In April of 2021, CBS’s “60 Minutes” falsely claimed that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis exclusively chose Publix, a major Florida supermarket chain, to distribute Covid vaccines because it had donated to his political campaign.
Rep. Jared Moskowitz, a Democrat who helped oversee the state’s vaccine distribution at the time, repeatedly debunked the accusation. He did so first in response to a March 2, 2021, Miami Herald piece.
“This idea why @Publix was picked has been utter nonsense,” Moskowitz wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “We reached out to all pharmacies and they were the only one who at the time could execute on the mission.”
On April 4, the day the “60 Minutes” segment aired, Moskowitz tweeted, “@60Minutes I said this before and I’ll say it again. @Publix was recommended by @FLSERT and @HealthyFla as the other pharmacies were not ready to start. Period! Full Stop! No one from the Governor’s office suggested Publix. It’s just absolute malarkey.”
Now, the same reporter who did the flawed DeSantis piece, Sharyn Alfonsi, has accused her employer of censoring her story about deportees El Salvador’s prison. “The public will correctly identify this as corporate censorship,” Alfonsi wrote in an email to her colleagues that has been viewed four million times on X.
However, Alfonsi offered no evidence to support her allegation of “corporate censorship,” implying that people to whom Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss reports caused her to delay the piece.
