In the realm of policymaking, global to local, predicted costs of measures taken today often bear little resemblance to the reality that unfolds. In the case of Jefferson County Public Utility District (PUD), poor policy choices have resulted in additional costs to ratepayers, not least of which is reliance on a crew coming from inland Washington (image above).
Early last fall, we reported here on the PUD’s controversial decision to mandate covid jabs for all employees. No other PUD in Washington State felt the need to be so exclusive at the time, and the policy met with pushback from employees and PUD contractors, customer/owners and one commissioner.
Our follow-up article was published on Dec. 23rd, three days after the deadline for being considered “fully vaccinated” had passed.
The inability of the jabs to prevent infection or transmission was already well established, even within the PUD. Subsequent to his firing for non-compliance (despite his accepted religious exemption), 7-year veteran lineman Kurt Anderson recounted in a letter to the commissioners and his co-workers how unjust this policy was, given facts on the ground:
“One only has to look to the PUD roster to see this truth, after being fully vaccinated a PUD employee contracted covid. The fully vaccinated coworkers of this individual were allowed to continue working regular and overtime hours, the unvaccinated coworkers were sent home on unpaid time off for 10 days quarantine with the requirement to complete a covid test…”
Also in his letter, Anderson highlighted the dubious claim by both General Manager Kevin Streett and Commissioner Ken Collins that the mandate was necessary to “be in compliance” with state edicts filtered through the Department of Transportation (WSDOT), despite the fact that this agency had already agreed with the Washington Public Utility Association (WAPUDA) that PUDs were exempt. There was not an iota of curiosity that no other PUD was concerned that they were “out of compliance.”
As the penny drops — tails, we lose?
It’s as though talking point memos have been distributed to PUD leadership. In unison now they’re using the straw man defense that imposition of the unpopular mandate was “to comply with the governor’s order.” That order mysteriously did not affect other PUDs in Washington state.
The fallout is measured in employees and contractors who’ve lost their jobs — or taken the jab (against their better judgment) to keep them. Recent records requests reveal that our PUD has granted four employees exemptions from the mandates and, sadly, three have been fired.
Fallout is also measured in higher costs to the customer/owners because the only electrical contractor our PUD management could procure who purportedly had “fully-vaccinated crews” is charging us a shocking premium to cross the Cascades to lend a hand.
At the first meeting of the year on Jan. 4 it was announced that Palouse Power, an electrical contractor from Quincy WA, would be replacing Titan, the outfit that was fired in December.
Confusion among PUD leadership around bidding was apparent that evening. When presented with the request that the board “accept the qualified line contractor applicant, Palouse Power,” Commissioner Collins asked, “So what action is required of the board?” GM Streett replied, “A motion by the board to approve them…”
At this point, Counsel Joel Paisner interrupted with “I think it’s to accept them as low bidder.” GM Street said, “No, no, per RCW all line contractors are approved by the board. Yearly, we bring a list to you, this is the first one… it’s just the formality that we do yearly.”
Streett said Titan left because of the mandates and “vaccinated crews were tough to come by.” He claimed that there were some locally, but they were busy. He admitted that Palouse “is a bit more expensive.” Commissioners Dan Toepper and Jeff Randall inquired further about bidding, with the latter asking if there will be a bid process. Streett replied, “For the next while Palouse will be our contractor… We’ve gone through our [RCW] obligations, it was difficult” referring to the challenge of finding vaxxed crews.
Included in the agenda packet was a resolution “declaring the [storm] period of December 24, 2021 through January 8, 2022, a state of emergency,” an exemption process provided to municipal entities through RCW 39.04.280. Recovering from his earlier delusive reference to “the lowest bidder,” Counsel Paisner confirmed that this declaration allowed the PUD to “waive the competitive bidding requirements” that normally applied based on RCW 54.04.070. It is unclear how the future end of the emergency, January 8th, was arrived at a week before, when the agenda was prepared.
At the Jan. 4th meeting, I requested an estimate from GM Streett for additional costs to ratepayers for Palouse over Titan. In a responsive letter, Operations Director Scott Bancroft explained that making a direct cost comparison was difficult because of varying crew qualifications and how each contractor charged for equipment. It appears that Palouse is adding a markup to employee wages. The contract also guarantees overtime.
Inside sources tell me it was the perks our PUD offered that incentivized Palouse top-tier journeyman linemen to commit. Scheduled overtime is a real sweet deal compared to what our utility’s line crew gets — regular interruption of family life — dinner, kids’ ballgames, sleep, holidays…
My sources disagree with other details in that letter from Bancroft, including crew structure needs and how Titan fulfilled them in the past. There are also serious concerns about misuse of emergencies to bypass bidding requirements and the legality of these projects vis-à-vis the Small Works Roster.
