“If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”
Hemingway
Over the last month, political forces have conspired to take down Dr. David Damsker, Director the Bucks County Health Department. If this plot sounds familiar to you, it’s because the same exact thing happened around this time last year. Despite enduring various attacks last Summer and Fall, Dr. Damsker was eventually proven right on every COVID-19 mitigation effort that he implemented. Now, as we enter the 3rd school year that is affected by COVID hysteria, Dr. Damsker has once again endured nakedly political attacks. This time they appear to have succeeded in silencing him.
Before we get into these attacks, allow me to show you the one chart that detonates a thermonuclear warhead on anyone who would claim that Dr. Damsker has not done enough to stop COVID-19. Below is a chart of total COVID-19 mortality in all nine Southeastern Pennsylvania counties, plus the state of Pennsylvania. You’ll notice that Bucks County, under Dr. Damsker’s leadership, has the second-lowest mortality (including a lower mortality than the state as a whole).
Despite this chart, which shows Dr. Damsker has clearly outperformed neighboring counties and the state, political hacks would have you believe that he is somehow “reckless”. Let me be as clear as I can: Dr. Damsker and the Bucks County Health Department have demonstrably outperformed neighboring health departments in Montgomery & Philadelphia Counties AND the Pennsylvania Department of Health. That is a fact. The chart is right there for all to see. Anyone, in any position, anywhere, who would claim that Dr. Damsker has been negligent in his management of COVID-19 must also claim that the health departments of Philadelphia County, Montgomery County, and Pennsylvania are all more negligent. If they don’t, then they are obviously blinded by political hackery.
So who are these political hacks who are so desperate to take down Dr. Damsker?
Takedown Timeline
August 15 – A Few Bad Superintendents
After months of preparing our community for a completely normal 2021-2022 school year, Dr. Damsker released his ” 2021-2022 School Reopening Guidance and Frequently Asked Questions“. This guidance was released in direct response to a few adversarial Bucks County superintendents claiming that they could not open school unless Dr. Damsker provided further guidance on key issues.
The August 15th guidance mostly maintains the usual, well-understood positions that Dr. Damsker has taken. School should be as normal as possible. Masks should be optional. Healthy children should go to school. It introduces the concept of “Targeted Temporary Mitigation” (TTM), which essentially says that any mitigation effort should always be targeted and limited in time, not broadly applied or open-ended.
Little did we know at the time that August 15th would be the last piece of guidance we’d ever receive from Dr. Damsker himself without undue political influence.
August 17 – Hospital Executives
After successfully side-stepping the pressure from school superintendents and keeping schools on track to open normally, Dr. Damsker met his first high-scale political ambush on August 17th. Senior executives from all six Bucks County hospitals, led by Doylestown Health executives Jim Brexler and Dr. Scott Levy, informed Dr. Damsker that local pediatric hospitals will overflow with COVID-19 hospitalizations if schoolchildren are not made to wear masks. This attack was highly disingenuous in nature, as local hospitals (including the pediatric hospitals like CHOP and St. Christopher’s) are running at totally normal capacity and have been for many months. I described this lie in my article about Damsker’s response to the ambush. Despite my overreaction in that article, Dr. Damsker had no real choice but to accept what the hospital executives were saying (despite it being untrue) and issue county-wide support for the hospitals’ recommendation that schoolchildren mask up.
As an update, here are the census charts for all 3 local hospitals that support intensive pediatric care: CHOP, St. Christopher’s, and Lehigh Valley. All hospital census data is collected from here.
If these charts look like “business as usual” to you, that’s because this is exactly what “business as usual” is like. Not a single one of these three pediatric hospitals is even at its highest run rate of the year. Yet back in Winter time, when their admissions were higher, you didn’t hear news stories about collapsing pediatric care, did you?
Besides the pediatric hospitals running at normal capacity, there is an even-more embarrassing reality for Brexler and Dr. Levy. Their claim about how dire the situation was (when it wasn’t) was immediately followed by the end of the Summer case surge in Bucks County. In the chart below, you’ll see that Bucks County cases peaked on August 24, exactly one week after Brexler and Dr. Levy claimed that doom and gloom was just around the corner.
Seriously, do “health experts” ever get anything right? Is Dr. Damsker the only one? I mean, the 7-day case average in Bucks county has been declining for over two weeks now— have you heard a peep about that from Brexler or Dr. Levy? No, no you haven’t. Just lol.
