the most aggressive coveted liability protection bill in the united states of america and that was i commend the governor for his leadership you know we all took this on uh you know this is a this is a great example for for floridians on how your government works and truly truly works together you know the governor came out very early on and says we got to get businesses open we got to give them the confidence and i think there's probably not a person in this room who hasn't been to their favorite pizza place or their favorite restaurant or their favorite location to go and hang out with your family where you have not had a business owner who says i am scared i am worried about what could happen even though i'm doing all the right things i'm worried that i could get hit with a lawsuit or you have our our front line health care workers who've been working so hard during this pandemic who are concerned that you know they too could be a victim of a frivolous lawsuit even though they're doing the right thing what this bill does is says if you're doing the right things you're protected you're protected and you have the most aggressive protection in america if you're doing the wrong things then there's a way for people to get there but this is an awesome example about how our partners in the senate senate president simpson and i got to work together with our senate colleagues with our house members chair burton on the health care committee spearheaded our work in in the health care liability bill uh representative lawrence mcclure from plant city uh tackled our business liability bill which we passed off the floor uh week one but we're proud of the work of the house and senate it's a great example of our government working for small business owners and people throughout the state who are doing the right thing we're delighted to be here and and i want to reiterate everything the speaker just said it was real honor to working with the house and their staff to make sure that we got a comprehensive package put together but the reason this bill is so needed is because this governor had a vision as soon as we shut down how do we reopen safely how do we protect our most vulnerable how do we get our economy moving that shows up in every matrix and every set of numbers you can derive from the pandemic and so this governor has shown great leadership we've had businesses front line workers in health care that in the face of the tragedy they were facing last march april may had to go to work every day had to prepare had less ppe than they may have would have preferred to have had this bill was essential to make sure we protected those folks all of the days that were shut down there were no farmers shut down anywhere there were no truck drivers shut down anywhere everyone still had to eat everyone still had to go to work that was going to provide for those basic services that had to be accomplished you know so we could all live our lives even in a locked down state so when we think about being locked down we're talking probably 30 or 40 percent of our population were actually locked down the rest of us were still working every day those businesses that had to be there every day then we're here for today and so i appreciate the governor's leadership on this issue i appreciate the speaker and his team working with us so well to get this bill done early in session we're very proud to be here governor let's do it hello all right here we go [Applause] i just wanted to make some comments now and i've said stuff previously but we are not uh supporting doing any vaccine passports in the state of florida and no one was more aggressive about getting this out of you look at all the different points throughout florida whether it's a hospital county health department a retail pharmacy a drive-through sites church sites all this stuff it's important but we always said we want to provide it for all but mandated for none and that was something that while it was advised to take particularly if you're vulnerable we were not going to force you to do it so there were there was never under discussion any mandates to take vaccines we will not have coveted vaccines mandated in florida the flip side of that though with these vaccine passports is it's completely unacceptable for either the government or the private sector to impose upon you the requirement that you show proof of vaccine to just simply be able to participate in normal society you want to go to a movie theater should you have to show that no you want to go to a game do you no i'm going to go to a theme park no so we're not supportive of that um i think it's something that people have certain freedoms and individual liberties to make decisions for themselves i also wonder it's like okay you're going to do this and then what give all this information to some big corporation you want the fox to guard the hen house i mean give me a break i think this is something that has huge privacy implications it is not necessary to do you know we're gonna have hit three and a half million seniors that have gotten shots uh sometime this week likely 75 percent of seniors it's important to be able to do it but at the same time we are not going to have you provide proof of this just to be able to live your life normally and i'm going to be taking some action in an executive function emergency function here very shortly but i've spoken i just spoke with the speaker about it and i'm telling wilton publicly so hopefully he agrees with me but we do need we need the legislature to come in and just say this is not happening in florida and i think that that would provide a lot of certainty for a lot of people uh i understand kind of how some folks uh can embrace the idea and i'm not saying it's all necessarily done for bad purposes but i think ultimately it would create problems uh in the state it's not necessary to do and so we're going to look to do it so we will do some action this week and then we will also work with the legislature if you're going to be doing something on reform in terms of the out out outgrowth of this covid crisis and i do think there needs to be reform including you know i think that there should be more robust checks on the governor even though i utilized this power judiciously i was trying to lift people up rather than continuing to lock people down but you think about it we have kids locked out of schools in different parts of this country for over a year we have businesses that have been locked down in lives destroyed for over a year based on one governor's decision and yes even though i didn't take that what if i had done that or someone else had done that there needs to be some checks there there needs to be checks on local government uh they should not be able to be closing things down like we saw you know i had to pry a lot of this stuff open over the summer and that's why we see boom in certain parts of the state as a result of that so i think all those things are important but as part of that i think you say with a covid vaccine no passports no mandates and i i think the vaccines are already showing to be beneficial if you look at the senior rates the seniors are doing better than the overall population in terms of fewer hospitalizations and fewer infections even so i think it's good and we've obviously worked very hard to get it at the same time this is an emergency use deal it's not necessary hasn't been fully approved by the by the fda and i just think that to do the vaccine so vaccine passports a big mistake so so we're taking action and we're going to work with the legislature that whatever gets across the finish line to reform in light of this will also have something to say