Line crews are arguably the most critical position in an electrical utility. Current and former employees say that in order to develop and maintain a healthy, cohesive line workforce, the PUD needs to train them from pre-apprentice through to the journeyman lineman stage. They know what the job entails and work best without micromanagement. Our PUD is struggling to achieve these ends.
Was the mandate ever enforced without prejudice?
Now, as jab mandates around the globe fall faster than the scales from many Americans’ eyes, our sources reveal continuing unequal — even dishonest — application of the vax policy from the very beginning. Why Kurt Anderson was fired despite the acceptance of his religious exemption remains a mystery.
Senior administration reportedly told contractors at the outset “just sign the [attestation] form,” indicating that one only needed to say that they were complying.
After firing main contractor Titan which supplied back-up crews, as well as some of our own linemen who refused to take the shots, then discovering that “it was difficult” to find all-vaxxed replacements because no contractors imposed that requirement, Jefferson PUD was in a tough spot. Like Titan, Palouse had a mix of jabbed and unjabbed linemen.
There is suspicion that Palouse Power was brought in from the other side of the mountains because none of the PUD employees who work in the field would know for certain the jab status of their crews, which was not the case with the familiar Titan employees. Palouse could send unvaxxed linemen and no one would be the wiser.
From internal communications, it looks like there was no other choice — Palouse was the end of the line. In a letter to the commissioners and GM Streett, Scott Bancroft explained that Titan “would not provide documentation for vaccination or an accommodation.” Nor would four other contractors on the PUD’s small works roster that Bancroft reached out to. But in a phone call with Palouse — who was not on the roster and had not even bid on the contract — Bancroft was told yes, they’d sign the requested forms:
“Palouse Power was called and they were able to provide a vaccinated dock crew [to] the Jefferson County PUD.”
As with local contractors who simply were asked to sign unverified “attestation” forms, it appears the PUD required only the appearance of vaxx status to seal the deal for Palouse crews, too.
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At the February 15 meeting, GM Streett assured fired contractor, Marty Kithcart, that “contractors, when they come in our yard, have to be vaccinated. That’s a true statement.” But PUD employees claim that they’ve seen people they understand to be unvaxxed in the yard.
Click above for archived recording of Feb. 15 meeting. Exchange below between Kithcart and staff takes place from 2:01:00-2:05:00.
Streett appeared to struggle to answer more questions from Kithcart:
Marty Kithcart: So if you’ve got one vaccinated person versus an unvaccinated person, can they ride around in the truck together?
[extended pause] Kevin Streett: So… we’re vaccinated, so I’m going to say there would be vaccinated people together.
Marty Kithcart: But if one is unvaccinated?
Counsel Joel Paisner: You know, I’m going to step in and answer that and say that that’s really a hypothetical and it’s hard, because the policy itself has to be applied to individuals. So, so it’s hard to know.
Despite that eye-watering feat of doublespeak, the dodged answer to the question is obvious.
What’s going on here? We were promised transparency.
Policy-driven emergencies or emergency-driven policies?
Whose idea was the mandate? In its own right, it created an emergency — fewer line crew, an unhappy workforce, highly questionable ‘fair labor’ practices — all the while staring at the likely prospect that this policy would ultimately be rescinded, based on numerous observable situations at the time of its enactment.
It looks to be an expensive choice, as well. As it stands, Palouse is charging the PUD $41,287 per week. Any personnel needs above that are charged per diem. We paid $5,980 to lodge the crew at the Harborside Inn during the holiday storm power restoration and cleanup.
As of February, they moved to three RV spots at Point Hudson, which cost us roughly $2,355/month (the estimate we were given publicly was $1,800/month). We were told at a meeting in January that we’ll be using those spots for temporary housing for incoming employees after our need for Palouse is behind us.
As a comparator, we were charged $21,959 per week for Titan’s last dock crew. No RV spots. No per diem.
This ill-advised course of action was initiated by general manager Streett and supported by legal counsel Paisner and two commissioners, Collins and Randall. The position these four men have taken has proven to be untenable. At the moment it appears that they’ve painted themselves into a corner from which they cannot emerge gracefully.
Arrested for refusing to wear a mask. The charge was trespassing, but it was really about a woman’s refusal to wear a mask while shopping in the Port Townsend Food Co-op. With the end of the statewide masking mandate approaching, we’ve been asked, “What happened to that woman who was arrested in the Co-op last year?”
On April 5, 2021, Rachelle Merle was engaged in shopping in the Co-op, where she is a member and co-owner, and was told by management to put on a mask or leave. She went about her business without a mask. The Co-op called in Port Townsend police who arrested, handcuffed and charged her with trespassing. See, “The Arrest of Rachelle Merle: The Food Co-op on Trial.”
Merle was also “trespassed” from the Co-op for one year, meaning the Co-op revoked this member’s rights to shop in the store and threatened to have her arrested again if she stepped inside the store during the next twelve months. I have written previously how this violated Merle’s rights as a co-owner.
