Health board serving Canyon County votes to stop offering COVID-19 vaccine at its clinics
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Angela Palermo, Idaho Statesman
(Idaho Statesman) — Southwest District Health will no longer offer the COVID-19 vaccine to residents who want to pay for it.
The health district’s board members voted 4-3 to stop administering the vaccine at its clinics after a handful of anti-vaccine doctors, among them Dr. Ryan Cole, who sits on the Central District Health board, gave presentations at a lengthy meeting Tuesday night. Before the meeting, the board received hundreds of public comments asking the health district to remove the vaccine from its programs.
Dr. Perry Jansen, the health district’s medical director, gave the only presentation in favor of continuing to offer the COVID-19 vaccine. The health district serves more than 300,000 people in Canyon, Adams, Gem, Owyhee, Payette and Washington counties.
“I think the main thing we want to emphasize is that we do believe in a patient’s freedom of choice for their care,” Jansen said. “We’re not talking about mandates for vaccines or anything but the ability for patients to make decisions in coordination with their doctor for their own health.”
Dr. John Tribble, the lone physician on the board, said the vaccine “presents much more risk than benefit,” and that recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to get it are “patently absurd.”
The CDC recommends people age 6 months and older get the updated COVID-19 vaccine that was released this fall.
“Given waning immunity of the population from previous exposure to the virus and from prior vaccination, we strongly encourage those who are eligible to consider receiving an updated COVID-19 vaccine to provide better protection against currently circulating variants,” Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, previously said in a statement.
Jansen awknowledged various rare but adverse effects associated with the vaccine in his presentation and indicated that the benefits outweigh the potential risks. For example, he noted that some cases of myocarditis, inflammation of the heart muscle, have been observed in young men who received an mRNA vaccine (Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech), particularly after the second dose. The CDC says that such cases are rare and that most patients saw their symptoms resolve by the time of hospital discharge.
“In this group, age 18-29, the risk of death from COVID is very small but is higher, quite a bit higher than the risk of even getting myocarditis,” Jansen said. “So you have to balance those risks.”
He said that while there are fewer hospitalizations and deaths related to the virus now than they were a few years ago, it’s still circulating, and “people are still dying from COVID.”
Boise saw a spike in the level of COVID-19 in its wastewater in early September, according to the city’s dashboard. The state and its health districts no longer keep track of the number of positive cases, so wastewater testing has become a useful tool to track local spread.
Tribble argued at the meeting that it wasn’t an issue of personal freedom, because the health district isn’t the sole provider of the COVID-19 vaccine.
“You can get this for free at Walmart,” Tribble said, though he didn’t mention that it’s free at those stores only with insurance. “If we continue to offer this, we are giving a tacit endorsement of these shots when we should not be. We are here to protect the public.”
Jansen noted that the vaccine is no longer free. Most health insurances cover it, but the updated shots cost about $200 out of pocket, he said. The health district is able to buy doses of the vaccine at a discount and offer it to uninsured residents for less.
A federal program previously covered the cost for uninsured or underinsured people.
David Wiseman, a bioscientist who said he led a research and development program at Johnson & Johnson, joined the meeting remotely via teleconference and told the board that he agreed with Jansen that patients should have the freedom to choose whether they want to get the vaccine. His issue, he said, was whether the shots should be funded by the health district.
Jansen spoke up again to clarify that the vaccines are not subsidized by the health district. The patients pay for the shots themselves, and most come in and ask for it, he said.
“We’re not using taxpayer money to buy vaccines to give to people,” Jansen said.
He reminded the board that there’s a consensus in scientific and medical communities that the COVID-19 vaccine is broadly safe and effective. He also told the board that “honestly, you’re not qualified” to determine whether the vaccine is safe or not.
Still, the board ultimately decided to stop offering it after hearing conspiracy-laden presentations from multiple doctors accused of spreading misinformation about COVID-19, including:
McCullough alleged in his presentation that the vaccines were giving people COVID-19.
“Doctors like myself are seeing patients, now patient after patient, who have taken a COVID vaccine, and because the vaccines don’t work they get COVID as well,” McCullough said.
Nearly three hours into the meeting, Kelly Aberasturi, the board chair and trustee, asked the presenters to “get it wrapped up as soon as possible,” saying that the same presentation had been delivered to the board a couple of years ago.
After the presentations, Jennifer Riebe, a commissioner for Payette County, spoke in favor of continuing to offer the vaccine at the health district’s clinics.
“I just want to remind us there are a lot of taxpayers in our district that would like to come here and take that vaccine,” Riebe said. “You’re speaking, I think, for the taxpayers that don’t want the vaccine. We have a broader constituency than that.”
Riebe expressed concerns that the board would go after other vaccines next, such as the measles, polio or shingles vaccines. The health district offers over a dozen vaccines for diseases that it says can cause hospitalization or even death, especially in infants, young children and older adults.
“I’m not comfortable with that,” she said.
The board members who voted in favor of no longer administering the vaccine at health district offices include Tribble, the physician representative; Viki Purdy, executive council representative from Adams County; Zach Brooks, commissioner from Canyon County; and Bill Butticci, commissioner from Gem County. Those who voted against were Riebe, the commissioner from Payette County; Aberasturi, the board chair and the commissioner from Owyhee County; and Lyndon Haines, the board vice-chair from Washington County.
By law, Idaho’s district boards of health must have a representative from each county in the district and a physician, if one is available to serve.
The COVID-19 vaccine is still available at pharmacies and health care clinics elsewhere in the counties the health district covers.