A doctor called coronavirus vaccines 'fake.' Now he sits on an Idaho regional health board. [View all]

[Celerity]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/09/16/idaho-covid-gop-ryan-cole/



Leaders of Idaho’s most populous county were deluged with constituent emails last month as they prepared to choose the newest member of a once-obscure regional health board. A doctor who served on the board for 15 years had just been let go over his support for pandemic restrictions. Hundreds wrote in for Ryan Cole, a doctor — backed by the Ada County Republican Party — who has called coronavirus vaccines “fake.” The Republican commissioners of the county — which encompasses the state capital, Boise — said they welcomed Cole’s “outsider” perspective and willingness to “question” established medical guidance. They appointed him over the protests of their lone Democratic colleague.

To critics, Cole’s elevation to a public health-care role is an extreme example of GOP-driven resistance to not only mandates but basic medical guidance, as the pandemic overwhelms Idaho’s hospitals like never before. The covid-19 patients filling hospital wards and prompting statewide rationing of care are almost all unvaccinated. Yet Idaho’s lieutenant governor recently suggested, falsely, that vaccinated people are more likely to die, and some officials in the heavily conservative state — where many preach “freedom” from government — consider even recommending the shots to be an overreach. As the delta variant fuels a new wave of coronavirus hospitalizations and deaths nationwide, some see Idaho as just the latest example of a pandemic response hobbled by politics and a year of intense backlash against public health restrictions.

“To watch my state implode over political decisions that have adverse consequences on health is horrifying to me. … That’s the tragedy that I’m watching unfold,” said Ted Epperly, Cole’s predecessor on the Central District Health Board, which can make broad rules such as mask mandates but had some of its authority stripped this year. David Pate, a friend of Epperly and a former CEO of Boise-based St. Luke’s Health System, said that if there is no political will or ability to enact mask mandates, authorities need to at least give people good information. He said the combination of decreasing public health officials’ powers and then allowing them to spread falsehoods is “the worst possible outcome.” He just learned that a charter school he successfully urged to require masks has changed course after hearing a presentation from Cole.

A lifelong Republican and member of the governor’s coronavirus advisory group, Pate marveled that a segment of the right has been spreading misinformation that he said will be most deadly to their shot-spurning base. About 40 percent of Idaho’s population is fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, one of the lowest rates in the country and significantly below the national figure of 54 percent. “The America that I know and love … yes, we’re going to have intense debates,” Pate said. “We’re going to have different views of things. But any time we’ve faced an existential threat, we’ve pulled together. … We do whatever we need to do to protect our fellow man and our country. And I think it’s terrifying that that doesn’t seem to be how we’re handling this.” Cole said in an email that the news media “has disastrously and disingenuously mischaracterized me,” but he did not respond to further questions.

snip