Governor McKee, I believe it was your December 15th Press Conference when responding to a question about your highly restrictive policies, your comment was something like, “If anyone has any other ideas, I’d love to hear them.”
I’m penning this open letter because I have other ideas, and as it takes several weeks to months to get an appointment with your office, and the RI press corps does not seem interested in accurately covering anything from Republicans recently, I felt the only way to offer these “other ideas” before it’s too late is through an open letter.
Governor, there is a storm coming and you are not preparing for it.
The press release announcing your December 15 press conference began “Governor McKee Announces Comprehensive Actions to Address COVID-19 Cases and Alleviate Pressure on Hospital Systems While Keeping Schools Open for In-Person Learning and Preventing Economic Disruption to Small Businesses.” You then laid out a series of extremely strict, crippling requirements for both the citizenry of, and the businesses in the state of Rhode Island.
Governor, with all sincerity – the actions you announced will do little to nothing to “alleviate pressure” on our hospitals, keep our schools open for in-person learning, and especially they will not prevent economic interruption in our business community. My statements are not political in nature, and I am not criticizing your approach for partisan reasons. I am writing to you to point out that you are not focused on the right things necessary to achieve the goals stated in the headline of your press release.
First, the burden on our hospital system has been growing since far before the COVID pandemic, however this health crisis has expedited the inevitable and total collapse of our healthcare system, and your policies are regrettably hastening that. We are constantly updated on how our hospitals are “near capacity” and I think that by now most have come to recognize that this statement, while used so ubiquitously, is misleading. Our hospitals are nearing “staffed capacity.” Which means the estimated 30% of hospital and medically licensed personnel across RI you fired are no longer able to work in the healthcare industry, thus reducing the “total capacity” of a 100 bed facility to 70 beds if they have the proper staffing (this doesn’t even include the increased staffing law that you signed this year which goes into effect soon.)
Furthermore, the most recent figures that we’ve seen are that 11-13% of hospital admissions were with or from COVID. That leaves the remaining 87-89% of admissions to things other than COVID. We have also further identified that far too many people have been putting off routine procedures, screenings and doctor visits for the past 2 years which is already contributing to an increase in hospitalizations now, and will incontrovertibly contribute to an imminent increase in hospitalizations for much more serious health reasons in the months and years to come.
When we factor in the burn-out of our healthcare professionals and combine that with Rhode Island’s anemic Medical Reimbursement Rate which helps fund all medical positions and is especially impactful in the CNA and social work fields which are relied upon in every single healthcare setting from hospitals, nursing homes, and any other congregate care setting, we are hemorrhaging healthcare workers and an unrecoverable rate.
The professionals on the one end of the spectrum including doctors, nurses, LPNS, PAs, X-Ray Techs et al are burning out, retiring early, or leaving their fields at an alarming rate. The professionals on the other end of the spectrum including CNAs, social work staff and other support positions that are paid in part through Medicaid Reimbursement, are leaving Rhode Island because they know that that they can either drive an extra 10-15 minutes and go work over the state line in CT or MA and earn up to 50% more for the same job, or they are leaving those fields altogether because the private market has increased its wages due to crippling government programs and mandates where instead of changing bed-pans for $14/hr., they can ring groceries for $19/hr. or flip burgers for $17/hr. And they are choosing to do exactly that. We as a state have been grossly negligent in maintaining a competitive Medicaid Reimbursement Rate.
As has been clearly established, the Omicron Variant of COVID is spreading rapidly and it comprises 75% of all diagnoses in the US as of 12/21/21. There is also clear evidence that this variant has much less concern about who is vaccinated. Clearly this is a variant that spreads more easily and despite all the masking and proof-of-vaccination requirements, will not just continue to spread, but will spread exponentially.
If the RI government is telling us that our hospitals are at “critical capacity” right now, then we are in for one hell of a winter without adopting proactive measures instead of reactive measures. This much is clear – the number of COVID hospital admissions will increase dramatically, and the number of people leaving healthcare with increase as well. FEMA aid notwithstanding, our hospitals will become buildings lined with gurneys of suffering patients waiting hours to days to be treated or even seen. These gurneys will fill the rooms, line the hallways, and take over breakrooms. Patients seeking admission to the hospital for otherwise serious issues will be turned away and told they are better off at home. We won’t recognize our healthcare system anymore.