August 23 – Acting Secretary of Health Alison Beam (not a doctor)
Fortunately for the good citizens of Bucks County, the August 17th ambush on Dr. Damsker fell relatively flat. School board directors up and down the County understood the political maneuvering being done by the hospital execs, and they held the line. After the dust settled, the August 17th press release had not moved the needle one iota. School districts that were bound for mask optional policies before the press release stayed true to their course, as did school districts that were bound for mask required policies. The hospital executives completely failed. So it was time for the political machinery to escalate firepower.
Alison Beam, Acting Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Health, who is not a doctor, sent a letter to the Bucks County Commissioners under the pretense that the Commissioners would then use that letter as leverage to get Dr. Damsker to go even further. Keep in mind that the implication Acting Secretary Beam (not a doctor) is making is that Dr. Damsker is being reckless. I would highly encourage Acting Secretary Beam (not a doctor) to go look at the chart at the top of this article. I believe that she’s completely unaware that her own COVID mortality metrics covering the state of Pennsylvania are worse than the COVID mortality metrics of Bucks County and Dr. Damsker. Maybe Dr. Damsker should be the one writing nastygrams to the state, rather than the other way around.
Anyway, the Commissioners did indeed choose to use Acting Secretary Beam’s (not a doctor) letter to force yet more guidance. This came in the form of new BCHD school recommendations. Somewhat miraculously, Dr. Damsker was able to negotiate the guidance to maintain his position on contact tracing and quarantine. This is especially critical, as his most prized guidance is that healthy children should stay in school. Too many schools across the country are sending home contacts of contacts of contacts, leading to unnecessary learning loss and community stress. My understanding is that Dr. Damsker rushed back from his family vacation specifically to negotiate this issue, and he gave up on recommending a mask-optional approach in exchange for only isolating sick kids.
This guidance from August 23 is the moment when everything changed in Bucks County. Up until this point, school board directors who had pinned their cart to Dr. Damsker’s horse were in a bad position. They had been saying for months that we should all listen to Dr. Damsker. Now, Dr. Damsker is saying that school should look very abnormal. What is a board director to do?
Fortunately, the insertion of PA DoH Acting Secretary Alison Beam (not a doctor) was the key ingredient in exposing just how political all of this had become. The same school board directors who felt handcuffed to Dr. Damsker and compelled to follow him into mask requirements were now free to openly say in their meetings “this guidance is political in nature; it is no longer coming from Dr. Damsker himself”.
When the dust settled, the line once again had not moved. School districts that wanted mask-optional were still headed for mask-optional.
August 29 – Bucks County Commissioners
On August 29, the Bucks County Commissioners sent a letter to all Bucks County School District Board members. Apparently, this letter was sent without Dr. Damsker’s support or approval, as his name is not on it anywhere. Yet it makes sweeping claims and generalizations about Public Health policies, and it urges school board directors to implement medical interventions. I cannot even begin to process how wild this is. The County Commissioners think that they are Public Health doctors capable of pushing medical directives without any involvement from the actual Public Health doctor who has authority in this domain. Commissioner Marseglia is a social worker. Commissioner Harvie is a teacher. Commissioner DiGirolamo is a farmer. They should leave medicine to the doctor.
At this point, it became even more abundantly clear that Dr. Damsker is being politically oppressed. From being bullied by the hospital executives to being chided by Acting Secretary Beam (not a doctor) to being left off of a Public Health letter sent by the County Commissioners, there was no longer any doubt. Dr. Damsker had been sidelined, and Bucks County Public Health was now being driven by purely political entities.
RECAP
Now let’s recap all of the attackers against Dr. Damsker:
August 15 – A Few Bad Superintendents
August 17 – Hospital Executives
August 23 – Acting Secretary of Health Alison Beam (not a doctor)
August 29 – Bucks County Commissioners
August 31 – Governor Wolf
Despite all of these bad actors aligning themselves against Dr. Damsker, school board directors in key school districts were still barreling ahead towards a mask-optional start to the school year. Bensalem, Central Bucks, Council Rock, Neshaminy, Pennridge, and Quakertown had all made it through the political storm.
And then, on August 31, with all other ammunition expended, Governor Wolf finally resorted to his last viable option: state-wide mandate. At extreme political cost to himself and his anointed successor Josh Shapiro, he authorized Acting Secretary Beam (not a doctor) to order a mask mandate in all school settings across the Commonwealth.
