Chelan-Douglas Health District Kicks Off 2023 Listening To More COVID Misinformation
They also listened to a presentation on a study focused on the health affects of wildfire smoke on farmworkers and their families during the fire season
The Chelan Douglas Health District Board of Directors began its first meeting of 2023 in a way that has become routine – by listening to why COVID-19 vaccines should be halted and recalled.
Douglas County resident Laurie Buhler made her case for why the vaccines are dangerous and deadly, citing data collected by the Center for Disease Control’s VAERS system, which stands for “vaccine adverse event reporting system.”
“My question for you all today is how much harm is too much harm for a vaccine? It is important to know that 67% of VAERS reports are made by healthcare workers. It is time consuming and sometimes frustrating,” Buhler said. “So when medical professionals file a VAERS report it should be taken seriously.”
She did not cite a source on the statistic, but according to the CDC anyone including healthcare providers, vaccine manufacturers and the public can submit reports to the system. In a disclaimer in bold lettering on the VAERS website, the CDC also notes that, “While very important in monitoring vaccine safety, VAERS reports alone cannot be used to determine if a vaccine caused or contributed to an adverse event or illness.”
Buhler did acknowledge that in her remarks.
“There have been over 16,000 deaths in the US reported since 2020,” she said. “Let me be clear, these death reports do not prove causality.”
Anti-vaccine activists have been using, some say twisting, VAERS data in order to spread misinformation, stoke fear and convince others to avoid COVID-19 vaccines since early in the pandemic.
Buhler spoke about the 1976 swine flu vaccine, which according to her “was halted after 25 deaths.” She did not cite her source on that either, but there were false and misleading tabloid stories at the time that led to hysteria about that vaccine, as well as a series of blunders made by government officials which led to the recall of a batch of that vaccine. In many ways, the “swine flu affair” as it became known laid the groundwork for the modern anti-vaccine movement. You can read more about that here.
Buhler closed by noting that lettuce and baby formula are recalled if there are just one or two deaths that occur because of defects in those products, and questioned why the same hasn’t been done for these vaccines.
“How much harm is too much harm for a vaccine? Correlation does not equal causation but correlation should equal investigation,” she said. “It is time to halt the COVID-19 vaccines for our community and for our children.”
Buhler and a small group of anti-vaccine activists have become a fixture at CDHD meetings, taking 30 to 40 minutes to decry COVID-19 vaccines at the beginning of each meeting.
And that was the topic of Carin Smith’s public comment, which was third and last. Smith is an alternate health board member, but was not attending the meeting in that capacity and noted that she was speaking as a private citizen.
Smith said more and more of the board’s time has been focused on the public comments section of the meeting, and it’s taking their attention away from the multitude of other work it does. It’s like there are two meetings, she said, and one is focused solely on the issue of COVID-19 vaccines.
“This appears to be an organized effort by a small group to provide a one-sided view of one specific issue, which could lead to an inaccurate view of what’s thought by the general public and a majority of medical experts,” she said.
In no way should the views of this small-but-vocal minority be interpreted as the reflection of the views of the community as a whole, she said. It takes volunteer time and paid staff time to focus on debating the safety and efficacy of COVID vaccines at every meeting.
“What’s the endgame? Because it feels like the board is getting played without knowing what the overall strategy is,” she said. “How can the public health board continue to function when we’re spending this much time on one issue? Public health includes safe water, sewer, food inspection, disaster response, clean air, maternal care, diseases like diabetes and many other topics.”
But it’s not just a group of average citizens who committed themselves to advancing an anti-vaccine agenda at these meetings. Board member Bill Sullivan has focused on COVID vaccines since he joined the board in 2022 and in July, he had board secretary Hollie Casey send a five-page list of web links that take the reader down a rabbit hole of COVID misinformation. Then at August’s board meeting he introduced a motion to prohibit the health district from administering and promoting COVID vaccines for minors.
“Vaccines have caused injuries to people,” Sullivan said at that meeting. “It’s irrefutable at this point that there is something occurring with the vaccines that has never happened before. And yet we’re hearing virtually nothing.”
The health district’s legal council, Chuck Zimmerman, said that Sullivan’s motion could open them up to litigation and it was defeated 9-1 at that meeting.
