evidence: Ron DeSantis wasn't always a COVID rebel: Looking back at the Florida governor's initial pandemic response [...] When COVID vaccines were first released, DeSantis, like many other governors, trumpeted their arrival. As Trump's term was coming to an end after he was defeated in the 2020 election, the Florida governor attended a White House summit on the vaccines that were about to receive emergency use authorization from the FDA. A couple of weeks before Christmas that year, New York nurse Sandra Lindsay became the first American outside of clinical trials to receive a COVID-19 vaccine, and DeSantis facilitated the rollout in his state and got his shot by the spring of 2021 — though he didn't do so in front of cameras.