An email arrived over the weekend… reminding me of the Board of County Commissioners’ work session this morning, Tuesday, April 26, at 8:30am.
Mr Hudson,
I wanted to let you know that a small group of concerned citizens including myself are scheduled to present to the Commissioners at this next work session. The topic is whether it is in the best interest for Archuleta County to stay with San Juan Basin Public Health or form an independent public health department. Our objective is to encourage the Commissioners to consider assembling a Task Force (Phase 2 if you will) to pick up where the Health District Investigation Committee of 2021 left off. The presentation will include a Power Point presentation and narrative by several speakers.
You have demonstrated an interest in the subject, and I wanted to give you a heads up…
As suggested in Part One, the people living in Pagosa Springs, Colorado have widely differing views about who the villain is… in the tale of COVID-19.
Some of our neighbors believe that San Juan Basin Public Health — an agency serving La Plata and Archuleta County with ‘Five Foundational Services’ and ‘Seven Foundational Capabilities’ — is our local big, bad wolf. In the opinion of some, SJBPH violated our constitutional rights by imposing masking requirements and enforcing ‘lock-down’ policies on schools, businesses, government agencies, and individuals.
Typically, these citizens viewed COVID as a somewhat more severe form of the common flu, and saw the draconian public health measures instituted by state and local government as unwarranted — and ultimately, as more dangerous than the disease. This perspective was evidenced at numerous meetings of the Archuleta Board of County Commissioners during 2021, and resulted in the BOCC’s decision to convene a ‘Health District Investigation Committee’, charged with researching the possibility of Archuleta County leaving SJBPH and forming its own, independent local health district.
That committee delivered a final report in March. The committee’s basic conclusion, after spending five months looking into the question, seemed to be, “We are not able to offer a recommendation, because the issues are too complex and the necessary information too difficult to obtain…”
In conclusion, we learned much about the different health structures and services among those that we contacted and those that provided information. There are many more questions to be asked and research to be done…
…BOCC may consider exploring additional questions with both SJBPH and the community to stay open to learning about the public health landscape and gaps that can be addressed in a responsive manner. Toward this end, BOCC may consider formal public outreach or polling as a next step to see what the public needs are and who the public health clients are and will be in the future.
You can read more about the March presentation here.
Since the release of that final report, SJBPH has been making a concerted effort to provide the BOCC with presentations about the district’s past, present, and future services. One of the main points made in the presentations is that SJBPH — like so many local health districts — struggled to fulfill its various missions during the pandemic, because so much energy was expended on tracking COVID’s spread, keeping the public informed, facilitating the distribution of the new vaccines, and handling the other tasks suggested or required by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) and by the national Centers for Disease Control (CDC).
SJBPH’s increased effort to inform the BOCC included a power point presentation last week.
As mentioned in Part One of this editorial, at least some people in Archuleta County suspect that oppressive forces within our society are planning to use the COVID pandemic or similar ’emergencies’ to further deprive American citizens of their constitutional rights.
This fear could easy be stoked by a certain interpretation of slides like this one, shared during last week’s SJBPH presentation to the BOCC.
On its face, this information appears to summarize the difficulties faced by LHDs (Local Health Districts) maintaining their ordinary service levels during a public health emergency, as staff were reassigned to the COVID response effort.
It also makes this statement:
“LHDs need long-term resource investments expanding capacity for preparedness planning, health equity, and community recovery to bolster response to future public health emergencies.”
A citizen who views SJBPH as an instrument of anti-democratic social engineering, might view talk about “long-term resource investments, expanding capacity” as a reason to be worried about the future.
One of the links at the bottom of the “Hindering” slide (shown above) leads to a Public Health Institute web page about ‘equity in contact tracing’ — contact tracing being one of the key tools used by LHDs in attempting to slow the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, especially during 2020. As we entered 2021, the public health industry shifted its focus to getting people vaccinated. SJBPH had limited success convincing people in Archuleta County to accept a (poorly tested?) vaccine. According to last week’s presentation, only 63% of Archuleta County is “up to date with vaccination.”
I raise the question about whether the vaccines were “poorly tested” because a 2021 study reported in Science found the protection from the vaccines faltering significantly over time, with the efficacy of all three vaccine’s declining during 2021.
As COVID-19 breakthrough infections continue to emerge in some vaccine recipients and health authorities are developing policies around booster vaccinations, national data on COVID-19 vaccine breakthrough infections is inadequate but urgently needed. Now a study from the Public Health Institute, the Veterans Affairs Medical Center and the University of Texas Health Science Center published today in the journal ‘Science’ analyzed COVID infection by vaccination status among 780,225 Veterans.
Researchers found that protection against any COVID-19 infection declined for all vaccine types, with overall vaccine protection declining from 88% in February to 48% by October 2021. The decline was greatest for the Janssen (Johnson & Johnson) vaccine, with protection against infection declining from 86% in March to 13% in September…
The Daily Post published numerous press releases from San Juan Basin Public Health over the past two years. I honestly cannot recall any press release that questioned the efficacy of the vaccines… or for that matter, the efficacy of any of the various measures LHDs implemented over a two year period…