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Covid backlash hobbles public health and future pandemic response

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Michael Ejercito

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Mar 9, 2023, 11:09:18 AM3/9/23

https://archive.is/PQKqa#selection-711.0-1979.63

Covid backlash hobbles public health and future pandemic response
Lawsuits and legislation have stripped public health officials of their
powers in three years
By Lauren Weber and Joel Achenbach
March 8, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EST

Protesters descend on the Ohio Statehouse for an anti-mask rally in
Columbus on July 18, 2020. (Jeff Dean/AFP/Getty Images)
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When the next pandemic sweeps the United States, health officials in
Ohio won’t be able to shutter businesses or schools, even if they become
epicenters of outbreaks. Nor will they be empowered to force Ohioans who
have been exposed to go into quarantine. State officials in North Dakota
are barred from directing people to wear masks to slow the spread. Not
even the president can force federal agencies to issue vaccination or
testing mandates to thwart its march.
Conservative and libertarian forces have defanged much of the nation’s
public health system through legislation and litigation as the world
staggers into the fourth year of covid.

Why covid-19 vaccination gaps persist
4:11
Hispanic adults are among the most eager to get vaccinated, researchers
say, but they still have one of the lowest covid-19 vaccination rates in
the country. (Video: Joy Yi, Whitney Leaming/The Washington Post)
At least 30 states, nearly all led by Republican legislatures, have
passed laws since 2020 that limit public health authority, according to
a Washington Post analysis of laws collected by Kaiser Health News and
the Associated Press as well as the Association of State and Territorial
Health Officials and the Center for Public Health Law Research at Temple
University.
Health officials and governors in more than half the country are now
restricted from issuing mask mandates, ordering school closures and
imposing other protective measures or must seek permission from their
state legislatures before renewing emergency orders, the analysis showed.
The movement to curtail public health powers successfully tapped into a
populist rejection of pandemic measures following widespread anger and
confusion over the government response to covid. Grass-roots-backed
candidates ran for county commissions and local health boards on the
platform of dismantling health departments’ authority. Republican
legislators and attorneys general, religious liberty groups and the
legal arms of libertarian think tanks filed lawsuits and wrote new laws
modeled after legislation promoted by groups such as the American
Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative, corporate-backed influence
in statehouses across the country.
The Alabama legislature barred businesses from requiring proof of
coronavirus vaccination. In Tennessee, officials cannot close churches
during a state of emergency. Florida made it illegal for schools to
require coronavirus vaccinations.
[Cut short: One million covid deaths]
The result, public health experts warn, is a battered patchwork system
that makes it harder for leaders to protect the country from infectious
diseases that cross red and blue state borders.
“One day we’re going to have a really bad global crisis and a pandemic
far worse than covid, and we’ll look to the government to protect us,
but it’ll have its hands behind its back and a blindfold on,” said
Lawrence Gostin, director of Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute
for National and Global Health Law. “We’ll die with our rights on — we
want liberty but we don’t want protection.”
Those seeking to dismantle public health powers say they’re fighting
back against an intrusion on their rights by unelected bureaucrats who
overstepped amid a national crisis.
“We don’t want to concentrate power in a single set of hands,” said Rick
Esenberg, head of the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, a
libertarian law firm that won a state Supreme Court case barring health
officials from closing schools. “It’s a usurpation of the legislative role.”
Many conservatives said they did not believe the public health orders
were effective in saving lives, despite evidence to the contrary. One
study, for example, found that coronavirus vaccines prevented 3.2
million additional deaths in the United States.
Leaders in the public health establishment readily admit that many of
their problems have been self-inflicted. Among the mistakes: an early
failure by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to roll out a
diagnostic test for covid; an about-face on whether people should wear
masks to limit the spread of the virus; and confusing messages on when
to exit isolation after an infection. The duration of school closures
remains a source of recriminations.
“We deserve to have that backlash to some extent,” said Deborah Birx,
the coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force under
President Donald Trump, citing early CDC stumbles.

