By Gerald Braude
In this newsletter:
An Informed Life Radio links
The Enigmatic Influence of Clallam County’s Public Health Officer
DOH Promotes Bivalent Boosters on Children
March 17 Episode of An Informed Life Radio show links
Guest: Jabri Harrison
Did diseases decline because of vaccines? Not according to history… - Learn the Risk
vaccine hesitancy - PMC - NCBI (nih.gov)
vaccine confidence - PMC - NCBI (nih.gov)
vaccine immunity - PMC - NCBI (nih.gov)
Browse All Movies | Childrens Health Defense
Never Again is Now Global - Five-part Docuseries | NOW ON DEMAND | Childrens Health Defense
Home - Children's Health Defense Tennessee Chapter (childrenshealthdefense.org)
Amazon.com : John Maxwell 5 Levels of Leadership
Amazon.com: Somewhere I’d Rather Be : Jabri Harrison: Audible Books & Originals
KUOW’s Isolde Raftery at UW Bookstore Event Tying Vaccine Choice to Racism
Adverse Effects of Vaccines: Evidence and Causality (2012) - search for “Autism” to see narrowing down to 5 studies. Footnote on page 146 about the Madsen study, “One of the authors of this article, P. Thorsen, was indicted for embezzlement on April 13, 2011. The implications for the integrity of the study are unknown at this time.”
The Enigmatic Influence of Clallam County’s Public Health Officer
Who would have ever thought at the start of this third decade of the century that public health officials would have loomed into the nation’s spotlight to promote vaccines. First, there was Dr. Anthony Fauci. Then came along Dr. Peter Hotez. Not to be undone, the Olympic Peninsula has had Dr. Allison Berry.
Dr. Berry, who is the public health officer for Clallam County and Jefferson County, instigated the havoc on the Olympic Peninsula on September 2, 2021 with her requirement for proof of COVID-19 vaccination for indoor restaurant and bar patrons. The following day, 200 to 300 Clallam County residents gathered at the Clallam County Courthouse and demanded the firing of Berry.
Hundreds gather at Clallam Courthouse, seeking health officer | Sequim Gazette
Later that month, opponents of the Berry’s mandate went to businesses in Port Angeles and Sequim, saying they would cover penalties for violating mask health orders.
Vaccine opponents urge restaurant owners to break mandate | Sequim Gazette
Mike French, owner of First Street Haven restaurant in Port Angeles, said a woman dropped off a two-page flier at his restaurant, stating that their civil rights were violated and that segregation and discrimination were against the law. But French said he had no intention of violating the health order. “The mandate keeps us safe,” he said.
A public records request by Informed Choice Washington revealed that six Clallam County residents filed complaints to the Washington Board of Health (BOH) about Regional Health Officer Alison Berry. The first paragraph of one of the complaints gets straight to the point:
On September 2, 2021, the Clallam County public health officer issued a public health order (hereinafter referred to as the “vaccine mandate order”) restricting the entry of all people (except those under the age of twelve) in restaurants and bars located in Clallam County unless that person provided proof that they were vaccinated against COVID-19. The vaccine order mandate (exhibit A on page 3) purports to have been issued by the public health officer under the authority of RCW 70.05.070. The public health officer, however, violated RCW 70.05.070 by issuing the vaccine mandate order without receiving direction of the Clallam County Board of Health.
The Washington State Board of Health (BOH) fielded comments about Dr. Berry during its October 13, 2021 meeting via Zoom.
Complaint filed against Clallam, Jefferson health officer | Sequim Gazette
But six of the seven public comments given at the BOH meeting were in support of the Dr. Berry. The following minutes from the meeting reveal this:
Jamie Bodden, Washington State Association of Local Public Health Officials (WSALPHO), provided comments on the Clallam County complaint against the local health officer. She said that local health officers have a broad scope to protect the public from disease and harm. She said Clallam County Board of Health passed a resolution supporting Dr. Berry and her work on behalf of the health department in September.
Liz Bumgarner provided comments in support of the work Dr. Berry has done in Clallam County. She said most people are very supportive and grateful of Dr. Berry. She stated her position on supporting vaccinations and community health and stated her position as against the disinformation of public health.
Brian Grad provided comments in support of the work Dr. Berry has done in Clallam County and said he was in favor of the Board to dismiss the complaint. He stated his position on supporting vaccinations and stated his position as against the disinformation against public health, its authority and vaccinations.
Joe Kunzler provided comments in support of Dr. Berry and the work she has done in Clallam County. He said he hopes others will take her lead to finish off COVID-19.