Finally, one of the impending federal mandates for small businesses is to have unvaccinated employees “provide a negative test every week” in order to remain employed. As of 12/21/2021 the federal mandate has not kicked in and most companies are not enforcing a “weekly test” policy. As of this moment we are seeing 6-8 day turnaround times on PCR tests, and the “instant” antigen testing system in RI is not even accepting appointments for 4-5 days. This rush on testing, and the government’s typical reactionary measures to it are going to make the “once per week testing” option for employers impossible, compelling them to release even more of their staff, and place even more people into immediate financial crisis because as we know, the state refuses to pay unemployment to these citizens. This will be the next crisis to deal with – the overwhelming number of people who are not allowed to work, nor are they being allowed to use the unemployment insurance that they themselves funded. This will lay irrevocable devastation across Rhode Island’s small business community.
“Other Ideas”
This can all be avoided. Instead of turning to heavy-handed mandates that will be enforced by government agents raiding businesses and issuing fines and closure notices over who has a mask on or who has the most recent booster – we should be focused on solving the problem and not oppressing and punishing our already suffering citizens and small businesses. Take all those resources – be they financial, human or consumable and redirect your energy toward helping people rather than punishing them.
On the same day as your press conference, December 15, a constituent reached out to me because they had been exposed to the virus, started feeling ill, and as a sufferer with acute COPD, they took a rapid test which came back positive. By this time, the individual was having breathing issues and their doctor prescribed Monoclonal Antibody (MAB) treatment on the spot. MAB is a therapy that is infused via IV and has had remarkable results in completely reversing the progression of the virus and has eliminated or reduced the length of hospitalizations more than any other treatment. This individual called their local provider of MAB and was told there was an 8-10 day wait to get in for an appointment. This person then called several other providers and was told the same thing – 8 to 10 days for an appointment. The individual then called me. I quickly learned that regardless of where they go, the wait will be the same because the state is overrun with requests and cannot fill them all. This was last week. A mere six weeks prior, an individual could have walked into a MAB center anywhere in RI and received their infusion on the spot. Last week they waited 8-10 days, and the full outbreak hasn’t even really started. A person in dire need of MAB will not survive 8-10+ days waiting for an appointment, and they will inevitably be hospitalized.
Why must they wait 8-10 days? Is it because we don’t have enough medicine? Maybe we don’t have enough facilities to use? Maybe it’s far too expensive and the insurance companies won’t cover it. No. None of those things are the problem. The problem is that we fired the staff necessary to administer the infusions. Yes, it’s that simple – we have everything we need except the people to administer the lifesaving treatment.
That’s right. There is plenty of medicine for this treatment. The health insurance companies in RI are absolutely begging to pay for every cost associated with administering MAB because those costs are insignificant when compared to those of a hospital stay. Any medical or EMT facility can be used to provide the infusion. In fact, we could be using our local fire departments and ambulance corps and their staff to be administering the infusions right in our own communities. All we need are licensed paramedics, and the health insurance industry will help set them up with everything they need and train them to start curing people right in their own towns. But we don’t have the staff because we fired them.
Now for the solution. First, a person seeking MABs already has COVID, so the hyperbolic “danger” they are in while being treated by an unvaccinated healthcare worker is moot. Next, reverse course on the ridiculous vaccine mandates for healthcare providers, or at a minimum allow those with naturally acquired immunity who are qualified to administer MAB infusions to staff these infusion centers that we can set up in every community. In fact, all you really need to do is look in your own back yard of Cumberland to see that their Fire Departments have done exactly what I describe here and are saving peoples’ lives and keeping them out of the hospital on a daily basis using this community model with paramedics.
Governor, if you want to keep hospitals functional through the impending onslaught of COVID cases during this winter, please talk to our health insurance providers, take charge of your own Department of Health and demand they create procedures for reactivating the licenses of, and working with the nurses, paramedics and doctors who’ve been terminated to bring them back in this capacity to help mitigate the inevitable increase in COVID hospitalizations. If you have the courage to lead on this, you very well may be able to say that you prevented the collapse of our healthcare system.
