Gov. DeSantis gives COVID-19 vaccine update from The Villages

Governor Ron DeSantis reiterated his plan on Tuesday to vaccinate the state’s senior population before moving on to younger populations who may be at risk due to comorbidities.

DeSantis spoke about the need to vaccinate seniors during a news conference at The Villages. During the news conference, close to 10 residents of the retirement community received the vaccine. They will need a second dose in 21 days.

“Some say the younger workers in Florida,” should get the vaccine, DeSantis said.

“We have to put our grandparents and parents first,” he added.

His message on Tuesday mirrored what he said during a news conference on Monday: “Our whole strategy around COVID has always recognized the dramatic discrepancy in risk based on age. So if you’re trying to mitigate based on age, surely you would want to vaccinate based on age and there’s been some great analysis done to show that if you vaccinate the bulk of the 70 plus population the mortality on this goes really, really down. So that’s really what we’re looking for,” he said.

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A Center for Disease Control panel recommended that the next round of shots will focus on people 75 plus and essential workers, such as teachers, first responders, and grocery store workers.

But DeSantis stressed that all of Florida’s senior citizens need to be the next priority, not just those in nursing homes. After that, he said we can move on to other groups of people.

DeSantis said the problem with administering to older people is more efficient.

“We thought about doing the comorbidities; I just thought functionally, how do you do that?”

DeSantis said he continues to send in strike teams to bolster CVS and Walgreens vaccine distributions to assisted living facilities.

The governor said he expects Florida to get 750 thousand more doses by the end of this month and between one and a half to two million doses in January.