(Photo from Smith’s Facebook)
ORLANDO | Eight news media companies and a Florida nonprofit have joined the lawsuit Florida Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith (D-Orlando) and Florida Center for Government Accountability filed against the Florida Department of Health and the state surgeon general, Dr. Scott Rivkees.
The Associated Press, The New York Times, Gannett, Scripps Media, the publishing companies of the Miami Herald, South Florida Sun Sentinel, Tampa Bay Times, The Washington Post and the nonprofit First Amendment Foundation filed a motion to intervene Sept. 15 supporting Smith and the Florida Center in their efforts to get the health department to release public records for daily local COVID-19 pediatric hospitalizations, case counts and more.
“[B]etween June 30, 2020, and June 3, 2021, the [Health] Department maintained a website that displayed a COVID-19 data ‘dashboard’ that was updated daily with data including, but not limited, to positive and negative test results and corresponding age, gender, zip code, and county, as well as emergency room visits, deaths, and hospitalizations,” the motion reads. “Despite the continued challenges the COVID-19 pandemic presents to Florida residents, the Department ceased publishing the daily data on or about June 3, 2021. Instead, it now publishes a weekly COVID-19 ‘Situation Report,’ which excludes several of the key data points originally included in the former daily reports. Critically missing from this weekly data is, for example, county-by-county COVID-19 fatality numbers.”
The motion goes on to state, as with Smith and the Florida Center, members of the news media have made several requests to the health department for the same type of data that was available to the public just a few months ago regarding Florida’s COVID-19 cases.
Smith took to social media Sept. 15, praising the motion, writing “Every Floridian, including members of press, has a constitutional right to freedom of information. We welcome this news!”
Smith’s lawsuit was assigned to Leon County Circuit Court Judge John C. Cooper Sept. 8. Cooper is the same judge who ruled against Gov. Ron DeSantis’ barring of mask mandates in Florida schools saying DeSantis and his administration acted “without legal authority.”
A pre-trial hearing for the lawsuit has been scheduled for Sept. 20 at 4 p.m. where they will discuss the status of the case, schedule a trial and decide whether the motion will be allowed.
Read the motion here.
Read the original lawsuit here.
