Hysterical Tennessee Republicans Fire Vaccine Chief for Encouraging Vaccines
By Bess Levin
July 13, 2021
As you’ve probably heard by now, a new pet cause among Republicans is to convince Americans that the COVID-19 vaccines are bad, and that any campaign to encourage people to get vaccinated against the highly contagious disease is akin to Nazism. That necessarily requires disseminating loads of misinformation, like that the federal government is basically knocking on people‘s doors and doing forced vaccinations, and shutting down reason and science wherever possible. And in Tennessee, that apparently means firing someone whose literal job is to promote vaccines for…promoting vaccines.
The New York Times reports that Tennessee’s top immunization official, Michelle Fiscus, says she was forced out of her job this week after writing a memo regarding a 34-year-old legal doctrine that suggests some teenagers can get vaccinations without their parents’ consent. That doctrine is obviously an important one in the event that a teenager happens to be under the parental care of someone who gets their medical advice from Fox News or the ex-president of the United States, particularly given the fact that, in the past two weeks, newly reported cases of COVID-19 have been on the rise, while the overall vaccination rate in Tennessee has stalled and is significantly lower than the national rate, according to the Times. But apparently, letting teens know their rights was a bridge too far for conservatives in the state.
Per the Times:
One Republican lawmaker, Scott Cepicky, accused [Fiscus’s agency] of employing “peer pressure” to prod young people into getting immunized.
In a lengthy and searing statement describing her departure, Dr. Fiscus said that the actions of lawmakers have gravely endangered the public by undermining confidence in the vaccines even as virus cases are rising in Tennessee and as concerns about the delta variant are emerging in parts of the country. “I am not a political operative, I am a physician who was, until today, charged with protecting the people of Tennessee, including its children, against preventable diseases like COVID-19,” Dr. Fiscus wrote.… Anger from lawmakers intensified after the memo by Dr. Fiscus was circulated to medical providers explaining a so-called mature minor doctrine, which allows doctors to treat patients between the ages of 14 and 18 without parental consent under a State Supreme Court ruling from 1987. The memo repeated information that has been publicly available on the Department of Health’s website for years.
In recent weeks, lawmakers have pointed to the memo and to advertisements from the agency on social media, contending that the department was going too far in its efforts to reach teenagers. During hearings, lawmakers even raised the prospect of dissolving the department.… A spokesman for the Tennessee Department of Health declined on Tuesday to comment on the dismissal of Dr. Fiscus.
“When you have advertisements like this, with a young girl with a patch on her arm, all smiling,” Cepicky said as he held up a copy of a social media post during a recent hearing, per the Times. “We all know how impressionable our young people are, and wanting to fit in in life.” During that same hearing, Lisa Piercey, the Tennessee’s health commissioner, explained to lawmakers that “Under no circumstance is the department encouraging children to seek out vaccination without parental consent,” adding that she knew of just eight cases in which the doctrine had been invoked—with three of them being for her own children while she was at work.
Nevertheless, with conservatives on an anti-science, anti-public-health rampage, the department has since scaled back its vaccination campaign and, according to the Times, removed social media posts informing people that children 12 and older are eligible to get inoculated. Per The Tennessean, the Department of Health will also “stop all COVID-19 vaccine events on school property, despite holding at least one such event this month,” and “take steps to ensure it no longer sends postcards or other notices reminding teenagers to get their second dose of the coronavirus vaccines.” Oh, and the clampdown isn’t just about coronavirus shots anymore:
The Tennessee Department of Health will halt all adolescent vaccine outreach—not just for coronavirus, but all diseases—amid pressure from Republican state lawmakers, according to an internal report and agency emails obtained by The Tennessean. If the health department must issue any information about vaccines, staff are instructed to strip the agency logo off the documents.
In her statement, Fiscus wrote that health officials have been “disparaged, demeaned, accused, and sometimes vilified by a public who chooses not to believe in science, and elected and appointed officials who have put their own self-interest above the people they were chosen to represent and protect.… [It] was MY job to provide evidence-based education and vaccine access so that Tennesseans could protect themselves against COVID-19. I have now been terminated for doing exactly that.”
