Tim Steller's column: As virus surges, internet epidemiologists hold sway in Cochise County

The hospitals are stuffed with COVID-19 patients again, and a school district has gone to remote learning.

People in Cochise County are dying of COVID-19 at a higher rate than in Arizona as a whole, which has one of the worst state rates in the country.

And the Cochise County Board of Supervisors just rejected $1.9 million in funding to deal with the pandemic, citing ivermectin, the Constitution and “socialist medicine.”

If the USA has been COVID-19’s garden, then Arizona is its prized plant, and Cochise County its essential oil.

The Board of Supervisors’ decision, at a Jan. 4 meeting, boggled the minds of some in Cochise County, especially those working in hospitals.

“What I see is suffering and death. I feel like that’s not what they see,” Dr. Cristian Laguillo, of Copper Queen Community Hospital in Bisbee, told me. “They are obviously in an alternate reality from me.”

The clashing realities became clear at the meeting where the supervisors turned down the money. The state grant was to be used to provide free COVID-19 testing, to continue contact tracing of infections, to expand a public health alert system, and to hire a security guard for health department locations where irate people have shown up repeatedly.

Board chair Ann English proceeded with the item as if it were a routine grant approval, but fellow Supervisors Peggy Judd and Tom Crosby had questions, doubts, alternative information. They spelled out their concerns about how the county is responding to the pandemic not just that day, but also in a biweekly meeting on COVID-19 that took place Friday morning.

Before rejecting the money, Crosby, of Sierra Vista, said, “My observation is, the overall government trend is toward threatening and eroding constitutional rights. As someone who is in a position of governmental authority, I’m not going to endorse something that could turn out like Agent Orange that messes people up.”

Agent Orange, as you likely know, was a defoliant American forces used in Vietnam. It hurt millions of Vietnamese people and U.S. soldiers exposed to it, who suffered effects that included cancer.

Crosby has used the comparison repeatedly when expressing his doubts about the mRNA vaccines -- one of which has been fully approved by the FDA -- that have significantly reduced hospitalizations and deaths from the novel coronavirus but have not prevented infection as well as hoped.

Guidance from a chiropractor

Cochise County isn’t the first in Arizona to reject funding related to COVID-19. In September, the Pinal County Board of Supervisors rejected a $3.3 million grant to improve “vaccine equity” across the county, but it reversed the decision in November.

In Cochise County, Crosby has also said the county should not be in the vaccination business at all, calling it “socialist medicine.” On Friday, he asked for changes to Cochise County’s COVID-19 vaccine consent form — a form that the county takes straight from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“When the vaccine first came out, I didn’t hear anything about needing a booster, especially not every five months or so,” he explained. “So that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about.”

He also argued that the county should disclose data on adverse reactions to the vaccines, which he has been studying on his own. This prompted a back-and-forth with Alicia Thompson, the director of Cochise County’s health department.

“As we’ve seen, the whole VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System) surveillance system is greatly misunderstood by our community members,” she said. “Anyone, at any time, can go in and put in a VAERS report. There is no oversight.”

English, the board chair, made the key point: “I want someone else’s stamp on it other than this board of supervisors, because we’re not medical experts. It shouldn’t be up to us.”

Once upon a time this request to defer to the experts might have held sway. But in this era of changing pandemic advice and doing your own research, it no longer does, especially in more conservative areas of the country like Cochise County.

In response to Crosby requesting regular updates on adverse vaccine reactions from the county, his colleague Judd said Friday that she doesn’t think she needs them.

“I’m fine with doing my own research,” she said. “I want to be able to present things here and have people at least respect us for the things we’ve learned.”

“I have some pretty good doctors that can give their own opinion, people I know in person that would do this for me and give opinions,” she went on.

“I know they’re just opinions, but they’re their truth, and they found people to back it and doctors to back it. These are medical doctors practicing — well, the one that I’m close to is actually a chiropractor, but he does a whole bunch of holistic medicine.”

“There’s going to be two truths, and we’re going to have it forever, unless we kind of like work together,” she concluded.

Grant could’ve been helpful

The truth on the ground has been one of fast-spreading COVID-19. Douglas Unified School District went to remote schooling last week because so many teachers and staff members are out with omicron that there weren’t enough adults to staff the classrooms.

“The main problems that we’re seeing in our hospitals are, No. 1, staffing,” Thompson, the county health director, told me Friday. “One of our hospitals had like 51 of their caregivers out with COVID. Being able to just staff the beds has been really a challenge.”

In Sierra Vista, “Canyon Vista (hospital) has not been below 100% capacity in weeks,” she said. “In their ED, they’re well over 100% capacity.”

The state grant could have helped the hospitals in the northern part of the county, especially, because it would have allowed the county to set up free testing sites, Thompson said. That would keep people from going to the crowded hospitals, where they have been going, for tests.

English said the board has a policy of not reversing earlier decisions, meaning it is unlikely to follow Pinal County’s lead and accept the grant later.

Meanwhile, deaths are continuing. The count was up to 494 on Saturday, which leaves a death rate from COVID-19 of 378 per 100,000 people, according to the Arizona Department of Health Services. That’s higher than the statewide rate of 349 per 100,000, which is the second highest rate among all states.

All of this is taking place in a county that lost 4.5% of its population between the 2010 and 2020 censuses.

The experts and people in the trenches, people like Thompson and Laguillo, insist vaccination is the best way to prevent deaths. But in the USA in 2022, especially in places like Cochise County, it’s the internet epidemiologists and people with chiropractor friends who may hold power.