On that day, August 31, the vast majority of Pennsylvania school districts had started school with a mask-optional policy.
ORANGE = Mask Conditional
GREEN = Mask Required
Notice the red in the bottom right-hand corner of this image? That’s Bucks County (and 2 neighboring Montgomery County districts).
Consider the political embarrassment of this situation. One would expect districts in the rural parts of the state to choose mask-optional. But Bucks County? A Philadelphia suburb? Oh no, we can’t have that. Metropolitan areas are supposed to be Democrat strongholds.
My opinion is that the entire state Order is designed to force compliance specifically in Bucks County, because without such an order Dr. Damsker would once again be proven completely correct. Bucks County already has better COVID metrics (see chart at top of page) than the state and other metropolitan counties. Bucks County recommended for masks to be optional in schools in Summer of 2020. What happens, politically, if schools open normally with no masks and the sky does not fall?
The political cost of Dr. Damsker’s success simply became too high. As the only health department director in Pennsylvania practicing medicine instead of politics, Dr. Damsker had threaded the needle and found a way to get a majority of Bucks County schoolchildren into a mask-optional environment with no requirement for healthy students to quarantine. It truly delivers the final death blow to COVID hysteria, and so Governor Wolf desperately needed to stop it. So desperately, in fact, that he was willing to incur immense political damage to himself and his allies. All because of little Bucks County, and our ostracized health director.
A Clear Argument for Dr. Damsker
Just hours after the August 31 masking order from Acting Secretary Beam (not a doctor), Central Bucks School District held its monthly Board meeting. The Health & Safety Plan, including masking policy, was set to be discussed as it is a standing agenda item. At the meeting, CBSD Board Director Leigh Vlasblom successfully negotiated for mask exception forms that would not require a doctor signature or further documentation.
Jim Brexler and Dr. Scott Levy were both in attendance and both spoke. Dr. Levy spoke a total of three times, including once when called up to the podium by the Board to answer questions about Public Health. His comments at this meeting highlight exactly why Bucks County desperately needs Dr. Damsker.
All of Dr. Levy’s quotes below can be found on the August 31 CBSD Board meeting archive.
“This is not a disease that’s different for children and adults.”
Dr. Scott Levy, @ 1:54:05 of meeting
Right off the bat, we’re hit with an absolutely stunning comment. The Chief Medical Officer of a major local hospital said that COVID-19 is not different for children and adults. I’d like to believe that he simply used poor wording, but the problem is that he was reading from a prepared statement. He actually prepared that line.
At this point in the pandemic, every human with a pulse knows that children are at extremely lower risk than adults. The disparity is so steep that an unvaccinated teenager is at less risk from COVID than a vaccinated 30-year-old. That same unvaccinated teenager is at orders of magnitude less risk than a vaccinated geriatric adult.
By using this line, Dr. Levy is clearly only speaking to one group of people: the people disconnected from reality, the people we affectionately call “Team Apocalypse”. They, and he, want to believe that COVID is some existential threat to children. It’s not. Even with Delta.
“We supplied information to the [Central Bucks] school board in 2020; we didn’t put our name on that.”
Dr. Scott Levy, @ 1:55:40 of meeting
With this comment, Dr. Levy claims to have not “put our name on that” when talking about the 2020 CBSD Health & Safety Plan. This is incredibly bizarre, as it is very demonstrably false. I keep all Health & Safety Plans for all Bucks County school districts right here on this website. On page 9 of the 2020 CBSD Health & Safety Plan, you can see for yourself that Jim Brexler and Dr. Scott Levy were, indeed, named on the plan along with a bunch of other reps from Doylestown Hospital:
Why on Earth would Dr. Levy misconstrue this? Is it because he is ashamed to have his name on the plan that sent 1,100 healthy kids to quarantine at home for two weeks, when only a few of them (literally a few) ever came down with COVID? Is it because this plan kept kids from eating lunch during the school day? Is it because emails between him and Jamie Walker showed that he had absolutely no input into the plan? Did Dr. Kopicki put his name on the plan without his consent? Somebody here is lying, and I hope it isn’t Dr. Levy.
“When I review the literature that is not a term that I have been able to cover as a evidence-based process…. Temporary mitigation is a concept that I’m really not familiar with.”