Harmony Rutter provided comments in support of Dr. Berry and the work she has done in Clallam County. She stated her position on vaccinations and thanked Dr. Berry and the local community for the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines.
Ron Richards provided comments in support of Dr. Berry and the work she has done in Clallam County and asked the Board to dismiss the complaint. He stated his support on Dr. Berry’s efforts to combat the epidemic amid harassment by individuals opposed to vaccines and wearing masks.
WSBOH-Minutes-2021-10-13-Final.pdf (wa.gov)
The only other public comment about Dr. Berry was more of an neutral stance:
Daniel O’Keefe provided comments about the Clallam County complaint against the local health officer and stated his position and concerns about public trust, verifiable data, and the evidence Dr. Berry has to make local public health decisions.
During the BOH’s discussion about the complaint, Secretary Designee Scott Lindquist stated that the complaint was a gross misinterpretation of the RCW that goes against a decision someone doesn’t like. He said that the local board of health appoints the health officer and the health officer then has a broad range. He noted the local health officer has a medical degree and the expertise to make decisions for disease prevention. He stated that in his opinion there are no grounds for this complaint. Vice Chair Tom Pendergrass expressed his agreement with Lindquist, noting that the local health officer was acting within their scope of responsibility and the local board of health verified they agreed with the health officer’s decisions. He noted his confusion of why this was coming before the State Board of Health. Bob Lutz, Board Member, stated his agreement with others and that the statute was clear in that the broad authority is vested in powers and duties of the local health officer who has the clinical knowledge. Chair Keith Grellner noted that currently, local boards of health are elected leaders, they appoint the local health officer based on their credentialing. He continued that the local board of health does not direct a local health officer daily to take actions to uphold the law. He noted that it is the local health officer’s responsibility to prevent the transmission of disease and that it is not optional. He furthered that the local board of health did not reprimand the local health officer, they supported her decision. Grellner indicated that the complaint had no merit and if considered at all, should be done at the local level. Temple Lentz, Board Member, stated that as a member of local board of health, she found this complaint to be frivolous and a misunderstanding of statute. She said that the statute clearly does not require the local health officer to seek permission for every decision and says quite the opposite.
On December 3, 2021, owners of six restaurants filed lawsuits against Dr. Berry’s requirement of proof-of-COVID-vaccination mandate for bars and restaurants.
Restaurant owners file lawsuit against vaccine proof order | Sequim Gazette
The legal dispute was settled with the lifting of the restriction on March 11, 2022.
The accumulation of Dr. Berry’s heavy-handed influence on Clallam County’s health policies came at the March 21, 2023 Clallam County Board of Health meeting. She wore a white mask as she expressed her concerns that even though the county has one of the highest vaccination rates in the United States, the majority of the county population does not have the bivalent booster.
“You can still get severe disease if you’re not up-to-date on your COVID-19 shots,” she said. “We are encouraging anyone who has not got the bivalent shot to do so, so you won’t get severe disease outcomes somewhere down the road.”
Dr. Berry was asked, “Do we still have a public health messaging campaign for promoting the bivalent boosters?” She replied, “Yes, we still have messaging, but it’s not the same as it was when we were working with a paid consultant. We have done a lot of bivalent booster campaigns, such as through Facebook, but we don’t have a large scale marketing campaign. We need to increase the messaging.”
Dr. Berry then set out to enlighten the board about her view of what she considers misinformation. “There’s been a lot of literature coming out lately that’s been fueling a misinformation storm over the last few months,” she said.
She first addressed a Lancet study concerning immunity from prior infection versus immunity from vaccination. “They did not include the mix immunity in that study,” she said. “They found that with prior infection you did not have some persistence of infection in severe disease from prior infection. What natural immunity doesn’t protect is subsequent infections. So, we still see a 36-percent protection against subsequent infection from the prior infection. The common misconception is that if you’ve had COVID-19, you can’t get it again. That’s not true. You can definitely get it again, and we know that you are more likely to get long COVID from repeated infections. Bivalent boosters were not studied because they didn’t have time. We know that getting your bivalent protects you from getting severe disease and subsequent infection.” Berry recommended getting the bivalent shot four months after a prior infection. “We’ll see a move to annual boosting,” she added.
Berry then addressed what she called the “misconception of herd immunity”. The trouble with the idea that if we all got COVID-19, we’d all get better is you can’t compare immunity without looking at the risk of infection that got you there.” She then showed the board the following chart released by the National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom that shows their all-cause mortality during the pandemic.
