OPINION: Outbreak of ignorance is spreading to this region

This editorial was published in the Yakima Herald-Republic.

You knew it was coming.

With the federal government — along with all forms of common sense — being dismantled before our eyes in the past month, it was clear Americans’ health and safety would soon be on shaky ground.

And with a Republican-controlled Congress obediently clearing the way for a 71-year-old conspiracy theorist and vaccine skeptic to take command of the Department of Health and Human Services, the news out of Franklin County should be no surprise.

In a unanimous vote, county commissioners there have passed a resolution aimed at pushing the county’s health department to stop offering, paying for or promoting COVID-19 vaccinations. They also don’t want health officials talking about any number of other vaccines, including ones that have been used safely and effectively for years.

Commissioners apparently staked their decision on misinformation from a group that’s been barnstorming the Northwest, preaching discredited snake-oil strategies for a pandemic that’s killed 1.2 million Americans. The group’s frontman is a pathologist whose medical license has been restricted in Washington because of his “numerous demonstrably false” statements about the coronavirus vaccine, according to state disciplinary paperwork.

Great.

So now folks in Franklin County are essentially being urged by elected leaders to forego measures that could save their lives and instead trust their health to quack pseudo-science.

Worse yet, they’re being encouraged to make choices that will undoubtedly put their children’s and their neighbors’ health at risk, too.

The national contagion of misinformation has reached pandemic proportions, and we’re seeing the frightening results every day: measles outbreaks in Texas and New Mexico, tuberculosis infecting Kansas — and alarming whooping cough reports here in our own state.

The common denominator? Distrust in professionally tested and provably reliable prevention measures that are recommended by doctors.

Which leads us to ask, why would anyone — especially a parent — forsake a doctor’s advice and swallow the lies of hucksters? And why would anyone — particularly a person presumably elected to serve the common good — try to mislead the public and undermine true experts on such an important subject?

That second question is one that Franklin County voters should be asking their reckless county commissioners. And they should be demanding some verifiable answers.

Because if enough other counties follow the Franklin board’s irresponsible resolution with similarly dangerous ideas, we’ll soon find ourselves facing health crises we haven’t seen in decades. It will be one expensive and totally avoidable catastrophe after another.

Meantime, now that federal health information is under the supervision of someone who doesn’t believe in science, new questions are already spreading faster than the measles.

It’s a crying shame that nobody wants to listen to logical answers anymore.

TNS