I'm sure everyone has seen photos of those thousands of cots on Tropicana Field prior to Milton. The only thing apparently clear about them, however, is that the citizens of Florida will be paying for them. According to Tampa Bay Times reporting, what was not clear was who owned them and why they were there. The Tampa Bay Rays declined to comment. The National Guard and Duke Energy said they didn't stage there. "The day before Milton made landfall, a photo of the rows of cots inside the stadium went viral on social media and the Florida Division of Emergency Management confirmed it had established a 10,000-person base camp there for debris cleanup crews and emergency responders. Dozens of mobile shower trailers sat parked outside the ballpark, suggesting the workers were prepared to be there for a while." "After Milton, Guthrie (Florida emergency services director) said the cots didn’t belong to the state. He said all state resources had been moved about 12 hours before tropical storm-force winds hit St. Petersburg. Despite a governor’s spokesperson posting on social media that the Trop resources were moved to Jacksonville, Guthrie said only a fraction went there, while other supplies were spread to staging areas still active from Hurricane Helene." “I don’t know whose cots they were,” Guthrie said, adding that all of the state’s cots at the Trop were put to use across the state, including in makeshift shelters like those in warehouses or the Seminole Hard Rock Casino. Regardless, the cots that remained in the Trop were usable afterward, he said. “No money was wasted,” he added. The problem with Guthrie's "no money wasted" statement was that 4000 of the cots belonged to a state contractor, CDR Maquire, which has been paid $35 million by the taxpayers so far this year for their emergency services. When asked why Guthrie said the cots weren't part of a state operation and that no money was wasted, the Division of Emergency Services didn't respond. "When the governor’s office was similarly asked for clarity, DeSantis spokesperson Jeremy Redfern declined to answer, and instead questioned the merits of a story about “cots owned by a contractor being on an empty baseball field.” Any takers on a bet (other than confirmed bet welchers) that CDR Maquire billed the state for those cots? Double or nothing that the owner of CDR Maquire is a DeSantis donor? A Milton mystery solved: Who left thousands of cots in Trop as roof shredded amaged+Tampa+Bay+roofs.+What+now%3f+
The president of CDR Maquire is Carlos A. Duart. "CDR — which received a no-bid contract from DeSantis’s team to provide covid vaccinations in long-term care facilities — sent a $1 million check just days before Christmas, at a time when most major donors had written off DeSantis as a viable contender, according to campaign finance records. It was the only seven-figure check the DeSantis effort received in December, highlighting just how difficult fundraising had become." https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/03/27/desantis-donors-florida-presidential-campaign/ DeSantis also appointed Duart to the Florida International University Board of Trustees. I'm sure if I dig deeper, there's more.
Oh, it gets better. Back to that no-bid contract awarded CDR for Covid vaccinations. It was worth $24 million. One itsy, bitsy, almost insignificant problem. The beneficiary of that no-bid contract, CDR, had NO experience working in long term care facilities. "But the favored vendor had no experience working in long-term care facilities, and the result has been a rush to vaccinate that has been rife with miscommunication and frustration, and even fraught with misinformation that discouraged some people from getting vaccinated, officials from long-term care facilities said." “Communications has been very haphazard, and chaotic,’' said Lindsey Starnes, vice president of Petra Care Consultant, which is helping a chain of assisted living facilities in Florida and the Southeast handle vaccine distribution. “When a team of nine shows up unannounced at a dementia care building and says ‘It’s time to get vaccinated,’ it throws staff and residents into a chaotic spin that will require them days to recover from.” "Compounding the confusion was a questionnaire used by CDR to screen residents and staff at Rosecastle of Zephyrhills Assisted Living & Memory Care on Sunday, she said. It incorrectly suggested that the vaccine could trigger allergies in people allergic to eggs, and three staff members refused to take the vaccine as a result. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, however, has said that eggs are not used in either the Pfizer vaccine or the Moderna vaccine and people with allergies will not be affected." "Represented by lobbyists Nick Iarossi and Jonathon Kilman, both of whom are close to DeSantis, the company was first given contracts to find scarce resources for personal protective equipment. Next, it received a sole-source contract to establish field hospitals when the state thought the first surge of the coronavirus would exceed the number of beds in South Florida hospitals. And in September, CDR Maguire became the sole-source contractor to take over the COVID testing sites operated by the state." Switch of vaccine vendors at Florida ALFs caused ‘chaos’
where are the criminal prosecutions for all these no bid contracts to unqualified cronies? can all this really be legal?