But his commitment to combating vaccines remained unwavering. In September, Sullivan had Casey send another email with an updated list. By this time the attachment had grown to 18 pages and included more than 200 web links. Some of the sources cited were sites like americanfaith.com and The Epoch Times, which is a “far-right international multi-language newspaper and media company affiliated with the Falun Gong new religious movement” according to Wikipedia.
Medical experts he cited included “America’s Frontline Doctors,” an organization which became infamous for peddling bogus COVID cures and therapies during the height of the pandemic and whose founder was sentenced to prison for her role in the Capitol Riot on Jan. 6, 2021.
These emails prompted fellow board member Dr. Bindu Nayak to send her own list of links with information about how COVID vaccines have been proven to be safe and effective and prepare for the August meeting.
“I reviewed the links he sent and did a lot of research on my own to discuss why his information was incorrect,” Nayak said. “Probably 12 hours total.”
If the other board members spent as much time reviewing the links Sullivan provided that would add up to nearly 200 hours spent poring over articles with headlines like “Natural Immunity is Superior, but CDC Buries the Data” and “Doctors ‘baffled’ by a ‘mysterious’ new ‘sudden death syndrome’ killing healthy young people” from a website called Life Site News, a Canadian Catholic conservative anti-abortion advocacy website.
Sullivan’s crusade against COVID vaccines doesn’t end in the boardroom however. This week he’s been promoting an anti-vax conference featuring NBA legend and rising star of the conservative anti-vaccine movement John Stockton. The event is set to take place in Wenatchee on Jan. 28.
“The failed public health response to the COVID pandemic ruined lives and changed our country forever,” Sullivan said in a press release for the event.
The event is being put on jointly by “Informed Consent WA” and “Truth and Accountability Project Washington” and is billed as a forum that will give voice to people harmed by the pandemic response, “be it though vaccine injuries vaccine mandates, hospital protocols, closure of business, schools, churches or effects of forced masking.”
I plan on attending the conference to hear some of the stories. I’ll write something up about that experience on Sunday.
Other Highlights From The Meeting
The board also listened to a presentation titled “Clean Air, I Care” by CAFE’s Environmental Justice Coordinator Laura Rivera and Savannah D’ Evelyn of the University of Washington. They presented findings from a study done last year to try to get a better understanding of how wildfire smoke affects the health of farmworkers and their children, many of whom spend a majority of their day outdoors during the smokiest time of year in North Central Washington.
The study was done holding a series of town hall listening sessions across North Central Washington and asking how wildfire smoke has affected farmworkers and their children, many of whom spend their summer days alongside their parents in their fields.
Dr. Nayak, a physician with Confluence Health, noted that the emergency room sees a spike in visits visits from Spanish-speaking families with children suffering from asthma in peak wildfire months like July and August, but that it can’t be known if those families were all spending a majority of their time outdoors because of work.
Other board members like Dan Sutton and Board Chair Kevin Overbay wondered aloud whether better forest management might lead to a decrease in smoke that effects those workers, but D’ Evelyn demurred and said subjects like that are out of the scope of a study like this. They are focused on action items that are more immediate and practical in the short-run, like emergency alerts that go out in Spanish as well as English. That doesn’t currently happen in this region, which is a fact that Overbay and board vice-chair Marc Straub found surprising.
Sullivan didn’t have much to say about the potential harmful side effects of wildfire smoke on farmworkers’ children, but he seemed perplexed about Rivera’s title.
“I think maybe the board is a little unfamiliar with environmental justice in terms of a health board and how that ties in,” he said ”Maybe someone could help me out with it?”
After Rivera explained her job title Sullivan still seemed confused, so fellow board member and Executive Director of CAFE Alma Chacon jumped in and explained that often negative environmental factors, like wildfire smoke, often disproportionately impact vulnerable communities like migrants and farmworkers. When it comes to smoke, for instance, farmworkers don’t have the luxury of retreating to an air conditioned, well-filtered and air purified indoor environment.
I’m reaching out to Chacon to get more information about the study and its findings and plan to do a story on that in the future.
You can watch and listen to the full board meeting below and read the minutes here.