Dr. Scott Levy, @ 3:52:58 of meeting
This statement from Dr. Levy is probably the most important statement he made all night. It was in response to CBSD Board Director Leigh Vlasblom asking for his opinion about Targeted Temporary Mitigation (TTM). Dr. Levy took the question as an opportunity to undermine Dr. Damsker by insinuating that TTM is not evidence-based and that Dr. Damsker just whipped it up out of thin air. Notice that Dr. Levy does not speak to the merits of the concept.
The big problem for Dr. Levy is that Dr. Damsker did not create the concept of TTM. In December of 2020, the Pennsylvania Department of Health, in coordination with Governor Wolf, ordered the closure of bars and restaurants under the guise of mitigating COVID-19. The title of that Order is “Order of the Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Health Directing Limited-Time Targeted Mitigation“.
Hmmmmm….. Limited-Time Targeted Mitigation. That term is faintly familiar. ::: strokes mustache :::
Now, granted, what Dr. Levy actually said at the CBSD Board meeting was “Temporary mitigation is a concept that I’m really not familiar with.” Maybe we should give him the benefit of the doubt, because the state Order from last December used the term “Limited-Time”. It takes a second grade reading level to be able to mesh “temporary” with “limited-time“, and maybe that’s just too much to ask of a hospital executive.
But here’s the real problem: Dr. Levy didn’t throw shade at the Pennsylvania Department of Health when they used the concept. Did Dr. Levy even know that the state used it in its December 2020 order, over 8 months before Dr. Damsker used it? If he did know, then why only attack Dr. Damsker for it, and why act like he’s never heard of it? If he didn’t know, then should we really listen to him for Public Health advice? I mean, to be clear on how egregious this is, I found this information by literally googling the term:
Furthermore, Dr. Levy claimed that he reviewed the literature and could not find this as an “evidence-based process”. So why did I find this study in 2 seconds of googling? The study says “We…show targeted mitigation policies based on local monitoring to be more efficient than country-level or non-targeted measures.“
Consider that I am just some guy who has absolutely no medical training apart from a couple Anatomy & Physiology classes in college (in which I did get an A, mind you). I don’t have accolades or degrees in this field; I am not board certified in anything. But I do have wifi. Why am I, a guy with only an internet connection, able to find these things while Dr. Levy, the big gun brought in to crush Dr. Damsker, is not? I seriously think this is a matter of major concern to Bucks County Public Health. If Dr. Levy is going to act like a health director at school board meetings, then he should have to address whether his statement was either ignorance in not being able to run a google search or dishonesty in wanting to hurt Dr. Damsker. The truth must be one of those two things. Either one disqualifies him from participating in Public Health.
“Clinicians…have looked analytically at the data.”
Dr. Scott Levy, @ 1:53:41 of meeting
“It’s extremely challenging for people who have not spent their career doing this to understand the benefit, the balance of risk and benefit.”
Dr. Scott Levy, @ 1:55:30 of meeting
Multiple times throughout his comments, Dr. Levy uses good old-fashioned argumentum ad verecundiam (appeal to authority) to argue for masks. He implies that only clinically-trained experts with a full career of experience behind them are capable of balancing risk and benefit when it comes to masks. While I could blast this statement 100 different ways, I think the proper course of action is to actually agree with it. Yes, it’s very challenging…for people like Dr. Levy.
You see, the argument I’m making in this article is that Dr. Levy is not a Public Health doctor. He has no business speaking to a school board about Public Health policy. He embarrassed himself when he tried it. He has not spent a career pursuing Public Health; he has spent a career as a kidney doctor and a hospital executive. Is it supposed to be some kind of big shocker that attending physicians are going to be wildly inclined to encourage medical interventions? Obviously doctors love medical interventions. That’s the whole point. Hospital executives are going to encourage medical interventions–big surprise!
It takes a Public Health doctor, like Dr. Damsker, to step back from any given intervention and actually evaluate the big picture.
I’m not arguing over the intelligence of doctors. They are plenty intelligent. What I’m arguing is that spending your life in a system designed to support medical interventions clearly makes people more susceptible to support medical interventions.
But is the mask intervention good for Public Health?
When it comes to masks on schoolchildren, all we have to do is look around. We are living in a community where school board meetings turn into shouting matches between neighbors. People are thwacking others over the head with cardboard signs. School board directors are receiving death threats. There are countless lawsuits being fired all over the place. The community is being torn apart.