Behind the scenes, the Co-op told the County Prosecutor’s Office it did not want to press the charges or see the case go to trial. See my prior articles on this turn of events.
Merle never did go to trial. The charges against her were dismissed December 23, 2021. You didn’t read about this in The Leader, which never even covered the arrest, though thousands of people came to Port Townsend Free Press to read and comment about it on our site or social media.
The dismissal is “with prejudice,” meaning charges cannot be refiled without violating Merle’s right against double jeopardy — a citizen’s right, basically, not to have to defend the same charges more than once. The charges were dismissed as part of a plea bargain.
As Jefferson County Prosecutor James Kennedy explained in his statement to the Free Press (reproduced verbatim, below), “Ms. Merle entered into a Continuation for Dismissal (or CFD) with the Prosecutor’s Office. It is essentially a diversion. The way it works is that if the defendant abides by certain conditions and stays out of trouble for a certain length of time the Prosecutor’s Office will move to dismiss the case once the time period has elapsed.”
He added, “The time period for this diversion was 6 months…and the defendant fully complied with it.” Merle, a mother of three, had no prior criminal record whatsoever. Her choices that day contained no element of criminal intent whatsoever.
Merle made no secret of her reasons for incurring and accepting the arrest. She is opposed to the mask mandate and strongly believed it was a violation of individual rights and not justified by the best medical science. She has repeatedly in social media posts warned against creeping totalitarianism wrapped in the COVID mandates from the governor and Jefferson County Public Health Officer.
Merle raised thousands of dollars to hire criminal defense attorney Calebjon Vandenbos, who has taken on several of these types of cases. He provided the following comments to Port Townsend Free Press:
Vandenbos:
Rachelle asked me to send some thoughts along to you about her case and its significance. In my opinion legal cases don’t have much of a chance of being important at this point. Right now, the debate is with hearts and minds, a cultural and value disagreement, not legal.
That being said, this case is an example of what makes this cultural conflict particularly difficult. Private and public forces can suppress dissent without ideological or legal accountability and this case was a good example. The formal criminal trespass case against Ms. Merle was pretty straightforward — the store told her to leave and she didn’t. There wasn’t much to fight there from a purely ‘legal’ perspective. That’s why the case resolved the way it did.
But the real reason Ms. Merle was arrested was because of her dissent. Regardless of if the science is agreed, the ‘right’ response to COVID 19 depends on a person’s values and beliefs. But the coop and the government are able to side-step these issues: the store points to the dubious mask mandate, and the government points to the store’s decision to expel. A confrontation over the real issues — discrimination based on ideology and the legality of the mandates — is avoided. It’s a problem, and there is no apparent solution at this point.
Here are our questions to the County Prosecutor and his full response (it has always been my practice to publish verbatim responses to written questions):
PTFP: Do you have any comment on the case against Rachelle Burt Merle, involving the charge of trespassing for being inside the PT Food Co-op without a mask and refusing to leave? Also, why were the charges dismissed and under what terms?
Prosecuting Attorney Kennedy: Ms. Merle entered into a Continuation for Dismissal (or CFD) with the Prosecutor’s Office. It is essentially a diversion. The way it works is that if the defendant abides by certain conditions and stays out of trouble for a certain length of time the Prosecutor’s Office will move to dismiss the case once the time period has elapsed. If the defendant fails to abide by the conditions then the prosecution can move to revoke the agreement. If the court agrees, the court will then review the discovery to determine if the crime alleged was in fact committed.
These types of diversions are not uncommon when we are working with cases where the offense is relatively minor and the defendant does not have significant criminal history.
In this case, the defendant had zero criminal history that we are aware of, additionally there were some other facts and circumstances that were unique to the case (e.g. the victim being a co-op, which the defendant is a member) that led us to believe that a diversion was the proper way to adjudicate the case. The time period for this diversion was 6 months (this can vary from case to case) and the defendant fully complied with it. Consistent with our agreement we dismissed the case.
So I think I answered your second question without answering your first. To answer your first – The prosecution and the defendant came to a resolution that would allow the defendant to avoid having a criminal conviction by way of a diversion agreement. The defendant fully complied with the agreement so the prosecution, in fulfillment of its end of the bargain, moved to dismissed the case.
You mentioned this in your email, but I think it is important to reiterate, what was charged was Criminal Trespassing, not a violation of any public health order. The issue of masking is what lead to the charged offense, but was not the offense itself.
Homeschooling is being chosen by more and more parents both nationwide and locally since the beginning of the Covid lockdowns in 2020. Faced with shuttered schools and small businesses, many parents found both time and incentive to explore schooling their children at home.
This trend may be the silver lining in the dark cloud created by both the virus and the governmental overreach that followed.
Because of varying states’ laws and reporting, the exact number of homeschool students in the United States is difficult to obtain. However, estimates done by the National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI) show that, while in recent years homeschooling has seen a steady 2% to 8% annual growth in the number of students, 2020 saw even more dramatic growth.