This is the leadership that our state needs. You can continue to do what everyone else is doing by playing “follow the leader”, and you’ll continue to get more of the same of what each of those “followers” have. But if you dare to be a leader and institute bold policies that are scientifically proven to achieve the goals you state as your own, you may just pull this off. If you stay on the same course, our state will continue to suffer, only much greater.
Michael Chippendale is a Republican state representative for district 40, covering Coventry, Foster, and Glocester.
Featured image by Hiroshi Tsubono on Unsplash.
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Enforced use of the term, “Latinx,” is exactly the cultural imperialism that progressives claim to oppose. As usual, they only actually oppose the forced spread of ideas that don’t jibe with their own beliefs. Just look at how Marisa Penaloza writes about a Pew Research Center survey finding “only 3% [of Latinos] say they use the term.” I’ve emphasized the key words in the following:
- “Latinx Is A Term Many Still Can’t Embrace”
- “Latinx has not caught on.“
- “only 23% of Hispanic adults have heard of the term Latinx.”
- “Some argue that Latinx is not Spanish enough, but Vazquez says they need to remember that ‘Spanish…is the original language of colonization.'”
The condescending attitude is that change is inevitable, and resistance is retrograde. When it’s useful to claim, progressives insist that “our Black and Brown brothers and sisters” have “beautiful cultures.” When those cultures disagree, the script instantly flips to a reminder that brown people were colonizers, too.
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Interestingly, Dr. Michael Fine is against non-vaccination shaming, mainly because he isn’t very confident in the vaccines we have against COVID. One gets the impression, however, that he makes that concession in order to promote his real goal:
If everyone stops going to bars and restaurants TODAY, and stops shopping TODAY, we’ll see a drop in community transmission in about ten days, or two to three generations of spread. The load on hospitals and other health care folks will start to drop in about two weeks.
… we can just stay home for a bit, take the responsibility for public health back from a government that puts business and commerce before human lives, and, in doing so, rebuild our democracy just a little, doing for others what we would want others do for us.
He doesn’t explain how destroying our fellow citizens’ livelihoods furthers democracy. Some might think doing so will make more people dependent on the government that has so disappointed Dr. Fine.
It’s a strange ideology, socialism, desiring to consolidate power in a few as a first principle against all evidence of wisdom.
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Kelly O’Neill reports for WJAR that the Salvation Army is 11% behind on donations in Rhode Island and 30% in New Bedford. Whether the percentages are “behind the goal” or “behind last year” isn’t clear, but it amounts to tens of thousands of dollars in this area. Rhode Island’s state coordinator, Roger Duperree points to staffing shortages for bell ringers, but his New Bedford counterpart doesn’t seem so sure:
“Last year, we met our goal. This is strange for me this year because we are not close to the goal,” Maj. Michael Jung said.
Outside of the mainstream bubble, however, these results aren’t surprising at all (regarding both the donations and the volunteers). If you don’t exist entirely within the boundaries of approved information, you know that a wave of disapproval swept through the country when an internal guidance document came to light showing the Salvation Army to have swallowed the racist, antiracist pill:
The resource guide itself contains “five sessions” to “help delve into the topic of racism and the Church.” Those include entire sections titled. “Self-Care for People of Color,” “What is Whiteness?,” “Lamenting and Repenting — a Conversation Guide,” among others.
The guileless Christians in the organization helpfully expose just how racist this ideology is, admonishing the reader to “stop trying to be ‘colorblind’,” because not being racist “actually ignores the God-given differences we all possess, as well as the beautiful cultures of our Black and Brown brothers and sisters.” As is typical, all cultures are beautiful… unless you’re white. In that case, your culture must be deconstructed to show the decidedly non-beautiful core of “white supremacy.”
For people with white skin, “a sincere apology is necessary.” In response to donation shortfalls across the country, the organization hid the guidance in a desk and offered a palpably non-sincere apology for having been maliciously misunderstood. Maybe some donors were satisfied with that lack of repentance, but when certificates “redeemable for one white apology in lieu of a cash donation” are circulating widely, at least part of the Salvation Army’s mystery may be solved.
Featured image by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash.
