There is a contradiction between Florida and federal law regarding vaccines. Companies required by the federal mandate to vaccinate all employees will be fined by Florida if they punish or fire employees who refuse the vaccine.
It’s not clear how the federal government is going to react but unlikely DeSantis will back down.
At a news conference Thursday in Panama City, DeSantis called the federal mandate for health care workers “insane, especially given the ineffectiveness of these shots to actually stop transmission between individuals.” He also said the mandates were contributing to labor shortages in the health care industry.
Biden is both politically weak and nationally unpopular, so pushing his luck on mandates will only bring this issue to a head and make matters worse for him. Yet doing nothing may embolden other governors to follow DeSantis, who seems to have made a good move by sharpening the outlines of this conflict.