Ebb and flow happen everywhere – in natural tidal rhythms, in social structures, and in the cycles of individual lives. Staying at high tide all the time is unsustainable.
These past 3 years, deadly lockdowns and incessant propaganda campaigns have propelled the world into a perpetual state of emergency, but things change. Paranoia and persecution over yesterday’s virus are thankfully waning, so folks have a breather to recuperate and tend their own gardens. Quoting my pastor, “now in this time of relative peace, let us build up in preparation for the next storm that may come.”
Likewise we editors at the Port Townsend Free Press find ourselves recharging after years publishing at fever pitch. Nobody’s going anywhere, but newsworthy local events, contributions arriving over the transom, and our own personal juice to write articles have dipped to a simultaneous low ebb.
This is to acknowledge what some loyal readers may have noticed — that content is sparse as we take a break. But whether or not new articles are published, we remain committed to maintaining a platform for open and uncensored community dialogue. Our monthly Off Topic!letters forum will continue to welcome your participation.
We do have some provocative pieces in the pipeline. And starting with the news briefs below, we’ll be posting “shorts” as they accumulate.
We also want to renew our call for reader contributions. The easiest way is to post a comment to the monthly Off Topic! letters forum, but if you’ve got some interesting local news, experiences, or insights to share in an article, don’t be shy… feel free to Contact Us!
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Where’s the Emergency? An Update
As previously reported, Jefferson remains the only County in Washington State still huddling in its own private State of Emergency.
But County Commissioners and staff have acknowledged they no longer see any impediment to terminating their 13th (!) consecutive temporary CV emergency declaration. That was made clear at their January 23 meeting when Human Resources Director Sarah Melancon reported the rate of infected staff had really declined and the need for employee CV leave and emergency help was questionable.
Nevertheless, their current thinking expressed by Commissioner Kate Dean at the March 13 meeting is: “We are still very much considering when to rescind our emergency order. The federal order, of course, is set to end on May 11th. So I think that that’s a good time frame for us to be targeted to.”
My own thinking expressed at January 23 public comment: “I appreciate your being open to normalizing it. … Just from an integrity point of view, an emergency is an emergency. When there’s an emergency, the captain can do whatever he wants, but when it’s not an emergency, things should be done by the rule of law.”
Whatever the practical excuse, governing by emergency powers when no emergency exists is abuse of office and a slippery slope to tyranny.
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Closed Door Policy at Jefferson Courthouse
Jefferson County Courthouse moved its courtroom security checkpoint down from the second floor to the basement in 2020 to enforce lockdown mask mandates throughout the building, in the process shuttering the beautiful main entrance doors on the first floor.
This forces everyone entering the building to walk through a metal detector and be searched by sheriffs for weapons (including keychain pocket knives) — perhaps appropriate for courtrooms, but time-consuming, invasive, and expensive overreach when it comes to folks just wanting to pay a tax bill, renew a license, or ask a question.
On February 21, 2023, Commissioners held a hearing to update courthouse weapon security practices. Multiple attorneys and courthouse employees gave Public Comment explaining why their jobs should exempt them from security screening, while one outsider advocated screening 100% of the time without favoritism.
Treasurer Stacie Prada commented the quiet part out loud:
I do appreciate that [screening] is at a public entrance for the full building. We’ve had a lot fewer tense incidents on the first floor since we’ve done this. We do have Assessor, Auditor, Treasurer, and while they sound administrative, people get pretty heated. And so we do not have to call security as often, because they already know they’re in the building and they’ve gone through security. And we also know that or can trust that they don’t have weapons on them, where we couldn’t before.
My comment was that there’s little benefit for employees continually having to go through checkpoints to take care of routine business, but the same is true for their customers. Both problems have the same solution: move the courtroom security checkpoint back up to the second floor next to the courtrooms where it always was!
Courthouse staff might like having their customers go through sheriff security checks as an attitude adjuster, but court rules and defunct mask mandates are disingenuous pretexts not enjoyed by public servants in other office buildings. Respect is important, but needs to cut both ways.
Moreover, any desire by staff to discourage unruly customers is irrelevant to the legal issue at hand.RCW 9.41.300(1)(b) requires “The restricted areas do not include common areas of ingress and egress to the building … when it is possible to protect court areas without restricting ingress and access to the building. The restricted areas shall be the minimum necessary.”
Since “it is possible” to do so by returning the checkpoint to the second floor near the courtrooms where it was for decades, this should be an open-and-shut case.
Like our county’s continuing non-emergency State of Emergency, the issue is one of integrity: not to skirt or ignore the clear letter of the law. The public needs to be able to walk freely through the courthouse entrance doors instead of locking them down like in a police state.
But Commissioners kept those doors closed for now by approving Ordinance No. 01-0227-23 on February 27, which just tweaks the old policy by adding a weapon security locker and exempting attorneys and employees from screening, keeping the public in line.
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Streatery Departure Lets the Sunshine in at Quimper Sound
While enjoying the vibes at Quimper Sound on March 14, proprietor James Schultz told me how his business doubled the same day the streatery shack blocking his storefront came down, his January sales rose atypically higher than last summer’s streatery-blocked levels, and his attitude is much brighter now that sunshine through his window is no longer blocked!
During the bad old days, Quimper Sound’s window was almost completely obscured.
I joked with James about when he might expect a hefty refund check from the city and/or the blocking streatery restaurant for his years of lost business revenue. The twelfth of never?
It’s like deja vu all over again.On Dec. 9, NYC’s health commissar advised that everyone (including 2-year-olds!) “should wear a mask at all times when in an indoor public setting.” Then our state’s public health leaders followed in lockstep.