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With Dune back in the popular culture, all people of good will and right mind should be relieved that it includes one of the most profound moments of the book, captured here in the prior movie adaptation because it was the best clip I could find quickly:
The quick summary is this: The priestess lady is testing the protagonist. She presents a choice: he sticks his hand in a box that produces pain, and if he can take ownership of his will and keep his hand in the box, he lives; otherwise, she’ll prick him with deadly poison, and he’ll die. The test will prove he’s human.
Something of the same sentiment can be found in an effectively censored speech by Abigail Shrier at Princeton University reproduced on Bari Weiss’s Substack. For context, Shrier rocketed into the hall of cancelation fame when she dared to publish a book investigating the dreadfully harmful contagion of teenage girls’ proclaiming themselves to be something other than teenage girls only to have their schools and doctors abet their adolescent impulses toward irrevocable self-mutilation against the will of their parents. Here’s the profound conclusion:
I’m 43, which I realize makes me very old to many of you. But not so long from now, you’ll wake up and be 43 yourselves. And when I look back on my life thus far, it occurs to me that the decisions of which I am most proud—the ones that strike like an unexpected kiss—are not the times when I obeyed the algorithm. They’re the times when I defied it and felt, for a moment, the magic and power of being alive. When I felt, even for an instant, the exquisite joy of not being anyone’s subject. When I had the unmistakable sense that I’ve existed for a purpose, that I stood the chance of leaving the world better than I found it. You don’t get any of that through lock-step career achievement and you certainly don’t get that by being the Left’s star pupil.
The lesson I hope we’ve learned since Frank Herbert first published Dune in 1965 (but fear we have not) is that we shouldn’t assume that the truth is the opposite of what others say it is so that we can prove our autonomy by rebelling against it. That is basically what the transgender craze is bringing to life, but it is merely another way of lacking free will. The difference is only that the computer algorithm that controls you introduces a negative sign at some point.
Imagine not a pain box, but an affirmation box, and the priestess will kill you as a non-human if you do not withdraw.
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One can’t fault individuals for making the best career decisions for themselves at each step, and we should assume that every professional is doing the best he or she can to do a job well and honestly in the moment. Still, every time a Rhode Island journalist proves that a job in government communications is an integral part of the career path, the credibility of the whole enterprise takes a hit.
This time, as Katherine Gregg of the Providence Journal notes on Twitter, it’s Daniel Kittredge of the Cranston Herald, joining the Rhode Island Senate’s communication office.
This is a problem that the journalism industry has to work out. The public can’t trust a news media that is interwoven with government. The decision to publish unhelpful stories, or even unhelpful details within otherwise neutral, or even healthy, stories, could be a future obstacle to that lucrative PR job.
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In some alternative reality, the Western world is having an intelligent, informed, science-based discussion about biology and the appropriate measures to take against COVID-19. In that world, an article like this, by Joseph Mercola in the Epoch Times, isn’t limited to a relatively unknown publication but is being widely discussed on all forms of major media and acknowledged by government officials:
The antibodies declined in the first months after infection, as should be expected, then leveled off to about 10% to 20% of the maximum concentration detected. In a commentary on the study, Andreas Radbruch and Hyun-Dong Chang of the German Rheumatism Research Centre Berlin explained:
“This is consistent with the expectation that 10–20% of the plasma cells in an acute immune reaction become memory plasma cells, and is a clear indication of a shift from antibody production by short-lived plasma cells to antibody production by memory plasma cells. This is not unexpected, given that immune memory to many viruses and vaccines is stable over decades, if not for a lifetime.”
Of course, we shouldn’t go too far in the other direction and should acknowledge that much remains unknown, but the idea that no information outside the rah-rah vaccination line should be recognized is bizarre.
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I’m honestly baffled that a coalition of “open government organizations” would call on Democrat Governor Dan McKee to reinstate executive orders allowing government bodies to meet remotely again:
We therefore once again strongly urge you to reinstate your earlier executive orders so as to permit public bodies to meet virtually and thereby allow the public to monitor and, where authorized, participate in those meetings remotely. The discouraging and admittedly tiring length of time that we have all had to deal with the effects of Covid demands more, not less, attention to ensuring public oversight of the democratic process.
We’d be better off mandating that government be completely closed down except for vital services.
