Friday, June 12, 2020

Public Health Officials Under Siege

Public Health Officials Face Wave Of Threats, Pressure Amid Coronavirus Response


Emily Brown was stretched thin.
As the director of the Rio Grande County Public Health Department in rural Colorado, she was working 12- and 14-hour days, struggling to respond to the pandemic with only five full-time employees for more than 11,000 residents. Case counts were rising.
She was already at odds with county commissioners, who were pushing to loosen public health restrictions in late May, against her advice. She had previously clashed with them over data releases and had haggled over a variance regarding reopening businesses.
But she reasoned that standing up for public health principles was worth it, even if she risked losing the job that allowed her to live close to her hometown and help her parents with their farm.
Emily Brown was director of the Rio Grande County Public Health Department
 
in Colorado until May 22, when the county commissioners fired her after battling
with her 
over coronavirus restrictions. “They finally were tired of me not going
along the line they 
wanted me to go along,” she says.
(Photo by Theresa Anselmo/Courtesy of Emily Brown)
Then came the Facebook post: a photo of her and other health officials with comments about their weight and references to “armed citizens” and “bodies swinging from trees.”
The commissioners had asked her to meet with them the next day. She intended to ask them for more support. Instead, she was fired.
“They finally were tired of me not going along the line they wanted me to go along,” she said.
In the battle against COVID-19, public health workers spread across states, cities and small towns make up an invisible army on the front lines. But that army, which has suffered neglect for decades, is under assault when it’s needed most.
Officials who usually work behind the scenes managing everything from immunizations to water quality inspections have found themselves center stage. Elected officials and members of the public who are frustrated with the lockdowns and safety restrictions have at times turned public health workers into politicized punching bags, battering them with countless angry calls and even physical threats.
Ohio's state health director, Dr. Amy Acton, resigned
yesterday, a likely victim of the assaults upon public
health officials occurring nationwide.
[Photo from March 19, 2020 press conference]
On Thursday, Dr. Amy Acton, Ohio’s state health director, who had armed protesters come to her house, resigned. The health officer for Orange County, California, quit Monday after weeks of criticism and personal threats from residents and other public officials over an order requiring face coverings in public.
As the pressure and scrutiny rise, many more health officials have chosen to leave or been pushed out of their jobs. A review by KHN and The Associated Press finds at least 27 state and local health leaders have resigned, retired or been fired since April across 13 states.
From North Carolina to California, they have left their posts due to a mix of backlash and stressful, nonstop working conditions, all while dealing with chronic staffing and funding shortages.
Some health officials have not been up to the job during the biggest health crisis in a century. Others previously had plans to leave or cited their own health issues.
But Lori Tremmel Freeman, CEO of the National Association of County and City Health Officials, said the majority of what she calls an“alarming” exodus resulted from increasing pressure as states reopen. Three of those 27 were members of her board and well known in the public health community — Rio Grande County’s Brown; Detroit’s senior public health adviser, Dr. Kanzoni Asabigi; and the head of North Carolina’s Gaston County Department of Health and Human Services, Chris Dobbins.
Asabigi’s sudden retirement, considering his stature in the public health community, shocked Freeman.She also was upset to hear about the departure of Dobbins, who was chosen as health director of the year for North Carolina in 2017. Asabigi and Dobbins did not reply to requests for comment.
“They just don’t leave like that,” Freeman said.
Public health officials are “really getting tired of the ongoing pressures and the blame game,” Freeman said. She warned that more departures could be expected in the coming days and weeks as political pressure trickles down from the federal to the state to the local level.
From the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, federal public health officials have complained of being sidelined or politicized. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been marginalized; a government whistleblower said he faced retaliation because he opposed a White House directive to allow widespread access to the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 treatment.
In Hawaii, U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard called on the governor to fire his top public health officials, saying she believed they were too slow on testing, contact tracing and travel restrictions. In Wisconsin, several Republican lawmakers have repeatedly demanded that the state’s health services secretary resign, and the state’s conservative Supreme Court ruled 4-3 that she had exceeded her authority by extending a stay-at-home order.
With the increased public scrutiny, security details — like those seen on a federal level for Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top infectious disease expert — have been assigned to state health leaders, including Georgia’s Dr. Kathleen Toomey after she was threatened. Ohio’s Dr. Amy Acton, who also had a security detail assigned after armed protesters showed up at her home, resigned Thursday.