As a weirdly-authoritarian Dec. 9 Seattle Timesfront-page story pontificates, “It’s time, Washingtonians: You should resume regularly wearing a mask indoors, if you haven’t already.”
That’s based on:
“new guidance from 12 county health officers and 25 hospital executives is fueled by the region and county’s surge in viral respiratory illnesses – mainly influenza and RSV” with “pediatric hospitals … overcapacity for months”, so they “recommend that everyone wear a high-quality, well-fitting mask when around others in indoor spaces to protect against both acquiring and spreading these infections to others.”
Likewise Jefferson/Clallam County Health Officer Allison Berry filled the front page of the Dec. 10 Peninsula Daily News, saying “our health care systems are not strong enough to handle all of … these viruses at the same time… It’s been worn down by two years of responding to COVID-19, we were short-staffed going into the winter season,” but “If we wore masks indoors, particularly around kids and around the elderly, that would make all the difference.”
Berry reveals she’s involved in “ongoing discussions about returning to mandatory masking” which is “possible”, but “what makes us consider mandates is when we see critical infrastructure fail. So when we see that people can’t access medical care when they need it… that’s when we begin to look at mandates.”
Questions Begged
Of course, this begs lots of questions. For instance: Why precisely are our heath care systems weak, worn-down, and short-staffed, especially after all the federal funding windfallspumped into them?
Could public health authorities possibly be to blame for monomaniacally focusing on a single virus while throttling care for all other conditions, driving people crazy by exaggerating its dangers while enforcing useless hygiene theatre, and preventing safe and effective early treatment options while pushing deadly and useless Remdesivir and mRNA jabs?
Could all the health workers forced to quit or retire to avoid jab mandates, or who were made sick by taking the jabs, or had their morale destroyed by hostile work environments, possibly have contributed to short-staffing?
When Berry says she might dictate mask mandates if “we see critical infrastructure fail” or if “people can’t access medical care”… how is that more logical than kicking your dog when you’re mad at your boss? Where’s the causal connection between gagging innocent bystanders and fixing infrastructure management failures?
This harkens back to Berry’s Sep. 2, 2021 fallacious and discriminatory restaurant/bar mandate, which targeted those unwilling to disclose their HIPAA-protected private medical records to eateries. Where was there ever any causal justification for this punitive mandate, especially given CDC admission that mRNA injections are “not effective at preventing transmission of the virus”?
Another question being begged: How dare NYC and other health officers blithely talk about reintroducing masking in schools and child care facilities for all kids two (!!) years old and up, with no concern about the psychological hell, impoverished learning, disrupted socialization, increased suicides, and physical harms they’d be cavalierly inflicting on children at minimal risk from these seasonal colds and flus?
Have these fools or knaves learned nothing from the destruction wreaked on kids these past few years — not by covid, but by their own lockdown measures? What’s being “advised” by these health authorities is literally child abuse.
But the main question being begged here is: Why face masks? Why trot out this singularly ineffective nostrum once again, as if it were an all-powerful savior, when it was never considered a panacea for respiratory viruses prior to 2020, and it has failed miserably to have any significant beneficial effect during the years it’s been pushed and mandated worldwide, as documented by numerous careful studies.
Stephen Petty is a Certified Industrial Hygenist and Certified Professional Engineer who has worked for 45 years in the field of health and safety, protecting workers and the public from toxins. He has been involved in over 400 legal cases of exposure control and PPE. In the powerful 15-minute expert testimony below, Petty summarizes the reality on masks’ effectiveness against viruses.
The current warmed-over propaganda campaign to force “high-quality” masks over everybody’s mouths and noses has long been rendered absurd.
And now, coincidental to the latest mask campaign, an extremely high-quality randomized controlled mask study was published on Nov. 29. This was big news that should have been reported in the papers and by health officers if they were worth their salt.
The Annals of Internal Medicine just published a randomized controlled trial comparing the ability of medical masks to prevent COVID infection to fit-tested N95s. Importantly, this trial was conducted on healthcare workers who would be most likely to use masks appropriately.
They examined 29 different health care facilities on multiple continents, from North America to Asia and Africa. The percentage of healthcare workers testing positive for COVID in each group was tracked to determine how effective or ineffective higher-quality masking was in preventing infection.
Unsurprisingly, the results confirmed that there is essentially zero difference between surgical [the common blue and green pleated “medical” masks made of nonwoven material] or N95 respirators when it comes to tests results.
The N95 masks provided statistically-insignificant 1% reduction in cases, while causing 3% increase in adverse events compared to surgical masks — that’s 13.6% gratuitous adverse events compared to wearing no mask at all!
The researchers also took pains to ensure that the control and treatment groups shared as many similarities as possible. The N95s in use were even specifically fit tested and approved respirators, far from the KN95s commonly used by the general public.
Everyone, in each health care facility, “for all activities,” was required to wear masks. They even tracked potential exposure points, whether at home, in the community or in hospital exposures.
Yet none of that mattered; there was no difference in outcomes between the medical and N95 level masks.
On top of being functionally useless, N95s were substantially more likely to result in adverse effects.
This becomes even more noteworthy since compliance with respirator masking was lower. While still extremely high, health care workers “always” wore N95s 80.7% of the time instead of 91.2% for medical masks.
This is one of the many issues the “experts” now pushing for (now disproven) “higher-quality” masking should address. Health care professionals who are trained to use N95s can’t always use them yet experience higher rates of adverse effects.
Imagine how much worse compliance would be among the general public, especially if 13% are suffering significant side effects.
