DeSantis slams federal court's 'terrible' ruling on vaccine mandates as 'massive expansion of federal power'

In a Sunday interview on Fox News show "Sunday Morning Futures," Florida Governor Ron DeSantis stressed the importance of not allowing the Occupational Safety and Health Administration vaccine mandate to stand.

"Governor, a federal judge, an appeals court on Friday allowed President Biden's vaccine mandate for private employers to take effect as New York and California are reimposing these mask mandates. It looks like this is going to the Supreme Court. You recently talked about that monoclonal treatment from AstraZeneca, right?" said show host Maria Bartiromo.

"Well, first of all, on the OSHA mandate, I thought it was a terrible decision," responded DeSantis. "Now, this is just a three judge panel. I thought the whole circuit in the 6th would certainly have struck this down. I do think we’re going to get positive relief from the U.S. Supreme Court on that," he continued.

DeSantis continued on to describe what Florida has put into place to fight the vaccine mandates: "But Maria, what we did in Florida is we didn't leave it to chance. We passed substantive protections in a special session for Floridians so that they are able to have generous ability to opt out of these types of mandates. And so, we feel like we’ve done what we needed to do to protect our employees."

"I think it's important from a legal and constitutional matter that something like the OSHA mandate not be allowed to stand. They reached back decades, found some statute, and are using that to force vaccinations. That's never been done in the history of our country,"the Republican governor added.

"And so, I think it's a massive expansion of federal power that goes beyond the Constitution. So, we absolutely need to win that case at the Supreme Court," he continued.

DeSantis went on to talk about monoclonal antibody treatments in the state.

"And yes, we had another monoclonal — this is more for preventative, for very high-risk people. You take it, and then you've got about six months of really good protection — and we should be talking about all this stuff," said DeSantis.

"All you hear is the same stuff about masking and lockdowns. We should be talking more about early treatment. Fortunately, in Florida, we are, but that has been a huge problem for the last year when we've had available treatments and they've not been touted by the powers that be," he continued.

"Yeah, I mean, Governor, we're not even sure what fully vaccinated means anymore. The other day, Dr. Fauci said, you know, it couldn't be that fully vaccinated means three shots, which is two shots for the vaccination and then one booster shot. Have you gotten the booster?" Bartiromo asked.

DeSantis stated that he received the "normal shot," and stressed that "at the end of the day it's people's individual decisions about what they want to do."

"Now Florida, we banned vaccine passports, we won't let them fire you, even private businesses, over this because we don't think that's appropriate. But one of the reasons why we took those steps is because we knew the definition of vaccination would be a shifting target," DeSantis said.

"And I predicted this a month and a half ago, and people said that I was wrong. And now we're starting to see it come to fruition. So there's gonna be people who've done maybe two Pfizer shots who are not doing booster and they can be considered in certain parts of the country to be unvaccinated and then denied the ability to participate in society like everybody else," he continued.

"It's gone way, way too far. And that is a decision that people should make for themselves, but they should not have their rights, freedoms, or liberties restricted based on these boosters," he concluded.