The Rational of Commissioner Bettigole’s School Mask Policy
Philadelphia Health Commissioner, Dr. Cheryl Bettigole, was asked during the March 10th Board of Health meeting to explain the rational of reinstating the school masking requirement after a school’s spring break. For most of Philadelphia’s more than a quarter million K-12 students the City’s mask mandate will have been rescinded four weeks prior to this test of youthful obedience being tested.
Covid19 case rates (the term “cases”, once reserved to measure clinical cases of illness but now in current public health jargon means “positive tests”) have dropped to the level of statistical noise. The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) stopped asking hospitals to report their Covid19 hospitalizations and deaths in January. Dr. Fauci has moved on to warning the public about the threat that tuberculosis plays in the conflict between Ukraineand Russia. So what was Dr. Bettigole thinking.
Fellow board member Dr. Marla Gold generally has a question or two during these public meetings while the rest of the board remains mostly silent. “That’s without testing. Can you explain the rational of that masking period?”, Dr. Gold asked Bettigole.
Bettigole responded “Yeah so, we talked to the School District. There was worry that what we saw with Christmas break was the kids went and they visited friends, relatives they traveled and they came back and we saw schools, I think we had 80 schools close the first week. So just to try to avoid having that happening after spring break we figure one week of masking after break would avoid that if it was going to happen. I think with cases as low as they are now we’re less worried but we don’t know where we’re exactly going to be and spring breaks, of course, vary in time. So it’s just to avoid a post break surge that closes down schools.”
Dr. Gold should have followed up with a clarifying question but it would have thrown cold water on Bettigole’s logic. Philadelphia students were already masked after they returned from Winter break last January. Furthermore, student returns happened during the absolute peak of a viral outbreak attributed to the Omicron variant.
Bettigole, being a public health expert, should have awareness of the nature of viral outbreaks and that they appear statistically as peaks and troughs during the Winter months. Both of these observations, if acknowledged, would have likely brought embarrassment and perhaps a reevaluation of a policy that can find no scientific support.
Once a peak in outbreak is reached epidemiologists mirror the rise to predict when the outbreak will clear. This has been understood for more than 180 years hence it has achieved the rare status of law in science (see Far’s Law). Furthermore, what seems always to be hidden from view is schools were not closed due to a mass spread of debilitating illness but from testing the healthy and recording asymptomatic or false positives into the School District’s Covid19 Dashboard. In the wake of fearful rhetoric broadcast by the government health agencies, politicians and the media the School District closed schools due to over cautious metrics created by Bettigole.
The fanning of fear was exemplified by the strange and sensationalized death of an Olney Charter High School student in mid December, 2021. The senior’s death was labeled a Covid19 fatality but considering her age, 17, and the shocking rapid onset of the illness, there should have been a major CDC and Phila. Health Public Health Dept. investigation.
The student, in the span of three days, went from no respiratory symptoms and being mobile to dying from brain damage and multiple organ failures. Very little was mentioned of this case other than to highlight the family’s Go Fund Me appeal and coverage of a walk out of 40 teachers from the student’s school to demand stricter virus controls at the school. If this student’s death was due to Covid19 the case would have had international reverberations.
Commissioner Bettigole was appointed after the resignation of Commissioner Thomas Farley in 2021 because of his inexcusable ordering of the disposal of two children’s remains who were killed during the military style attack on the MOVE house in 1985 by Philadelphia Police. The City’s medical examiner had illegally lent the remains to the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University for study by their departments of anthropology and archaeology, without the family’s knowledge or permission.
Mayor Kenney hoped to restore public trust in the City’s Health Department particularly among black Philadelphians by pressuring Farley to resign and promoting Bettigole to Commissioner. Needless to say, trust has not been restored, particularly due to Bettigole’s narrow minded focus on masks, vaccines and social distancing.
The failure of Bettigole to grasp college science needs to be called out. She doesn’t believe in natural immunity, her agency has broadly disseminated disinformation based on recently admitted unreliable data, she blames the unvaccinated for Sars-CoV-2 variants, has a racialized lens through which she views public health but denies the value that vitamin D would have on a largely malnourished black population of the city and now demands our children be jerked back and forth with on again – off again masking requirements that are based on a personal hunch about what’s going on.