Beyond statistics, just think about the physical facts: Sure, surgical masks can protect surgeons from blowing bacteria directly into an open wound. But viruses are more than an order of magnitude smaller than bacteria, so they CAN pass through surgical masks, and they DO easily pass around the sides and top of all kinds of masks when breathing out, as viruses follow the paths of least resistance, after which they enter the persistent viral soup of indoor atmospheres.
That’s why masks have never shown any significant viral protection for others in randomized controlled studies. Your mask does little or nothing to protect you, but most significantly there’s no way it can protect grandma or anybody else. And thus falls the entire pretext for mask mandates.
Wearing a diaper on your foot would be just as “effective” and a lot safer than wearing it on your face. Health authorities still pushing face diapers on kids (or anybody else) after years of lockdown failures are neither competent nor fit to keep their positions.
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“Masking is a stupid, superstitious exercise that does nothing to stop virus infections, but that’s beside the point. Imagine, instead, that strapping these low-quality pseudomedical plastics to your face actually reduced your rate of respiratory infection. In this counterfactual scenario, it would follow that masks are at least partly responsible for the immunity deficit causing the unusually high rates of RSV and influenza infection…. Continuing to mask would merely prolong our immunological naiveté for another season, potentially leading to long-term dependence on this ridiculous, antisocial ritual. It’s a blessing that masks actually do nothing.”
— eugyppius (writing about a similar situation in Germany)
Part One of this series addressed our health officer’s disinformation about the CDC’s cover-up of alarming safety signals from their v-safe database. While v-safe was developed specifically for the Covid roll-out — a digital app designed for registered vax recipients to easily report their side effects after the shots — there is another vaccine reporting system also in place: VAERS.
VAERS, the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System, has been the CDC’s primary tool for monitoring vaccine safety since 1990. It was established soon after the U.S. Congress removed all liability from the vaccine industry for their products. A system mostly used by health professionals, it was the public’s way to report injuries and deaths from vaccines for 30 years (until v-safe arrived with the Covid-19 injections).
VAERS differs from v-safe in several important ways. VAERS reporting is far more complex and detailed — not a user-friendly app, but a lengthy undertaking that must be completed on-line or, for individuals daunted by the process, by phone with the help of CDC staff. It does not provide “near real time” reports as v-safe was designed to do.
But most significantly, VAERS is the system that captures deaths following vaccination. Since only a living person who got the shot submits feedback to v-safe, deaths after vaccination are not reported on that app.
Our final Halloween “Berry Dropping” takes a look at how VAERS not only has been providing evidence of damage from Covid-19 shots, but more importantly the unprecedented death count since this new mRNA technology first rolled out. And how Allison Berry (and the CDC) have misrepresented that data and tried to discredit VAERS reports submitted in an effort to deny vax injuries and deaths.
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BERRY blaming anti-vaxxers for scary VAERS evidence:
“Unfortunately VAERS,
which was created by the CDC as a safety monitoring system,
has been largely hijacked by anti-vaccine groups,
who have gone in and actually started inputting false claims
into the database and then pointing back to the false claims
that they just put into the database as proof
for the lack of safety of the vaccines.” (10-20-22 BOH meeting)
I’ve searched the Internet every way I can think of, and I couldn’t find any evidence of vaccine skeptics inputting false VAERS reports, much less the widescale conspiracy that Berry alleges. Here are some typical search results:
As can be seen from these results (and all others I’ve found), what’s alleged by anti-anti-vaxxers is that vaccine skeptics make false claims about the VAERS database, not that they input false claims into the VAERS database.
“There are groups that have started putting in false information into VAERS, and then going back around and saying, ‘I found it in a public database. See, you’re hiding it!’ And that’s a real thing that’s happening unfortunately by some members of the anti-vaccine contingent. And that is usually where that ‘data’, quote-unquote, is coming from.”
Contrary to Berry’s pipedream about vaccine skeptics blithely putting in false VAERS information, consider that everyone laboriously entering their personal documentation into VAERS gets warned by the CDC that “knowingly filing a false VAERS report is a violation of Federal law … punishable by fine and imprisonment.”
As one commentator observed, “It’s a federal crime to file a false VAERS report. VAERS verifies reports and vax-status including type/brand, date and location. You think ‘anti-vaxxers’ are getting vaxxes (they don’t want) so they can risk fed imprisonment by filing a false report?”
Cardiologist and epidemiologist Dr. Peter McCullough, who has filled out many VAERS reports (including for death following the Covid vax), underscores the threat of legal action for falsifying information. And the process of filing is challenging, he says, even for a medical professional:
“It takes a lot of effort [to fill out a VAERS report], it takes about a half an hour filling out multiple forms… falsification of a form is punishable by imprisonment or federal fines, very serious. These deaths that the CDC is telling us are happening after the vaccine, I can tell you, are real.”
Moreover, now that an unhinged Department of Homeland Security is classifying vaccine misinformation and conspiracy theories (like Berry’s?) as a “Terrorism Threat”, DHS would hardly treat lightly any bonafide disinformation war against the VAERS system such as Berry imagines — each false report a self-documented felony.
Unlike most conspiracy theories, Berry’s would be an easy one to prove and prosecute if true, especially since it targets a demonized “terrorist” group, and pharma-funded media would have a field day with such a story — but I haven’t heard of even one lone nut accused of trying to do this, much less any widescale campaign large enough to move the needle on the millions of VAERS reports.
“Contrary to claims that most of these reports are made by lay-people … or those with malign intent … and are hence clinically unreliable, we identified … 72% authored by health service employees.
“50% died in less than 48 hours after receiving their COVID-19 vaccination. This increases to 80% when we extend to the first week post-vaccination.
