evidence: It helped DeSantis that sometimes he was right. In April, 2021, "60 Minutes" reported that he had given the Publix supermarket chain a no-bid contract to distribute the COVID vaccine, after it contributed a hundred thousand dollars to his political-action committee. The segment featured video of a press conference, at which the show’s reporter Sharyn Alfonsi suggested that DeSantis had engaged in "pay to play." Viewers saw DeSantis tearing into Alfonsi: "It’s wrong, it’s a fake narrative. I just disabused you of the narrative, and you don’t care about the facts." But the unedited video, which later circulated online, showed DeSantis providing an explanation: in consultation with local officials, vaccine contracts had also been offered to several other retail and pharmaceutical chains. [...] Last July, DeSantis travelled to St. Petersburg and encouraged Floridians to get a COVID vaccine. He’d received one himself, he noted: the single-shot Johnson & Johnson. "These vaccines are saving lives," he said.