In Orange County, in late May, nearly a hundred people attended a county supervisors meeting, waiting hours to speak against an order requiring face coverings. One person suggested that the order might make it necessary to invoke Second Amendment rights to bear arms, while another read aloud the home address of the order’s author — the county’s chief health officer, Dr. Nichole Quick — as well as the name of her boyfriend.
Quick, attending by phone, left the meeting. In a statement, the sheriff’s office later said Quick had expressed concern for her safety following “several threatening statements both in public comment and online.” She was given personal protection by the sheriff.
But Monday, after yet another public meeting that included criticism from members of the board of supervisors, Quick resigned. She could not be reached for comment. Earlier, the county’s deputy director of public health services, David Souleles, retired abruptly.
An official in another California county also has been given a security detail, said Kat DeBurgh, the executive director of the Health Officers Association of California, declining to name the county or official because the threats have not been made public.
Many local health leaders, accustomed to relative anonymity as they work to protect the public’s health, have been shocked by the growing threats, said Theresa Anselmo, the executive director of the Colorado Association of Local Public Health Officials.
After polling local health directors across the state at a meeting last month, Anselmo found about 80% said they or their personal property had been threatened since the pandemic began. About 80% also said they’d encountered threats to pull funding from their department or other forms of political pressure.
To Anselmo, the ugly politics and threats are a result of the politicization of the pandemic from the start. So far in Colorado, six top local health officials have retired, resigned or been fired. A handful of state and local health department staff members have left as well, she said.
“It’s just appalling that in this country that spends as much as we do on health care that we’re facing these really difficult ethical dilemmas: Do I stay in my job and risk threats, or do I leave because it’s not worth it?” Anselmo asked.
In California, senior health officials from seven counties, including Quick and Souleles, have resigned or retired since March 15. Dr. Charity Dean, the second in command at the state Department of Public Health, submitted her resignation June 4. Burnout seems to be contributing to many of those decisions, DeBurgh said.
In addition to the harm to current officers, DeBurgh is worried about the impact these events will have on recruiting people into public health leadership.
“It’s disheartening to see people who disagree with the order go from attacking the order to attacking the officer to questioning their motivation, expertise and patriotism,” said DeBurgh. “That’s not something that should ever happen.”
Some of the online abuse has been going on for years, said Bill Snook, a spokesperson for thehealth department in Kansas City, Missouri. He has seen instances in which people took a health inspector’s name and made a meme out of it, or said a health worker should be strung up or killed. He said opponents of vaccinations, known as anti-vaxxers, have called staffers “baby killers.”
The pandemic, though, has brought such behavior to another level.
In Ohio, the Delaware General Health District has had two lockdowns since the pandemic began — one after an angry individual came to the health department. Fortunately, the doors were locked, said Dustin Kent, program manager for the department’s residential services unit.
Angry calls over contact tracing continue to pour in, Kent said.
In Colorado, the Tri-County Health Department, which serves Adams, Arapahoe and Douglas counties near Denver, has also been getting hundreds of calls and emails from frustrated citizens, deputy director Jennifer Ludwig said.
Some have been angry their businesses could not open and blamed the health department for depriving them of their livelihood. Others were furious with neighbors who were not wearing masks outside. It’s a constant wave of “confusion and angst and anxiety and anger,” she said.
Then in April and May, rocks were thrown at one of their office’s windows — three separate times. The office was tagged with obscene graffiti. The department also received an email calling members of the department “tyrants,” adding “you’re about to start a hot-shooting … civil war.”  Health department workers decamped to another office.
Although the police determined there was no imminent threat, Ludwig stressed how proud she was of her staff, who weathered the pressure while working round-the-clock.
“It does wear on you, but at the same time we know what we need to do to keep moving to keep our community safe,” she said. “Despite the complaints, the grievances, the threats, the vandalism — the staff have really excelled and stood up.”
The threats didn’t end there, however: Someone asked on the health department’s Facebook page how many people would like to know the home addresses of the Tri-County Health Department leadership. “You want to make this a war??? No problem,” the poster wrote.
Back in Colorado’s Rio Grande County, some members of the community have rallied in support of Brown with public comments and a letter to the editor of a local paper. Meanwhile, COVID-19 case counts have jumped from 14 to 49 as of Wednesday.
Brown is grappling with what she should do next: dive back into another strenuous public health job in a pandemic, or take a moment to recoup?
When she told her 6-year-old son she no longer had a job, he responded: “Good — now you can spend more time with us.”