According to estimates by Brian D. Ray, PhD of the NHERI, the number of homeschool students rose from 2.5 million in the spring of 2019 to 3.7 million in the 2020-2021 school year. Google Trends shows search interest peaking the topic of Homeschooling during March and July of 2020 and again in August 2021.
Local homeschool communities also saw dramatic growth in the months before the start of the 2021 school year, according to Danielle Galmukoff, a member of the Port Townsend Classical Conversations homeschooling community. The group plans to expand in Jefferson County with a new community in Quilcene starting in the fall of 2022.
The Port Townsend community is currently composed of approximately 40 families and 75 students. Galmukoff explained that the Classical Conversations non-profit focuses on a classical Christian education and provides curriculum guidance and support with programs for all grade levels.
In addition, each week the Classical Conversations homeschool group gets together for a community day. On these days children of the same age are taught the new curriculum and memory work for the week and have a chance to learn with their peers. Though Christian based, Galmukoff notes that the community is open to all, and many non-Christians have joined and benefited.
Galmukoff and her husband were both homeschooled, yet were reluctant to homeschool their daughter when she reached school age. “I just didn’t have my priorities straight,” Galmukoff said. “I didn’t need to work, but I felt a desire to work because it was the narrative that women should work and have a career of their own.”
After marriage she started her own hair salon business in Port Townsend and was successful. She didn’t want to give that up, but her view changed later as her daughter approached middle school and son approached school age. Both she and her husband decided to homeschool to give their children the biblical worldview they desired. They have now been homeschooling both their daughter and their son for four years.
Teaching and imparting a set of beliefs and values is one of the common reasons parents give for choosing to homeschool. According to the NHERI, other common reasons include wanting to:
customize or individualize the curriculum and learning environment for each child;
accomplish more academically than in schools;
use pedagogical approaches other than those typical in institutional schools;
enhance family relationships between children and parents and among siblings;
provide guided and reasoned social interactions with youthful peers and adults;
provide a safer environment for children and youth, because of physical violence, drugs and alcohol, psychological abuse, racism, and improper and unhealthy sexuality associated with institutional schools;
find an alternative education approach when public or private institutional schools are closed due to acute health situations such as related to disease (e.g., Covid-19, Coronavirus);
protect minority children from racism in public schools or lower expectations of children of color (e.g., black) (e.g., Fields-Smith, 2020; Mazama & Lundy, 2012).
Even though the decision was made, Galmukoff had doubts about her ability to homeschool her children. She wasn’t confident in her education. She doubted her patience. And she didn’t think she was good at teaching things. To those considering homeschooling and having similar concerns she recommends making a list of your doubts and talking them over with a parent who has homeschooling experience.
She overcame her doubts by joining a homeschool community. The support and experience of the other mothers in the community gave her the confidence to start.
“Now I help other moms, where four years ago I felt completely inadequate,” Galmukoff states. As for patience, she says it is a skill that you develop by practice.
Galmukoff says some of the benefits of home schooling she has experienced include: “Better family relationships. Before, when I was working and my daughter was in school, we were seeing the worst of each other. Before school we were rushed, and after school we were both often tired and cranky. Now if a child is feeling ill in the morning, I can spend time with them and not have to worry about finding a babysitter or calling in sick to work.”
She enjoys watching her children learn and grow, and now that she experiences that daily, she regrets all that she missed while working. About the narrative she felt was telling her that she needed a career, she now laughs and says: “Who told me this?”
“Homeschooling is a tough decision because it demands a lot of self-sacrifice, but it can be very beautiful,” Galmukoff states. It allows more individualized instruction, adapting to each child’s learning style. It allows more flexible learning schedules, taking breaks and eating or exercising when energy is low. And it allows the parents to truly understand their child’s abilities.
The first few months of homeschooling is a transition time for students who have previously attended public or private schools, according to Galmukoff. Parents should allow some time for “unschooling”: unlearning the programming of the highly structured school day.
Homeschooling allows for more productive and less rigid days. She states that her son in second grade spends about 2 hours per day on his schoolwork and her daughter in 9th grade spends 5 to 6 hours per day. Chores, walks, and other activities are also included in the day.
Galmukoff says that she is often asked about the socialization of her children. She jokes that: “Socialization is something you do with puppies, not children. With children, you encourage healthy relationships with people around you in your community”.
Homeschooling is becoming increasingly popular in the United States, making more resources available to help parents reach their goals for their children’s education. As local homeschool communities and support groups develop, it becomes a much more feasible option for parents looking to remove their children from mainstream institutions for a wide variety of reasons.
Homeschooling is changing the narrative around family life and education.
A few additional resources to learn more about Homeschooling:
A good place to learn about homeschooling in Washington State is on the Washington Homeschool Organization website. This website explains the laws and regulations around homeschooling in Washington State. It also lists homeschool support groups and Co-ops in the state.
