By Daniel Ducassi, FloridaBulldog.org
Months after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said contact tracing doesn’t work, his administration has continued to pay millions of dollars in no-bid deals for a COVID-19 contact tracing app made by a company with ties to a prominent, billionaire Republican donor and represented by an influential Tallahassee lobbyist.
“I think we have to admit that contact tracing has just not worked,” DeSantis asserted in March 2021. “I think it’s largely been ineffective.”
Not long after the governor spoke, however, the Florida Department of Health inked a $6.7 million deal with Twenty Labs to continue providing a contact tracing app for the state called Healthy Together, records from Florida’s government contract database show. State officials made the first payment to the company for $550,676 on Sept. 17, 2021. The final two payments under that contract, totaling almost $1.2 million, were made on May 20 and June 1 of this year.
A more recent contract worth $400,000 shows the state paid the company another $200,000 on June 15.
The post Florida kept paying millions for a contact tracing app after DeSantis said contact tracing doesn’t work appeared first on Florida Bulldog.
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