During remarks on Sept. 9, Biden said that the United States "can and will turn the tide" against COVID-19 by mass vaccinations, while casting blame "at the 80 million" people who haven't been vaccinated. "We're in a tough stretch," he said. "This is not about freedom or personal choice," he said. "It's about protecting yourself and those around you."

"Governor DeSantis is focused on working for Floridians," Christina Pushaw, press secretary for DeSantis told The Epoch Times.

"Yesterday's White House spectacle was a desperate attempt to regain control of the narrative and distract from the Biden administration's abject failures: Afghanistan, the border crisis, and the COVID-19 response."

"Vaccine mandates are unscientific, ineffective, and fundamentally wrong," she said.

"In Florida, we will fight back."

While speaking to the media the next day, DeSantis noted how Biden has been critical of Florida's Parents' Bill of Rights (pdf), saying Biden believes that school boards should be able to "force five-year-old kids to wear masks all day.

"That's what he thinks is appropriate government?" he said. Yet, he institutes an unprecedented mandate, "which even his own people have acknowledged in the past is not constitutional. That's not leadership."

DeSantis said Biden promised—when campaigning in 2020—that he would "shut down the virus."

Yet today the country has 300 percent more cases than there were a year ago "when we had no vaccines at all."

"He's doubling down on things that are going to be very destructive for the livelihoods of many, many Americans," he said.

"Nobody should lose their job based on this decision."