“All 250 people in this interim collection were reported as COVID-19 deaths. This means that all, even those who received one or more negative test results, are erroneously counted in the officially reported national COVID-19 death tally.
“The quantity and quality of data provided by the USA VAERS dataset is capable of supporting meaningful research.”
The Elephant in the Room vs. the Naked Emperor
Why in the world are Berry and her ilk so intent on cooking up absurd storylines to discredit and distract from the plain results coming out of the FDA & CDC’s own Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System? The latest picture revealed by OpenVAERS is worth a million wounds:
The elephant in the room is that:
Just 3 covid vaccines have accounted for 1,447,520 adverse event reports in less than 2 years, massively more than the 39,000 reports for all vaccines in a typical year, and 62% higher than the grand total of all other vaccines combined throughout VAERS’ 32-year history.
31,696 deaths reported in just 23 months from mRNA covid shots alone is more than triple the 9,655 deaths reported in 32 years from a combined list of 112 other vaccines.
There are 150-300 deaths reported to VAERS per year from all other vaccines combined; in 2021 alone, 21,382 death reports from just the covid shots were filed.
How can this be? Either:
This rise represents a terribly-concerning unexplained safety signal that must be investigated and understood before injection roll-out can ethically continue;
— OR —
Don’t believe your lying eyes, because: “anti-vaxxers”, “correlation doesn’t equal causation”, “trust the science”, “safe & effective”, and other propaganda non-sequiturs.
The Hippocratic Oath for physicians to “do no harm”, the Nuremburg Code, and the Precautionary Principle all dictate that barely-tested experimental interventions must be considered guilty of possible harms until proven innocent, and experiments on live subjects (currently 71% of the world’s population) may not proceed without resolving potentially-deadly safety signals.
Beyond its role as a signal, the 48-hour time-to-onset in half the VAERS reports is a strong indicator of causality, confirmed by the many cases of “worsening of a side effect following repeated doses within the same individual” found by Israeli Health Ministry study of its own vaccine safety data.
Berry pretends to know that the unprecedented rise in VAERS reports is due to fraud and overcounting, but given hospital disregard and disincentives, it is far more likely that VAERS deaths are being underreported by an estimated 40 times, which matches the underreporting factor found when recently-released v-safe data was compared with VAERS.
This VAERS alarm unfortunately aligns with chilling insurance company statistics revealing “there has been a 40% increase in death rates for 18- to 64-year-old individuals across the U.S., when comparing Q3 2021 data to pre-pandemic data from the same period in 2019 … that cannot be explained simply by covid infections themselves.”
In the face of all these signals and in full “see no evil” mode, Berry reported to the Board of Health on October 20 that:
“Severe side effects from these vaccines are incredibly incredibly rare, on the order of less than 10 per million doses delivered.”
Not “rare” nor even “incredibly rare”, Berry’s “incredibly incredibly rare” claim of near-zero severe effects is gaslighting the vaccine-injured by saying their experiences never happened, they are just making it up, and their million+ VAERS reports (72% by healthcare providers) were all fraudulent. Move along, nothing to see here.
There’s a great divide between Berry’s rose-colored world of 0.001% severe side effects versus the 33% actually found in the CDC v-safe data.
There’s a huge credibility gap between Berry telling County Commissioners on November 15, 2021 that “No one else has died from their COVID-19 vaccine. I believe it’s 11 nationwide” versus the 18,461 deaths underreported to VAERS at the time of her statement.
Her VAERS conspiracy fantasy is just a particularly telling example, since her other statements about masking, covid deaths, case testing, vaccine trials, safety, and efficacy have likewise been exposed as vacuous misinformation throughout this series and earlier PTFP articles.
Berry is not an authority to be trusted. Her emergency powers arose out of fear, but the outsized authority she claims over our county, along with the dangerous injections she pushes, are what’s really scary.
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“The words of this wizard stand on their heads… help means ruin, and saving means slaying, that is plain.”
— Gimli in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings
Jefferson County will be alone in its own private State of Emergency if commissioners approve its 13th temporary Covid-19 response policy emergency declaration at their October 24 board meeting. Meanwhile, Washington State and all its other counties (including neighbor Clallam) will have discarded their emergency declarations as of October 31.
County residents have been under the grip of multiple overlapping federal, state, county, and city emergency rules since both Jeffco and Port Townsend declared a State of Emergency on March 16, 2020, joining the February 29 state and March 13 federal declarations.
These unprecedented emergency lockdowns were originally sold by former Jeffco Health Officer Tom Locke and others as short-term measures to “flatten the curve” so it “does not overwhelm medical services,” which White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Deborah Birx recently admitted was an evidence-free deception to “make these palatable” while “I was trying to figure out how to extend it” since “I didn’t have the numbers in front of me yet to make the case for extending it longer, but I had two weeks to get them.”
A careful peer-reviewed cost/benefit analysis found the emergency “lockdowns have had, at best, a marginal effect on the number of Covid-19 deaths. … The costs were at least thirty-five times higher than the benefits. The reasonable conservative case is that the cost/benefit ratio is around 141 … Lockdowns are not just an inefficient policy, they must rank as one of the greatest peacetime policy disasters of all time.”
So the goal posts for lockdowns and emergency declarations kept moving as each old justification became discredited, eventually landing on little more than public health case-detection funding imperatives, perpetuation of Emergency Use Authorizations for the mRNA spike protein injections, and convenient ramping up for any future actual emergencies.
