Politicians Overrule Board of Health's Medical Officer

The CDC recently relaxed masking recommendations and changed them to "community-level" metrics. As some may have seen, I was furious and wrote an article for Forbes about the CDC throwing vulnerable people under the bus. My sentiments haven't changed.

But here, I want to mention how short-sighted this was in assuming local politicians would actually follow the CDC's metric.

Our local politicians are so enamored of the GOP and "freedom" that they hurt the local counties in their vying for attention. The Western Maryland Delegation is perhaps best known for their poorly thought out publicity stunt last fall. Then, they proposed seceding from Maryland and joining West Virginia. What does that do besides make them a laughingstock? Western Maryland gets more funding and support from "downstate," which is Democrat, than we contribute in taxes. Do you think that will continue after they so flagrantly dissed the MD legislature?

In Maryland, the local county health officer is nominated by the county and appointed by the Secretary of the Maryland Department of Health. They serve at the pleasure of the county. In Allegany County, where I live, the Board of Health consists of the County Commissioners and the Health Officer. Other counties, like Howard, have larger boards, although they are appointed by the county council. Howard County has 11 members; we have four — the three commissioners and one health officer.

When the CDC came out with its new guidance, Allegany County was colored red — high risk for and high rates of COVID transmission. We, and neighboring Garrett County to our west, have consistently had the highest rate of COVID infections in the state. We have one county hospital, now run by UPMC. Our death rate was approximately 1 in 300, our county's COVID response ranked even worse than Mississippi's in 2020.

Before the Board of Health even met to discuss masks and quarantines, Commissioner Jake Shade announced on his Facebook page that "Allegany County would be the first county in the state of Maryland to end burdensome quarantine requirements for students." He apparently told Governor Larry Hogan of this ambition. Too bad that the commissioners didn't really bother to discuss this with the county health officer before they made their decision. Jenelle Mayer, MPH, opposed the measure. Similarly, soon after, the Board of Education voted to make masking optional, which she felt was premature given our county's COVID numbers.

These were both nakedly political decisions. The only reason we had any luck with masking in Allegany County, despite extraordinarily high COVID rates, was because of state mandates for masking in public places, guided by the CDC. Local officials here have not instituted any protections on their own.

One of the problems with the new CDC plan is that it emphasizes hospitalizations and local capacity. But our hospital has consistently refused to share information regarding its ability to handle additional patients. They have also not done enough to educate locals about treatment for COVID, though our vaccination rate has only recently broken 50%.

Community members provide vaccination clinics focusing on lower-income areas because the health department clinics are difficult to access with negligible public transportation here. The Women's Action Coalition also has a series of Q&A's in the paper to help educate about masks, vaccines, and now about available treatments. Given that we only have 1 primary care provider per 1900 people (compared with 1 in 713 in Maryland), as well as the transportation difficulties, you can't rely on patients getting information from their physicians.

Although there are many advantages to living in a scenic rural community, it saddens and angers me to have politicians seemingly having little interest in caring for their constituents and making decisions that should be left to medical professionals. I also naively hoped that they and the local citizens would be more willing to care for their vulnerable neighbors. There are churches all over Cumberland — local lore was that we had the highest per capita rate of churches in the country. That's easy to believe as you drive around town. Yet even some of them were pushing to drop masking early on. Caring for others seems to have been missed by many.

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Cite this: Judy Stone. Politicians Overrule Board of Health's Medical Officer - Medscape - Mar 17, 2022.