COVID-driven remote meetings set open government back decades in Rhode Island, made it much more difficult to hold government officials accountable, and put a huge wet blanket on public participation. From my experience, this has been so obvious that one almost has to conclude that activists are manipulating ACCESS/RI to advance the complete antithesis of what they claim to support.
The media people on the list, like Scott Pickering of the East Bay Media Group and Ethan Shorey of the Valley Breeze, are perhaps well meaning and only hoping to make their employees’ lives easier. However, those with any experience advocating for issues, like Steven Brown of the RI ACLU and John Marion of Common Cause RI, should see the manifest problems.
Sure, it would be great if all meetings had to be live-streamed, recorded, and made available in streamable online archives for on-demand viewing. But allowing elected officials to go back to the near-complete situational control of participating in public meetings as if they were corporate staff meetings is a recipe for corruption.
Having the power, with the click of a button, to completely silence undesired speakers (as if they no longer existed) and easily enforce the most strict and unreasonable time limits, while preventing the need to endure so much as a tense room, is every corrupt official’s dream. Open government groups ought to be the most concerned organizations about this step, not its lead advocates, which makes you wonder where their sympathies actually lie.
Featured image by Justin Katz.
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This isn’t exactly a difficult political opportunity to identify, but it’s fun to wonder whether somebody on Seth Magaziner’s campaign team listened to my weekly segment with John DePetro, yesterday:
We must address the dangerous hospital staffing shortage that has created a state of crisis in emergency rooms and other care delivery facilities across the Rhode Island.
Today, I proposed the following measures to address the emergency room staffing shortage…
He goes on to list precisely the sort of steps the state should be taking (rather than trying to put residents in a mandatory bubble) to alleviate healthcare provider shortages.
The caveat (naturally) is that our agreement is only on the short term. Magaziner’s a progressive, so with a horizon past the political opportunity of an immediate crisis, I’m sure his preferred policies remain of the sort that destroy nations.
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I was perfectly comfortable receiving the Pfizer vaccine against COVID. I investigated how they work and reviewed the numbers, and decided it made sense. Since I wrote that post in May, however, public health authorities and those who’ve put them on a pedestal have continued to sound like pitchmen rather than scientists, which has made me increasingly reluctant to follow their advice.
Most confoundingly, a level or two down from the experts in the range of informed citizens, people are sharing pro-vaccination stories that even advocates should see through. One such person recently shared a CNBC article by health and wellness reporter Cory Stieg. The headline this person was promoting is pretty nearly a lie: “Natural immunity doesn’t protect you as well as the Covid vaccines — here’s why.”
The article does not support that assertion in the least. It’s clickbait. The most Stieg can claim is:
If you’ve recovered from Covid, you do have a degree of immunity against the virus — but the amount can vary significantly, based on the severity of your illness and how long ago you recovered.
Currently, there’s no known way to test your immunity levels.
Well, duh. But if “there’s no known way to test your immunity levels,” doesn’t that apply to vaccines, too? Of course it does. That’s why such matters are judged through experiments and statistical analyses, and statistically, natural immunity is better. Indeed, as I’ve pointed out, the confusion comes from the fact that public health authorities are counting anybody in whom the most-sensitive test is finding any trace of COVID as a “case.” The more reasonable conclusion is that they don’t have immunity because they weren’t really infected. (And yes, that means the scare numbers of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are dramatically overblown.)
The failure of experts to lead the way in a reasoned and honest presentation of the facts justifiably increases skepticism in the public even of things that prove reasonable when investigated. By the numbers, three circumstances are roughly equal when it comes to determining that you’re of reduced risk:
- One, if you’ve had COVID, especially if you’ve actually had it, rather than simply testing positive after being identified through contact tracing
- Two, if you’ve been vaccinated
- Three, if you’re young
Sure, none of these factors cancel out, so the person at the least risk, which means almost no risk at all, is the one who fits in all three categories, but the incremental benefit is fractional and well within the range of what a reasonable public health regime ought to leave to the individual, particularly when there’s any risk at all of side effects from the vaccines.
Unfortunately, we’re not being governed or guided by a reasonable public health regime, but a fleet of vaccine salespeople swept up in an ideological campaign.
Featured image by the CDC on Unsplash.
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