“Cowards die many times before their deaths;
Shakespeare
The valiant never taste of death but once.”
I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised nor saddened by yesterday’s capitulation from Bucks County Health Department Director Dr. David Damsker. I guess that maybe we all should have seen it coming. The forces working against him are immense, dishonest, and merciless. Who could resist such pressure? How could one man possibly be the hero that we all thought Dr. Damsker was? Of course his defeat was only a matter of time.
Still, I find myself wondering “what if“. What if he had done this thing differently or that thing differently? What if I had? Is there some version of events where he perseveres to see this through? Or is this outcome simply destiny?
And then it hits me: Dr. Damsker was never really that hero at all.
When I started Bucks County Sports Association last December, I did so because every single child in Bucks County was being forced to wear a mask while actively playing sports. Did Dr. Damsker do anything about that? No, he didn’t. It wasn’t until the league that I created embarrassed him and his health department that he finally issued guidance stopping the pseudo-scientific witchcraft. He wasn’t willing to do the dirty work until someone else blazed the way.
We now know that Pennsylvania’s Disease Prevention and Control Law of 1955 places full control of local pandemic response, including public and private schools, in the hands of the local health department. Did Dr. Damsker use this fact last summer, when his guidance was ignored and 70,000+ Bucks County kids started the school year virtual? No, he didn’t. He waited for families to spend their own hard-earned money suing school districts over the issue before asserting any control. Again, he wasn’t willing to lead the way through hardship, at least not before someone else did.
The fact is that Dr. Damsker never really gave us any reason to believe that he could pull this off. So why did we?
The Ambush
Tuesday, August 17, 2021, started out as any other Tuesday for Dr. Damsker. Like normal, he had a scheduled weekly call with Bucks County hospital leaders and one with school district superintendents. At the previous week’s meeting, he was asked by the superintendents to answer several operational and logistical questions, which led to him releasing an FAQ document on Sunday. So now, on Tuesday, Dr. Damsker was prepared to join the weekly calls to follow-up on how his FAQ document was received.
Instead, he was met with a coordinated ambush designed to professionally humiliate him.
Without Dr. Damsker’s awareness, hospital executives from all six hospital systems in Bucks County had coordinated to speak about the urgent need to mask schoolchildren lest the hospitals be overrun. The ring leaders of the effort were Doylestown Health’s CEO Jim Brexler and CMO Dr. Scott Levy. Dr. Levy is the one you might remember from the Central Bucks School District fiasco, when he agreed to have his name at the very top of the 2020 CBSD Health & Safety Plan and then later admitted that he never even saw it or provided any input.
The plan was simple: the hospital executives’ job was to paint a picture so dire that Dr. Damsker would have no choice but to relent and agree that all 100,000+ schoolchildren in Bucks County should wear masks.
To accomplish that objective, the hospital executives described local “pediatric specialty hospitals” being overwhelmed and unable to cope with the stress of potential COVID-19 patients. In our region, “pediatric specialty hospitals” refers to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children, and Lehigh Valley Hospital. The plan required that the pediatric hospitals be the focus, despite all of them being outside Bucks County, because none of the six Bucks County hospitals are equipped to provide intensive pediatric care. So it doesn’t matter how Bucks County hospitals are doing (they are running at low capacity right now); it only matters how CHOP, St. Christopher’s, and Lehigh Valley are doing.
And so the hospital executives wove their web, describing that a mask-optional start to the school year would cause untold death and destruction to these already-faltering children’s hospitals. All the while, Dr. Damsker was more of a bystander than an active participant. Naturally, the whole thing was designed to put him in his place.
The Announcement
Within minutes of the meeting ending, the press release dropped. At this point, Dr. Damsker hadn’t even had enough time to fully process what went down, but we are to believe that he somehow had enough time to write a 300-word statement. Okay.
The key message from the statement is contained in the following three-sentence paragraph:
“Even under normal circumstances, hospitals in Bucks County have limited ability to treat severe pediatric cases of any type. As our hospitals must refer all serious cases to pediatric specialty hospitals in the region, many of those same specialty pediatric hospitals are already operating at close to capacity because of non-COVID illnesses and staffing issues. While our COVID-19 cases among school-aged children remain very low, hospitals are growing concerned that any pediatric COVID-19 cases could stress the system.“
Health Department Amends School Guidance After Hospitals Request Masking
Just as Commissioner Marseglia and the hospital executives had planned, the data point that moved the needle was the fact that the children’s hospitals are “already operating at close to capacity because of non-COVID illnesses and staffing issues“.
Now, first off, let’s address the fact that the hospital executives such as Jim Brexler and Dr. Scott Levy are the people directly responsible for the current staffing crisis that all hospital systems are experiencing. By mandating the COVID-19 vaccine as a requirement of employment, they have chased away a huge percentage of healthcare workers who have either moved to other health systems or left the industry. Think about how diabolic this is: these people force an incredibly unethical mandate on their workforce, then they use the resultant staffing shortage as leverage to strong-arm health department directors into doing their bidding.
As if that’s not bad enough, the implication being made is demonstrably false. The idea being presented is that regional children’s hospitals are so close to capacity that they couldn’t possibly take a COVID-19 surge. Yet here is the hospital census for three local children’s hospitals–CHOP, St. Christopher’s, and Lehigh Valley–over the last six months. In each chart, the blue line shows total hospitalizations, the orange line shows intensive care.
