The Cowlitz County Board of Health says its purpose is to supervise “all matters pertaining to the preservation of the life and health of the people in Cowlitz County.” For some of the board members, though, that mission has taken a back seat.
The four-member bloc of Kelly Lane, Arne Mortensen, Rick Dahl and Lindy Campbell who backed the recent “medical freedom” resolution have made it clear that it is political points, not protecting health, that is their top priority.
Lane, who wrote the resolution, and his allies have shown a hostility to medical science all year, ever since they barred practicing physicians from the board in January. Mortensen claimed the board could seek input from experts when needed, but he’s made it clear he’s not interested in expertise, only opinions that are in lockstep with his own.
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Former Cowlitz County Medical Officers Alan Melnick and Steve Krager had plenty of expertise in public health. But they reported data that directly contradicts the board of health’s false claims that COVID had no impact on death counts. Melnick and Krager told the board the truth, rather than what some of them wanted to hear, so the two of them had to go. The Cowlitz County Health Board didn’t approve their contract renewals, and as a result, the officers resigned to prevent any liability from the county possibly continuing to use their signatures on records.
Cowlitz County now has to rely on stopgap measures by requesting to use a regional medical officer every two weeks to be able to carry out basic government functions, such as issuing death certificates or food handler cards.
Mortensen accused the medical officers of being biased, but make no mistake: when he said “that group has failed us,” the “us” he referred to was his political allies, not the people whose life and health are supposed to be the board’s paramount concern.
By making claims that health mandates did more harm than good, they place their own comfort over the safety of vulnerable people. Was social distancing convenient? No. Was it preferable to spreading a disease that has killed over one million Americans since 2020? Certainly.
Out-and-out cures to diseases that work after they are contracted are tremendously rare. Consequently, public health measures put a lot of emphasis on preventative measures, like vaccinations, hygiene and social distancing. But the end result is that we can’t see the people not getting sick. It’s easy to write off the work when the end result is prevention, rather than cure.
Instead of health professionals like those from PeaceHealth, Lane, Mortensen, Dahl and Campbell put their faith in “a lot of internet resources” Lane said he found. Conspiracy theories about horse deworming medication curing COVID-19 may have been removed from the final resolution draft, but Lane still demonstrated he was selecting his sources not for accuracy, but ideological purity.
It’s a disappointingly cavalier treatment of science, especially from Mortensen, who holds a Ph.D. in oceanography. No amount of random Google searches can replicate the value of peer review, and we wouldn’t expect anyone to discard Mortensen’s research just because someone found a page online that disagreed with him. Yet he seems willing to do this with medicine.
A well-run board of health should embrace the expertise offered by physicians working on the front lines in modern health care systems. Instead, they’ve chosen to push that wisdom away, just like they did Melnick and Krager.
We hope the board of health can rethink their relationship with the medical community. If they are going to carry out their mission as stated, they will need to do so by making decisions based on credible data. That won’t be possible if the county health officers are concerned with only telling the board what they want to hear.