When Kelley Vollmar, health department director in Jefferson County,
Mo., issued a mask mandate, community members chattered online about
finding her address and chasing her out of the county. (Neeta Satam for
The Washington Post)
More than 1,000 legal decisions have been made at the local, state and
federal level regarding public health protections since March 2020,
according to research published in January in the American Journal of
Public Health. While only a quarter succeeded in weakening public health
powers, the rulings have substantially chipped away at the legal
standing of health agencies and officials to protect the public, said
Wendy Parmet, director of Northeastern University’s Center for Health
Policy and Law, who co-wrote the paper. “The courts are leaving us
vulnerable,” Parmet said.
The lawsuits found a conservative Supreme Court and federal judiciary
transformed by Trump and ready to strip the federal government’s public
health powers to issue mandates or other disease-control measures, said
Jennifer Piatt, a deputy director with the Network for Public Health Law.
A single federal judge in Florida was able to defeat the CDC’s travel
mask mandate. Republican attorneys general knocked out a federal
vaccinate-or-test mandate issued by the Occupational Safety and Health
Administration.
[Three days in the deadliest month of the covid pandemic]
These “big court wins” ensure that the next time there is a pandemic,
the country will not be able to respond as it had in 2020 with
government overreach, said Peter Bisbee, executive director of the
Republican Attorneys General Association.
“People are going to push for more freedom in every aspect of their
lives, but specifically when it comes to the ability to make decisions
regarding health and medicine,” Bisbee said. “So many people lost faith
with the government messaging on public health crises.”
The consequences are already playing out in Columbus, Ohio, where a
child with measles was able to wander around a mall before showing
symptoms in November, potentially spreading the highly contagious
disease. The state legislature in 2021 had stripped the city health
commissioner’s ability to order someone suspected of having an
infectious disease to quarantine.

Mysheika Roberts, Columbus health commissioner, explains her decision to
seek a public health emergency order for the Ohio city to help combat
the spread of the coronavirus on March 13, 2020. (Andrew Welsh-Huggins/AP)
Columbus Health Commissioner Mysheika Roberts bemoans the basic public
health functions she has lost control of — such as the ability to shut
down a restaurant with a hepatitis A outbreak as she had done before
covid. “All the other workers exposed preparing food for others to eat —
they could continue to go to work and shed hepatitis A” under the new
legislation, she said.
In Wisconsin, the constant threat of lawsuits by the Wisconsin Institute
for Law & Liberty has made officials wary of acting quickly to address
any public health threat, said Kirsten Johnson, the former health
commissioner of Milwaukee who is now the state’s health secretary.
Before the pandemic, Johnson said, she had threatened to shut down a
prominent local golf tournament after E. coli was found in the well
water, which forced the organizers to bring in bottled water. Now, she
said, she’s afraid to issue such a threat, for fear of legal retribution.
“At the beginning of the pandemic, it didn’t even occur to me that
public health authority was an issue,” Johnson said. “Fast forward a
year later, I had great hesitation of what was appropriate.”
The next time a pandemic hits, many public health officials will be
forced to go to state legislatures and to Congress to ask for explicit
authorization to act — a delay that could cost lives, said Edward
Fallone, a constitutional law expert at Marquette University Law School.
“Masking requirements, vaccine requirements, school closures are
completely off the table without new legislation,” Fallone said.
The push to dismantle the nation’s public health system was ramping up
in the summer of 2020 — months into a widespread shutdown of
restaurants, workplaces and schools — when the Heritage Foundation, a
conservative think tank, hosted a virtual forum on how state
legislatures could curtail governors’ shutdown powers.
On tap were representatives from the American Legislative Exchange
Council (ALEC) as well as a think tank and legal support group.
The message was clear: The government reaction to covid is a threat to
individual liberties that must be stopped.
“You have to narrowly define the authorities of the governor and make it
very clear to society and to the courts that certain things are to be
protected, such as individual and constitutional liberties,” said
Jonathon Hauenschild, who had worked on model legislation for ALEC,
according to a video recording of the July 2020 forum.
[The delta variant is ravaging this Missouri city. Many residents are
still wary of vaccines.]
Many states drew inspiration from the council’s model legislation.
In Missouri, John Wiemann, a former speaker pro tempore in the state
House of Representatives, said he used the council’s model legislation
when he co-sponsored a 2021 law that curtailed local public health
leaders’ ability to extend emergency orders without approval from
elected officials.
“It provided protections for the consumers and businesses with regards
to public health agencies out of control, unchecked with any kind of
supervision from elected officials,” he said.
Kelley Vollmar, health department director in Jefferson County, Mo.,
said the new law whittled her ability to fight covid and future
infectious diseases. In addition, a circuit court ruling stripped health
departments of their power to issue orders such as mandating masks and
closing schools without the support of an elected health board or county
commission. The state’s Republican attorney general refused to appeal
the ruling on behalf of the Missouri health department.
Backlash against her attempts to issue a mask mandate was so severe that
the mandate lasted just four months. The attorney who was supposed to
defend her department quit. Community members chattered online about
finding Vollmar’s address and chasing her out of the county.
Now, a gun store owner who gained local infamy for banning anyone from
wearing masks in his store says he is campaigning for an elected spot on
the health board so he can fire Vollmar and gut the department.