So here we are supposed to believe that Dr. Damsker must absolutely change the guidance that he has stuck to for months, because now the children’s hospitals are just too filled up to support any more kids. But when we look at the data, we can see–clear as day–that the situation in these hospitals has not changed at all in at least six months. The only census that is even rising at all is St. Christopher’s total hospitalizations, and that rise is smaller than the rise that occurred in February–you know, when schoolkids were still wearing masks ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
What I’m trying to show you here is that this is a complete and total hit job by all of the hospital executives in Bucks County. When I say names like Jim Brexler and Scott Levy, I want to be very clear that I am saying the names of people who want to hurt children, and they did it by lying. There is no recent change to any of the local children’s hospitals. These executives just want Bucks County kids in masks. Why?
For added measure, you can check out Bucks County hospitals like St. Luke’s, Doylestown, Grandview, and St. Mary’s to see that hospitalizations and ICU census are down all across the county. These hospitals are trending downward, not upward. Where is the crisis? These hospitals have plenty of capacity. COVID-19 admissions are a tiny percentage of overall hospitalizations. Why are the executives trying to paint a dire picture?
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Dr. Damsker’s statement (which wasn’t written by Dr. Damsker) concludes with the following:
Because of this, hospitals in Bucks County have recommended that schools begin the fall semester with a mask requirement.
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As a result of this new information provided by our partner hospitals, we support their recommendation to follow CDC guidance on masking in schools. This is particularly important for students who are unvaccinated, which includes all students under 12. We continue to urge, in the strongest possible sense, that everyone get vaccinated.
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The remainder of the county’s recently released guidance remains in effect. The Health Department will continue as an active partner with our schools and hospitals as we navigate through this ongoing fight.
Health Department Amends School Guidance After Hospitals Request Masking
The Aftermath
Immediately we are faced with several outcomes that have nothing to do with whether or not schoolkids wear masks.
First, Dr. Damsker is no longer in control. Given that he conceded his mask position to the Bucks County hospital executives, I find it safe to assume that Dr. Damsker is no longer in control of any COVID-19 decision that happens in Bucks County. If the hospital executives get to set public policy when it comes to masks on our kids, then they obviously get to do the same thing any time they want for any other issue. Dr. Damsker is no longer running the Bucks County Health Department; hospital executives are.
- “Uh-oh, the hospitals are overrun (they aren’t), better PCR+ test every student in Bucks County daily.”
- “Uh-oh, the hospitals are overrun (they aren’t), better close down gyms and restaurants.”
- “Uh-oh, the hospitals are overrun (they aren’t), better mandate vaccines.”
As far as I am concerned, Dr. Damsker just neutered himself by not standing up to this ambush. He no longer is in control of anything.
Secondly, Dr. Damsker’s brand-spanking-new idea of “Targeted Temporary Mitigation”, or TTM, goes right out the window. The press release contains zero language about any timeline. This is presumably open-ended, not temporary at all. Obviously it is not targeted, as the recommendation to mask applies to every student. So TTM lasted about 48 hours. Nice.
Thirdly, by faltering on this issue and in this manner, Dr. Damsker has stupidly justified every attack thrown at him. He has been called “Death Damsker” because his policies are just soooo wildly irresponsible. Well up until yesterday, I found it very easy to defend him by simply pointing out that Bucks County has outperformed every single neighboring county when it comes to COVID mortality. But now, Dr. Damsker mistakenly admits that a policy of his would have led to increased illness. The entire press release is predicated on the claim that WITH MASKS, schoolchildren will not flood the hospital system, but WITHOUT MASKS they will. This claim flies in the face of everything that Dr. Damsker has ever said about in-school spread. It’s like watching a prisoner of war be forced to record a confession, and the prisoner blinks and squints erratically to try to signal that he is under duress. We all know that Dr. Damsker does not agree with the premise. But he read the confession anyway. He went from “no kids in Bucks have been hospitalized” to “kids will flood the hospitals if people listen to me“. How can anyone trust his policies again?
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I feel horrible for Dr. Damsker, because I know that this is not him at all. He did not want this and he does not think this is right. He was ruthlessly ambushed by the colleagues that he collaborates with every day–people that he thought supported him. I find it incredibly tragic to have to separate from him after all that he has done for Bucks County and especially for Bucks County kids. I know where his heart is, and this is not it.
In that critical moment yesterday, the only way for Dr. Damsker to save himself and the children of Bucks County was for him to say what ReOpen Bucks has always said: “No. Make Me.” Of course, that is a lot to ask of someone when it means obvious termination and professional ostracism. We should have known all along that when push came to shove, he would not be capable of that.
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Fortunately, there are still schools in Bucks County that intend to open with a mask-optional policy on Day 1. These schools and their leaders pick up the torch from our fallen health director and carry it forward. Their perseverance through hardship will result in the truth being known. Every single day that passes, we will be able to compare mask-optional schools to mask-required schools. We will see that mask requirements in schools do not make any difference at all; they never did. And that, ultimately, is the one thing that these hospital executives and Commissioner Marseglia are desperately trying to prevent. They are “all-in” on the big lie. And the big lie is about to come crashing down.