that that's just simply not going to be permitted in the state of florida yes sir and you're asking the legislature to also pass the legislation so i think yeah so we're going to do an emergency order which is obviously temporary but then we want them to make it permanent to say no covet vaccine passports uh this is something that uh that that we want available for all but but mandated for women none uh people caring for children at home who are denying unemployment because you didn't have the requirement who's that can you give me that information you have the information on those people that you can provide well yeah why didn't you why didn't you leave it here why were those people so you didn't can you provide me those the the indications of that or the examples i don't trust the premise of the question so yes i would like to see some validity to what they're saying before i indulge the premise because i don't think that the premise uh it's not something i'm going to accept at face value okay let's let's do something else yes sir uh i have not endorsed that and it's not something that i'm uh that i'm pushing um so i think i have talked with chris about it but uh it's not something i'm endorsed well no i mean i think that that's if you look at uh some of the stuff that's now coming down the pike i mean some of this stuff's got a lot of really bad things in it and it's not necessarily what you would have had 30 years ago if someone's in college and they're doing something you know you have some really really bad stuff in there so i think having the ability to identify that i think that's safety and quite frankly when you get into some of that stuff that's not medicinal at that point for she said she sure a sense of quote impending doom because she said the case trend line around the country is going back up and it's a bad sign so listen when you're in those positions i think what you want to be doing is providing calm to people provide the facts but when you start talking about doom i mean what you're saying is that the vaccines must not work because we've had millions and millions of people around the country vaccinated states like florida prioritizing the elderly i think it's working i think it's good i think if you look this thing has followed a very consistent seasonal pattern so right now you see a little bit more increases in some of the northern parts of the country but that tracks almost exactly with what happened last march and into april and i think what you'll likely see is i think you'll see a decline across the country as we get into april and may and then i think what you need in our our part of the country based on last year you know we never really go without the this the in terms of the um the pattern of this the north they go spike and then they go nothing over the summer then it comes back so we obviously had the most significant outbreak june july and so i think we're going to have enough protective coat between immunity conferred by infection and by the vaccines uh to buy when we get to that point but i think what you're seeing is is the natural cycle of this i think it's repeating itself year over year uh and i think also when you look at you know they say oh this state has all these these new cases but if you look if they're all young people and if the elderly people are protected then you're not going to see a big big surge in hospitalizations and so in florida our our peak hospitalized census for covid patients was about 9 600 over the summer now we're at about 28.50 i think like that and quite frankly being in the 2000s is kind of the endemic baseline somewhere in there so so i think we've made a huge amount of progress i think the overall country has made a lot of progress and i don't think there's anything wrong with saying that and just pointing out that things are we have more immunity in the population we have these vaccines that are i think having a beneficial effect on our elderly population uh but if you're saying it's going to be doomed when we've done however many i mean we've done 150 million shots nationwide then then to me the message is saying that some of that stuff must not have been terribly effective and i think there's actually probably evidence that it has been if you look at the nursing home uh results over the last couple weeks i mean because you know we went into nursing homes third week of december you know we obviously had a bigger task than most states because we've got almost 4000 ltcs but if you look at that by the time you did the first and second dose you know probably december january first dose end of january february even maybe even into march for the second dose now you're a couple weeks beyond that and you're really starting to see the decline across the country i mean it's really uh exciting to be able to see that there's a lot of people that have been protected by by getting those vaccines out so i think things are i think things are going well now we anticipated a little bit of a blip up in march just because that's typically what happens you go december or january it goes down in february a little up in march and then it goes down in in april and may but i think the hospitalizations have been very stable because of the seniors first vaccine strategy the fact is the folks who are getting testing positive tend to be people who are at very low risk for hospitalization and that's a good thing yes sir yes sir yes well first of all this vaccine so i don't i'm not i'm not aware of any mandate to say that if i want to go to a football game or a basketball game and i think those are important just trying to figure out how you feel about vaccination so what i'm talking about is what we're going to do with this particular vaccine going forward and first of all this has not been approved for for kids it has not been now they're going to try that but i also think this particular vaccine would be totally inappropriate to mandate for kids given how low of a risk kids are to coven 19. i mean if you talk to folks the respiratory hospital admissions for respiratory viruses for for children this year dramatically down year over year this winter compared to what it was in kind of the normal flu season and that's an indication and so it's not approved for kids if it would be approved for kids i would not support mandating it for kids in fact i mean i think given how low risk covet is and given how low of risk the school setting is it wouldn't make any sense to do that but our vaccine passport is specifically focusing on the covid19 vaccines uh the the the eua that are under eua and um this would be to understand if you do a vaccine passport to say yeah you know if you want to go to a movie theater you want to get on a plane or you want to do that that is a bridge further than we have ever gone um in this country without question and it's a little bit different saying that versus saying you know hey with the measles or somebody in a school setting which is obviously you know could be very problematic so uh that we're not going to do it this would be an unprecedented expansion i think of using this both with public or with private power and that's why i think that businesses should not be allowed uh to be doing this either because i think it just puts us down a slippery slope and i think it'll end up being in a situation uh that we'll live to regret in the future okay we'll have more stuff tomorrow thank you

Channel: WPTV News - FL Palm Beaches and Treasure Coast

Views: 51,347

Keywords: COVID-liability law, Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis

Id: oGaE4RFR9lA

Length: 20min 34sec (1234 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 29 2021