Public Comment About Extending Jeffco’s Emergency
That brings us to the County Commissioners’ October 17 meeting, whose agenda centered on discussion and potential action “In the Matter of Adopting a 13th Temporary County Policy Based on Emergency Response to the Covid-19 Pandemic”, about which I expressed the following Public Comment:
I saw that Jefferson County may be keeping its emergency orders even after the other counties and the state lifts them on October 31, and personally I would really urge you not to do that. For one thing, that would be putting you out there special doing this unlike the other diligence from the other counties.
I understand that according to our health officer, “Jefferson doesn’t have the level of population immunity that others do, because it did such a good job controlling the virus before.” And there may be cases now and there may be cases in the future, but I’m not quite sure that constitutes an emergency.
If things happen during the winter, then maybe at that point one could consider calling it an emergency. Part of it is, I really would like us to normalize.
Forgive me for putting it this way, but for your electoral prospects, a lot of information has been coming out that makes the wisdom of these lockdowns look suspicious. To the extent you’re standing out there as the only county doing this thing, that allows you to be saddled with this label of being the “Lockdown Commissioners” or having done it above and beyond what other counties have done. Whereas if you’re just following the same actions as everybody else, at least you’re acting in a more safe way about all of this.
Another thing… a lot of stuff has been coming out in the news, like the European Parliament hearing Pfizer say they hadn’t done any testing on transmission for their vaccine, which was obviously part of the original narrative about it.
You’ve got countries around the world — Denmark, Norway, Australia — abandoning a lot of these recommendations for kids to have this vaccine, so things are changing and the narrative is shifting insofar as what the appropriate guidance should be.
So you could almost say that this is becoming the emerging guidance.
Commissioner Responses to Emergency Comment
Commissioner Kate Dean responded:
One of things I’m most pleased about as we move into this endemic phase, we can start to heal some of the things that have cursed our country and communities. I think we knew all along this was a grand experiment; none of us had ever been through anything like this, and we’re all doing our best. I think it will be years before we understand what was effective and what was the right choice.I feel some hope that the things which have divided us for the last few years, that we can at least all say: we tried, we’re doing our best, we did well in this community. I don’t have regrets, but I’ll say we learned every step of the way.
Our conversation last week will be continued this afternoon regarding the emergency order. I have some concern about continuing it, mostly because I feel there’s a bit of a “crying wolf” situation: If we continue it, we perpetuate the sense of emergency, and then, where there actually is an emergency, it’s harder to rally folks to respond as such.
But I trust very much that the staff who are dealing with the administrative end of this think there’s a lot of benefit in keeping it in place to revisit in a few more months, in part because it’s hard to get stuff going again, so if we were to rescind it, then getting it back in place if we have a surge just takes capacity, when Public Health and the Department of Emergency Management have less capacity.
So I’m going along with staff’s recommendation. We’ll have more discussion about it today, but I anticipate we’ll go ahead with keeping it in place.
But I share your concern; I worry it’s a little disingenuous myself. But it’s a tool for administrative purposes, and we’re not doing any sort of lockdown. Obviously we’re all here today, and we’re glad to have the public back!
Commissioner Greg Brotherton responded:
I’m on the screen here today because covid is still with us. I’m on day 6 of my second positive test. While it was a very mild case, we still as a county have to deal with the reality that there is a lot of transmission, I assume over 400 per 100,000 in our community.
And some of the levers that emergency order for us are really critical to come up with extra pay for staff so we can maintain services, and also take care of them so they can stay home when they’re sick.
I’m also feel like it it’s a little bit disingenuous, and we’ll have a robust conversation I’m sure at 1:30, but I’m also like Commissioner Dean inclined to take the staff recommendation and just keep it on a little while longer, not as a lockdown, but to make sure we still have those levers available as we continue to deal with it, as I can attest with firsthand experience.
Commissioner Heidi Eisenhour responded:
I’m still evading covid, full stop, thankfully! … I was saying last week, we put all this stuff in place, so what happens if we rip the Band-Aid off now, with the potential cases happening in Europe, that Dr. Berry has been talking about, and how we’ve tended to follow the trend with our cases going up after cases in Europe in the past.
Personally, I know more people with covid right now than I ever have. And so, I don’t feel it’s time to stop having the precautions in place that we do, especially how the things we put in place affect the team here in the county for human resources issues. So It’s something we are going to have more of a conversation about this afternoon.
Health Officer on Emergency and Everyday Powers
Following Health Officer Allison Berry’s community update, Commissioner Brotherton asked her:
Where does the requirement to wear masks in health situations come from, could you remind me?
Berry answered:
It’s currently a mandate from the state. So there is an order from the Secretary of Health, and the Secretary of Health’s orders extend past the declaration of emergency.
That’s probably worth digging into a little bit. So health officers and secretaries of health always have the ability and authority and obligation to control infectious diseases regardless of states of emergency. Governors only have that authority when a declaration of emergency is in place.
So after October 31, the Governor doesn’t have the ability to issue orders around the pandemic, but health officers still do. We always have had that authority, we will continue to do so. Secretaries of health do too.
Many folks didn’t know we existed before the pandemic, but we have always been here! So if there was, for instance, a measles outbreak, we would issue health orders around that.
And so, as long as we’re still seeing high rates of covid transmission, we’re likely to see health orders related to that, but they’re more targeted now than they used to be, because we’re in a different phase of the pandemic.
And that one most critical space is health care. We need people to be able to see their doctors, and not get covid from that interaction. And so that’s where we are still requiring masking. Longterm care facilities also fall under that space, because people can’t choose whether or not they need to live there. And it’s really important to protect them in that space.
