Health Department in One State Can No Longer Give COVID-19 Vaccines. Here’s Why; Scientist Who Battled for COVID Common Sense Over Media and Government Censors Wins Top Award, and other C-Virus related stories

Health department in one state can no longer give COVID-19 vaccines. Here’s why:

A regional public health department in Idaho is no longer providing COVID-19 vaccines to residents in six counties after a narrow decision by its board.

Southwest District Health appears to be the first in the nation to be restricted from giving COVID-19 vaccines. Vaccinations are an essential function of a public health department.

While policymakers in Texas banned health departments from promoting COVID vaccines and Florida’s surgeon general bucked medical consensus to recommend against the vaccine, governmental bodies across the country haven’t blocked the vaccines outright.

“I’m not aware of anything else like this,” said Adriane Casalotti, chief of government and public affairs for the National Association of County and City Health Officials. She said health departments have stopped offering the vaccine because of cost or low demand, but not based on “a judgment of the medical product itself.”

The six-county district along the Idaho-Oregon border includes three counties in the Boise metropolitan area. Demand for COVID vaccines in the health district has declined — with 1,601 given in 2021 to 64 so far in 2024. The same is true for other vaccines: Idaho has the highest childhood vaccination exemption rate in the nation, and last year, the Southwest District Health Department rushed to contain a rare measles outbreak that sickened 10.

On Oct. 22, the health department’s board voted 4-3 in favor of the ban — despite Southwest’s medical director testifying to the vaccine’s necessity.

“Our request of the board is that we would be able to carry and offer those (vaccines), recognizing that we always have these discussions of risks and benefits,” Dr. Perry Jansen said at the meeting. “This is not a blind, everybody-gets-a-shot approach. This is a thoughtful approach.”

Opposite Jansen’s plea were more than 290 public comments, many of which called for an end to vaccine mandates or taxpayer funding of the vaccines, neither of which are happening in the district. At the meeting, many people who spoke are nationally known for making the rounds to testify against COVID vaccines, including Dr. Peter McCullough, a Texas cardiologist who sells “contagion emergency kits” that include ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine — drugs that have not been approved to treat COVID-19 and can have dangerous side effects. —>READ MORE HERE

Scientist who battled for COVID common sense over media and government censors wins top award:

Few in the media seemed eager to attend a ceremony last week in Washington, D.C., where the prestigious American Academy of Sciences and Letters was awarding its top intellectual freedom award.

The problem may have been the recipient: Stanford Professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.

Bhattacharya has spent years being vilified by the media over his dissenting views on the pandemic. As one of the signatories of the 2020 Great Barrington Declaration, he was canceled, censored, and even received death threats.

That open letter called on government officials and public health authorities to rethink the mandatory lockdowns and other extreme measures in light of past pandemics.

All the signatories became targets of an orthodoxy enforced by an alliance of political, corporate, media, and academic groups. Most were blocked on social media despite being accomplished scientists with expertise in this area.

It did not matter that positions once denounced as “conspiracy theories” have been recognized or embraced by many.

Some argued that there was no need to shut down schools, which has led to a crisis in mental illness among the young and the loss of critical years of education. Other nations heeded such advice with more limited shutdowns (including keeping schools open) and did not experience our losses.

Others argued that the virus’s origin was likely the Chinese research lab in Wuhan. That position was denounced by the Washington Post as a “debunked” coronavirus “conspiracy theory.” The New York Times Science and Health reporter Apoorva Mandavilli called any mention of the lab theory “racist.”

Federal agencies now support the lab theory as the most likely based on the scientific evidence.

Likewise, many questioned the efficacy of those blue surgical masks and supported natural immunity to the virus — both positions were later recognized by the government. —>READ MORE HERE

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