Here’s the video of yesterday’s Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors meeting (Feb 8, 2022) regarding COVID-19 (3:36 through at 5:29):
The meeting featured public health officer Dr. Sara Cody.
Public testimony came from the Santa Clara firefighters and others in the community who are all outraged about the draconian measures instituted in Santa Clara County by Dr. Cody.
The short story is that Dr. Cody doesn’t cite a single piece of evidence justifying why Santa Clara County has to have more restrictive measures than the State. She assures everyone she is studying whether we can align with California’s guidelines but has no timeline for providing an answer.
At no time does she identify a single intervention she has instituted that she credits for the amazing mortality numbers she shows in her mortality chart (@3:45:13 and shown below) which is not normalized and thus misleading. But it fools some Supervisors who think she’s awesome.
It’s not clear that anything will change since the Supervisors only went as far as suggesting that she should look into aligning the County policies with the State policies to eliminate confusion. They can’t direct her to do anything. She doesn’t report to them.
This story is of special interest for those in Santa Clara County, but for those living in other areas, it helps to illustrate some of the techniques that your public health officials will use to keep you in a state of emergency. It ends by highlighting key questions your local government officials should be asking and probably aren’t.
Why this video is important
This video is important because:
- Santa Clara County has some of the most draconian COVID restrictions in the County
- Prior to the meeting all the Supervisors were blindly supporting whatever Sara Cody said, regardless of what the science says
- By the end of the nearly 2 hour segment (Feb 8 2022 meeting: Agenda item #8 starting at 3:36 and ending at 5:29:45), it was clear that some of the Supervisors had realized that the public is very upset, but they are still not asking the right questions to get the policy change that is needed.
In short, having members of the public speak up at City Council and Board of Supervisors meetings helps, but to actually create change, at least one of the Supervisors needs to step up to the plate and have a 1:1 meeting with Dr. Cody and ask some of the hard questions that I outline at the end.
The public speaks for 45 minutes
Here is the video of the meeting, starting at 3:53 when the Supervisors stop talking and we hear from members of the public. Note that there was also a public comment section at the start of the meeting at 27:15 until 1:08:45.
The first public speaker (Collin Connors) was brilliant. He talked about the John Hopkins study showing the public interventions have virtually no effect on the pandemic, but had a huge negative effect on the public well being.
From the study:
“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.”
In short, this study, which was extremely well done, makes it crystal clear that Sara Cody caused enormous amounts of harm for no benefit. I know a highly qualified Stanford Professor that would love to debate Dr. Cody on this, but I guarantee that Dr. Cody will never accept such a debate.
None of the Supervisors mentioned this in their remarks. That’s stunning. This is one of the most important points made at the entire meeting.
The second public speaker (3:54:30) is firefighter Barry Arata who points out that the rates of COVID are virtually identical for vaccinated vs. unvaccinated firemen and police. He also points out that there isn’t a single documented case of anyone getting COVID from a first responder. He’s out of work now because of Dr. Cody’s mandate. There is no public benefit for this. Zero.
The point he makes is pretty simple: if Dr. Cody is worried about infecting the public, she should just order if you are symptomatic, you stay home, regardless of vaccination status. Period. This is because, as Dr. Fauci has pointed out, the main driver of spread is symptomatic people. See my article on asymptomatic spread for details.
The fourth speaker (Alex Bruni @ 3:58:52) points out that subjecting the unvaccinated to mandatory testing has led to skewed data. Multiple medical journals show equal chances of infection and he refers to the FOIA request that Barry Arata did showing this was true in Santa Clara County that vaccination made no difference in infection rates. SJPD had 229 positives, but only 28 were in those who were unvaccinated. The fire department had 160 positives. Only 13 were unvaccinated. The vaccinated only get tested if symptomatic, but the unvaccinated get tested twice a week regardless of symptoms. If the testing regimen was the same, we’d be seeing higher numbers among the vaccinated.
Dan Kearnan @ 4:01:03 asks the Supervisors to trust the people to do the right thing and stop the mandate.
Mike Rogers @ 4:03:12 points out the asymmetric testing skews the data collected which is why the data and conclusions in Santa Clara doesn’t match up with other areas. Says there are no exemptions for people who have been previously infected; this makes absolutely no sense.
Dr. Henry Arnold @ 4:05:17 says making vaccines available is OK, but mandating them in Santa Clara County is not. Case counts have dropped 75% in the last 3 weeks. Why are you continuing to trample people’s lives?
At 4:06:30, the President realizes there are too many speakers so just the first 15 speakers will get 2 minutes and the rest will only get 1 minute to speak.
….
Lydia (4:29:28) is a nurse who came out of medical leave to risk her life during the pandemic. She points out that because she’s had numerous religious exemptions granted in the past, her exemption for the COVID vaccine was not honored. That is ridiculous.
Fired Nurse (4:30:38) says most of the people she took care of for COVID were vaccinated. She risked her life at the start of the pandemic to save lives. Now the County is paying her back for that service by firing her because she wouldn’t take the vaccine.
Countyguy (4:32:36) commends Sara Cody for ruining thousands of lives. Worth a listen as he is saying things that I’m sure most people are thinking, but are too polite to verbalize.