Brotherton followed up about the emergency resolution:
We’re going to be considering our 13th emergency resolution about covid this afternoon, and I’m wondering if you had a chance to look at it, whether you weigh in favor of keeping our emergency resolution or adding a 13th?
We’ve talked a little and had public comment today about it being disingenuous to call it an emergency as we move into an endemic phase. And it does seem a little strange, at the same time, there’s still a lot of important levers that it opens up to us to use. As I can attest, covid is still very high in our community.
Berry answered:
Yeah, it’s certainly a challenge to figure out how to move in a seamless way into this endemic phase and not lose all the gains that we’ve made as a community. And I think that’s where these kinds of emergency declarations come in.
The biggest thing that the local emergency declaration makes available is the ability to rapidly fund certain situations or make certain control efforts available.
But again, the emergency declaration doesn’t actually have a lot of bearing over whether or not, for instance, I can issue a health order.
And I think that’s where sometimes people end up having strong feelings about the emergency declaration is that thought that we would no longer have public health authority. And it actually has no bearing on that.
What it does is allow us to fund covid test, or potentially move forward something like the Department of Emergency Management responding to a covid outbreak. So it allows us a little more flexibility in responding to things.
I think it was appropriate, for instance, the federal goverment did just announce that they extended their emergency declaration so that we can continue to use some of the tools we need to fight covid through the fall.
It’s a complex decision whether or not to maintain it. But I think it’s useful to have those tools available and only use them when we need them, but it’s good to have that option.
Public Comment After Emergency Wordsmithing
Commissioners returned in the afternoon to wordsmith their potential 13th emergency declaration together with public health staff. That draft would then be taken to the closed County Covid Coordination meeting on October 21 for further work. Afterwards I gave another Public Comment:
I really appreciate you all wanting to honor staff, and if you stop these orders now, you’d have to ramp up and all — I grok that.
But what are the pluses and minuses here? I heard from the health officer that the big advantage was that the emergency declaration would allow getting funds, for example, to pay for additional covid testing and management.
I feel like a lot of this is sort of redundant stuff that is already being covered elsewhere. So there’s funds for more testing?
Why exactly is Jefferson County in a special condition compared to other counties, if we’re the only county that’s going to be doing this? I also heard that it was because we have more cases.
We also had one death recently, which I think was somebody in her 80s with lots of comorbidities who had been vaccinated and boosted but not fully. That’s also a situation in which who’s to say she died from the covid or died from all these other conditions.
So the main thing is the cases. Is this really an emergency any more? I do feel we’re in the endemic stage and not the pandemic stage.
I do feel like it’s disingenuous, as I’ve heard from others to try to be applying emergency things for something that is really just a casedemic here.
It’s not lots of deaths. It’s not the hospitals being overburdened. It’s just lots of cases.
And part of the reasons for all these cases is all the testing. So in a sense, if you had more funds from having this emergency order, then you could have more testing which could possibly provide more cases and make things seem to be more like an emergency.
So I’m concerned that we’re in this walking-on-eggshells mode, where — oh my gosh! — we just had a case, now we’ve got to shut down the whole workplace or have everybody be masking, changing, doing things in different ways.
In a way, I personally feel like it would be better to step back, not have it so easy that we’re just continuing the state of emergency.
Why not just basically say, like every other county is doing, say: Okay, it’s really not an emergency any more.
It’s a matter of concern that we need to be watching; it’s not an emergency. If it is an emergency in the future, then we can at that point make a decision and ramp up.
And then that’d be due diligence rather than it being this eggshelly thing, where on the turn of a dime, we’ll be back in this mode and you’ll never be able to feel you can normalize.
One other thing I’ll toss out: Jefferson County is different in one other way: I saw that there’s 22.6% bivalent boostering, which is more than twice the 10.2% in all the other counties in this state.
Who’s to say, I mean we have a correlation here, not a causation necessarily, between the boostering and the additional cases in this town. We’ve also been told by our health officer we don’t have the same level of population immunity as everyone else. So who knows?
But let’s take a step back and wait and see.
Commmissioner Dean responded:
I also came at this from the pluses and minuses, and like you heard me say earlier, I was afraid of the “crying wolf” scenario.
But what I couldn’t get to are what the negatives were. There are some positives that are potential positives, like not having to go through this whole process again.
Should we decide that we are in a state of emergency in a couple of months as we see numbers rise potentially, or if there are funding opportunities that we want to be eligible for, or just need to be able to respond in a true emergency fashion — you see that it takes us a long time!
Our process is very deliberative and includes a lot of people. On Friday, our staff will be meeting again. And so that’s where I felt like the negatives just aren’t there.
I appreciate that we’ve softened the language and really tried to not overstate things in this version, so I’m still happy to move it ahead at staff’s recommendation.
Commmissioner Brotherton responded:
I think you may be getting hung up on the word “emergency” like I did as well. And I think this is really just about the preservation of the temporary standards that we have.
I’m supportive of taking this to staff and seeing if everyone agrees, if we can get a consensus from the county coordination meeting this Friday.
I don’t see (as Kate said) any negatives from this. It just allows us to keep paid covid leave, which is critical for some of our staff. I’m in favor of moving this forward to county coordination.
Commmissioner Eisenhour responded:
I know covid has hampered all the departments, and now we’re needing to reduce the hours that the transfer station’s open because of capacity issues. It’s not tied to this policy, but it’s tied to people being sick and our county family.
I think taking away tools for managers to provide our team with what they need when they need it – it doesn’t feel like the time for that right now.
But the line of questioning that I had at the beginning of this session, where I was trying to unpack whether there was another place where we could take care of these policy matters … what I heard was that there’s not. So that further shores up my support for us continuing this conversation.