Vollmar shows printouts of threats she and her staff received on social
media during the pandemic. (Neeta Satam for The Washington Post)
Ian McFarland vowed on Facebook to give the health department “hell” and
used profane language to threaten workers with sexual assault in
December 2021, according to a screenshot Vollmar shared with The Post.
McFarland, in an October 2020 post she also shared, had suggested
holding a Second Amendment rally at a coronavirus testing site where
Vollmar’s staff would be working.
McFarland told The Post he was just joking around and was angry because
he believes the health department acted beyond its authority and
destroyed people’s lives and livelihoods.
“You can’t deny what they did was inappropriate and wrong if you are a
normal person who looked at life and liberty in America,” said
McFarland, a self-described constitutionalist who has vowed to turn away
government money if he wins.
He cited the $2 million in additional revenue he said his gun store
recorded as evidence his views are widely shared by the community, which
he said came to support him after his mask ban.
Amid the county’s contentious race for health board, Vollmar said a
quarter of her 81-person staff is on the verge of quitting. They change
out of their uniform polos before leaving work because of the continued
barrage of harassment and threats.
Vollmar said she is dismayed by the way the narrative of the pandemic
has become distorted. The basic facts have been lost, she said; these
public health measures were stopgaps to protect people’s lives before
vaccines and treatment were available. A majority of Americans in 2021
said they supported mask mandates and social distancing in both red and
blue states, according to a Monmouth University poll.
What haunts her most, Vollmar said, is the more than 600 lives that have
been lost to covid in Jefferson County. That despite her best efforts,
even she could not protect her own mother from contracting the disease
that killed her in December 2020. That even if she keeps her job after
the April health board election, Americans are now at greater risk — not
only for covid, but for whatever comes next.
“The reality is public health has been silenced,” Vollmar said.

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HeartDoc Andrew

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Mar 9, 2023, 1:36:00 PM3/9/23

Michael Ejercito wrote:

>https://archive.is/PQKqa#selection-711.0-1979.63
>
>
>Covid backlash hobbles public health and future pandemic response
>Lawsuits and legislation have stripped public health officials of their
>powers in three years
>By Lauren Weber and Joel Achenbach
>March 8, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EST
>
>Protesters descend on the Ohio Statehouse for an anti-mask rally in
>Columbus on July 18, 2020. (Jeff Dean/AFP/Getty Images)