By Steve Contorno, CNN

Gov. Ron DeSantis has a new message for Dr. Anthony Fauci for Republicans to visit Florida’s beaches.

“Fauci Can Pound Sand” is written on the sole of sandals that can now be purchased on the DeSantis Crusade website. During their shopping, DeSantis fans can also buy koozies with “Don’t Fauci My Florida” beer. directed to his site from a recent DeSantis crusade email, themed line: “Fauci for Prison. “

In the absence of a transparent political opponent at the start of his re-election crusade, DeSantis appears to have created one between the 81-year-old Brooklyn doctor and Biden’s top medical adviser. Beyond the products of the crusade and fundraising launches, Fauci ranks high. in the maximum of DeSantis’ public comments.

Restaurants were left “withering on the vine” because of Fauci, DeSantis told academics at a state school in January. Fauci has relied on China’s coronavirus data, DeSantis recently told a conservative podcast. “We’re opting for freedom over Fauci,” business leaders said in November.

DeSantis made Fauci an adjective (“Faucian dystopia”) and a political doctrine (“Faucism”).

For DeSantis, Fauci is a practical shortcut to the pandemic mitigation measures he fought as governor, such as masks, vaccination mandates, and controlled shutdowns. DeSantis has attracted more attention than any Republican leader in the country by ignoring the clinic’s recommendation. It networks and keeps Florida open, which earned him a spot on the most sensible list of long-term Republican presidential candidates.

While running for a momentary term, DeSantis has only intensified his opposition to coronavirus restrictions and, by extension, the country’s most sensible infectious disease expert, going so far as to suggest that Fauci deserves to be prosecuted for alleged begging before Congress.

The U. S. representative USA Charlie Crist, who is running for number one Democrat to challenge DeSantis in November, said Fauci’s remedy was “below the governor’s office. “

“I think he’s pretty unhappy to be frank,” Crist said. “Dr. Fauci is a guy who seeks to advise the country through a pandemic that we all suffer, save lives and reduce infections. Our governor’s reaction is to make people laugh. of him and make fun of him. That’s not how a governor behaves.

Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried and state Sen. Annette Taddeo are also running for the Democratic nomination, which will be decided in a number one spot in August. DeSantis rarely spoke about one of the Democratic candidates on the crusade path or in his public comments.

In particular, it’s Fauci, not President Joe Biden or his potential Democratic opponents, whom DeSantis called in his recent State of the State Report when he called school closures and vaccination orders “tricky statements. “

DeSantis is far from the only Republican to attack Fauci for political purposes. The extreme excessive rhetoric of the right compared to Fauci with the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, who tortured and experimented on concentration camp prisoners. At a Senate hearing on Covid-19 last month, Fauci accused Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky of campaigning on lies about the doctor and warned that the attacks had resulted in “threats to my life, harassment of my circle of family members and young people with obscene phone calls. Fauci has been assigned his own security service since April 2020.

But DeSantis is one of the elected Republicans building a sales device around Fauci’s attack. His political committee, Friends of Ron DeSantis, has spent $560,000 since August on stock for its online store.

His committee drew attention when it began promoting “Don’t Fauci My Florida” T-shirts and koozies last July, prompting widespread contempt or praise along predictable partisan lines. A few weeks after the pieces hit the market, Florida became the national epicenter. of the outbreak of the Delta variant in the country. At its peak in September, another 350 people were dying each day in Florida.

Florida is approaching 65,000 coronavirus deaths after its new wave of hospitalizations in the Omnicron variant. The state ranks 18th for deaths consistent with capita.

Asked in August via CNN’s Jake Tapper about clothing, Fauci said, “There’s no position for that when you’re facing a public fitness crisis. “

“Anyone who attacks me, it’s just a mirror image of the politicization of what deserves to be a purely public fitness factor and that’s unfortunate,” Fauci said. “I’m attacked personally because I’m a visual person, yet I’m just articulating smart public fitness practices that are highly recommended through an organization and that organization is the CDC. “

The DeSantis Crusade responded to a request for comment.

Last month, many American doctors and scientists signed a letter calling for an end to private attacks on Fauci.

“Criticism is inaccurate, unscientific, ill-founded on facts and, increasingly, motivated by partisan politics. It’s a distraction from what deserves to be the national purpose: to run together to, despite everything, triumph over a pandemic that kills some 500,000 people. other people a year,” wrote the group, which included dozens of Nobel laureates and Dr. Bill Frist, a former Republican leader of the Tennessee Senate.

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. , told Fox News last year that he thought the crackpots were “funny” and claimed Fauci had earned public criticism.

“There’s a perception that Fauci is perfect,” Rubio said. “Fauci has been shamelessly and enthusiastically involved in the political debate in this country. “

Two years ago, Fauci was far from a surname, but he was a renowned medical scientist who had been director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984. When Covid 19 arrived in the United States, it plunged into the highlights. as a key member of then-President Donald Trump’s White House Coronavirus Task Force and has become a trusted voice explaining why and the truth in times of uncertainty.

DeSantis and Fauci faced off from the start. When Covid-19 began to spread in the U. S. In March 2020, Fauci said Florida was experiencing community spread of the virus and not just remote cases, which DeSantis questioned. A month later, when DeSantis was ready to reopen schools before the rest of the country, Fauci publicly warned against this.

But DeSantis largely dominated his complaint while Fauci worked for Trump, a close best friend of the governor. That replaced when Biden took office.

“Ultimately, we chose freedom over Faucism,” DeSantis said at a Republican rally in the key state of Pennsylvania in a May 2021 speech, a line he continues to use regularly.

Overall, as the pandemic drags on and Republicans and Democrats are increasingly at odds over masks and vaccines, Fauci has become a polarizing figure. A Gallup vote in December found that 52 percent approved of Fauci, compared with 47 percent who said they disapproved of him. While 85 percent of Democrats gave Fauci the highest grades, the ballot found that only 19 percent of Republicans said they approved of him. The self-employed were distributed more equitably. Kevin Cate, a media representative running for Fried, said only a “hateful little partisan” would politicize a scientist during a pandemic. He said he wasn’t worried that voters’ emotions about Fauci would have an effect on the campaign.

“There are only a limited number of things you can control,” Cate said. “The environment, whether it’s the stock market, the jobs, the 401ks, the virus, none of those things are under Nikki Fried’s control. “

DeSantis took advantage of discontent with Fauci among Republicans to expand his developing national logo and contribute more dollars to his re-election bid, which already has $72 million between his crusade and his political committee.

Fauci sandals appeared on social media with a video cutting clips of Fauci’s so-called changes in pandemic policies. On Tuesday, the conservative One America News Network streamed the virtual video in its entirety, adding commands on how to reserve the sandals, prompting an ad-tracking service to misreport the content as a cross-ad.

DeSantis Crusade spokesman Dave Abrams said the crusade did not pay for the ad and called OAN’s processing of the 60-second video “covering the content of the crusade. “

Taddeo, who posted a daily tweet last year counting how many Floridians died after the DeSantis committee began promoting anti-Fauci equipment, said the governor’s latest attack on Fauci was hypocritical. He noted that DeSantis also replaced its pandemic strategy after final schools for the first time. time, end bars, and allow local governments to implement mask requirements.

“We learned a lot along the way, adding To DeSantis. He likes to communicate how Florida is open for business and he likes the fact that we’ve closed,” Taddeo said. “Even he had to learn.

El-CNN-Wire™

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