Let me relate a poignant personal awakening I experienced after delivering the following public comment to the Jefferson County Board of Health at its February 17 meeting:
My comment is about recent statements made by Health Officer Berry.
Beware, Dr. Berry… mentioning this fact got a reporter censored off Twitter on July 31
I appreciated her telling Commissioners on Monday about the original Pfizer trials showing 15 all-cause deaths from those getting vaccinated exceeding the 14 all-cause deaths from the control group.
She then went on to soft-peddle the number of deaths, saying “in those early trials … they were vaccinating very, very elderly people.”
That’s actually not true.In fact, there were only about 800 people 75 years and older (4.4%) in each of the two 18,000 size subject groups.
BMJ editor Peter Doshi noted that “frail elderly people … are not enrolled into vaccine trials in sufficient numbers,” and a JAMA study found older people have disproportionately been excluded from CV trials in general.
More importantly, Dr.Berry apparently doesn’t know about the July 28 FDA data update, which showed “Pfizer somehow miscounted – or publicly misreported, or both – the number of deaths in one of the most important clinical trials in the history of medicine.”In fact the FDA is now showing there were 21 all-cause deaths among the trial jabbed compared to 17 in the control group, which is 24% more deaths in 6 months.
The fact that significantly more people died in the vaccinated group than the control group should be raising major red flags.
I also wish to draw your attention to two troubling quotes from your Health Officer in the Feb. 10 Peninsula Daily News.The story noted that “Many parents have said their children experience mental health crises while wearing a mask, according to national reports.”Dr. Berry gaslighted and discounted the authentic experiences of these many parents by curtly claiming, “There is no data for this.”
She continued blaming parents by saying, “What is challenging for students is the position that they are put in when they see the misbehavior of their parents. When we see them put in a position where their parents are encouraging them not to wear masks and their teachers are saying they have to, that’s a really difficult position for kids.”
Yes, the whole situation is difficult for kids and everyone involved, but Berry sees the whole problem as one of parental misbehavior, guilty of the crime of having different deeply-held beliefs than the bureaucrats who created this situation.
Health Officer Berry did not directly respond to my public comment, but tangentially said the following:
As far as vaccine safety, I think the simplest explanation is we’ve over 500 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccines delivered in the United States, with continuous monitoring of safety of the vaccines and of the trials around them.We have more data around the safety of these vaccines than any vaccine that has ever come before, and we do continue to see that they are safe and they are incredibly effective.The majority of the county has gotten fully vaccinated, and as we continue to see the same here, I really want to encourage as many of our citizens as possible to move forward and get vaccinated, especially as we move into this next phase of the pandemic, that’s going to be increasingly important.
Though we may have “more data around the safety of these vaccines than any vaccine that has ever come before,” that data disturbingly shows the novel mRNA injection is associated with more deaths and adverse events than ALL previous vaccines COMBINED throughout the monitoring system’s 32-year history.
The only other response touching my comment was from Commissioner Kate Dean:
From my perspective on the masking issue, between my husband and I, we have four kids.So we have a lot of kids around us often.And I will say from that experience with lots and lots of kids, the only kids I see having trouble with masking are kids whose parents have trouble with masking.And of course, kids are welcome to create their own opinions on things, but that is really consistently true.I certainly related to Dr. Berry’s comments that I see kids struggle when they’re told that they will struggle.
Thinking about this particular commenting experience afterwards, something seemed different than past ones, leaving me with a bittersweet feeling of culmination and completion.
The Board of Health has notoriously squeezed off public comment in the past, but I had no complaints about their commenting process this time: they allowed a full 3 minutes to each commentator, they offered extra time to the first commentator after a technical snafu, nobody was cut off, and chairman Greg Brotherton’s moderation was friendly and respectful.
In terms of my own performance, I felt my points were well-supported, understandable, and well-delivered for a change; I spoke fairly naturally from organized notes; I didn’t run out of time nor get lost in the weeds with points too hairy to understand; I didn’t say anything insulting nor personal nor push any buttons that could distract from my points.For who I am and what I was saying, I could hardly have done much better.
But what was the end result?Everybody there seemed to completely ignore everything I had to say, not even deigning to ridicule or take offense or contradict any point I had made.There wasn’t even a veiled reference to “misinformation” or “partisanship” or any other supposed sin blamed on commentators in the past.I didn’t get a rise out of anybody.Berry did not even pretend to respond to my specific criticisms of her.
I tried to provide them new information from authoritative sources about matters of life and death, demonstrate that their in-house Delphic Oracle was not always trustworthy, and make clear that her demonization of parents is not okay.
The Health Board was not having any of it.They simply did not care.Or maybe because I had not made any apparent mistakes they could puncture with a cheap shot, they had nothing to say.Or maybe they identified me as a misinformation super-spreader, so guarded themselves from catching my bug.Or maybe they had at last consciously adopted a strategy that their best course was to politely ignore me and not “feed the troll” nor provide ammunition for future Free Press articles.Who knows?