On October 19, Ben Montalbano asked County Commisioner (District 3) candidate Marcia Kelbon this question:
If you were the County Commissioner now would you vote to extend the Emergency Authorization Act, now before the board? Many of us voters are not sure about you stand on community imposed mandates.
Candidate Kelbon’s response:
I do not see a need or defensible justification for a continued state of emergency. There are continued county employee protections that best be addressed by permanent employee policies.
To elaborate, I am surprised that this is even being considered at this point and that the three commissioners have expressed support for an extension.
I highlight county employee protections such as extended sick leave because that is the reason they most discussed, but they acknowledge that this could be addressed through their employee manual.
The other reason stated often is that it is a lot of work to put an emergency measure back in place if there is a surge. Work avoidance is not a reason to limit liberties.
The deputy prosecuting attorney also noted that the current emergency ruling avoids the need for competitive bidding for OlyCap – indefensible.
If there is a surge, people can choose to mask and/or boost if they choose. We need to be out of a police state and get on with life, with individuals and businesses making their own health decisions.
This quarantine law provides narrow emergency detention powers to health officers for up to 10 days over infected persons posing serious and imminent risk, but only after a long series of provisions and recourses have been exhausted — none of which in any way applied to or authorized Health Officer Berry’s open-ended discriminatory regulation over restaurant/bar business practices, requiring them to demand HIPAA-protected private health information from their patrons.
Our counties’ restaurant vaccine mandate was a pure example of illegal emergency power overreach and the dangers of governance not by laws but by lawless “emergency” orders. Anything goes in an emergency — which is not a good thing.
Emergency declarations risk replacing everything good about our government — laws, rights, and due process — with lawless orders by unaccountable executives and unelected health czars.
They are meant for genuine short-term physical emergencies like earthquakes, and if used to replace normal government indefinitely under the pretext of long-term conditions like flus and climate change, such perpetual emergency takeovers are indistinguishable from totalitarian coups.
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“In the end it’s very simple:
Emergency powers are just another name for lawlessness. You can be a nation of rights and laws, or a nation of emergency. You cannot do both.”
– el gato malo
The Port Townsend City Council heard my policing concerns in this Public Comment at their September 6 meeting:
In past public comments, I regularly asked about police staffing. My underlying concern was ensuring sufficient police if ever Antifa-like gangs threatened to trash and terrorize our town. I hadn’t realized until August 15 that the real question was not “Could the police protect us?” but “Would they protect us?”
Chief Olson’s response afterwards was to downplay the criminal gang activity and blame the victims. After admitting to the Peninsula Daily News that multiple blackclad thugs were “carrying police batons” and “suspected to have a concealed firearm” and chiding women that their “agenda was put ahead of safety”, he changed his story for the Leader, insinuating that victims who “suffered multiple physical and sexual assaults” from assailants “armed with pepper spray, batons, and firearms” were making things up.
Olson gaslighted that “there was no property damage” (not counting the victims’ property) and “no visual injuries” (discounting bruises, a sprained ankle, and emotional trauma) and that assaulted women may “feel like they were victims”, but in reality their experience was “similar to being in a mosh pit.” Here Olson pretends that consensual concert activity is the same thing as women being targeted and attacked by a violent street gang while his police did nothing but watch.
Who gave this directive to police? Who decided that, according to Olson, “all of our officers were primarily focused on an orderly council meeting”, so none could stop nearby violent crimes under their watch? Why did police allow the gang to block folks from entering the council building to sign up for comment, so only gang sympathizers could make public comments? Was Olson just following orders or involved in writing those orders?
Given how council glad-handed with gang sympathizers at their August 15 meeting, given councilor Wennstrom’s involvement along with her Facebook campaign threatening women to leave town, given how the city and its police clearly picked a side and let it beat up the other side, the question has to be asked: Were city officials actively complicit with gang organizers or just negligent in allowing this violent gang to assault female elders and violate their peaceable assembly rights?
The city — and at this point, the nation — needs answers to these questions. If the responsible individuals are not willing to fess up and accept the consequences for their actions, then an independent investigation or truth & reconciliation commission may be needed.
In any case, I’m grateful some lessons were learned and proper policing held the violent elements at bay on September 3. But the council and its police still need to be accountable for what happened on August 15, take responsibility for their mistakes, be honest, and stop blaming the victims.
Staff and Council Response
City Manger John Mauro responded that some of my policing concerns would be addressed in his later city manager report, pointing out the city’s August 11 Mountain View Pool Q&A explaining how the city’s decision-making is based on state law (but not mentioning any policing issues as it preceded the August 15 assaults).
[Police Chief] Tom deserves a lot of kudos, but so do the agencies we work with, East Jefferson County, Sequim, Port Angeles, state agencies like the Washington State Patrol, Federal agencies, specifically working with a lot of jurisdictions and Public Works team … minimizing violence. …
This isn’t a decision to permit or not permit an event … When someone wants to hold a free-speech first-amendment-right rally in any location, they can do so, and there’s nothing the city can do to prevent that.
The event’s permit is a process by which we can glean information about what to expect, how we can resource up, how to prepare, and even ask: do you request police presence? In the instance of 15th, that answer was ‘No’ on that event permit, so we with two-and-a-half working days adjusted accordingly based on a request.
Now we could, of course, deny resourcing, traffic closures, as we see fit. That’s where we have yes/no decision making authority, but we can’t keep someone from assembling to exercise free speech …
That’s something we need to prepare for. There was no injury, property damage, and I would say part of the reflection talking with state and federal agencies was the appropriate but not over-the-top presence of multiple agencies is likely what prevented problems from happening in the first place.