And here we have Dr. Levy lecturing us, the little Plebeians, about how only doctors can be the proper judge of whether the costs of masking are worth the rewards. Only they can properly read the data, despite all the destruction we can see with our own eyes. Meanwhile, Dr. Damsker, the one guy around here who actually has spent a career doing Public Health, is sitting there shaking his head. He understands the balance of risk and benefit on this issue, and he knows that Dr. Levy is wrong.
“So the fact that Doylestown right now we’re at 16% positivity rate despite the fact that a large number of people are coming in to get negative tests to travel is striking and concerning.”
Dr. Scott Levy, @ 3:56:25 of meeting
This was the last of Dr. Levy’s flubs, and it’s appropriate to leave it at the end because it truly captures that Dr. Levy just doesn’t understand how the community feels about COVID-19. Dr. Levy considers it to be “striking and concerning” when a ton of people come in for negative tests so that they can travel and many of them pop positive. Do you know what a normal person considers that to be? Good news.
Seriously, stop and think about it. This is supposed to be a super deadly pandemic with a brand-new, super-deadly variant. Yet perfectly healthy people are plowing into a hospital that is not at all overwhelmed–it’s running at normal capacity–and testing positive for the virus. Shouldn’t we be singing from the mountaintops that the virus is being found so widely on healthy people?
The charts of hospital census up above tell the whole story: hospital admission numbers are normal and stable. What does an increase in COVID tell us, in the absence of a hospital surge? It tells us that hospital patients are being admitted “with” COVID, not “for” COVID. A simple gander at the case and death curves for the past couple months shows very clearly that severe illness is way down, despite cases being up. Dr. Damsker had already called it correctly a month ago: “While our cases have increased in Bucks over the past few weeks, our hospitalizations and deaths have not risen in a corresponding way” – Dr. Damsker, in his August 17 statement.
The problem here is not with the positivity of healthy people; the problem is with Dr. Levy’s concern for it. His concern should be on disease–not on the presence of a virus that is well on its way to being endemic. Never before in human history have we had this insane, monomaniac focus on finding fragmented virus particles everywhere we possibly can. It’s completely unprecedented. One might say that it is not “evidence-based“.
O Captain! My Captain!
Unfortunately, Dr. Damsker has truly been sidelined. My understanding is that he has been told to cease all communication with school board directors and administrators, under threat of employment termination.
The coming weeks and months will continue to devolve into political chaos as there is no nobody guiding our Ship of State. It has been become abundantly clear that I was wrong to believe the Bucks County Commissioners are capable of such leadership. They’ve shown themselves to be just another cog in the political machine, along with hospital executives who can’t use google, Acting Secretary Beam (not a doctor), and Governor Wolf.
At an individual school district level, we are very blessed to have strong leaders willing to fill the leadership vacuum. Brave board directors in Central Bucks, Council Rock, Pennridge, and Quakertown have decided to continue battling against insurmountable odds. They’ve chosen to follow the August 31 state-wide school masking order while allowing exceptions without further medical documentation or signature. This has made it easy for families to choose whether or not they want their children to wear masks in school. More info on this process can be found here.
Right now, as I write this, even with a state-wide mandate for all schoolchildren to wear masks, there are thousands of public school students in Bucks County without a mask on their faces. There are even more private school students learning in the same manner. After everything that has been thrown at Dr. Damsker and at Bucks County students, the big lie is still being unraveled with every passing hour. I am collecting data each and every day showing that COVID prevalence is no different in communities or schools where masks are ubiquitous vs where they are not.
Over the next few weeks, I will be sharing this data with you. If Central Bucks, Council Rock, Pennridge, and Quakertown experience COVID outcomes that are significantly worse than the rest, then I will very publicly admit my error. If they experience COVID outcomes that are identical to the rest (as even Team Apocalypse knows they will), then I fully expect every political figure who has attacked Dr. Damsker to publicly apologize to him, including the hospital executives, the County Commissioners, Acting Secretary Beam (not a doctor), and Governor Wolf.
And then, long after we are done giving Dr. Damsker the credit he rightfully deserves, I expect everyone to forever remember the courageous stand being taken all across Pennsylvania by school board directors who look at their students, and then look back at the politicians, and say “No. Make me.“
