EXCLUSIVE — Ron DeSantis: ‘I Would Oppose’ if Congress Tried to Make Vaccine Passports a Reality

JACKSONVILLE, Florida — Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is essentially “mandating, effectively, a vaccine passport which is discriminatory,” particularly in relation to the cruise industry, and vowed to oppose any attempts to make vaccine passports a reality if Congress pursues such a controversial agenda item.

DeSantis told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview on Tuesday that the current tension with the cruise industry over vaccine passports is really rooted in the federal agency, as it is “mandating, effectively, a vaccine passport which is discriminatory because we have 100 million-plus Americans who have recovered from COVID.”

“They have immunity. Many of them are not getting vaccinated because they’re already immune. So we don’t believe that that’s good policy to allow that,” he said, blasting the CDC for effectively putting its heel on the neck of the cruise industry, adding an enormous amount of pressure.

However, DeSantis explained we would “not even be having this discussion about cruise lines had we not sued the CDC because really they don’t have a leg to stand on.”

“They’re basically saying, Congress has delegated them carte blanche authority to do whatever the hell they want to with cruise ships,” he said before expressing his unfiltered view on vaccine passports.

“And so like a vaccine passport, look, obviously I’m not supportive of it, but even people who support, you have to admit, it’s a controversial matter, and it would absolutely require Congress to be the one to authorize that,” DeSantis told Breitbart News. “And I would oppose it if they tried to do that, but clearly, you can’t just say a bureaucracy can do whatever the heck they want.”

The CDC, he added, is “absolutely” driven by politics.

“You saw a lot of examples, but the one that was the most crystal clear to me was when we were getting ready to do vaccine distribution. They have their ACIP [Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices] panel. They wrote a report in November, I was probably the only governor who read it,” he said, noting it was “mostly about social justice and inequity and all these left-wing buzz terms.”

At this point, he added, the American people have really “tuned the CDC out.”