But what I do know is that Berry did not even bother to acknowledge or stand corrected or disagree or defend herself or attack back against any of my specific points. Instead she just trotted out her usual talking points and called it a day.
And everybody else there seemed to be totally okay with that, completely incurious and uninterested in anything I had to say.After all, they had a full agenda they needed to get on with.So they turned their attention to their next order of very important health business: namely, racial health equity work.
The Board of Health has succeeded in sealing themselves off from reality and new information. What else is there to say? The rest is silence.
“I’m going to continue to mask, I’m going to continue to distance. It’s just not safe out there.” Public Comment, 2-14-22 BOCC meeting
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What will it take to break the mass delusional psychosis perpetrated on the public? For thousands of years humans have known safety and comfort in sharing smiles and facial expressions, handshakes and hugs. We are wired to find pleasure in open faces and physical closeness, to depend on visual cues and nurturing touch for critical social and emotional development… and to be afraid of dehumanized faces that are masked and expressionless.
Two solid years of a relentless fear campaign has worked on rewiring those innate responses. A devastatingly effective crusade by pharma-captured regulatory agencies, legacy media, increasingly totalitarian government and the healthcare industry has stripped humanity of these basic human needs, substituting shock and awe in a new medical tyranny that has turned our world upside down. In its wake is a collective brainwashing that will not be easily undone.
Draconian measures are lifting around the world as increasing numbers of U.S. states and nations recognize that masks are useless, that social distancing made no difference in viral spread, that the vaxxed are actually more vulnerable to Omicron than the unvaxxed, and that Omicron poses less risk of death than the flu. However despite the Covid narrative continuing to crumble, what psychologists liken to a hypnotic spell keeps the traumatized masses still living in terror of a virus with a 99.8% survival rate. Fear of human contact, of the air we breathe, and of other life is normalized in this spell.
Jefferson County looks to be among the last holdouts for the mass delusion.
On Monday, February 14, a Port Townsend resident demonstrated this psychosis in a public comment to county commissioners at their weekly board meeting:
“We need to do more. We need to do better. We need to bring this thing under control and take stronger measures, not loosen restrictions that are gonna just make more people sick…
“I’m going to continue to mask, I’m going to continue to distance and stay away from any kind of gathering and concentrated groups. It’s just not safe out there, and anything you do that makes it less safe, is not okay.”
Our frightened neighbor might benefit from reading the January 2022 Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Lockdowns on COVID-19 Mortality published by Johns Hopkins University. “Lockdowns are defined as the imposition of at least one compulsory, non-pharmaceutical intervention,” like masking, physical distancing, bans on public gatherings, and school closures. In a systematic, thorough review of 18,590 studies looking at Covid restrictions across the globe over the last two years, 24 qualified as meeting stringent eligibility requirements for inclusion. An analysis of each of those 24 studies concluded that “lockdowns have had little to no effect on COVID-19 mortality.” The review confirms that all the measures inflicted on global populations have been for naught:
“Lockdowns in Europe and the United States only reduced COVID-19 mortality by 0.2% on average.”
A finding of 0.2% is statistically insignificant. And the many studies demonstrating the medical, psychological, social, and economic harms from these measures turn that minuscule fraction of a positive percentage point into a colossal negative. Not only have restrictions been for naught, they have caused far more harm than good. As the Johns Hopkins review notes:
“While this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted. In consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument.”
Nonetheless, those under the spell may never feel safe again unless these damaging policies—even “stronger”—are continued in perpetuity.
Dr. Byram Bridle, PhD, a Canadian professor of viral immunology, recently spoke to this phenomenon at a press conference in Ottawa:
“Once you have everybody so scared—we’ve seen the fear of Omicron, which is no worse for the vast majority of people than a bad cold… adults here in Ottawa, they’re actually scared of the snow in Ottawa. Do you know why? Because there are so many unvaccinated people that surely we must be contaminating the snow with massive quantities of SARS-CoV-2 and the snow is going to kill them. And I’m serious, they are requesting that government officials start testing the snowbanks in Ottawa.”
Sound crazy? That same irrationality is evident in our community. A Port Townsend NextDoor post worried that deer are spreading Covid. Fifteen states had documented Omicron infections in whitetail deer. There is no evidence that the animals can spread it to humans. But the brainwashed fearful sound the watch-out-for-deer! alarm, much as they demonize healthy people as super-spreaders when all evidence shows asymptomatic transmission is a myth.
