TALLAHASSEE — Attorneys for the Florida Department of Health, school boards and parties such as the NAACP battled Thursday about whether Surgeon General Scott Rivkees should give a deposition in a legal fight over the state’s efforts to prevent school mask mandates.

Administrative Law Judge Brian Newman held a nearly hour-long hearing as the department seeks a protective order to block Rivkees from having to testify in challenges to an Aug. 6 rule issued by the health agency. The rule required that parents be able to “opt out” their children from any school mask mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic.

School boards in Broward, Alachua, Orange, Miami-Dade and Leon counties and other parties, including the Florida State Conference of the NAACP, have challenged the rule. Their attorneys want to question Rivkees, who, as surgeon general, heads the Department of Health and signed the rule.

At least in part, they contend that the effort to prevent mask requirements in schools conflicts with past statements by Rivkees about masks helping curb the spread of COVID-19.

The Hillsborough County Republican Party alerted federal election regulators Tuesday that it may file its monthly campaign finance reports late because a key member of the organization died Saturday from COVID-19.

Prior to his death, Gregg Prentice developed and maintained software that electronically tracked donations to the Hillsborough County GOP and supplied data for the organization’s monthly finance reports. None of the other officers knew how to operate Prentice’s software, the party told the the Federal Elections Commission.

“We will be struggling to get all of this entered in the proper format by our deadline on September20, but we will try to do so with our best effort,” the party wrote.

For the better part of a decade, the cause Prentice took up was Florida’s election systems. Armed with analysis gleaned from self-sorted voter databases, he often levied severe accusations at local election supervisors, especially in Democratic counties. That work at times drew the attention of national conservative organizations and Republican lawmakers, who periodically consulted Prentice when writing voting laws, Wood said.

Sixty years ago tomorrow the largest clinical trial in history began. On April 26, 1954, thousands of U.S. schoolchildren rolled up their sleeves to take Jonas Salk’s inactivated poliovirus vaccine. Newspapers reported that Randall Kerr of McClean, Virginia, was the first child in the trial to get the shot. (Thousands of others in earlier stages of research had received the vaccine, including Salk’s wife and children.)

The 1954 trial was blinded, meaning that the children didn’t know whether they received the vaccine or a saline placebo injection. Regardless, most viewed themselves if not exactly as test subjects (which they certainly were) but as Polio Pioneers, as they and their parents were encouraged to think of them. About 1.3 million first- second- and third-graders participated in the trial as vaccine recipients (about 422,000), placebo recipients (about 201,000), and observed control subjects (about 725,000) (see the official report on the trial for details on the study design). About nine months after the trial ended, Thomas Francis, MD, announced in April 1955 that the vaccine group had significantly fewer cases of polio than the control groups, and the vaccine was licensed.

Over the past few years, scores of participants in the 1954 vaccine trials have posted comments on this blog. Many participants recall being afraid both of getting the shots and of getting polio, and many remember friends and family members who became ill with polio. Memory can be tricky: several people remembered getting the polio “drops” in this trial – though the oral vaccine, in liquid form, would not be used for several more years. They were probably revaccinated with the oral vaccine later because of its better immunogenicity.

Most of the participants I’ve corresponded with take pride in their role in the trial. But some of them question the methods used to enroll children in the trial and remark on the changes we’ve seen since the 1950s in the ethical considerations that guide medical research.

As a growing number of school districts defy a state order against mask mandates, Florida’s public universities are showing no desire to mount their own rebellion.

Repeatedly in recent days, university leaders have pushed aside calls for safety measures like mask mandates, stronger action to encourage vaccinations, or the ability to temporarily teach online. Faculty groups, meanwhile, have been voicing fears about multiplying coronavirus cases with a deepening sense of outrage.

University officials say the state has legally tied their hands from taking stronger action. But they have declined to explain exactly what rules or laws prevent them from challenging the state like many school districts have.

The issue surfaced Aug. 24 at the University of South Florida during a tense exchange between two members of the board of trustees. Trustee Tim Boaz, who heads the Faculty Senate, lamented in a meeting that USF hadn’t taken stronger steps against the virus.

The video, posted to Twitter by the website "ONLY in DADE," was reportedly shot at the Miami International Airport on Friday evening.

At the start of the video, a maskless man wearing a baseball hat backwards is hopping around the terminal and swinging his arms as if he's boxing, as he threatens a man that appears to be an airline worker.

"Wow, he's actually calling people n****rs," an off camera woman is heard saying after the maskless man shouted the n-word.

He then started knocking over the post and rope stanchions used to line people up at the gate for boarding.

The state reported 1,727 deaths from Aug. 20 through Thursday, the most recent seven-day period of data released by the state. That is the highest number of COVID-19 fatalities reported in a single week since the start of the pandemic.

The state distributed over 460,000 vaccinations last week and nearly 280,000 more Floridians were fully inoculated against the coronavirus, 17 percent of whom were 19 or younger. But 41 percent of the total population is unvaccinated.

Young Floridians also continue to lead all age groups in positivity rates: Ages 12-19 have a 23 percent positivity rate, the highest in the state. Children ages 12 and under have the second highest rate at 19 percent — and those 11 and under cannot be vaccinated.

The fight over whether schoolchildren should wear masks gripped the state this week. A Leon County judge on Friday overturned Gov. Ron DeSantis’ executive order banning school districts from requiring masks.

Ron DeSantis is a governor uninterested in actually governing, a lawyer with little respect for the law, an anti-elitist with an Ivy League education and a hypocrite unbothered by inconsistency. Populist politics, not public policy, is his long suit.

So it is not surprising that he has made a monumental mess of masking in public schools. When it became apparent that many of Florida’s 67 local school boards intended to require students, teachers and staff to wear masks based on the recommendations of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy of Pediatrics, plus the clear consensus of health care professionals generally, DeSantis did not see a serious public health issue. He saw an irresistible opportunity to pander to the MAGA peanut gallery on a grand scale.

Through a combination of executive orders and emergency rule making by a docile Department of Health and a spineless state Board of Education, DeSantis forbade mandatory masking in public schools and made private school vouchers available to the parents of every child in any school district with a mask mandate. This cowed almost all of the recalcitrant district school board members and superintendents, who tried to save face and have it both ways by requiring masks but allowing parental opt-outs.

And things have gone downhill for DeSantis from there. He and whoever gives him what passes for advice in such matters realized the voucher threat was not going to get the job done. Not enough parents in Broward and Alachua were going to take advantage of the vouchers to make a difference, as evidenced by the low percentages of parents who have opted out of the quasi-mask mandates in the compliant school districts.