“You can see that the blue line is all cause mortality,” Berry said. “You can see that most of these deaths were among the unvaccinated. And so, yes, you can get immunity from prior infection, but in order to do so, you need to survive that infection. That’s why we encourage vaccination so that we don’t have to lose you along the way.”
Berry then cites the above graph to get more specific with what she calls misinformation about all-cause mortality. “There is common misinformation that I hear about that the vaccines are leading to the spike in all-cause mortality. What you can see based on this split is the spike in all cause mortality is in the people who are not vaccinated. They are dying of COVID-19. They are dying of heart attacks, strokes from their COVID-19 infection. We are not seeing that in the vaccinated. We are not seeing the spike.”
The above graph shows that the huge blue spike that Berry is referring to occurred when just the COVID-19 shots were being introduced to start off 2021. As the number of shots increased, the all-cause mortality per 100,000 for the unvaccinated slowly decreased over the course of the rest of 2021 as well as all over 2022.
A March 4, 2023 Expose’ article, citing the NHS as well, offers a viewpoint that contradicts what Berry had told the board.
The article started with the following premise:
On the 21st of February 2023, a UK Government agency, known as the Office for National Statistics (ONS), published data on deaths by vaccination status in England up to 31st December 2022. The article used the latest dataset from the ONS, titled “Deaths by Vaccination Status, England, 1 April 2021 to 31 December 2022.
The article extracted the following two charts on the mortality rates by vaccination status for all-cause deaths not involving COVID-19.
The Expose’ article then states the following:
As you can see from the above, the mortality rate per 100,00 among the unvaccinated remained at pretty much the same level throughout the entirety of 2022, with no major increases, or dips.
But what’s concerning is the fact that the unvaccinated mortality rate was lower than the one dose vaccinated and two dose vaccinated for the entire year. And the 3+ dose vaccinated for 8 months of the year.
Berry went on to alarm the board about the spike in maternal mortality 2021 due to COVID-19. “We have had a 40-percent rise in the United States,” she said. “That is the most recent coupled data. So pregnancy and COVID-19 are very risky in combination. Clallam County maternal mortality has risen but is still low, but we have seen a spike in miscarriages and that’s due to the COVID-19 infection.”
While any infection during pregnancy can potentially lead to complications and even death, the factors surrounding COVID-19 are complex and not well-studied. Factors such as heightened fear during pregnancy due to public health messaging, denial of early treatment protocols proven safe during pregnancy, increased anxiety of hospital settings and separation of birthing mother from loved ones and infant, and vaccination adverse reactions.
For the most part, the rest of Berry’s presentation to the board focused on masking. Even though the emergency orders for masking in healthcare facilities is being lifted on April 3, Berry still recommended wearing a mask. “Most healthcare organizations in our region are still going to be masking at the patient provider interface so that we are going to see masks on providers although we won’t see a mandate for patients to wear masks anymore. Each organization will come up with their own policies. In our region, most providers will still be wearing masks.”
Berry was then asked about a New York Times article that referred to the Cochrane study in which their meta-analysis found that wearing masks had no significant impact on curtailing the spread of COVID-19 — regardless of the type of mask studied.
Below is a link to the study:
Berry huffed and puffed non-stop through her mask as she said the following:
“This is another piece of misinformation that has provided quite a storm. A meta-analysis can be a powerful tool to increase the amount of data points in your study. However, it is very dependent on how you structure the studies that you pull into that conglomerate. And this Cochrane study has a pretty failed flaw in which they decided to look only at randomized control trials, which sounds good, but there are limits to randomized control trials. Randomized control trials are really good for studying things such as a drug that you are giving to a participant. They are not good at population level studies. So, particularly when you are looking at something that now has an evidence basis for it, it becomes not ethical to randomize.
“The folks doing the study actually took a bit of a page from the tobacco companies on this one. Back in the day when we were trying to convince folks that you shouldn’t smoke because it’s bad for you, the tobacco companies said that you can’t actually prove that because you’ve never had a randomized control trial where you randomize someone to smoking, which of course we haven’t done because it would be unethical by killing people. Same thing is true with masks. We have so much accumulated evidence on the protection element of masks that it would be wildly unethical for me to go to the ICU and say half of you nurses wear a mask, half don’t, and we’ll see what happens. It’s not ethical to do that, so we don’t do it.”