Epidemiologist Dr. Paul Alexander, PhD, also spoke at the Ottawa press conference. Former Covid pandemic advisor to the World Health Organization (WHO), Alexander and a team of global scientists have published over 500 scientific papers on these policies. The WHO conducted a focused study on asymptomatic transmission. Alexander called out the disinformation that healthy people spread the virus, used to justify lockdowns:
“This issue about asymptomatic transmission—that was rare. That was a lie. We studied it, we looked at it… We knew the study out of China published in Lancet very early in 2020 that showed us that out of a 10 million sample they found that of all of the [Covid] positive persons that moved around—and they looked at all of the contacts—that there was NO asymptomatic transmission. So we understood this virus very clearly, very early on… This asymptomatic transmission was bogus.”
Dr. Bridle agreed:
“We have drilled into peoples’ heads that somehow healthy people are carriers of these deadly pathogens, they’re going to kill other people. If that’s what you believe, we are never going to be able to de-mask or stop the physical distancing ever again for the rest of our lives. And I’m afraid people are actually wanting to take us there.”
Masking is perhaps the most overt example of the psychosis that has gripped so much of our populace. Not only is our fearful neighbor at the beginning of this article “going to continue to mask… continue to distance,” he admonishes the commissioners that if they allow masking and other restrictions to be lifted for the rest of us, that “is not okay,”
Epidemiology advisor Paul Alexander expounded on masks, referring back to his experience working for the WHO:
“We looked at masking… I am considered an expert on these Covid masks. Blue surgical masks and white masks, they are utter garbage. They have always been ineffective… they have never worked. Never. And they are actually very toxic; they have toxic particles in them. Toxic to our children… I looked at 150 studies that show the masks are ineffective. They just do not work. Period.”
Corroborating assertions by Alexander and other doctors and scientists that facemasks provide no benefit, a comprehensive examination of data has resulted in the just-published “UNMASKED: the Global Failure of Covid Mask Mandates.”
From the book jacket: Since early 2020, masks have been promoted by experts and implemented as mandates by politicians in an attempt to slow the spread of COVID-19…but a thorough examination of the data shows they’ve failed.
Looking “at data from all over the world, from the granular county level to entire countries,” author Ian Miller concludes: “Despite extraordinary worldwide compliance, the mask experiment resulted in an unequivocal failure.”
New York Post columnist Karol Markowicz writes: “Ian’s work has been essential throughout the pandemic. His charts have provided the kind of clarity sorely lacking in dissecting the COVID-19 data. Unmasked will elevate the conversation and hopefully, make sure we don’t make any of the same mistakes ever again.”
But at the February 14 BOCC meeting Commissioner Greg Brotherton demonstrated his brainwashing:
“Masks are effective… Are we going to incorporate them in the way that Asia has before this?… Masks are never completely going away, I don’t think.”
Brotherton parrots Jefferson/Clallam County Health Officer Dr. Allison Berry’s disinformation that masking is keeping us safe. In the Feb. 10 Peninsula Daily News (PDN) article “Region’s health officer warns of lifting mask mandates too soon,” Berry contends state mandates should not be lifted in early April: “If we revoke our mitigation measures too soon as a community and as a state, we will prolong this surge.” Her arbitrary pronouncements continue. We will be unsafe if we lift mandates over the next couple of months, but if we wait until her predicted time it will be “very safe:”
“If we kept masking through May for June, I think it would be very safe to revoke the mandate then.”
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The third medical expert at the table in Ottawa, Cambridge-trained pathologist Dr. Roger Hodkinson, MD, expanded on masking and the other measures imposed on a fearful public:
“Masks – to put it in the vernacular, you cannot stop a mosquito with a chain link fence. It’s absurd.
“Social distancing – this condition is spread by aerosols, not by droplets, so it can be in the aisle at Walmart that no one else is in and you’re still going to get it. Social distancing makes no sense whatsoever…
“But more than anything, lockdowns… it has created the most incredible carnage around the world… it’s physical, it’s mental, it’s psychological, and it’s also economic. It’s affected every single person on earth for a situation basically no worse than a bad seasonal flu. Yes, some variations, obviously. But if this problem had been handled in the usual way, as we’ve done with other viral pandemics, and simply done nothing but accommodate to it in practical ways, common sense… this would have all been over within six months….”
In addition to advising WHO during the early stages of the pandemic, epidemiologist Alexander was a senior advisor to the White House at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. He was an insider witness to horrifying data withheld from the public:
“I was in the administration… You saw Trump fighting daily with his own task force because he tried to open the society and open schools. Because we were getting the data to show that the lockdowns were killing people. The school closures were killing children, they were causing children to commit suicide. We saw the failures…. lockdowns have killed thousands of people beyond the virus.
“We were getting reports on a daily basis from the states and winding it up to the Oval [office]… that little children 8, 9, 10 years old were found hung in their bedrooms. They committed suicide because of the school closures and lockdowns… the legacy media decided that they would hide that information from the public.”