Corruption everywhere in our society - and around the planet. We pile on DeSantis, justifiably, but it has been in the past and would be in the future a Democratic Governor doing the same thing. But I sometimes wonder, what is corruption. If I were Governor and had a huge construction project to do, I'd give it to my long-time best friend, who is honest and who I trust 100% to do a good job.....and to donate to my campaign fund. Is that corruption? It might be close to it if government regulations required open-bidding.
Yeah, I guess I did view it with a wider lens, but I did note my opinion of DeSantis before doing so.
I worked for CDR during Delta and Omicron. I was on the tail end of the nursing home assignments and only witnessed one of them but they seemed like they had their quality control procedures down by then. We administered the monoclonal antibodies in Jacksonville during Delta and saw as many as 300 plus a day during that spike which the dwindled down to 200s, 100s on down until omicron hit and then they were eventually shut down because the MABs were found to be ineffective against it. This was one of the slower locations as south florida and central Florida were seeing many more per day at multiple locations. I never confirmed how much they were charging for each administration but the numbers being thrown around were somewhere between $1200 to $1600 a piece and even, I'm not sure if that was for the total combination of meds or each component in and of itself. I believe they didn't even have to pay for use of the public library so their overhead was product and employee salaries. We had anywhere from 10 to 15 medics at $50/hr another corresponding number of CNAs, IT personnel, supervisors etc. They paid mileage and per diems for food as well. We wondered how it waa worth paying us when it slowed down but rough math using conservative estimates came to 10s of millions a day in revenue. I researched the CEO and his connections to DeSantis. I wasn't surprised they had been granted a no-bid contract because these kind of deals are rampant regaedless of party and at all levels of government. Ive become pretty apathetic about national politics and even state/county because the machine is too big and the general public cant focus long enough on one subject to mobilize enough to demand accountability. At least at the city level consituents can apply pressure to put some of these turds on blast and expose them for what they are.
Interesting details. Correct me if I’m wrong but weren’t many medical personnel getting huge pay for working during Covid? Seems like the GOV decided to burn the cash to get the vaccines and MABs out to whoever needed them as fast as we could. I sent more than a few to a mab center in Ormond. Most all said they felt incredibly better in a day or two and none went to the hospital. I’d wager the money spent all across the country was crazy and that most all these type groups made out like bandits. Question is was it worth the money to rapidly deploy vaccines and treatments during the pandemic? Depends on how many hospitalizations were prevented, just one of those are running 50-100k (on the light end) and into the millions.
Not sure exactly what you're asking. If it's do I think it was worth a massive expenditure to deploy the response I'd say yes....at times. We saw the same thing you did with Delta. People were miserable sick and the imdevimab/casirivimab combination seemed to have great effectiveness. I don't have as strong an opinion on the vaccines because I got in mostly after those and I was pretty indifferent on them one way or the other. I don't fear them like many but there was a brief time where they seemed to lessen the effects of the actual virus before it mutated over and over again. I will say I backed away during omicron because imdevimab/casirivimab were ineffective yet the centers were kept open as long as they could stay profitable and even tried using bamlanivimab and etesevimab which didn't work either. I saw some effective treatments but I also saw a lot of money driven borderline ethical if not worse operations. At one point they were literally operating day to day whether DeSantis gave the ok to duart or not because it was nearing its end stages. We have no idea what CDRs profit margins were and who got a piece of all that money during the response.
It was more observation and commentary on what I understood the situation to be at that time. Your response was helpful.