This story is a collaboration between The Associated Press and Kaiser Health News. AP writer Audrey McAvoy in Honolulu and KHN correspondent Angela Hart in Sacramento contributed to this report.

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Thursday, June 11, 2020

Pastor calls out City Council’s “water is wet” resolution on racism as public-health-crisis

Olivet pastor decries empty statement as hypocritical, insincere, and lacking integrity

By R. T. Andrews


“You cannot say that you are against systemic racism on paper when your practices demonstrate otherwise.
Rev. Jawanza Karriem Colvin, Senior Pastor of Olivet InstitutionalBaptist Church, at a
meeting of the Greater Cleveland Congregations, earlier this year. Photo courtesy of GCC.
In a scathing denunciation of Cleveland’s political leadership, both black and white, the Rev. Jawanza Karriem Colvin, senior pastor of Olivet Institutional Baptist Church, lambasted City Council’s passage of a resolution declaring racism to be a public health crisis as a well-meaning but empty public relations reaction to the twin public crises facing our community and the nation.
On the surface, the measure passed by council last week tracks similar resolutions and declarations by public officials, civic, business, and political organizations across the nation. But Colvin, citing council’s meekness, reactivity, and lack of any substantive activity, denounced its members as do-nothing money changers who should be driven out of City Hall.
Asking what have our council and mayor done either to initiate new policies for police accountability or to address the disparate impact of the coronavirus on Cleveland’s black population, Colvin recited a litany of swift actions taken by mayors, city councils, and police chiefs across the country, including Chicago, Houston, Denver, Phoenix, Broward County, FL, and others. In many of these locales, policies were announced to change police practices immediately.

"Legislators are not doing their basic duties and the mayor is silent."

Colvin said people in other places “are taking real substantive action while we make empty statements.” Noting that Cleveland’s resolution was issued with no budget and no plan, he said it had “no bite, no meat, no substance; it was a p.r. action.”
Colvin’s remarks were delivered during his weekly hour-long radio program, “Freedom Talk”, which airs every Wednesday at 5PM on community radio station WOVU-FM/95.9. His remarks, evocative of an Old Testament prophet, went well beyond his criticism of the resolution, which he called “so much sounding brass and tinkling cymbals”.
The pastor gave due praise and credit to many of Cleveland’s nonprofit and groups and its religious community for their leadership on public policy matters. He said every major move by city council in recent years originated somewhere else, from institutions like the YWCA, United Way, and the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland.
Colvin credited council, the mayor and the police chief only with having a “keen sense of the obvious”. He said even the impetus for the resolution — whose principal sponsors were Blaine Griffin and Basheer Jones, African American councilmen who represent eastside wards — came from nonprofit groups external to the council. The nonprofits did the research work on the resolution, Colvin said. All Council had to do was say “Aye.”
Colvin bemoaned the prevailing culture of the city’s political establishment and its impact on both Cleveland’s performance and standing. There is no leadership coming out of city council, he said, and that there was no balance between City Hall’s executive and legislative branches. “The city council doesn’t move without the mayor’s approval”. He compared Cleveland to other communities that have younger leadership and more dynamic economies.
One point in particular stuck in the pastor’s craw: council’s failure in the past several months to have a single meeting of its health and human services committee, which Griffin chairs. Colvin said social distancing and the closing of city hall were no excuse. Council members had found ways to meet on other matters, but not to address the fact that black people are sick and dying in the streets of police violence, and elsewhere from the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I don’t know whether to be disappointed or disgusted,” he said. “These are the people we are looking to to lead change.…Legislators are not doing their basic duties” and the mayor is silent. “You cannot say that you are against systemic racism on paper when your practices demonstrate otherwise.”
Colvin devoted the entire hour to this topic, which he called “Communities in Crisis”. In addition to excoriating what he called council’s lack of integrity, insincerity and hypocrisy, he offered his insights on the systemic and structural racism that are currently nationwide topics of discussion in the wake of the public lynching of George Floyd by four Minneapolis policemen and numerous other recent murders of innocent black people while jogging or sleeping.
Colvin addressed white supremacy as the imbedded nature of white privilege in every facet, form and fashion around the world. And he observed that not only white people are its practitioners and defenders.
“You don’t have to be white to still reinforce systemic racism …You can be operating systemic racism by not dismantling the operations that support systemic racism.”
While not equating Cleveland’s structural racism with the city’s poor standing among its peers, Colvin’s jeremiad could be seen to make the implicit connection. As he credited the civic leaders who have publicly pledged to work towards ending structural racism, he took issue with the part of their statement which attempted to position Cleveland as a progressive standard bearer.

It is a moral blind spot on this city that we think we can get by with mediocrity. … The more we accept mediocrity, the more we gon’ get what we got.”

“We are not a progressive city … We are more concerned about charity than we are about justice.”
Colvin described the city’s culture and absence of leadership as “a shame. It is a moral blind spot on this city that we think we can get by with mediocrity. … The more we accept mediocrity, the more we gon’ get what we got,” he said, slipping momentarily into a vernacular that belied his education at Morehouse and Columbia. He then referenced Einstein’s definition of insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
Notwithstanding his dismay, despondency, disappointment, discouragement and disgust that while other cities — even suburban Beachwood — are taking action, Colvin said he thought that council would finally have a hearing on the devastating effect the coronavirus is having on black citizens, churches and businesses.
He implied that he expected pushback to his remarks and invited those who had his phone number to give him a call if so moved. And he closed by paraphrasing the activist Gloria Steinem:
“The truth will set you free, but first it’s gon’ tick you off.”
“Freedom Talk” is scheduled to repeat at 1PM today. It will be livestreamed here.
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