Viral immunologist Bridle worried that the fear narrative and brainwashing over the last two years has set us up for a short hop to accepting these destructive policies as necessary for other common viruses in our midst:
“The flu can actually kill our children in much greater numbers than SARS-CoV-2 ever will. I was using that argument to try and put SARS-CoV-2 into a relevant clinical context. I actually stopped that because I started getting quite scared that I could see what’s going to happen — they’re going to start flipping the narrative. They’re gonna start using the flu to institute all of this stuff. It’s a very small step to take in that direction… when you understand the depth of the fear that people have had drilled into their head about Omicron, it is a small step to start convincing them ‘You know what? Whoops. We never saw how deadly dangerous the flu actually was.’
“We lived with the flu. There was a certain quality of life that we accepted despite the fact that some people die with it. But now we’ve had this attitude that we can’t have any infectious disease that we don’t want to have deaths with. People can die from cancers and all kinds of other things that we’re not going to pay proper attention to right now. But all they have to do is start turning the focus on the flu…
Dr. Bridle offered a useful illustration of how we are being played:
“If we put the spotlight on the flu, it would begin to look very scary. Put on the ticker tape over the news all the time — Here’s another case. Here’s another case. Think about it. When your kids are in school, it starts out with one kid. Next day it’s three kids. Next day there’s ten. And then it’s infiltrated ten homes. And then it’s in the surrounding classrooms. It spreads like wildfire.
“Being contagious is not necessarily a problem. That’s what they’ve tried to scare us with. Omicron definitely is contagious. But it is not particularly dangerous. And this is typical of these kinds of viruses. If a virus wants to live with us for a long period of time, it doesn’t want to kill its host. It wants to infect as many of us as possible and keep us alive. Ideally the situation for a virus is that it causes no harm whatsoever; we happily co-exist. And Omicron is taking us in that direction.”
In a PDN poll, readers were asked “Will you feel safe enough to go indoors without a mask if/when the state removes its mandate?” At the time of this screen shot on February 15th, 934 readers had responded. If the poll results accurately reflect our communities, nearly half have bought into the madness, fearful that taking off the masks will be unsafe.
Will you feel safe enough to go indoors without a mask if/when the state removes its mandate?
Why do so many still buy into the narrative?
Crediting Belgian Professor of Clinical Psychology Mattias Desmet and American medical doctor and psychiatrist Mark McDonald, renowned cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough describes the genesis of the mass psychosis that continues to persist:
“A mass psychosis is when there is a group think that develops that’s so strong that it leads to something horrific—examples are these mass suicides that occur in religious cults… Nazi Germany when people walked into gas chambers and were gassed…”
Four conditions must be met:
“There must be a period of prolonged isolation. Lockdowns.”
“There must be a withdrawal of things taken away from people that they used to enjoy. That’s happened.”
“There must be constant, free-floating anxiety.”
“There must be a single solution, offered by an entity in authority.”
“For instance, a narrative is distributed which says there is a very dangerous virus and that we should go into lockdown. If these four conditions are met then there might be an extremely extraordinary willingness to participate in the strategy of the lockdowns even when the narrative in itself is absolutely absurd. When people start to participate all together in the strategy to deal with the object of anxiety, a new kind of social bond, and a new meaning-making emerges.”
Psychiatrist Mark McDonald, MD, author of United States of Fear: How America Fell Victim to a Mass Delusional Psychosis, explains further:
“The fuel is fear. We cannot become mass delusionally psychotic without first being scared. The fear has been the driver behind this pandemic from the very beginning. Without fear, it all falls apart… An entire group, an entire population which is the American people, all at the same time, losing their rational faculties. Being unable to think, acting as a herd…
“It’s been the fear driven by government, corporations and the media all colluding together to perpetuate the mass delusional psychosis… The endpoint of this is the same as for every totalitarian regime throughout the 20th century—dependency on government. Once people depend on government, then they don’t depend on their families, they don’t depend on their churches, they don’t depend on their communities.”
Dr. Hodkinson describes the techniques “by which you can break even the most hardened terrorist in Guantanamo Bay”:
“You drive fear. And you keep it on. Fear, driven by the morning graph in the paper. The PCR graph with so-called cases… the vast percentage, 97% or so, were false positives. And that’s what drove fear. That’s what drove contact tracing. That’s what destroyed restaurants…
“And then isolation, otherwise known as quarantine. Keep people separated. Don’t let them talk to each other.
“You break anyone with those methods.”
Now those in our midst who are driven by fear cannot let down their guard. For them, humanity has become the virus: “It’s just not safe out there.”
They will mask and distance and insist that we need more restrictions that do not make a whit of difference against these viruses.
Directives that only serve to make us afraid of human contact, of pets and wildlife—even snow. Policies designed to create anxiety, discord and alienation. Mandates that ultimately divide us into believers versus non-believers of a false narrative.
Galmukoff and her husband were both homeschooled, yet were reluctant to homeschool their daughter when she reached school age. “I just didn’t have my priorities straight,” Galmukoff said. “I didn’t need to work, but I felt a desire to work because it was the narrative that women should work and have a career of their own.”
