Philadelphia Health Commissioner Cheryl Bettigole Resigns. May We Never Forget Her
Dr Cheryl Bettigole will be leaving her post this week as Philadelphia’s Health Commissioner. Over two and a half years, she presided over the worst of Philadelphia’s uncritical embrace of the nation’s disastrous COVID response – shutting down commerce and culture, isolating the healthy, suppressing effective repurposed drugs, and promoting a hastily-developed “vaccine” that has had more reported deaths and injuries, to the CDC, than all previous vaccines combined.
Dr. Bettigole took over the job from disgraced former Commissioner Thomas Farley who resigned over his ordered destruction of children’s remains collected after the police bombing and burning of the MOVE house in West Philadelphia in 1985.
Farley was quickly hired as Senior Deputy Director for the Community Health Administration of the Nation’s only major black majority city, Washington D.C. where he was immediately denounced as a “monster” by local activists.
The media has reported on Bettigole’s departure with mostly very brief remarks on the historic period that she oversaw. Only one media account tacitly mentioned her mask mandates, who’s on again, off again routine, which made national news. No media account mentioned her vaccine mandate for all people aged 5 and up. An unprecedented requirement needed to be met to eat at a restaurant or attend any catered event in the city in the winter of 2022.
Bettigole will be quietly leaving the Department of Public Health with an incredible number of unanswered questions regarding her management of the COVID crisis a response that completely crippled a major city and upended the future of more than a quarter million of its children.
Perhaps the largest unanswered question and one her successor will face is what resulted from the PDOPH’s coerced experimental gene-based vaccine on the one and a quarter million Philadelphia who received them? Let us hope that the new head of the agency, whose purpose is primarily to monitor the health conditions of our city, will hold the integrity to make that inquiry.
Philadelphia is not alone failing to take an account of the historic medical interventions made during the COVID crisis. In fact, City Council members and Philadelphia’s representatives in Harrisburg are loath to even mention COVID by name. A bill, HR 143, put before the Health Committee this past fall and titled “Directing the Joint State Government Commission to conduct a study on the Commonwealth’s response to COVID-19” was, incredibly, amended to remove any mention of COVID-19.
Dr. Bettigole holds a common belief amongst health authorities that vaccines even experimental ones pose no serious risks. It represents a caviler position that ignores decades of science but is requisite for attaining positions in public health. In an interview with WPVI Ch. 6 on August 12th, 2021, when answering a question about why pregnant women need to take the COVID-19 shots, she stated that “this concern about the long-term side effects really doesn’t relate to the science of vaccines.” “There has never been a side effect from a vaccine more than six weeks out.”
Dr. Bettigole’s rose through the ranks in the Department of Public Health championing the idea that the disgraceful outcomes for people of color in our health care system are primarily the products of “historic and systemic racism“. What that means in a city that has had a majority of black politicians sitting in its mayor’s office, city council seats, and school board for over 40 years was never articulated by Dr. Bettigole during her two and a half-year tenure.
Problems that face black people in Philadelphia like poverty and malnutrition were not her focus. When questioned about why her department was not focusing on vitamin D deficiency instead of aggressively pushing an investigational pharmaceutical product, the PDOPH dismissed vitamin D as “having been studied and found not to be beneficial for treating COVID-19,” The report on the public hearing held on December 23, 2021.
The science behind the use of vitamin D to prevent and heal respiratory illness has been well established. There was clear science in the months before the vaccine rollout that this safe supplement can prevent hospitalization and death from Covid-19. In fact, it is difficult to find a COVID-19 death in anyone whose blood serum levels were not deficient in D. Most importantly, in Dr. Bettigole’s case, the populations most likely to suffer from a deficiency of vitamin D are people with dark skin shades. Over half of Philadelphians fall into this group.
From the very beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, Dr. Bettigole drummed up fear in the public about viral contagion. Avoiding panic is part of what public health officials are trained to do. There is ample evidence that generating public fear in these contexts can cause mass sociogenic illness and fill hospitals. Regardless, public health officials globally resorted to efforts to incite fear by constantly announcing rising “case” numbers and hugely overestimating the infection risk.
Dr. Bettigole conveniently forgot that a case of disease, historically, had a wholly different meaning. It once referred to a clinically diagnosed case of disease, i.e., a sick person: “There were ten cases of tuberculosis in the prison.” The public was not informed of the new meaning and that a test, not designed for diagnosis and inaccurate in many ways, was giving false positive readings on a frequent basis. Bettigole exploited this flaw to great effect.
Dr. Bettigole on college Covid rates and the mandate August 21st, 2021.
