State fires bungling vaccinator. Newspaper sides with her

Tennessee has one of the lowest covid 19 vaccination rates in the nation. On Monday, the state fired the woman in charge of vaccinations. The Tennessean newspaper sided with the bungling bureaucrat in a story that did not mention the low vaccination rate until Paragraph 18.

This is the local journalism you are supposed to support.

The story by Brett Kelman began, "The Tennessee state government on Monday fired its top vaccination official, becoming the latest of about two dozen states to lose years of institutional knowledge about vaccines in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic."

Considering how poorly those states handled the pandemic, that institutional knowledge was about as useful as a square bowling ball.

Kelman scarcely tried to get the other side as he wrote a piece sympathetic to the canned bureaucrat, Michelle Fiscus. The newspaper quickly gave her a separate story under the headline, "Tennessee's former top vaccine official: 'I am afraid for my state.'"

She became embroiled in a spat with legislators over a program to vaccinate teens without parental permission.

Teens are at the low end of covid 19 risk. This was a diversion from her incompetence. The story went on and on about that.

 

But Paragraphs 18 and 19 hit the reason she should have been fired. The paragraphs said, "These changes will likely hamper Tennessee’s vaccination efforts, which already lag behind much of the nation. As of Monday, federal and state data showed 38% of Tennesseans were fully vaccinated and the state’s rate of new vaccinations was idling.

"At the current pace, Tennessee won’t reach 50% vaccinated until March, according to health department estimates in an internal report obtained by The Tennessean."

And who is that on?

The medical director for vaccine-preventable diseases and immunization programs at the Tennessee Department of Health.

And who would that be?

Michelle Fiscus.

Instead of being partisan and anti-Republican in his news reporting, Brett Kelman would better serve his readers by being skeptical of bureaucratic claims.

The story ended, "Fiscus is at least the 25th official to leave a state’s top vaccination position since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a USA Today investigation published earlier this month. Most of these officials quit or retired earlier than planned, sometimes because of frustration with the politicization of the virus, USA Today reported. While these officials are not well known to the general public, they are a backbone of the nation’s vaccination system, both within a pandemic and without."

They are the backbone of a system that is broken. Instead of worshiping them, USA Today and the rest of the Gannett chain of newspapers (which includes the Tennessean) should be asking tough questions about why covid 19 spread despite masks, social distancing, and shutting down the country for months at a time.