And some of the rules literally according to the organizer killed the turnout, because we were saying here is what you can and cannot bring into a public space for this event.
Not a whole lot has happened over the last couple weeks. No, actually, I had trouble coming up with my list because so much of my mental space has been occupied by other things than what I would normally want to talk about here. …
This last Saturday, the protests … I’m very glad the police coordination there resulted in, as far as I’ve been able to understand, no violence, and I’m glad that it ended up being a peaceful event. Thanks for staff and team for making sure it went off without a hitch.
Councilor Ben Thomas was the only one to touch on concerns about the August 15 assaults, closing off the meeting with these heartfelt words:
I don’t know if this is the time or place, but I don’t know when the time or place is, so I just wanted to acknowledge: We’ve got a lot of emails, in person as well, comments on the event on 8/15.
I wish we could talk more openly and frankly about this stuff and realize it’s not an easy thing to do; it’s complicated. But there are a lot of hurt feelings, possibly worse, for people on how it went down.
And I read every word, and I’m sure other people do too, of everything that gets sent in. It’s not being ignored, there’s just not much we can do about it, going back in the past.
I’m sorry that people went through that. I did see it first hand, and I was disturbed by it. I didn’t think they were treated very well.
Even though, do I agree with everything they were saying? That’s not the point. So that did bum me out.
But also we’re getting a lot of stuff, hearing a lot about chromosomes and stuff, and this is not the body to figure out state law or how chromosomes work and gender. People are leaning on us about this, but I just don’t see it as our role.
I just wanted to say that out loud. Thank you.
Councilor Wennstrom Opens Up After the Meeting
Speaking personally, after delivering my Public Comment, I felt itchy about having singled out Councilor Libby Wennstrom by name. After the meeting broke up, I noticed her walking away alone down the sidewalk, and felt moved to call her name to connect and try to understand where she was coming from.
I started by confessing that I felt bad about singling her out in my comment, I’d found myself respecting her perspicacity and attention to detail during council discussions, so wondered what was going on with her Facebook TERF posting.
Wennstrom expressed feeling that trans people were being threatened, had noticed the TERF image someone else had made (adapted from tsunami warnings), and reposted it on her private Facebook page that was only shared with a few friends.
Unfortunately one of those friends liked or shared her post in a way that made it public for all to see. Wennstrom never intended it to go public, but in retrospect as a public official doesn’t think she should have posted it.
Wennstrom graciously continued talking with me, and we covered a lot of ground:
She related that various councilors and she personally have been flooded with a glut of emails, death threats, obscene images, etc., etc. Tonight was the first time she’d felt safe enough not to be accompanied by someone else for protection to a city meeting. (When shesaid that, realizing I stood alone about 6 feet away from her on the night-time city sidewalk, I took a step back, but she waved it away and said she didn’t feel threatened by me.)
Internally the city has been overloaded by these messages and surrounding issues.
Wennstrom said that a large number of dangerous armed Proud Boys were intending to come to the September 3 event, but were deterred when they heard there would be enforcement of a no-visible-weapons ban.
The reason police were focused on protecting councilors and the council building on August 15 was because of the threats they were getting after all the media attention.
Wennstrom said Amy Sousa hadn’t checked on the permit that organizers wanted police protection for her 8/15 event; I countered that the Peninsula Daily News quoted Sousa that Chief Olson had been repeatedly asked for separation from the counter-protesters.
I told Wennstrom about specific assaults and harms to attendees, mostly from a dozen violent bad actors; she had been under the impression that women were exaggerating, citing a case she had been shown of a woman pointing to bruises on her arm that were weeks old.
Wennstrom strongly objected to the idea that council had “directed” police not to help women being assaulted under their watch, saying neither council nor mayor has that authority and the city manager provides the police chief general policy. I reiterated that witnesses and video heard a police officer refuse to go into the crowd to help women, saying he’d been directed not to, so the question is who directed him. (That made me wonder whether Olson and/or Mauro might have been so concerned over threats council was receiving that they felt no officer could be spared from protecting council and its property.)
Wennstrom felt that legally there was nothing council could have done about the pool issues, since it is on property leased from the school district, controlled by the School Board, and managed by the YMCA.
She wished that Julie Jaman had gone through channels instead of escalating with an outside demonstration, council, Tucker Carlson, etc. resulting in doxxing of council and Y staffers, lives messed up, city disruption, the pool still being closed, budgets being drained that provide protection at events, etc. (I neglected in the time available to go into how Jaman did try to talk to YMCA management first, did try to get the Leader to publish her letter, etc. but was completely stonewalled.)
Wennstrom courteously heard out my opinion that mistakes might have been made on both sides, particularly that the YMCA messed up banning Jaman lifetime on the spot without due process, and city council messed up on August 1 by dismissing folks as bigots for expressing their honest narrow concerns about women and kids feeling safe in public bathrooms. Wennstrom said she heard someone say “trans people are pedophiles” at council and that set her off; I replied that I don’t think I heard anyone say that, but even if one person did, that’s not what other public commentators were saying, but they were all getting smeared with the same brush.
We’d been talking for a little while and it was getting cold, but as we were winding down three of her friends joined her, so we parted on pleasant terms. I appreciated her taking the time to talk with me and being open to respectful and factual feedback.
On my side, I hadn’t realized the extent to which city personnel were feeling terrorized and overburdened by all the negative feedback, doxxing, and publicity they’d been receiving.I also felt a little impressed how they continued trying to keep a stiff upper lip and take care of city business in a professional way, as seen by generally exemplary disposition of their straightforward council agenda on September 6.