At this point, the board laughed along with Berry. None of them asked her to produce the “accumulated evidence on the protection element of masks.” Berry caught her breath and went on:
“And so what in this study is that they pulled a few randomized control trials, mostly from the pre-COVID era, looking at non-COVID viruses, and mostly they pulled relatively poor quality ones because it’s not ethical to do a big randomized control trial. And so they put bad data in and got bad data out. And they found that it didn’t make any difference. Part of that was because they looked at was randomized to recommending a mask, not randomized to having someone wear a mask or not. So, if you recommend that you wear a mask, and you don’t wear it, it doesn’t make any difference for you. So, masks only work if they’re on your face, and that’s true, and that’s the one thing that the Cochrane review got right.
“So, the study got a lot of play because it told a group of the population what it wanted to hear, and that masks don’t work. But it was a very poor quality study. Even the authors in the study said in it that this is poor quality data, and it’s prone to bias, and we don’t recommend any policy decisions to be made from this.
“But one author in the study wrote a New York Times opinion piece saying the opposite of all that. That same gentleman is the guy who wrote the New York Times pieces on global warming not being real and refuting other major general scientific facts.
“Science is tricky. It is based on the accumulation of evidence, and so we have to look at multiple studies repeated over time to come to a conclusion. It doesn’t work that there’s just one study and all other studies are unimportant. That’s not how we do science. And so when it comes to masking, we have massive accumulated evidence based on so much that we can say masking works as a fact just as we can say that global warming is real as a fact, just like vaccinations work as a fact; they’re the accumulated evidence that we have. Unfortunately, one study can get billed poorly and be part of spreading misinformation. It is not a peer reviewed article. Otherwise, it would not have been published.”
The county commissioner who asked Berry about the New York Times article then made the parachute analogy about the Cochrane Study, explaining how unethical it would be to have subjects not wear parachutes to see whether they worked. Berry said, “And this would be applicable to that.”
The influence that Dr. Berry has had on the county is best summarized by a panel member at the board meeting: “I have been on many zoom calls during the past three years at both the public school and Peninsula College level. I don’t know how many counties are fortunate enough to have a public health officer, probably weekly at some point, such as you on these calls, and I know that they relied upon you greatly, so thank you.”
DOH Promotes Bivalent Boosters on Children
The latest COVID-19 Vaccine Partner Newsletter from the Washington Department of Health (DOH) provides the following Question of the Week:
Q: CAN 6 MONTHS - 4 YEAR OLDS WHO RECEIVED A PFIZER PRIMARY SERIES GET A BIVALENT BOOSTER?
A: As of March 16, 2023, the CDC has expanded its recommendation to allow children ages 6 months through 4 years who previously completed the full 3-dose original monovalent Pfizer COVID-19 primary vaccination series to now receive a booster dose of Pfizer's updated (bivalent) COVID-19 vaccine. The bivalent Pfizer booster dose can be administered if it has been at least 2 months since the child's completion of the monovalent primary series.
This update means that all children in this age group are now eligible to receive an updated vaccine, either through completion of their primary series or through a booster dose.
The newsletter also posts the following photo:
“This turns my stomach,” says Informed Choice Washington Board Secretary Lisa Templeton. “They have created a supposedly humorous meme lightheartedly sharing the despicable news that CDC has ‘recommended’ that babies, toddlers, and preschoolers get shot up a fourth time. Let's pray parents tell them to beat sand.”
The announcement also appears on the DOH’s web site:
COVID-19 Vaccine Information for Health Care Providers | Washington State Department of Health
The March 17, 2023 Roundtable discussion on CHD-TV took up the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) decision to allow infants and children six months through age four to get Pfizer’s bivalent booster shot.
Roundtable Exclusive With Paul Marik, M.D. | Childrens Health Defense
As the show’s guest, Dr. Paul Marik said the FDA’s decision was a crime against humanity. He then stated the following:
“First, we know that the bivalent boosters don’t work. There’s an excellent study from the Cleveland Clinic, and what they have shown in adults is that the more you vaccinate, the greater the risk you have of getting COVID-19. The study also shows that natural immunity, which we have all forgotten about, is far superior to anything you can achieve with the vaccine. We know that the risk of a child actually dying from COVID-19 is zero to nonexistent. It just doesn’t exist. A child is more likely to be struck by lightning or drown in a bathtub than succumb to COVID-19. The FDA decision is an outrage. The facts are that Sweden, Denmark, and the United Kingdom have actually discontinued the COVID-19 shots for people under the age of fifty. So, somehow they figured out that these COVID-19 shots are not safe and effective. But in the United States they’re still vaccinating kids and pregnant women. It is truly astonishing. These people are lying, and they should be held accountable.”