Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Reuters
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s press secretary was an outspoken fan of Anthony Fauci and coronavirus vaccines before joining the anti-Fauci governor’s staff.
Jeremy Redfern, who became DeSantis’s top spokesperson in May, often echoes his boss’s opposition to Fauci, who led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases until 2022. “It wasn’t just that Fauci was bad,” Redfern tweeted in May. “Fauci’s ideas were terrible and detrimental to our republic; Fauci’s ideas were antithetical to individual liberty.”
But in 2020, Redfern was a keyboard warrior for Fauci, defending not just the NIAID director’s reputation, but also anti-COVID measures like travel restrictions. “Can you ask @realDonaldTrump to give Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx the Presidential Medal of Freedom?” Redfern tweeted at Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) in 2020. The tweet has been deleted, but still exists on the Internet Archive.