Grossly misleading and inflated case numbers were the basis for most policy guidelines set by the PDOPH. Dr. Bettigole’s Casedemic approach was best exemplified, quite glaringly, when she answered a question from the press on why she instituted a COVID-19 vaccine mandate for all students in higher education in Philadelphia. She stated that vaccination rates amongst college students were the lowest in the city, but their “case” rates of COVID were the highest. But was this demographic any more clinically ill than normal? Bettigole’s PDOPH wouldn’t tell you.
How many disabilities and deaths this college mandate caused may never be calculated, but at the University of Pennsylvania, at least four students died suddenly in the year following the mandate. For details on how the Moderna shots can disable a strong and healthy Chestnut Hill College sophomore, please read about the plight of Andre Cherry.
Dr. Bettigole was one of the last officials in the US to relax restrictions on the unvaccinated, after it was revealed that the vaccines were never tested for their effect on transmission and, if anything, vaccinated people are actually more likely to spread the disease symptom-free than the unvaccinated. Adding to the absurdity, unvaccinated Philadelphians were required to wear a mask in public settings; even N-95 masks pose no barrier to the spread of a virus that is hundreds of times smaller than pores in the mask. N-95 masks are prohibited from being used for asbestos removal and these masks will jet exhaled vapors out of the many gaps in their seal.
But Dr. Bettigole’s zeal went so far as to enforce the masking policy in Philadelphia’s Pre-K programs throughout the city, even after the mask mandate was lifted for K–12. The policy, set by the US Department of Health and Human Services, came in early 2022 and was roundly criticized by even most of the pro-mask contingent. When this policy was announced in December 2021, Dr. Bettigole stated, “We strongly support the new rules issued by the Head Start program.”
Dr. Bettigole’s knowledge of vaccine science was further tested when she absurdly accused the unvaccinated for the proliferation of virus variants (listen to WHYY interview above). One may easily forget that reporting on variants only begins with arrival of Delta in spring 2021, months after the shots were rolled out. No variants were reported in the 16 or so months Sars-CoV2 was circulating pre-vaccine. When vaccinating into a viral pandemic this evolutionary development is expected by vaccinologists and was predicted by vaccine scientist Geert Vanden Bossche.
The most profound legacy Dr. Bettigole will be leaving behind is the impact her public health policies had on Philadelphia’s children. Like all the PBOPH’s Covid policies the ones targeting schools were, perhaps, the most devoid of scientific support. Prior to the mRNA rollout children were remarkable untouched by this disease. The Oxford Covid Calculator which gives a risk assessment won’t even allow you to input an age under 18 as the chances are less than 1 in a million of dying from the virus.
Epidemiologists counsel that children can be out front, providing the core of a population’s herd immunity. The PDOPH ignored this closing schools and using rhetoric that made people perceive children as a threat. Never before had a society sought to protect adults at the expense of children.
Philadelphia schoolchildren were already lagging significantly below national averages before the COVID crisis. Students lost nearly a year of classroom instruction, and math and reading skills predictably plummeted, particularly among children in lower-income households. There has been some recovery in learning, but Philadelphia still remains below its pre-Covid baseline, and now absenteeism and truancy makes frequent headlines. There can be no hiding this lost generation of young people resulting these failed public health policies.
Furthermore, in an effort to press these novel “vaccines” on children, the Federal Department of Education, Governor Wolf’s office, and the PDOPH devised a way to make extracurricular activities like after-school sports require the COVID shots. It turned out that the greatest achievement Dr. Bettigole noted for the restaurant vaccine mandate was its value in increasing pediatric rates of uptake. “The thing that I found most compelling (about the effectiveness of the vaccine mandate on restaurants) is the very large increase in our pediatric vaccination rate. We are more than 20% above the national average. That is just a huge difference…”
The vaccine mandate helped Philadelphia lead the nation in vaccine rates in 5-12 year olds.
History will not look kindly on this misguided era of public health. Dr. Cheryl Bettigole’s actions as Commissioner of Public Health cannot be defended, and this is the principal reason why any type of retrospective analysis will never be conducted. Under Dr. Bettigole, the PDOPH abandoned the long-established public health playbook regarding pandemics, and what resulted is likely the greatest human disaster Philadelphia has seen in modern times.
Let us hope that never again will the public let health officials make it up as they go along. Novel ideas like social distancing and 6 feet of separation, barring loved ones from death beds and funerals, double masking, isolation, and quarantining the healthy, shuttering schools and churches for months, contact tracing after the virus had girdled the earth multiple times, and putting all bets on a new, unproven technology—these, we now know, were all products of pure speculation never before tested or even researched.
Dr. Cheryl Bettigole will stand as a living landmark for this public health hutzpah. May we never forget her.