In Southwestern Idaho a regional medical board agreed to prohibit public health clinics in that six-county region from distributing the coronavirus vaccine to the 335,000 people who live there. Not “make them optional and subject to personal choice” but prevent distribution through clinics that often but not exclusively serve lower income residents. It also means that residents of long-term care facilities in their Idaho district will no longer have easy access to coronavirus vaccines.

It’s the first time in the United States that access to a vaccine has been curtailed because of a local health board deeming it to be unsafe. The reason given was because pathologist Ryan Cole talked them into it. What Cole didn’t disclose was his medical license had recently been limited by Washington state so he now can’t practice primary care medicine and can’t prescribe medication due to evidence that he has “used his professional position as a physician to harm members of the public”, as stated in the disciplinary documents. The restrictions came after determining he had made “numerous demonstrably false” statements about the coronavirus vaccine, e.g., “all risk and no benefit.”

It’s prohibitions like this one in Idaho that cause more people to die. If it’s a choice between people dying and anti-vaccine mandates dying, it should be the latter. To the extent the Greater Idaho movement and its new legislation would foolishly accept these kinds of prohibitions as a consequence of possible success, it should go away too.

Chris Esposito

La Grande