DeSantis Campaign Press Release - ICYMI: Ron DeSantis on Jesse Watters Primetime

"We're going to clean house at places like the CDC."

Tallahassee, FL - Ron DeSantis today joined Jesse Watters on Fox News' Jesse Watters Primetime. The highlights are below.

Watch the full interview HERE.

On rejecting the left's COVID authoritarianism:

You have school districts in Maryland now imposing KN-95 mask mandates on school children. Are you kidding me? We know that doesn't work. We know that's harmful. I can tell you, in the state of Florida, we obviously fought back against all that when it was happening. But we've enacted permanent protections. You have a civil right, as a Floridian, to breathe clean air without someone telling you to put on a mask--whether it's your business you go into, whether it's a government agency, nothing. No mask mandates, no mandates on school children, no COVID vax mandates, and we've even banned gain of function research. I think part of the problem with this is a lot of these leftists, they think that these lockdown policies worked. They did not work. And nobody's been held accountable from Fauci on down. I've promised to bring a reckoning to CDC, NIH, FDA, all these agencies that lied to the American people repeatedly because if we don't have a reckoning, if we don't have accountability, they are going to try to do it again. And that's exactly what you see in some of these jurisdictions around the country. We all have to rise up as Americans and just say no.

On holding the medical establishment accountable:

You take something like an FDA, they're basically a subsidiary of Big Pharma. We're not going to allow people in the FDA to leave the FDA and cash out in pharma. It's like a revolving door. That's why you have them approving an mRNA vax for six-month-old babies for COVID. There was no evidence to support that. They're doing it because of that relationship. We're going to clean house at places like the CDC. They didn't follow the science during COVID, they followed the narrative during COVID, and that was very, very destructive. So we will clean house with personnel. You're going to have people in with me like my Surgeon General in Florida, Dr. Joseph Ladapo. You'll have people like Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford. These are people that were right about COVID from day one. They were pilloried by a very politicized scientific establishment, but they stood their ground, and they've been proving right. Those are the people that need to be in positions, not the political actors that we've seen over the last four or five years.

On his plan to stop the invasion and secure our border:

When I first became governor, we banned sanctuary cities. And you know what a lot of these weak-kneed Republicans said? They said that Latino voters were going to rebel against us because we did that. Guess what? In any poll that was ever done, Hispanics in Florida supported us banning sanctuary cities, more than any other demographic. When we've sent troops to the border to help Texas, we've had strong support across the state, especially with our Hispanic community. And when we transported the illegal aliens to beautiful Martha's Vineyard, the Venezuelans down in Florida were very supportive of that. So people want the rule of law. And I would say particularly Hispanic Americans want the rule of law. All those liberal politicians that you just showed, they're articulating why you can't have open borders. They're doing it in a way that may be a little bit more politically correct than they should be, but they are articulating open borders as a disaster. You're seeing what's happening in New York City. Just think of what's happening at these border towns. Think of all the fentanyl that's pouring in. Think of the sex trafficking and the human trafficking. We have a president that's ceded control of our southern border to the Mexican drug cartels. It's humiliating as a country to see this happening, and it is wrong. And we have got to be strong to say we will reverse all of these policies.

On his vision to reverse Bidenomics:

Under Biden, people are hurting and his policies are driving your grocery bills to be more expensive, your gas is going up, and he just took a lot of oil out of circulation in Alaska. His vision is $5, $6, $7 a gallon gas. My vision is open up energy, let's be energy dominant, and let's get back to $2 a gallon gas. That's what the American people need.